Writing Disaster in South Asian Literature and Culture: The Limits of Empathy and Cosmopolitan Imagination 1666951471, 9781666951479

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Writing Disaster in South Asian Literature and Culture

Writing Disaster in South Asian Literature and Culture The Limits of Empathy and Cosmopolitan Imagination Edited by Sk Sagir Ali and Swayamdipta Das

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Contents

Introduction: Writing Disaster in South Asian Literature and Culture Sk Sagir Ali and Swayamdipta Das PART I: ECOLOGICAL DISASTERS AND THE STATIST CONTOURS OF CONDITIONAL EMPATHY Chapter 1: Ecological Crises to Socio-Political Disaster: Revisiting the Politics of Empathy Around the Marichjhapi Massacre and the Dalit Question Madhumita Biswas Chapter 2: Ecological Disaster and The River of Stories: Resuscitating Empathy Through Graphic Narratives Pritha Banerjee



Chapter 3: Simulations of the Future: Climate Change and Disaster in Contemporary Indian Science Fiction in English Swati Moitra

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Chapter 4: Magic Realism and Trauma: A Study of Comingling of Spaces in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island 55 Nilanjan Chakraborty PART II: MIGRATION, DISPLACEMENT, AND THE COSMOPOLITAN GAZE: THE MONOLINGUALISM OF THE DISASTER IMAGINATION Chapter 5: Can Disaster be Known in the Light of Language?: Unity and Possibility of the Future in Shaktipada Rajguru’s Dandak Theke Marichjhapi Joydip Datta and Samrat Sengupta v

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Chapter 6: Fear of Refugee and Disaster: Monstrosity, Risky Body, and Moral Panic in Exit West 87 Sk Sagir Ali Chapter 7: Systemic Strategies of Identity Constructions and Deliberate Exclusions: Understanding the Socio, Economic, and Political Circumstances of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar Rajeesh C. Sarngadharan PART III: DISASTERS AND OTHER HETEROTOPIAS: DISASTER POETICS AND THE RE-WRITING OF THE POSTCOLONIAL NATION-STATE

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Chapter 8: Re-imagining Disaster Capitalism through Fecopoetics and the Literature of Waste: Fyatarus and the Beyond of the Empathy Machine in Select Short Stories by Nabarun Bhattacharya 119 Swayamdipta Das Chapter 9: War, Religion, and Terror: Syed Shamsul Haq’s Two Novellas Blue Venom and Forbidden Incense 129 Mohammad Shafiqul Islam Chapter 10: Global Catastrophe, Local Residues: Re-Thinking The ‘Global-Local’ Dynamic in Imagining Catastrophes Through Bishnu Dey’s ‘Cassandra’ Poems Subhayu Bhattacharjee Chapter 11: The Vanishing Dead: Memory, Necropolitics, and the Modern State Debamitra Kar PART IV: PANDEMICS, PUBLIC HEALTH DISASTERS, AND BIO-POLITICAL REGIMES OF CONTROL

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Chapter 12: Marked by Disposable Deaths: Mourning and Community in Times of Pandemic Shinjini Basu

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Chapter 13: Gendered Empathy and Its Impact on Efficient Pandemic Management Sudeshna Mukherjee

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Index

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About the Contributors



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Introduction Writing Disaster in South Asian Literature and Culture Sk Sagir Ali and Swayamdipta Das

The recent global pandemic in the form of COVID-19 triggered a set of unprecedented geopolitical and socio-cultural response mechanisms that had far-reaching consequences for our understanding of ‘disasters’ and the ways in which such events are received, co-opted, and translated in the collective social and political psyche. The pandemic was not an event that gestured toward a radical core of geopolitical change and transformation; rather, the event of the disaster led the state regimes to further reinstate bio-political practices, leading to what Agamben would call an ‘extended state of exception.’ The ‘disaster imagination’ that was peddled in the normative economy subscribed to an a priori field of affectivity and conditional empathy that neatly reiterated the ‘status quo’ even while seemingly gesturing toward a state of constant turmoil and flux. The reiterative images of death and personal and collective disaster invoked a field of affective empathy, mourning, and loss whose contours were retroactively conditioned by statist bio-political regimes through elaborate mechanisms of simulation and empathy machines to reiterate the socio-political status quo, and to co-opt the ‘real of the event’ into a familiarised pattern of affective coping mechanisms. The very idea of ‘quarantine’ thus became a generalised metaphor to refer to an ideological bubble whose empathetic and affective fields only engage with a disaster event in a manner that is preconditioned and bound by the contours of an insular, transpolitical, and familiarised ‘cosmopolitanism.’ One of the major issues that this book raises is how regimes of power translate, co-opt, and represent events of radical disaster (both man-made and natural) in order to create safe pockets of affective response systems and empathetic imaginary fields in the form of a certain conditioned currency of cosmopolitanism so 1

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that the regimes of geopolitical and bio-political power remain intact and pre-empt any transformative collective or cognitive agential breakthrough. South Asian literature has a long history of engaging with disaster events induced by the ecological crises, the Anthropocene, and the spectral effects of colonial-capitalist modernity that have plagued the subcontinent through the last hundred years or so. The Bengal famine in the 1940s, the partition of the Indian Subcontinent in 1947, the Marichjhapi massacre in 1979, the Bhopal Gas tragedy of 1984, the tsunami in the Indian Ocean at the turn of the century, and the Rohingya massacre in Myanmar in the last few years have plagued South Asia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These disaster events evade easy categorisation and the smug contours of any monolithic cause-and-effect linearity. While a vast corpus of literary and cultural representations of these disasters exists in the subcontinent which have attempted to adequately understand and socio-historically locate the different nexuses that lead to them, a discernible lacuna still exists in South Asian disaster studies—particularly when we take into consideration the affective cultural and hermeneutic realm that is coterminous with representational contours of the event of ‘disaster.’ While South Asian Anglophone literature and its discursive ethos remain ‘self-consciously’ embedded within the overt contours of the postcolonial nation-state and its western modernist registers, the representational ‘self’ of South Asian Anglophone disaster literature inevitably ends up (almost unknowingly) harking back to an affective and empathetic field of the ‘reading habitus’ that remains an extension of western modernity and its self-fashioning of a particular kind of exclusionary cosmopolitanism. The particular politico-ontological fields of this affective realm have hardly gone under the scanner, and the ideological blindspots of the disaster Darstellung remain to be deciphered in the field of South Asian literary and cultural studies. While the representational corpus of South Asian Anglophone literature and its rendering of the ‘postcolonial uncanny’ have widely been read in terms of a hybrid space of be-coming wherein a strategic mimicry of the Empire and its Western Enlightenment ethos lead to a subtle resistance performative, it remains to be asked how the empathy machine evoked in postcolonial disaster literature often fails to gesture beyond the ontological and empathetic imperatives dictated by the co-optive fields of global capitalist modernity often in terms of a pervasive liberal ideology that goes by the name of ‘global cosmopolitanism.’ To understand the ways in which the disaster imagery and its reiteration in the affective field of South Asian Anglophone literature and popular culture conditions and re-appropriates our set-responses to the event itself, and works to produce an ontological-empathetic field of a priori subjectivities that sustain and justify the status quo of global capitalist modernity, it is important to

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note how the ‘event’ of disaster evokes a topology and subjective field that is not aligned to radical alterity or ‘otherwise-than-being.’ THE SHOCK DOCTRINE AND THE PRE-EMPTIVE AFFECTIVE FIELD OF DISASTER LITERATURE Fredric Jameson in the book The Seeds of Time famously claimed that, ‘that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism’ (xii). While the statement attempts to delineate the power structures implicated in apocalyptic fiction and films, it also becomes a useful pointer to understand the ways in which the capitalocene recreates the simulacra of disaster and the apocalypse to co-opt and thus exhaust all other possible alternative ‘imaginable’ political and economic subsystems. ‘[It] captures precisely what I mean by ‘capitalist realism’: the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it’ (Fisher 1). The exhaustion of all other political alternatives also implies the retroactive creation of a collective imaginative field that, by empathetically identifying with the ‘disaster event,’ tends to fall back upon a priori structures of feeling and affective agency that are shaped by the capitalocene under the aegis of western modernity. The crisis and the concomitant catharsis thus lead to a more streamlined and fortified status quo that exhausts and preempts the radical contours of the cultural and postcolonial ‘uncanny,’ thus creating a sterile field of role-playings and affective agential kernels that remain subservient to the bio-political matrices of the nation-state and its various corridors of power. Naomi Klien in her book The Shock Doctrine talks at length about these ‘docile’ structures of feelings that the disaster imagery in literature and popular media attempts to evoke: the original disaster—the coup, the terrorist attack, the market meltdown, the war, the tsunami, the hurricane—puts the entire population into a state of collective shock. The falling bombs, the bursts of terror, the pounding winds serve to soften up whole societies much as the blaring music and blows in the torture cells soften up prisoners. Like the terrorized prisoner who gives up the names of comrades and renounces his faith, shocked societies often give up things they would otherwise fiercely protect. (17)

The ‘great rupture’ anticipated by the disaster imagination is thus symptomatic of the desire to recreate a clean canvas wherein the fecund fields of the western capitalocene can make easy inroads and thus create an entire

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subjective field wherein any differential or contingent reaction or emotional response is preempted and rendered unnecessary to the ongoing crises at hand. A well-devised teleological closure thus anticipates our stock responses to these disaster imageries, thus creating a geopolitically deterministic ethos that is governed by the pervasive logic of late capitalism. Klien further points out the ways in which a ‘disaster apartheid’ is set into motion by the hegemonic corridors of liberal modernity by dividing the geo-polity into two sections: a protected and secured Green Zone and a Red Zone that resides on the fringes of liminality. In this schemata, the Red Zone becomes the fecund site for the proliferation and projection of a state-sanctioned paranoia—a realm characterised by constant fear-mongering and the evocation of a disciplinary imperative to engage statist surveillance systems as these ‘other’ sites are prone to producing radical and unmappable ‘disasters.’ Klien writes: Not so long ago, disasters were periods of social leveling, rare moments when atomized communities put divisions aside and pulled together. Increasingly, however, disasters are the opposite: they provide windows into a cruel and ruthlessly divided future in which money and race buy survival . . . the Green Zone emerges everywhere that the disaster capitalism complex descends, with the same stark partitions between the included and the excluded, the protected and the damned. (413–14)

POST 9/11 REPRESENTATIONAL POLITICS OF DISASTER AND THE INVENTION OF THE RED ZONE The 9/11 and the series of disaster simulacrums and narratives surrounding it was a further reiteration of the disaster shock doctrine that the West specifically exploited to engage in a ‘war on terror’ rhetoric against the Middle East and those viable geopolitical hotspots that aid in its attempts to establish geo-capitalist sovereignty. When the locus of the disaster event emerges ‘elsewhere,’ there is a recurrent effort to gain ‘cultural ownership’ of the disaster vis-à-vis an ideological and spectral realm that caters specifically to the neo-liberal currency of empathetic imagination and a certain transnational cosmopolitanism that retains the status quo and exclusionary contours of global capitalist modernity and the logic of the laissez-faire economy. Dany Laferrière in The World is Moving Around Me talks at length about the stock responses of the Western literary canon to the Haitian earthquake in 2010: Are writers already at work? Will we see a race to write the great earthquake novel or the major essay about reconstruction? And the winner—will it be

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Frankétienne or a young, unknown woman novelist? Dalembert or a German writer who’d never even heard of Haiti before the event? . . . When it comes to the Lisbon earthquake, Voltaire’s poem is what remains. (139–40)

The lived experience of these cataclysmic disasters are co-opted and reduced by the cosmopolitan kernel afforded by quilting canonical registers like ‘world literature’ that are ultimately shaped and contoured by the social and imaginative capital accumulated and controlled by the Western sovereign ‘self.’ The ‘right to representation’ is not only monopolised by the empathy-mongers of Western literary canons, the remnants of this enunciatory space are diffused and pre-empted by a certain kind of cosmopolitan cultural thinking: so much so that even when regional writers and minor literary canons tackle and represent the ‘event,’ they end up reiterating the same fetishistic contours and representational ethics that hark back to the ethical imperatives of the Western liberal Enlightenment traditions. Neil Lazarus in his definition of the ‘postcolonial unconscious’ talks at length about the invisible ghosts and repressed mechanisms that dictate the ethics and politics of ‘postcolonial representations’ undertaken in the name of self-deterministic radical agency by Third World postcolonial writers. He says: The struggle over representations gave way to the struggle against representation itself, on the ground that the desire to speak for, of, or even about others was always shadowed by a secretly authoritarian aspiration. The theoretical resort has then often been to a consideration of difference under the rubric of incommensurability. While the idea of incommensurability has been given an airing in some very well-known works of the ‘postcolonial’ corpus, I suggest that the vast majority of ‘postcolonial’ literary writings point us in a quite different direction, towards the idea not of ‘fundamental alienness’ but of deepseated affinity and community, across and athwart the ‘international division of labour.’ (19)

THE NEO-LIBERAL COSMOPOLITAN GAZE AND THE MONOLINGUALISM OF THE DISASTER IMAGINATION IN SOUTH ASIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE In the South Asian literary context, the disaster imagery becomes an extension of the neo-liberal cosmopolitan gaze that works to further the consumerist ethos of the post-1989 ‘end of history’ discourse. Instead of unsettling the status quo, the disaster imagery of South Asian literature enunciates an affective field that identifies with these disaster events in terms of a monolingual field of global subjectivity that fails to move beyond the stratified fields of ‘cultural relativism.’ The literary representations and the peculiar canon of

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South Asian disaster literature that it forms pre-empt the utopian possibilities of these disaster events and render them co-optable within the generic constatives of what Graham Huggan would call ‘the postcolonial exotic.’ Huggan writes of the complex power nexus that binds the postcolonial (and South Asian) literary ethos: In negotiating their condition, and turning it to their own advantage, postcolonial writers are adept at manipulating the commercial codes of the international open market. They recognize that the value of their writing as an international commodity depends, to a large extent, on the exotic appeal it holds to an unfamiliar metropolitan audience . . . writers wish to strike back against the center, yet they also write and are marketed for it; they wish to speak from the margins, yet they are assimilated into the mainstream; they wish to undo the opposition between a European Self and its designated Others, yet they are pressed into the service of manufacturing cultural Otherness. (24)

Prof. Pallavi Rastogi, however, positions “postcolonial disaster fiction” not only as a reaffirmation of certain Western stereotypes but also as something that simultaneously disrupts the “disaster unconscious” of Western audiences: Disaster fiction may seem to comply with the project of reorientalism in which Western or Westernized audiences acquire a new form of superior selfhood through feelings of shock, horror, and pity that the continuous eruption of crisis evokes. Postcolonial disaster fiction pushes back against the unquestioning origins of disaster as something that merely is. Instead of infusing its readership with horror and pity, postcolonial disaster fiction also trains the readerly gaze to think about the complicated causes of catastrophe and to contemplate the many possible faces of relief, even as it first uses the sensationalism associated with crisis to capture the readers’ attention. (27)

The present volume attempts to understand the multifarious ways in which the disaster imagery permeates the South Asian literary and representational spaces vis-á-vis the hegemonic currency of neo-liberal global cosmopolitanism, and the ways in which the ‘disaster events’ often transgress the marked contours of pre-emptive affectivity and empathetic identification. It attempts to locate the power nexus that reiterates these fields of representation and the ways in which a counter-hegemonic writing and ontological field are often peddled in the literature and culture of South Asia. The book attempts to locate these ‘other spaces’ that disrupt the normative affective field of collective empathetic and cosmopolitan imagination and thus gesture toward ways in which the event of the ‘disaster’ might lead to newer ways to engage and agentially intervene in a more transformative public sphere in South Asia beyond the signposts of a curated cosmopolitanism.

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In the first part, titled ‘Ecological Disasters and the Statist Contours of Conditional Empathy,’ the book shall attempt to understand the ways in which the events of ecological disasters are represented in South Asian literature, and how the nation-state creates a field of affective mechanisms that co-opt and translate these events in a manner that retains the normative status quo. Madhumita Biswas’s chapter, ‘Ecological Crises to Socio-Political Disaster: Revisiting the Politics of Empathy Around Marichjhapi Massacre and the Dalit Question,’ takes up the events of the Marichjhapi massacre and the peculiar ecological crises narrative peddled by the nation-state to forcefully evict the Dalit settlers on the island. The chapter attempts to understand how the Dalit question and the rationale of ecological conservation are intertwined, and how the affective fields of ecological disaster and its conservational subsystems are deeply implicated not only in the Anthropocene but also extend to the Savarna politics of Dalit otherisation. The chapter ‘Ecological Disaster and The River of Stories—Resuscitating Empathy Through Graphic Narratives,’ by Pritha Banerjee, reads Orijit Sen’s River of Stories as a graphic narrative that significantly departs from the normative representation of ecological disasters. It reads Orijit Sen’s narrative as an important intervention in the way in which disasters are seen, narrated, experienced, and empathised with in different reading cultures. Swati Moitra’s chapter ‘Imaginative Science: Climate Change and Disaster in Contemporary Indian Science Fiction’ addresses some aspects of contemporary Indian science fiction in works such as Samit Basu’s Chosen Spirits (2020) and Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s Analog/Virtual: And Other Simulations of Your Future (2020) that engage with the question of the disaster while rooted in visions of a future India. The chapter locates these texts in the broader context of India’s technocratic vision in the era of Aadhar and the dominance of social media platforms, in order to address their visions of a ‘digital’-technocratic future in the era of climate change and large-scale inequality. Nilanjan Chakraborty’s chapter ‘Magic Realism and Trauma: A Study of Comingling of Spaces in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island’ investigates the ontological kernel of trauma through the fresh perspective of magic realism to understand the ways in which Ghosh’s narrative provides a differential way of representing postcolonial ecological disasters in the capitalocene. The second part of the book, titled ‘Migration, Displacement, and the Cosmopolitan Gaze: The Monolingualism of the Disaster Imagination,’ focuses on the events of migration and forced displacements, and attempts to understand the ways in which a certain monolingual currency of disaster imagination permeates our collective responses to these other sites of precarity. Joydip Datta and Samrat Sengupta’s chapter, ‘Can Disaster Know in the Light of the Language? Unity and Possibility of the Future in Shaktipada Rajguru’s Dandak Theke Marichjhapi,’ attempts to understand the ways in

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which disaster creates the possibilities to think about life through the forms of anxiety, fear, experience, and language. It takes up disaster as a conceptual and methodological category from Maurice Blanchot’s book The Writing of the Disaster (1980) through the exploration of a single text titled Dandak Theke Marichjhapi (1986) by Shaktipada Rajguru to show how the future is conceived through living in the disaster. Sk Sagir Ali’s chapter, ‘Fear of Refugee and Disaster: Monstrosity, Risky Body, and Moral Panic in Exit West,’ delves into Mohsin Ahmed’s Exit West to look into the incipient correspondence of terrorism, migration, and economic disaster, only to decipher how terrorism has accentuated the post-9/11 epoch as an age of involuntary migration. With the trope of migrancy, economics, and the narratives of terrorism and eco-terrorism, the chapter examines the concept of disaster as an effect of the ‘environmental change-conflict-migration nexus.’ Rajeesh C. Sarngadharan’s chapter, ‘Systemic Strategies of Identity Constructions and Deliberate Exclusions: Understanding the Socio, Economic, and Political Circumstances of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar,’ examines the ethnicnationalist field of identity formations that led to the otherisation of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. It delves into the majoritarian disaster crises that lead certain precarious sections of a nation-state to experience forced migration and historical and ethnic-nationalist otherisation. Part three, titled ‘Disasters and Other Heterotopias: Disaster Poetics and the Re-writing of the Postcolonial Nation-State,’ examines how the event of the disaster leads to a differential enunciatory field that leads one to re-imagine the constative contours of the postcolonial nation-state and its matrices of identity formations. It looks into the ways in which disasters act as heterotopic sites that challenge and subvert normative interpellative fields of historical, ethno-nationalist identitarian, and biopolitical ideologues. Swayamdipta Das’s chapter, ‘Re-imagining Disaster Capitalism through Fecopoetics and the Literature of Waste: Fyatarus and the Beyond of the Empathy Machine in Select Short Stories by Nabarun Bhattacharya,’ reads select short stories of Nabarun Bhattacharya and attempts to understand how the genre of waste literature, premised upon fecopoetics and the politics of scatology, re-imagines the spectacle of the disaster imagery so as to invoke a very radical hermeneutic perception of falling apart, and thus subsequently re-write the contours of the empathy machine of ‘disaster capitalism.’ Mohammad Shafiqul Islam’s chapter, ‘War, Religion, and Terror: Syed Shamsul Haq’s Two Novellas Blue Venom and Forbidden Incense,’ explores the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh as portrayed by Syed Shamsul Haq in his two novellas Blue Venom and Forbidden Incense to understand the ways in which the postcolonial nation-state is born out of an intrinsic kernel of violence and disaster. It attempts to understand how war and disaster poetics shape the history and future of postcolonial nation-states. Subhayu

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Bhattacharjee’s chapter, ‘Global Catastrophe, Local Residues: Re-Thinking the “Global-Local” Dynamic in Imagining Catastrophes Through Bishnu Dey’s “Cassandra” Poems,’ locates the differences in the local and global paradigms of the understanding of catastrophes and disaster events. It delves into the different modalities of catastrophic imaginations through a re-reading of Bishnu Dey’s ‘Cassandra’ poems. Debamitra Kar’s chapter, ‘The Vanishing Dead: Memory, Necropolitics, and the Modern State,’ locates the bio-political regimes of control and power exercised by the nation-state through the conditional performative of mourning surrounding the dead. It argues how statist regimes of power orchestrate a selective conditionality of mourning and collective affectivity in order to reiterate the status quo. The last section of the book, titled ‘Pandemics, Public Health Disasters, and Biopolitical Regimes of Control,’ focuses upon the recent COVID-19 pandemic and attempts to locate the ways in which bio-medical regimes of power responded to the public health disaster in order to effectively create an extended state of exception for the community. Shinjini Basu’s chapter, ‘Marked by Disposable Deaths: Mourning and Community in Times of Pandemic,’ delves into the event of the pandemic and the ways in which a certain field of mourning and death imaginarium gets evinced in the collective consciousness. Drawing upon Jean Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida’s works on mourning, it attempts to locate the possibility of a politics of mourning that resists communal sublation by bringing the singular, unique, and irredeemable loss brought by the event of ‘death’ into the reckoning. ‘Gendered Empathy and Its Impact on Efficient Pandemic Management,’ by Sudeshna Mukherjee again delves into the recent COVID-19 pandemic and attempts to understand how the affective category of empathy is constituted around a certain gendered identity. It examines the different ways in which the disaster event of the pandemic brought into focus the gender questions surrounding the field of empathetic identification and the agential interventions brought about by women leaders across the board. WORKS CITED Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2010. Huggan, Graham. ‘The Postcolonial Exotic.’ Transition, no. 64, 1994, pp. 22–29. Jameson, Fredric. The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2007.

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Laferrière, Dany. The World Is Moving Around Me: A Memoir of the Haiti Earthquake. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2013 Lazarus, Neil. The Postcolonial Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Rastogi, Pallavi. Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2020.

PART I

Ecological Disasters and the Statist Contours of Conditional Empathy

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Ecological Crises to Socio-Political Disaster Revisiting the Politics of Empathy Around the Marichjhapi Massacre and the Dalit Question Madhumita Biswas

Dipesh Chakrabarty in his famous essay, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’ recounts that although the scientific studies of global warming are often said to have originated with the discoveries of the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius in the 1890s, the self-conscious discussions concerning global warming and ecological crises emerged in the public realm during the 1980s and 1990s (199). However, the social outcry for ecological crises, as we know it, did not occur until the 2000s, as he remarks: The situation changed in the 2000s when the warnings became dire, and the signs of the crisis—such as the drought in Australia, frequent cyclones and brush fires, crop fail-ures in many parts of the world, the melting of Himalayan and other mountain glaciers and of the polar ice caps, and the increasing acidity of the seas and the damage to the food chain—became politically and economically inescapable. Added to this were growing concerns, voiced by many, about the rapid destruction of other species and about the global footprint of a human population poised to pass the nine billion mark by 2050. (Chakrabarty 199)

In discussing humans’ correlation to nature and their effect on natural history and climate change, Chakrabarty points out that while the age-old Viconian-Hobbesian idea segregated human history from natural history, Benedetto Croce and Collingwood’s opinions drew similar interpretations 13

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with minor nuances projecting toward an anthropogenic explanation of nature. Stalin’s influential yet infamous Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938) argued that ‘man’s environment did change but changed so slowly as to make the history of man’s relation to his environment almost timeless and thus not a subject of historiography at all’ (Chakrabarty 204). These ideas of natural historiography drastically changed as environmental historians such as Alfred Crosby started questioning the existence of man on earth as a biological agent, which was furthered by climate scientists who put forward man as a geological agent in advancing climate change. Naomi Oreskes in ‘The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change: How Do We Know We’re Not Wrong?’ writes: For centuries, scientists thought that earth processes were so large and powerful that nothing we could do could change them. This was a basic tenet of geological science: that human chronologies were insignificant compared with the vastness of geological time; that human activities were insignificant compared with the force of geological processes. And once they were. But no more. There are now so many of us cutting down so many trees and burning so many billions of tons of fossil fuels that we have indeed become geological agents. We have changed the chemistry of our atmosphere, causing sea level to rise, ice to melt, and climate to change. There is no reason to think otherwise. (93)

In this environmentalist context of human existence as a geological factor, escalating ecological crises, the emphasis on ecological conservation, and availing affirmative action manifest, putting the onus on human behaviour and sustenance. Chakrabarty explains: To call human beings geological agents is to scale up our imagination of the human. Humans are biological agents, both collectively and as individuals. They have always been so. There was no point in human history when humans were not biological agents. But we can become geological agents only historically and collectively, that is, when we have reached numbers and invented technologies that are on a scale large enough to have an impact on the planet itself. To call ourselves geological agents is to attribute to us a force on the same scale as that released at other times when there has been a mass extinction of species. We seem to be currently going through that kind of a period. (206–7)

Now, in this larger purview of ecological crises we embark upon a journey to decipher 1979’s Marichjhapi massacre in West Bengal, and ask the pertinent questions relating to it: Was the refugee settlement in Marichjhapi a real geological threat, as it was posited to be and needed ruthless eviction? If yes, how deeply was it affecting the surrounding forest reserve? Is ecological preservation more valuable than thousands of human lives lost? How

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was the social perception engineered in such a way that a horrible massacre claiming the lives of arguably thousands of Dalit refugees ensued at an island only one hundred kilometres away from the city of Calcutta (now Kolkata) and no public outcry or social intervention took place? Why were there no inquiry commissions entrusted with bringing justice to the victims of the Marichjhapi massacre, a state-led massacre that claimed the lives of arguably thousands of people between January and May 1979, for which no one was ever held accountable? Why are few written documents, both fictional and non-fictional, available on the Marichjhapi massacre? Why this collective amnesia and conscious omission of this subject from mainstream deliberations when it entails one of the most heinous human rights violations in post-Partition India? Is it because the lives lost, predominantly by poor Dalit refugees, resettling in the Sundarbans’ Marichjhapi, weighed less? Or maybe the state released the reason for their brutal eviction in the name of ‘ecological imbalance’ in their ‘unauthorised occupation of Marichjhapi which is a part of the Sundarbans Government Reserve Forest violating thereby the Forest Acts,’ making it a reasonable environmental issue to turn a blind eye to the atrocities? Focusing on Deep Halder’s Blood Island: An Oral History of the Marichjhapi Massacre (2019), and critical works by Ross Mallick, Annu Jalais, Debdutta Chowdhury, and others on this topic, this chapter attempts to delve into these aforementioned questions and the politics of selective empathy to address the Marichjhapi massacre. REFUGEE INFLUX AND THE DALITS Mondal never tires of retelling Marichjhapi. ‘Refugee settlement was never meant to be easy. How do you handle swarms crossing over from Bangladesh to West Bengal? The problem was, when they were in Opposition, Left leaders told the Bangladeshi Hindu refugees, who were being packed in hordes to squatter camps in Dandakaranya, that if they came to power they would bring them back to West Bengal. But once in power, they backtracked. (Halder 9)

After the Partition of India in 1947, the first wave of refugees to have migrated to West Bengal from previously East Pakistan was traditionally upper-caste elite. Of the 1.1 million who had arrived by June 1948, 350,000 were urban middle class, 550,000 were rural middle class, a little over one hundred thousand were agriculturalists, and under one hundred thousand were artisans (Chakrabarti 1). Among this socially upper or middle class, refugees from upper-caste origins who did not have property in India squatted on public and private land in Calcutta and other areas, and they resisted all efforts to evict them. With the help of their friends, relatives, caste members, and other

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influential social networks, they found a foothold in West Bengal, particularly in Calcutta (Chakrabarti 1). It is interesting to note here that these aforementioned upper-caste refugees had garnered public sympathy, which had played in their favour, as Ross Malick mentions, ‘Faced with this resistance and the public sympathy they generated among their relatives and caste members, the Congress government acquiesced in the illegal occupation’ (105). However, in the case of the lower-caste refugees—the untouchables, Dalits, and Namasudras—public empathy did not pour similarly in their favour. After the first wave of Hindu refugees (who were predominantly upper caste) migrated from erstwhile East Pakistan, communal atrocities fell on the remaining lower-caste Hindus—the untouchables and the Dalit Namasudras. As a result, after the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, following Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s death in 1975, West Bengal saw a huge influx of Namasudra refugees who lacked property and influence and became dependent upon the Indian government’s dole for their sustenance upon arrival. Congress government took this opportunity to disperse the Namasudra community in different states outside West Bengal, thus effectively breaking the Namasudra movement that had gained wind in the colonial period, making sure it did not gain pace in West Bengal, thereby enhancing the hegemony of the traditional Bengali tricaste elite (i.e, Brahmins Brahmins [priests], Kshatriyas [warriors], and Vaishyas [merchants]). These untouchables, the Dalits, the Namasudras who were dispersed to different refugee camps outside West Bengal met with deplorable living conditions, especially in Dandyakarnya (Mahyapradersh). The tribal natives of Dandyakaranya treated these newly arrived refugees as their opponents, as resources were limited in those arid lands with poor or no irrigation systems. Furthermore, the Namasudras’ caste identity was not recognised under the Schedule Castes in Madhya Pradesh under the Indian Constitution; hence, they did not fall under the affirmative action plans either. Consisting of predominantly agriculturally trained hardworking farmers, these Namasudras, Dalits, felt out of their depth in the foreign state, which was agriculturally and geographically dissimilar to their homeland, and where no one spoke their tongue. Chowdhury notes that: The leftist opposition played on these grievances to obtain a political base among these refugees of the untouchable caste. Left leaders harped on about the utopia of a ‘return to homeland’ that the refugees cherished and lured them to settle in West Bengal, especially in one of the islands in Sundarbans, called Marichjhapi. The Left-backed United Central Refugee Council (UCRC) together with Udbastu Unnayanshil Samity (UUS) convinced the refugees of a prosperous life and access to unlimited resource on their resettlement on the island. (667)

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A similar account of the devastating living conditions of the Mana Camps in Dandyakaranya and an incentive to escape to a better ‘homeland’ in West Bengal is heard from Safal Halder, a Marichjhapi massacre survivor’s oral narrative in Blood Island as well. Safal Halder narrates: Mana Camp was not a single camp. It was a cluster of 500 or more camps of varying sizes. I stayed in a camp called Kurud . . . leaders from JyotiBasu’s party, the CPI(M), had come to visit us at the camp a number of times. They assured us that as soon as they came to power in West Bengal, they would free us from the hills and forests of Dandakaranya and take us to the fertile plains of Bengal and give us a better life. We were naïve; we believed them. (Halder 42)

Approximately fifteen thousand refugee families (each family consisting of four members at least) sold their belongings in Dandyakaranya and set out for a ‘promised land’ resettlement in West Bengal. But unfortunately, to their dire shock, the Left government, after coming to power in West Bengal in 1977, had changed their previous standpoint on refugee resettlement in West Bengal, and thus denied entry to refugees fleeing from Mana Camps. As Mallick notes, ‘many refugees were arrested and returned to the resettlement camps. The remaining refugees managed to slip through police cordons, reaching their objective of Marichjhapi island, where settlement began’ (107). Safal Halder shares his experience of finding Marichjhapi: [The] committee leaders came to know of Marichjhapi, an uninhabited island in the heart of the Sundarbans. There was a rumor that some Leftist leaders had showed them the island as a possible habitat for the thousands of refugees deserting camps and reaching Bengal. Others say committee leaders themselves had discovered the island during their excursions to the Sundarbans. I don’t remember the exact day or month, but sometime in the middle of 1978, we hired boats and set off for Marichjhapi. (43)

This aforementioned information is vital to understanding the state of contestation among the Left Party members in 1978. We find in Ross Mallick’s account, as well as others, that there might have been party members within the Communist Party of India (Marxist) who were sympathetic to the refugee situation in West Bengal and how it was treated after the Left government came to power, and helped the refugees to find footing in the delta of the Ganges. From May 1977 ‘about 30,000 SC refugees, under the leadership of Satish Mandal, president of the Udbastu Unnayansil Samity, a former close associate of the Communist Party’s refugee programme, sailed to Morichjhanpi and set up a settlement there’ (Jalais, ‘Dwelling on Morichjhanpi’ 1758).

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MUD ISLAND TO HOMELAND Our dream home was a mud island filled with shrubs. There was a thick forest of useless shrubs and, unlike the rest of the Sundarbans, there was no plantation in the island. So it was a bloody lie told by the Left Front government that we destroyed a reserve forest to set up home in Marichjhapi. There was nothing to destroy! . . . I was in the first lot that set foot on the island. I felt like an astronaut on a new planet after an arduous travel through space and time. (Halder 43)

True to Safal Halder’s account Marichjhapi, the mud island in question, was: [A]n island in the northern-most forested part of the West Bengal Sundarbans, [which] had been cleared in 1975 and its mangrove vegetation replaced by a governmental programme of coconut and tamarisk plantation to increase state revenue. However, though this was not an island covered in mangrove forest. (Jalais, ‘Dwelling on Morichjhanpi’ 1759)

The refugees settling in Marichjhapi were hardworking cultivators and farmers, and within a few months’ time, they had built a school, fishery, salt pans, and health centre without any help from the government. Within a year and a half, Marichjhapi had become of the most thriving islands in Sundarbans. Poor islanders from nearby village islands of Sundarbans had migrated to Marichjhapi as well in search of better living conditions. The refugees as well as the islanders of Sundarbans were thriving in the newly emerged living conditions of the Marichjhapi. However, the government stated that: [T]he refugees were ‘in unauthorised occupation of Morichjhanpi which is a part of the Sundarbans government reserve forest violating thereby the Forest Acts’ and that refugees had come ‘with the intention of settling there permanently thereby disturbing the existing and potential forest wealth and also creating ecological imbalance.’ The government placed primacy on ecology, but this argument, believed the villagers, was more to legitimise their ejection from Morichjhanpi in the eyes of the Kolkata bhadralok. (Jalais, ‘Dwelling on Morichjhanpi’ 1759)

According to Niranjan Halder’s, one of the most prolific writers on Marichjhapi, account: These refugees were from East Pakistan, which has an abundance of water bodies. Fish breeding was in their blood. Even in Dandakaranya, a mainly arid land, whenever they had access to ponds, they would cultivate fish and send them to Calcutta. At Marichjhapi, they cultivated galdachingri [lobsters], which were high priced and in demand. They also worked in fields, built a school and a

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hospital, where two doctors from outside the island came to work for the islanders. They never cut trees. (67)

However, Mana Goldar, an inhabitant and survivor of the Marichjhapi Massacre, accepts that islanders did fell tress ‘Not a lot. But they did’ (Halder 86). But even so, since the cutting of tress was to support housing and not for commercial reasons, it can fairly be argued that it did not readily threaten the ecosystem of the Marichjhapi island. Moreover, it was mostly coconut trees and not mangroves as Marichjhapi had no mangrove plantation due to the government’s own revenue generation policies. Furthermore, we learn from journalist Sukhoranjan Sengupta’s (of Ananda Bazar Patrika) narrative: ‘Their leaders were strong in body and spirit. They told me that while they had made the island their home, they would not harm the coconut plantation; they hadn’t cut even a single coconut tree. Even the forest officials praised the discipline of these men’ (Halder 57). Hence, how much the refugee settlement in Marichjhapi was causing ecological crises is highly debatable. THE MASSACRE AND THE AFTERMATH West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu had declared that refugee settlement on Marichjhapi illegal and that it fell under the encroachment on Reserve Forest land and on the state- and World Wildlife Fund–sponsored tiger protection project. And if the refugees would not stop cutting trees (the truth regarding the cutting of trees has been already discussed), the government would take necessary action. Thus, ecological crises or not, it was clear that the Left government did not want the Namasudra-Dalit communities to get settled in Marichjhapi. When persuasion failed to make the refugees abandon their settlement, the West Bengal government started on January 26, 1979, an economic blockade of the settlement with thirty police launches. The community was tear-gassed, huts were razed, and fisheries and tube wells were destroyed, in an attempt to deprive refugees of food and water. (Mallick 108)

Mana Goldar recounts the horrors of the economic blockade: For eighteen long days, there was complete lockdown on such movements to the other side. There was no food to eat. Out of desperation, people started eating the soft upper portion of coconut plants, locally known as mathi. They would also eat a kind of local leafy vegetable, jadupalang, which was salty in taste. Lot of people died of food poisoning. Children died in large numbers, eating such things. (Halder 86)

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During the economic blockade, numerous lives were lost due to starvation, lack of drinking water, and medicines. Santosh Sarkar, a survivor of the massacre, bitterly recalls: ‘Every household in the island fell victim to dysentery. Death knocked on our doors every day. Naked bodies of children were strewn around the bank of Karankhali river as their mothers wailed’ (Halder 86). A brief account of the massacre of Marichjhapi jotted down by Anny Jalais in ‘Massacre in Marichjhapi’ showcases devastating figures, and the omissions and gaps in the news data ignite a worse body count and brutality. Jalais writes: Based on the data compiled by the ‘Udbastu Unnayanshil Samiti’ (Refugee Development Association’s) secretary Raiharan Barui we know that if police firing on the January 24 and 31 directly killed ‘only’ 14 people, the blockade of the island by police launches and boats caused 239 adults to die of cholera and typhoid and 136 of starvation, 271 children to die of hunger or due to lack of medical care, and at least three persons to commit suicide. This gives a total count of 663 people dying either due to police firings or to the blockade in just January 1979. During the same time 24 women were raped and sexually assaulted. 128 people went missing, and hundreds injured and imprisoned. It might also be worth mentioning that during this month 1,000 shacks were burnt down, 163 boats confiscated, 64 quintal of rice and flour destroyed. (‘Morichjhanpirmrityujhanpi,’ Adal badal, Bimal Biswas and Mala Mitra (eds). 19th year, numbers 3, 4 and 5, May, June and July 2004) The reason why we have not got the figures for those who died in the following months—especially in May when things got even nastier—was because the media was denied access to the area and reporting on the event banned. (Jalais, ‘“Massacre” in Morichjhanpi’ 2458)

Journalists who tried to write reports on Marichjhapi and the massacre were threatened, and their voices were muffled. On July 25, 1978, when renowned activist Pannalal Dssgupta wrote in Jugantar about the plight of the refugees of Marichjhapi, his publication of the next issue on the same article was snipped in the bud. The ruthlessness by which any form of dissent was silenced and news of the massacre was muffled from reaching the mainland is astonishing. Annu Jalais writes about the terrible conditions of the news reports who wanted to raise awareness regarding Marichjhapi: When Jyotirmoy Dutta. Ajit Chakraborty and Sunil Gangopadhyay hired a boat on September 7 to reach Morichjhanpi and wrote a report about the events they found no newspaper would publish it. As narrated by Nilanjana Chatterjee, when the state declared Morichjhanpi out of bounds for journalists, SaphalanandaHaldar who worked in Morichjhanpi on behalf of the refugees managed to evade police patrols and swim across to the mainland in order to inform newspaper offices in Calcutta about the shootings. With the publication

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of the story and his name in The Statesman on February 2. 1979, Haldar was arrested. Journalists Jyotirmoy Dutta of Jugantar and Niranjan Haldar of Ananda Bazar Patrika who took up the cause of the settlers were intimidated, attacked and threatened with dire consequences if they persisted. (‘“Massacre” in Morichjhanpi’ 2458)

An editorial in the Bengali daily Jugantar stated as Jyoti Basu prohibited any journalist from reporting on Marichjhapi: Again today, the leaders of the state made caustic remarks about journalists the Marichjhapi problem is apparently the creation of a few reporters. But journalists are society’s eyes and ears, we are merely witnesses. A journalist has no ability to cause something to occur; s/he can only describe it. But sometimes events are such that an immaculately unbiased description sounds like strong censure. . . . The mouths of journalists can be stopped but not the flow of history. (Chatterjee 312)

The Left government tried everything to silence the aftermath of the massacre from reaching the mainland masses. Newspapers were threatened by pulling out advertisements to stop publishing about Marichjhapi and its people. Mallick recounts: While Atharobaki Biswas is very specific in stating that 4,128 families died in transit from starvation, exhaustion, and police firings, Nilanjana Chatterjee indirectly corroborates this figure. Dr. Chatterjee states that by the time the eviction was completed on May 17, 1979, at least 3,000 refugees had secretly left Marichjhapi and scattered across West Bengal. . . . At the end of July 1979, a spokesman for the Dandakaranya Development Authority announced that of the nearly 15,000 families who had ‘deserted,’ around 5,000 families (approximately 20,000 refugees) had failed to return. The final deadline for them to re-register with the project was extended yet again to 31 August 1979 and the matter was considered officially closed. (Chatterjee 1992, 300). From these figures (20,000–3,000) it can be estimated that as many as 17,000 people died, and if based on her calculation of four per family, this represents 4,250 families, which is almost exactly the figure given by Atharobaki Biswas. Though these people are missing and presumed dead, no breakdown of how or where they died was ever undertaken. (Mallick 114)

Therefore, it can be denoted that thousands of lives were lost in the Marichjhapi massacre, although the Left government hardly accepts a few casualties. Deep Halder asked about the ‘massacre’ in his interview with Kanti Ganguly, the erstwhile minister of Sundarbans during the Marichjhapi massacre, and Ganguly protested vehemently to the use of the word ‘massacre.’ As the query went:

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‘What happened in Marichjhapi? Your government has been accused of killing thousands.’ ‘Rubbish. Even if I put the death toll at eight or ten, it would be too high a number.’ [Halder 100]

Further, when enquired on the caste angle of the massacre, Ganguly negates any such issue. According to him, the Left government was ‘never communal or casteist.’ He added, ‘Those Namasudras carried a deep-rooted anger towards Brahmins. I am a Brahmin, and have seen this for myself. But we had no such caste angle in mind when we denied them settlement in Marichjhapi’ (Halder 10). This twisted comment raises a critical point: even if what Ganguly claims are true, is that not only reinstating the caste angle even more deeply? If there is no caste-based segregation and discrimination, then why would the Namasudras hold deep-rooted anger toward the ‘upper castes’? Ganguly soon foreshadows his whole argument in favour of the environmental crises by dictating, ‘But how can you overlook the ecology? Can you strike a compromise with nature—can you become its enemy and hope for the human race to survive?’ (Halder 102). Thus, again, the lives of the Dalit refugees are weighed against nature and found wanting. To save the human race, humans were sacrificed and massacred, going back to the proverbial sentence by Orwell: ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’ Annu Jalais, in ‘Dwelling on Morichjhanpi,’ argues that the bloody events of Morichjhanpi were the pivotal point where ‘the people of the Sundarbans felt that they had been betrayed by the government and the Kolkata urbanites’ (1760). The urban Bhadraloki society was worried about the ecological balance, the environmental crises, the tiger project, and declaring Sundarbans as a world heritage site, but the poor villagers whose lives depended on the fodder from the forest became tiger food. To maintain the critical balance at the ecological margins, it is their lives that are sacrificed. But most unfortunately, the ecological façade falls short as advocate Sakya Sen, who had fought for the rights of the refugees at Calcutta Hugh Court, narrates: Justice B.C. Basak dismissed the case on the grounds that Marichjhapi was part of a reserved forest and the refugees didn’t have the right to settle there. On the basis of an oral statement of the government, the case was dismissed. Later, much later, we came to know that it wasn’t a reserved forest area at all. (Halder 76, emphasis mine)

Therefore, let us ask again, why did the Marichjhapi massacre happen? Who did it benefit? Thousands of Dalit refugee lives were lost over a theoretical question of nature versus man, where nature was not at stake to begin

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with. All these nameless refugees getting obliterated from the face of the earth without any trace or consequence, would their lives have been so easily disposable if not they were rootless, penniless ‘udbastus’ from Dalit origins? On careful contemplation, the Marichjhapi massacre turns out to be a socio-political disaster by the Left government in terms of post-Partition refugee resettlement in West Bengal, which was later shrouded by dictating an ecological crisis to unsuccessfully justify the human lives lost. And, in this case of the Marichjhapi massacre, the empathy machine was carefully politically orchestrated from the very beginning to portray the rootless, penniless ‘Dalit refugees’ as the ‘unwanted’ ecological ‘Other,’ who were illegally squatting on natural reserve areas, thus threatening the wellbeing of the elite bhadraloks at the centre by their sheer Dalit existence in the mud island of Marichjhapi, therefore, dually dismantling the hegemonic societal as well as natural ecosystem. In comparison to the tiger project and the ecological sustenance of the World Heritage Site of Sundarbans, the Dalits’ lives did not matter. The bhadralok elite of Bengali did not lose heart over the Dalits being massacred at Marichjhapi or thought it to a lesser cost to be paid for a better environmental tomorrow. Oral histories like Halder’s Blood Island thus become essential to reiterate the omitted narratives of the subaltern to revisit dominant historiography and hold perpetrators accountable for their sins against the desolate and the dead. WORKS CITED Chakrabarti, Prafulla K. The Marginal Men: The Refugees and the Left Political Syndrome in West Bengal. Lumiere Books, 1990. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses.’ Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 2, winter 2009, pp. 197–222. Chatterjee, Nilanjana. Midnight’s Unwanted Children: East Bengali Refugees and the Politics of Rehabilitation. PhD. dissertation, Brown University, 1992. Chowdhury, Debdatta. ‘Space, Identity, Territory: Marichjhapi Massacre, 1979.’ The International Journal of Human Rights, vol. 15, no. 5, pp. 664–82. Halder, Deep. Blood Island: An Oral History of the Marichjhapi Massacre. HarperCollins Publishers, 2019. Jalais, Annu. ‘Dwelling on Morichjhanpi: When Tigers Became “Citizens,” Refugees “Tiger-Food.”’ Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 40, no. 17, 2005, pp. 1757–62. ———. ‘“Massacre” in Morichjhanpi.’ Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 40, no. 2, 2005, pp. 2458–636. Mallick, Ross. ‘Refugee Resettlement in Forest Reserves: West Bengal Policy Reversal and the Marichjhapi Massacre.’ The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 58, no. 1, 1999, pp. 104–25.

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Oreskes, Naomi. ‘The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change: How Do We Know We’re Not Wrong?’ Climate Change: What It Means for Us, Our Children, and Our Grandchildren, edited by Joseph F. C. Dimento and Pamela Doughman. MIT Press, 2007, pp. 73–74.

Chapter 2

Ecological Disaster and The River of Stories Resuscitating Empathy Through Graphic Narratives Pritha Banerjee

How we see a hazard or a disaster has changed a lot over time. Earlier catastrophes or disasters were seen as ‘Acts of God’ placing the onus on an abstract ‘other’ instead of comprehending disasters as ‘consequences of human use of the earth’ (Smith and Petley 4). More complex environmental paradigms have emerged over the decades that acknowledge human culpability in disaster and foster greater sensitivity toward those most affected by these ecological disasters. Prior to the 1950s, the engineering paradigm focused on the physical causes of disaster and responded with scientific and engineering designs to defend against the hazards (Smith and Petley 4). From the 1950s to the 1970s, a behavioural paradigm focused on human response to disaster through long-term planning of avoiding sites of disaster (Smith and Petley 4), leading to a development paradigm between the 1970s and the 1990s that understood disasters in the least developed countries as ‘arising more from the workings of the global economy and the marginalisation of poor people than from the effects of extreme geophysical events’ (Smith and Petley 6). This paradigm thus critiques the human exploitation of natural resources as the cause of disasters rather than seeing disasters simply as natural occurrences. Hence, human culpability in the suffering experienced by people in least developed countries who suffer the most in any environmental disaster (Smith and Petley 4) becomes the centre point of this paradigm. Keith Smith and David N. Petley also emphasise the ‘economic and political systems 25

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that exercise power and influence, both nationally and globally, and result in marginalising poor people’ (6). In this chapter, I shall be reading Orijit Sen’s River of Stories as a significant graphic narrative of the development paradigm and human culpability in ecological disasters. Sen’s narrative in fact bridges an important transition toward the complexity paradigm for assessing and comprehending disasters, emerging from the 1990s, which considers how the impact of ecological disasters can be reduced in a sustainable way in the future, particularly for the poorest people, worst hit in such scenarios (Smith and Petley 4). As Smith and Petley observe, ‘disaster reduction depends on fundamental political, social and economic changes involving a redistribution of wealth and power’ (6). Through this chapter, I would like to propose Sen’s graphic novel as an important contribution to the way ecological disasters are seen, narrated, experienced, and empathised with. Engaging with disasters is so significant because they reveal the social and economic patterns that prioritise unsustainable practices and encourage the exploitation of natural resources. Disasters are often overwhelming for most people; difficult to comprehend and tackle at the first instance. Narrating the cause and effect of anthropogenic disasters are essential for empathising with the victims as well as for realising our own role in engineering such ecological disasters, whether through action or inaction. Graphic narratives like The River of Stories help us reconceptualise potential disasters wrought by human insensitivity or greed and strive to create environmental awareness and empathy for the ecosystem we are embedded in and yet unaware of how we are engineering disasters for ourselves. Rudolf Bahro calls this the logic of self-exterminism a result ‘of the unremitting and ever-accelerating growth of the industrial system,’ driven by the ‘Megamachine’1 of corporate capitalist enterprise (vii). David Clarke goes on to assert that we ‘are approaching a precipice of self-annihilation which will result from the degradation of the natural order, to the point where it can no longer support the Megamachine’ (Bahro vii). Orijit Sen’s work showcases the fallout of the workings of the ‘Megamachine’ that runs on the back of the touted horse of ‘development,’ bringing displacement and ecological disaster for the adivasis2 and the ecosystem inhabited by them. The long-standing effects of disaster are also analysed by Orijit Sen as it means the loss of balance of a delicate river ecology as well as the loss of a way of life along with the legends and myths deeply embedded in the geography and ecology of an area. Thus the graphic narrative tries to create a shift in the way we see ecology or the environment, showing it as deeply interwoven with the fabric of human life and not something apart from it, awakening empathy that is otherwise crushed by an empathy-denying corporate culture of consumerism and profit-based enterprise. Empathy itself needs to be understood as a wide spectrum of responses to the suffering we perceive in others. Cognitive empathy ‘denotes the ability to

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ascribe mental states to others,’ such as ‘beliefs, intentions, emotions’ (Olson 1). Such a projection is possible either through reflection or ‘by putting oneself in the position of others to see what one would think, feel, etc.’ (Olson 1). Hence by an inner simulation, we are able to experience cognitive empathy with others. Heinz Kohut describes empathy as ‘the capacity to think and feel oneself into the inner life of another person’ (82). Affective empathy, on the other hand, involves affect on the part of the empathiser and can actually take on some distinct forms and processes. ‘Empathic concern’ as explained by Heidi Maibom, is different from ‘empathic affect,’ as in case of the former, the person experiencing concern need not ‘match what the target is feeling,’ but is rather focused on ‘the welfare of the person, not their emotional situation’ (1). Empathic affect, on the other hand, describes the feeling of ‘being moved, and feeling soft-hearted and tender towards the target’ (Batson 46). Analysing the discussions of psychologists like Daniel C. Batson, Nancy Eisenberg, and Martin L. Hoffman, we see a greater premium placed on an ‘optimal response to another in need,’ which is more sympathy than distress, or ‘more empathic distress than personal distress’ (Maibom 1). Thus psychologists see empathic concern or sympathy in layman terms as more effective than empathic affect (Maibom 3), leading to more prosocial behaviour, as lesser personal distress reduces the dangers of denial, desensitisation, and aversion that may result from higher levels of affective distress on seeing another in pain and suffering.3 To avoid this ‘empathic overarousal’ (Eisenberg 674), eco-narratives of disasters have to therefore tread the fine ground to ensure empathy that does not overwhelm the empathising reader or viewer, disabling their ability to act upon the situation at hand. The River of Stories begins with the legend of Kujum Chantu, visualised as the mother of the universe providing for the whole world and its creatures, both human and nonhuman by the adivasis, starting off on a register that prioritises the myths and legends populating the culture and geography of a region, conveying ecological truths and rendering the ecosystem sacred and therefore inviolable. The picture of sufficiency (Sen 12) is very important as it signifies that there is enough for each species created by Kujum Chantu, who creates specific food for each creature she brings to life. This is in sharp contrast with a capitalist world order that for the sake of limitless profit extracts resources and destroys the ecosystem, not ‘caring’ about the loss or deprivation of others sharing the same resources or habitats. Hence, Orijit Sen begins the graphic narrative by etching out the sharp contrast between lives lived to the tune of the ‘rangai’4 and the legends of the earth and its creatures vis-á-vis lives in the city, out of tune with nature and the philosophy of equitable sharing. Sen brings together different kinds of narrative strains for telling the story of the Rewa Andolan,5 closely based on the Narmada Bachao Andolan6 though never directly referring to it. Relku, an adivasi from

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the village Jamli on the banks of the river Rewa, displaced by the extortion of the state officials and thekedars7 for the building of the dam, now works in the city and tells her story to Vishnubhai, a reporter. Relku works at Vishnu’s house as a domestic help and her story had hitherto remained unknown until Vishnu starts interrogating her, looking for a story for the newspaper The Voice. Relku’s narrative allows for the expression of emotional upheaval which a purely journalistic article could not have provided. At the same time, Vishnu’s reporting in the newspaper, which is included in the graphic novel as a crucial part of the story, is also important in creating an impact of large groups of people reading The Voice and getting them to think about issues that would be lost in the metanarratives of development spun by the state. The Kujum Chantu and Malgu Gayen’s rangai ruptures the linearity of time, creating pockets where empathy for the loss of identity and a way of life for the adivasis may be created. It is therefore described not just as a loss for the tribals in Jamli and adjacent areas, but a loss for all of us who could learn from the ecologically sustainable lifestyle of the adivasis instead of forcing them to emulate the capitalist and consumerist lifestyle of urban areas. The idyllic life of the children living in the lap of nature in Jamli is rudely disrupted by the arrival of the jeep, that is visually represented by the breaking of the branch on which the little boy was sitting, with sound effects placed in between panels, along with close-ups of the branch breaking and the boy falling to the ground (Sen 15). As readers, we become aware of the harsh manner in which the lives of the tribals are about to be affected. These are the moments through which Sen creates a subtle difference between the empathic reader and the insensitive government officials, by tilting the narrative to portray the latter as particularly cruel toward the adivasis and their way of life. The ‘big sarkari’ officials in the jeep talk about development based on building roads and better communication between the city and the villages (Sen 15). It is this narrative of growth and prosperity that causes anthropogenic ecological disasters like the one picturised by Sen in his book.8 These officials see ‘the very existence of people living in such a primitive way,’ as an ‘obstacle for modernizing the country’ (15). Thus the concept of modernity and civilisation held by the powerful in society become the dominant narrative, sometimes leading to the displacement of hundreds and thousands of indigenous people, like the adivasis at Jamli by the river Rewa in this story. Hence, The River of Stories documents the importance of challenging this metanarrative of ‘development’ and profiteering through graphic narratives that create visual triggers of empathy and critique the ‘Megamachine’ of the state and corporate machinery. Sen actually brings to the forefront a whole range of problematic issues, including the Forest Acts that restrict use of the forest land and access to its resources.9 The natural rights of the

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indigenous people who have lived sustainably on forest resources across time are re-asserted subtly by the text. The picture painted by Sen immediately alerts the reader to the exploitative and unjust nature of the Acts, when one of the villagers stands up and questions the official how the common wealth of the people could become government property—‘Sahib! These hills and forests are our home! We were all born here—our ancestors have lived here and after us, our children’ (Sen 16). The brave villager goes on to explain how the land was like a mother to them: ‘She gives us food and shelter. She takes care of our needs. We worship the trees, the river, the hills’ (Sen 16). The sarkari10 official sits on a charpai,11 elevated from the tribals to impose a sense of hierarchy and power. Sen’s panel art captures the scene from different angles, creating a cinematic effect that highlights the elevation used by the sarkari official. He tries to make them question their thoughts and belief systems, trying to sell them the state’s idea of growth and development, signified by the building of pucca12 roads and dams. His phrase, ‘little by little these jungles can be opened up,’ becomes a dangerous statement for forceful penetration of the interiors by the lifestyle of the cities, providing resources as well as a consumer base for the rich and the greedy. Playing on the parallel between exploitation of women, indigenous people, and natural resources, the official’s words and body language on the pages of Sen’s graphic narrative becomes representative of the empathy denying culture of capitalist and state enterprise that the book tries to counter through its layered narrative. The questions asked by the villager become symbolic of the questions Sen would like us to ask as well. The outspoken adivasi realises that the promised heaven of ‘proper houses’ and ‘factories’ might lead to their displacement, asking the most poignant question, ‘Does it mean we’ll have to go away from here and live somewhere else?’ (Sen 17). The official’s contempt for the ‘idiots’ shocks us into empathising with the disaster unfolding before our eyes. Thus, Sen ensures we feel uncomfortable through his narrative and graphic art and forces us to re-think dominant narratives of growth that we participate in. Relku’s tale also outlines the corruption that the officers encouraged, with thekedars allowed access to their sacred forests while the adivasis struggle to meet their basic needs and are forced to bribe the officers to collect grass and firewood from the forests that they have always thought of as common property of all humans. The caravans and traders from the city pile into Jamli with the successful building of roads, and their simple sustainable way of life is completely disrupted. The way the forest officials trap Relku’s father and uncle in a conspiracy to snatch their land is detailed by Sen, creating a relatable story so that Relku stops being a mere statistic on a page. Only through identification with the joys and sorrows of characters do literary narratives succeed in creating empathic responses in readers. Antriyo, Relku’s

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father, is seen believing in the rule of law, but is beaten up and thrown into jail for appealing to the police for justice! Gary Olson, referring back to Martin Luther King Jr.’s ideas, proposes the concept of ‘engaged empathy’ as the foundation of all social justice, requiring inclusive action toward all victims of injustice—individual victims certainly but also institutional ones (3). Olson sees such dynamic empathy as the foundation of all social justice. Such ‘radical altruism’ requiring people to put themselves at risk in empathy that actually engages with large-scale institutional injustice obviously stems from an ability to see life ‘through the eyes of others—to understand their feelings and motives and appreciate the indivisible, communal nature of life’ (Olson 5). King’s articulation of the interconnected nature of experience13 can be seen as an elevated experience of empathy that understands ‘whatever affects one directly affects all directly’ (Olson 5). King’s understanding of the inter-related nature of reality translated into his political activism, as he urged people to understand that ‘for some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until what you are ought to be’ (Warren 174). Thus, care and empathy for the other and action based on that seems essential for one’s own fulfilment and growth. Olson therefore calls for an ‘empathy epidemic’ to counteract the prevailing ‘culture of rampant individualism,’ as well as the importance of analysing the factors preventing the construction of an empathic culture including parenting, education, economic inequality, and popular perceptions regarding social status, etc. (Olson 6). According to Olson, isolated acts of empathy were not enough to ‘ameliorate large scale human suffering’ (6). Hence, he proposes ‘dangerous empathy’ as a practice ‘to make the world more conducive to loving one’s neighbour in a meaningful sense,’ being dangerous as it involves protesting against the ‘captains of industry’ (Olson 6–7). Thus Olson and King’s form of empathy is not the sentimental ‘armchair version’ but one that reacts in the face of injustice. King’s rhetoric was particularly effective in breaking through the usual resistance created in people’s minds by an ‘obdurate, empathy-inhibiting popular culture’ (Olson 7). The panel art in The River of Stories creates a significant parallel between Vishnu picking up his pen to write and Malgu Gayen picking up his rangai to sing ‘the river of stories/which rises from the soul’ (31), so that the stories can travel ‘to the far corners of the world, “touching people’s lives and perceptions with its sweet music’ (Sen 31). Both acts of narration, while so different in texture, can stir a storm in our hearts, awakening such ‘dangerous empathy’ for the adivasis whose lives have been disrupted and the fragile river ecology that shall be erased by the project. The telling of stories of personal loss moves us to understand the actual loss effected by such development narratives which statistical figures can never achieve. At the same time, Vishnu’s approach is unemotional. He’s out looking for stories but not

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really connected to Relku’s feelings. Relku asks Vishnu to visit her brother Somariyo in Ballanpur, almost in lieu of herself going back to meet her family, and is wistful that Vishnu does not see any need to take her there. Orijit Sen pits together different kinds of emotional responses by presenting them as a foil to Vishnu, creating a sensitive representation of different kinds of empathic registers for issues that seem distant for us, often afflicted by complete denial of issues as a result of participation in the culture of state and capitalist enterprise that demands such repression of empathy and enables ecological disasters. Vishnu’s reporting triggers empathy in many readers and kindles hope in many activists of the Rewa Andolan. Carolyn Pedwell also views empathy as an affective experience that is ‘radically unsettling,’ with the capacity for transforming consciousness, by ‘assuming ownership of one’s complicity in the suffering of others’ (Pedwell 165). In this case too, Pedwell understands empathy for the self as the basis of such radical unsettling empathy for others, that emerges on realising ourselves to be a part of ‘a deeply flawed, empathy-denying culture’ (Olson 7) and becoming aware of others trapped in the same rhetoric. As explained by Chomsky, the way to ‘trap and control people’ is to propagate the doctrine of ‘just care . . . about yourselves, don’t care about anyone else’ (Olson 7). Caring about each other or the feeling that ‘we’re in it together’ or that ‘we have responsibility for one another’ frightens the state that would rather keep people passive and obedient, to maintain the status quo of the rich and the powerful. In fact, as suggested by Norman Soloman, ‘considerable thought and energy is devoted by the plutocracy to constraining our human capacity for empathy . . . because of its system destabilising potential’ (Olson 9). In this scenario, with the brain’s plasticity sitting bait for the social and political organisation of contemporary corporate capitalism (Malabou 12), ‘dangerous empathy’ as proposed by Olson provides ‘actionable counter intelligence for the powerless’ (9). Elizabeth Thomas describes the power of empathy as that which can ‘shrink distance, cut through social and power hierarchies, transcend differences, and provoke political and social change’ (Olson 81). Images play a huge role in triggering such powerful empathy. Pizarro, Bedell, and Bloom explain that ‘images transcend language and geographic region, and they are able to strike instantly at the heart of the viewer’ (91). Depicting Vishnu’s journey to Ballanpur, the site of activist action, Sen uses the speech bubbles and the expressions of the characters as well as the actions in the panels to create a layered critique of cultural desensitisation. Speech bubbles clash and contrast with each other to create a commentary on different thought processes. Vishnu is seen reading a book, The Ecological Impact of Rewa Dams, and the supervisor of I.S. Associates clearly identifies him as belonging to ‘the other side’ (Sen 33) simply because Vishnu seems to be concerned about the ecological disaster in the making.

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However, Vishnu counters this claim and says that he doesn’t ‘know about sides,’ projecting himself as objective and undecided. This is also a way by which Vishnu’s approach is distinguished from that of Anand, the activist he meets at Ballanpur. As he projects himself as undecided, other characters feel the need to convince him and therefore reveal their own thought processes. Thus Vishnu becomes an important conduit for gathering ‘the river of stories’ that break through the walls within created by individuals based on individualist and consumerist metanarratives spun by corporate houses. The supervisor expresses his ire against media houses that ‘blow things out of proportion’ (Sen 33) and contests the important findings of Dr. Sundarlal14 who sees this battle of tribals fighting to protect the ecosystem as one of the ‘major grassroots environmental movement(s),’ (Sen 33) with great significance for the entire planet. The supervisor in turn cites the government’s defence, seeing the benefits accrued by the project as outweighing the costs involved. He acknowledges the loss of land, livelihood, and homes, but in the same breath suggests that it is all for the sake of growth as the project will generate 1450 megawatts of power, the canals carrying water to drought-prone areas (Sen 34). The supervisor is so convinced by this line of thought that he declares that ‘the nation can’t do without such a project!’ (Sen 34). What is striking in the supervisor’s narrative is a complete lack of empathy for the people who will be affected by this ecological disaster. The man listening to this dialogue and eating chips is a direct visual representation of the way the supervisor has consumed the narrative of development at the cost of the tribals and ecological balance. What Sen drives at through this representation is perhaps the desensitisation that state and corporate narratives can create, to the extent that the disaster is not seen as a disaster but rather as the unavoidable cost of benefiting ‘millions of people’ and involving millions of dollars of international aid ‘for the largest river valley project ever planned’ (34). The economics driving the bargain is truly mind boggling and suggests the stakes that drive the politicians and bureaucrats and local policemen to push through the project at all costs, burying any trickle of empathy within. The larger racket and corruption that forms a part of this process is suggested by the comments of the passengers on the train and the parallel playing of the card game with players calling each other cheats! The way the supervisor believes in the ‘very good rehabilitation programme’ (34) of the government for projects across the country displacing local populace for building dams, roads, etc., shows the deliberate blindfolding of critical thinking for the sake of justifying one’s job based on a project that visibly harms the ecosystem and the lives of adivasis associated with such areas. While a ticket checker cracks down upon the card players for gambling, the larger racket involving millions of dollars that facilitate such development projects remains possible because people like the supervisor believe in it and participate in the crime. At the

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same time, graphic narratives like in Sen’s The River of Stories can be seen as an important attempt at questioning the grand narrative of development of a few that leads to ecological and humanitarian disasters, by involving the readers’ critical thinking skills through the use of unique graphic novel art, that make readers aware of human culpability in triggering ecological disasters. The poor weaver who takes Vishnu to the Rewa Andolan office once he reaches Ballanpur provides an immediate poignant contrast to the supervisor’s narrative of benefit and development. The weaver reflects that while he does not own much in terms of material possessions, he cannot fathom how he will survive displacement by the project and the loss of his mother, the river Rewa: ‘I can’t bear to leave mother Rewa . . . she is the holy one, the provider and protector of life’ (Sen 36). Placing these words in the speech bubble of a weaver belonging visibly to a different religious community amplifies Sen’s message as identification with the mythic-geographical space among the villagers cuts across religion, caste, and gender. It highlights that the Rewa cannot be replaced, being so deeply connected with the lives of the people living on its banks. Even as the weaver speaks about his sense of emotional loss, the panels surrounding him showcase other members of the community living lives enmeshed with the river (Sen 36), thereby amplifying the weaver’s emotions and producing greater affect in us. It is also significant as it points toward how river ecosystems are unique and one cannot replace another. By showcasing personal narratives of loss, we feel for the trauma of the villagers and the disaster that is about to unfold through the construction of the dam. Thus, Sen’s graphic novel succeeds by making us empathise again. Vishnu’s interactions with Anand the activist also deserve close attention. Anand keeps hinting that by the end of the reporting stint, objective and non-aligned Vishnu would also become an activist (Sen 37) and join the Andolan, or at least hopes that he will. Anand’s own story of disillusionment with the corporate world as an engineer himself is perhaps the basis of his hope. He narrates his story to Vishnu, describing how he started questioning the idea of development and modern technology after visiting the Rewa movement. Deeply moved by the cause and realising the inequity of benefits derived from such ‘development’ and technology developed by people like him, he left his white-collar job to work with the tribals living in Ballanpur and to support the Rewa movement. Thus, through Anand’s story, Sen showcases an example of a character who has broken through the chains of corporate culture to empathise with the larger world around him. Olson’s research suggests that there is ‘a virtually seamless web connecting knowing ourselves, knowing how the real world works and knowing that something needs to be done by oneself’ (8). This is also a journey toward reclaiming a culture of engaged empathy, indispensable for any form of political action

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for change. As empathic engagement and critical thinking leads one to ask questions, it is dangerous for the wealthy and the powerful who would rather keep people lost in a forgetful stupor of complacency. The unjust social order is maintained by those benefiting from it and having the power to do so (Cohen and Rogers 17). The manufacture of consent is enabled by distracting citizens from the reality of the world they inhabit, disconnecting them from their empathic selves and keeping them confused (Olson 9). Olson also suggests that the construction of selves based on market values (9) facilitates this disjuncture with the naturally wired responses of solidarity, sympathy, and mutual support that would be ‘doctrinally dangerous’ (Chomsky 8). Thus Anand’s actions represent the stirrings of ‘dangerous empathy’ (Olson 9) that can lead to massive revolutions and transformation of consciousness and manner of living. Just as Anand hopes to create a domino effect through his act of storytelling, hoping to impact the decisions of those he meets, Vishnu’s article spreads the story further to critique complacency. In turn, Sen’s graphic narrative extends the act of storytelling by dislocating it from specific experience, by fictionalising an actual movement like the Narmada Bachao Andolan, thereby making it representative of larger issues at stake. The legend of Malgu Gayen keeps trickling in to narrate an alternative story of the origin of the Rewa river that is so deeply embedded in the minds and lives of the adivasis, who see the rivers Revli and Devli as Gayen’s daughters, the Revli becoming the river Rewa and the mother who sustains them. The river of empathy is also the river of stories, as stories kindle empathy. Sen’s book thus also negotiates the power of storytelling and its contribution in the upsurge of consciousness that is seen among those pursuing the movement. While Anand represents one who is totally convinced of the cause, Vishnu’s voice serves as an interim one that raises pertinent questions that have framed the development versus ecology debate over time. He asks if the activists had proposed any alternatives to the dam and finds that Anand is unable to provide an adequate response as ‘there are no easy answers for that—it’s an ongoing dialogue among us’ (Sen 46). This is significant as ecological disasters can only be prevented if an alternative perception of growth and development is provided to people, as suggested by deep ecology paradigms. The activist woman without a name, but visibly modelled on Medha Patkar15, raises questions regarding a culture that treats all natural resources as commodities, increasing the gap between the poor and the rich by inequitable distribution of resources (Sen 46). Citing Gandhi, she differentiates between man’s need and relentless greed (Sen 46). The panels created by Sen demonstrate the importance of peaceful assemblies in challenging the status quo and in boosting the morale of the people who would be affected by the disaster, as the gathering becomes a chance for sharing experience of living sustainably amid the gifts of nature. In the evening, when the adivasis and the

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activists sit together around a fire and reflect on the deeper reasons behind the anthropogenic disaster that the state is attempting to unfold through the building of the dam, Sen’s graphic art becomes a conduit for commenting on the processes that enable ‘dangerous empathy.’ The way the speech bubbles are placed on the page (Sen 47), create a circular process of questions and counter questions, highlighting the importance of breaking down hierarchies, through the positions of the speakers around the fire, with no one given more importance than the other, as well as the way our eyes move across the bubbles, to make sense of the conversations that emerge from people located across the page. It disturbs the linear progression of thought, thereby creating space for alternative processes of thinking. The use of affect is ‘swifter’ when dealing with ‘dangerous situations or those involving uncertainty’ (Keller 30). In fact, Keller also says that ‘affective responses are connected to the vividness of experience’ (30). I wish to argue that that graphic narratives representing disasters try to recreate this vividness of experience by superimposing multiple layers of emotional experience of the disaster unfolding or that which has already happened, to ‘move’ the readers and create a shift in awareness, to combat denial and desensitisation (Norgaard 213). The double spread created by Sen16 on pages 48 and 49 of the graphic novel showcases the geography of the land nurtured by the river Rewa and the stories that form a part of the landscape. The hand drawn map of the area and the river winding through it, in the midst of panels continuing the story, create an active parallel between Malgu Gayen’s song and the Rewa Andolan. At the corner of the double spread it says, ‘Rewa: A map of stories told and as yet untold’ (Sen 49). As the river is seen rushing toward the sea, to the tune of Gayen’s rangai, streams of people are seen joining the Rewa Andolan, with each of their personal narratives populating the river of stories. As the river meanders through the pages as a physical entity, the people joining the movement are those who have been able to tap into empathy within themselves, for the displaced adivasis and disrupted river ecology, countering the dominant cultural narrative of profit, greed, and consumerism, sacrificing their other activities to join in the movement. While numerical data creates a wall between observers and victims, individual and embodied examples of suffering create greater empathy in observers. It appears that good decision making on behalf of others affected by a disaster that seems to be at a spatial distance is only possible by tuning to an expanded sense of ecological awareness (Naess 189). Part III of Sen’s book, titled ‘The Sea,’ demarcates such an expansion achieved through the process of storytelling. The newspaper article by Vishnu in The Voice causes quite a stir, showing the possibilities of investigative journalism as a crucial wing of activist writing. At the same time, Sen’s graphic novel, by its very act of holding together multiple kinds of activist narratives, showcases the important role that graphic novels can

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play in giving life to important issues and create ruptures in the metanarrative woven by the state and corporatisation of culture. Both subjective and objective perceptions of the Rewa movement and the loss of life, identity, and meaning jostle for space in his panels. Those directly affected by the crisis as well as those hearing about it from a distance find their voices reflected on the pages, as he includes every possible response and rhetoric in his representation. The state and forest officials can sense the mood of the people changing and are forced to launch a campaign to undo the ‘damage’ caused by such critical thinking infused in people through Vishnu’s article (Sen 54). What is significant is that everyone has an opinion here, from the politicians, the adivasis, the activists, and the collegegoers. What would have been buried under government red tape gets exposed through the newspaper article and further through Sen’s graphic novel, creating possibilities for the revival of empathy, critical to both combating existing anthropogenic disasters and prevention of more such ecological disasters in the future. This shift in consciousness that seems so critical to breaking the stranglehold of the ‘Megamachine’ and addiction to a consumerist and capitalist lifestyle enforced by the ‘Megamachine’ seems possible only by mass movements such as the one depicted in The River of Stories. While the movement itself may or may not be completely ‘successful,’ as the final fate of the Rewa movement is not addressed, it plays an important role in disrupting the linear narrative of infinite growth and expansion at the cost of the ecosystem. ‘Epilogue under the Mahua Tree,’ with which The River of Stories ends, is Sen’s final stroke at questioning the concept of profit and growth, by showing an interaction between a politician who descends from a helicopter and Malgu Gayen, the rangai player, resting under a tree. By bringing a mythical character in direct interaction with a living symbol of greed and corruption, Sen creates a visual and symbolic contrast between what is sold as the idea of ‘a good life’ based on earning more money and acquisition of property and another rooted in satisfaction in what one already has and fulfilment in knowing that nature shall provide for all of man’s needs. The rat race defining corporate culture that decimates the ecology is critiqued by Gayen’s figure with the rangai, living to the tune of the natural world. Thus Sen’s graphic narrative may be seen as critical in its effort of shifting the readers’ consciousness, by questioning the ‘Megamachine’ in the juxtaposition of words and images on the page. I argue that these graphic novels also make us aware of the way the ‘Megamachine’ of the state and corporations have worked on drying up the reserves of empathy within us that can act as a powerful means of destabilisation of grand narratives woven by these institutions. The graphic novel resurrects inner affect and empathy that can be dangerous for economic regimes and showcases the way capitalism works at keeping such emotional responses at bay, as self-annihilation is only possible because of

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the extermination of empathy for our extended selves, inclusive of all forms of life around us. We can see The River of Stories as providing that impetus toward ‘contemplation’ of ecological and social inequities and impending disasters, that might speed up the transition to a state of consciousness that places the biosphere at the top of the agenda and contradicts the metanarrative of development at the cost of ecology. WORKS CITED Bahro, Rudolf. Avoiding Social and Ecological Disaster: The Politics of World Transformation: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Spiritual and Ecological Politics. Gateway Books, 1994. Bandi, Madhusudan. ‘Forest Rights Act: Towards the End of Struggle for Tribals?’ Social Scientist, vol. 42, no. 1/2, 2014, pp. 63–81. Batson, C. Daniel. Altruism in Humans. Oxford University Press, 2011. Chomsky, Noam. Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power. Seven Stories Press, 2017. Clark, Dana L. ‘The World Bank and Human Rights: The Need for Greater Accountability.’ Harv. Hum. Rts. J., vol. 15, 2002, pp. 205, 217. Cohen, Joshua, and Joel Rogers. ‘Knowledge, Morality and Hope: The Social Thought of Noam Chomsky.’ New Left Review, vol. 187, May/June 1991, pp. 5–27. Dastidar, Diptarup Ghosh. ‘Material Development and Human Regression: A Decolonial Reading of Orijit Sen’s River of Stories.’ History and Myth: Postcolonial Dimensions, edited by Arti Nirmal and Sayan Dey. Vernon Press, 2022. Dungdung, Gladson. ‘Proposed Amendment to Indian Forest Act Would Deepen Injustice.’ Down to Earth, April 17, 2019, https:​//​www​.downtoearth​.org​.in​/coverage​ /forests​/proposed​-amendment​-to​-indian​-forest​-act​-would​-deepen​-injustice​-63993. Eisenberg, Nancy. ‘Emotion, Regulation, and Moral Development.’ Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 51, no. 1, 2000, pp. 665–97. Hebbar, Ritambhara. ‘Forest Rights Act: Lessons from the Field.’ National Institute of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj, n.d., http:​//​nirdpr​.org​.in​/nird​_docs​/srsc​ /srsc230217​-14​.pdf. Hoffman, Martin L. Empathy and Moral Development. Cambridge University Press, 2000. Keller, Ryan S. ‘Keeping Disaster Human: Empathy, Systematization, and the Law.’ Minn. JL Sci. & Tech., vol. 17, 2016, pp. 1. Khapre, Shubhangi. ‘Medha Patkar Saga: From Narmada Anti-dam Movement Face to Fighter for Many Causes.’ The Indian Express, November 28, 2022, https:​ //​indianexpress​.com​/article​/political​-pulse​/medha​-patkar​-saga​-narmada​-anti​-dam​ -movement​-fighter​-causes​-8292896/. Kohut, Heinz. How Does Analysis Cure? University of Chicago Press, 2009. Maibom, Heidi, editor. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy. Taylor & Francis, 2017.

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Malabou, Catherine. What Should We Do With Our Brain? Fordham University Press, 2008. Mondal, Monidipa. Interview with Orijit Sen, ‘River of Stories.’ Kindle Magazine, November 1, 2013, http:​//​kindlemag​.in​/river​-stories/. Naess, Arne. ‘From Ecology to Ecosophy, From Science to Wisdom.’  World Futures: Journal of General Evolution, vol. 27, no. 2–4, 1989, pp. 185–90. Norgaard, Kari Marie. Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life. MIT Press, 2011. Olson, Gary. Empathy Imperiled: Capitalism, Culture, and the Brain. Springer Science, 2013. Pedwell, Carolyn. ‘Affective (Self-) Transformations: Empathy, Neoliberalism and International Development.’ Feminist Theory, vol. 13, no. 2, Aug. 2012, pp. 163–79. Pizarro, David A., et al. ‘The Creativity of Everyday Moral Reasoning: Empathy, Disgust, and Moral Persuasion.’ Creativity and Reason in Cognitive Development, edited by J. C. Kaufman and J. Baer, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 81–98. Sangvai, Sanjay. The River and Life: People’s Struggle in the Narmada Valley. Earthcare, 2002. Sankar, Nandini Ramesh, and Deepsikha Changmai. ‘Word, Image, and Alienated Literacies in the Graphic Novels of Orijit Sen.’ Word & Image, vol. 35, no. 2, 2019, pp. 112–25. Sen, Orijit. The River of Stories. Kalpavriksh, 1994. Smith, Keith, and David N. Petley. Environmental Hazards: Assessing Risk and Reducing Disaster. Routledge, 2008. Swarup, Harihar. ‘Bahuguna the Sentinel of the Himalayas.’ The Tribune, July 8, 2007, https:​//​www​.tribuneindia​.com​/2007​/20070708​/edit​.htm​#2. Warren, Marvyn A. King Came Preaching: The Pulpit Power of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Intervarsity Press, 2008.

NOTES 1. David Clarke explains Lewis Mumford’s idea of the ‘Megamachine’ in which we all participate, ‘and whose basic goals of more, faster and bigger are rooted in our souls, feeds on and is hostile to the natural order’ (Bahro vii). 2. The indigenous tribal groups in India are often referred to by the collective name adivasis. However, in reality it is constituted by heterogenous ethnic identities, having diverse traditions, languages, and belief systems. Many adivasi communities in India are spread across different parts of India’s forested and hilly regions, their lives interwoven with the natural landscapes and traditional sustainable practices. Orijit Sen’s graphic novel explores the life and legends of the adivasis or tribal population living on the banks of the river Rewa, another name for the River Narmada.

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3. ‘Most people feel distressed both for themselves and the target, when another’s bad situation makes them distressed’ (Maibom 3). Thus, in Maibom’s words, ‘the flipside of empathic distress is personal distress’ (3). See also Eisenberg 666. 4. The ‘rangai’ is a stringed instrument played by Malgu Gayen. 5. The word ‘Andolan’ means an agitation, campaign, or movement. The Rewa Andolan, or movement to save the river Rewa, is modelled on the actual Narmada Bachao Andolan, or the movement to save the river Narmada, discussed in note 6. 6. See Shankar and Chagmai 113. While the Sardar Sarovar Dam construction could not ultimately be stalled, the Narmada Bachao Andolan through the late 1980s and 1990s, constituted by adivasis, environmentalists, human rights activists, and farmers agitating against the construction of large dams across the Narmada River, created a flutter in political circles and even forced the World Bank to set up the Morse Commission, which clearly stated that the World Bank’s funding of the project was violating environmental and resettlement policies. See Clark 205, 217. See also Sangvai 10 for details on native tribes or adivasis affected by the building of dams on the Rewa or the Narmada. 7. A thekedar is a contractor, employed by the state or private organisations to hire labour for clearing and construction in the forest areas. 8. See Dastidar 3–18 for a decolonial perspective regarding the Eurocentric notions of ‘utility, work and leisure,’ countered by Sen’s The River of Stories. 9. On the recommendation of the National Commission on Agriculture 1976, the Forest Conservation Act 1980 came into being restricting use of forest land by native tribals. However, through the National Forest Policy of 1988, the centre demonstrated a better understanding of the ‘symbiotic relationship between tribals and forests,’ leading further to the Forests Rights Act of 2006 that tries to undo the damage of past discriminatory Forest Acts. See Dundung, ‘Proposed Amendment to Indian Forest Act.’ See also Hebbar, ‘Forest Rights Act: Lessons from the Field’ and Bandi, ‘Forest Rights Act: Towards the End of Struggle for Tribals?’ for more discussions in this area. 10. The ‘sarkari official’ refers to a government official functioning on behalf of the state. 11. The ‘charpai’ is traditional Indian bed or cot made of a wooden frame, supported by four legs. The frame is interwoven with jute strings or ropes to create a hammock-like bed, allowing for air circulation in hot and humid climate. Usually placed outdoors, the ‘chairpai’ is also a symbol of hospitality as guests are offered a place to rest and sit. 12. The ‘pucca’ or permanent roads are an important symbol of the state’s investment in infrastructure development, as a contrast to the ‘kuchha’ or temporary roads created by movement of individuals and carts through the forests. Touted as the symbol of social integration and better communication, the permanent roads are constructed using asphalt, concrete, and stone, clearing trees and homes in its way, often paving the way for greater movement of people through fragile ecological zones, disrupting ecological balance and traditional indigenous lifestyles. 13. Martin Luther King in one of his speeches at Oakwood College, Huntsville, Alabama, on March 2, 1962, expands on his idea that, ‘All life is interrelated . . .

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somehow we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied to a single garment of destiny’ (Warren 174). 14. One of the leaders of the Chipko movement for the protection of forests from commercial exploitation and felling in the Himalayas in Uttar Pradesh, India, in the 1970s, Sundarlal Bahuguna has been called the ‘sentry of the Himalayas.’ Through his life, he campaigned tirelessly for protecting the fragile ecosystem of the Himalayas, alarmed by the receding glaciers feeding the river Ganga and the flora and fauna of the area under threat from the forces of ‘development.’ He is also known for his agitation against the building of the Tehri Dam through long fasts and an undeterred will, forcing the government to promise a review of the project at least (Swarup, ‘Bahuguna the sentinel of the Himalayas’). 15. Medha Patkar has played a significant role in the Narmada Bachao Andolan, advocating for the rights of the displaced indigenous populations as well as the negative impact of dams on the ecosystem and environmental degradation, caused by such construction. Patkar actively organised rallies, protests, and hunger strikes to draw attention to the cause and played a crucial role in uniting and mobilising disparate stakeholders like the tribal and marginalised communities, activists, academics, and concerned citizens in this movement, drawing international attention to the Narmada Dam projects and their associated environmental and social impact (Khapre, ‘Medha Patkar Saga: From Narmada Anti-dam Movement Face to Fighter for many Causes’). 16. Sen, in an interview with Monidipa Mondal in 2013, describes the double spread as the ‘basic unit of a comic-book story’ (‘River of Stories’). See also Shankar and Chagmai 124.

Chapter 3

Simulations of the Future Climate Change and Disaster in Contemporary Indian Science Fiction in English Swati Moitra

‘Fiction meets #ClimateCrisis reality today in SanFran,’ (@sciencenotdogma) wrote Twitter user ScienceNotDogma in their response to a viral YouTube video set in San Francisco, adding a set of emojis for good measure. On September 9, 2020, the residents of San Francisco, California, woke up to disturbing rust-and-orange skies as nearby wildfires blocked sunlight. Strong winds carried smoke, ash, and soot from the wildfires to the city, while residents resorted to metaphors of ‘doomsday’ and ‘apocalypse’ to describe their experience of the same. A YouTube channel called DoctorSbaitso released a drone video of the city, while Twitter user Terry set the video to music from the 2017 dystopic science fiction film, Blade Runner 2049. ‘SF [San Francisco] today fits really well with Blade Runner 2049 music #apocalypse2020 #SanFrancisco,’ (@terrythethunder) Terry wrote, comparing the rust-and-orange skies to the stark orange filter used in the film. Its subsequent viral status suggested that the video had struck a chord with people across the globe, who engaged with it with references to other works of fiction such as the dystopic television show Black Mirror (2011–2019) and the sci-fi cult classic Dredd (2012). Twitter user Matthew Scheuerman wrote: Everytime I mention the fact that we are fast approaching a Cyberpunk future where our lives resemble dystopian fiction, there’s someone who scoffs and says ‘it’s not that bad.’ 41

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It’s that bad. (@mordecaidesign)

Another Twitter user, Venture Capital, took the opportunity to attack the then-US President Donald Trump’s climate policies: @realDonaldTrump sends troops to the Southern border for a fake caravan or to DC to gas peaceful protestors . . . but he won’t send them to California to help the firefighters . . . #DerelictionOfDuty #ResignNowTrump @realDonaldTrump saidAmerica’s cities are burning. The #ClimateDenierInChief owns this. #TrumpsAmerica cc @GretaThunberg (@kelly2277)

By tagging Donald Trump’s then-active Twitter account1 to @terrythethunder’s Blade Runner 2049 mash-up video and lambasting the Trump administration’s use of force against ‘a fake caravan’ and ‘peaceful protesters,’ @ kelly2277’s tweets seek to hold Trump accountable for the California wildfires and San Francisco’s apocalyptic orange skies. Donald Trump’s policies on climate and scientific research, including spending cuts on research and pulling out of the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, had led to massive outcries from scientists and activists across the world. It had even prompted an unprecedented article from the scientific journal Nature in October 2020, where it laid out the adverse impact of Trump’s policies on science. In the course of his four years in the White House, Trump had also shown unflinching support for the former Brazilian president, Jair Bolsanaro, whose tenure had been marked by climate change denial, a series of wildfires in the Amazon rainforests, and conflicts with indigenous custodians of the Amazon rainforests in Brazil. By tagging the young climate activist Greta Thunberg, the aforementioned tweets also serve as a call-back to Donald Trump’s infamous Twitter insults directed at Thunberg (see Nakamura and Wagner). They wade right into the domain of contemporary online climate activism, which seeks to tackle head on the urgency of climate change, and the problem of big business and policy that resists the same. The outpouring of science fiction references on social media to describe the experience of living through an extreme climate event points, undoubtedly, to the mainstream popularity of dystopic science fiction, evident in the success of blockbuster disaster movies and Netflix-driven shows like Black Mirror. This chapter will engage with this question, asking what makes contemporary science fiction pertinent to the articulation of the experience of everyday disasters in the age of climate change, and the growing challenges faced by democracies across continents. The chapter understands disaster in

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the light of Oliver-Smith and Hoffman’s articulate definition of the same as ‘all-encompassing occurrences’ that ‘sweep across every aspect of human life: environmental, biological, and sociocultural’ (Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 15), regardless of the speed in which they might unfold. In their words: By their very constitution, disasters spring from the nexus where environment, society, and technology come together—the point where place, people, and human construction of both the material and nonmaterial meet. It is from the interplay of these three planes that disasters emanate, and in their unfolding, they reimplicate every vector of their causal interface. (Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 15)

The chapter, furthermore, draws upon Oliver-Smith’s reading of the common-sensical relegation of disaster as a ‘nonroutine’ event that assumes ‘general societal equilibrium prior to disaster onset,’ and instead considers the disaster in terms of its embedded nature in ‘the forms and structures of ordinary life’ (Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 33). The chapter will engage with science fiction’s entanglement with disaster through its reading of two recent Indian works of fiction in English: Samit Basu’s Chosen Spirits (2020)2 and Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s Analog/Virtual: And Other Simulations of Your Future (2020). To this end, the first section of the chapter will engage with Amitav Ghosh’s (2016) concerns about the potential of science fiction to engage with the everyday disasters of the twenty-first century, and SeoYoung Chu’s (2010) formulation of science fiction as ‘a high-intensity variety of realism’ (Chu 74). Following this, the chapter will engage with the texts in question to study how their ‘high-intensity realism’ makes accessible the nexus of caste, capital, and privilege that goes hand in hand with considerations of climate change in India. REPRESENTING THE DISASTER In his 2016 book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh accuses literary fiction of falling behind when it comes to addressing the urgency of climate change. In his words: it could even be said that fiction that deals with climate change is almost by definition not of the kind that is taken seriously by serious literary journals: the mere mention of the subject is often enough to relegate a novel or a short story to the genre of science fiction. It is as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel. (Ghosh chapter 3)

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Ghosh’s sense of urgency with regards to climate change can scarcely be denied. His 2019 novel Gun Island is an attempt to engage ‘serious literary journals’ and their readers with the same. However, Ghosh’s relegation of the genre of science fiction to ‘extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel,’ and his failure to address the ‘non-seriousness’ of ‘serious literary journals’ toward the genre is a troubling omission. Science fiction—and speculative fiction at large—has persistently attempted to engage with imperialism, neo-liberal capital, and technology through its explorations of ‘extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel,’ among many other science fiction tropes. Ghosh, furthermore, holds a dim view of contemporary climate fiction or ‘cli-fi,’ a term coined by Dan Bloom in 2003 and popularised by the media in the past decade. Cli-fi, as Whiteley et al. have shown, is an increasingly diverse genre. In their words: As part of a marketing campaign for a CF novel, Bloom (2013) initially identified cli-fi as a subgenre of SF. Trexler and Johns-Putra (2011) maintain that while a variety of earlier novels on climate change starting in the 1960s could be considered SF, more recent CF falls into several genre categories, including thriller and literary fiction. (Whiteley et al. 2)

Ghosh’s conclusion on cli-fi is different, and markedly less sensitive toward its diversity. In his own words: That said, the question remains: Is it the case that science fiction is better equipped to address climate change than mainstream literary fiction? This might appear obvious to many. After all, there is now a new genre of science fiction called ‘climate fiction’ or cli-fi. But cli-fi is made up mostly of disaster stories set in the future, and that, to me, is exactly the rub. The future is but one aspect of the age of human-induced global warming: it also includes the recent past, and, most significantly, the present. (Ghosh chapter 16)

To Ghosh, ‘global warming resists science fiction’ because it is ‘not an imagined “other” world apart from ours; nor is it located in another “time” or another “dimension”’ (Ghosh chapter 16). Ghosh’s apprehension, it is evident, stems from the geographical and temporal locations that speculative fiction at large and science fiction in particular manages to traverse, often in the future, or in different, imagined worlds. Such locations might allow readers to imagine climate change as a concern for the distant future instead of here and now or tempt readers to imagine extraterrestrial enemies to the planet instead of mundane bureaucrats, businessmen, and policymakers. And yet, as the responses to San Francisco’s apocalyptic orange skies—discussed at the onset of this chapter—suggest, science fiction can lend itself to the articulation of the lived experience of climate change. Such articulation might

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even prompt anger against all-powerful policymakers such as Donald Trump and demand a more urgent response to the climate crisis. Seo-Young Chu’s arguments in the landmark book Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep?: A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation are significant in this regard. ‘Science-fictional environments, creatures, and artifacts are not the imaginary referents that most people understand them to be,’ Chu writes. ‘They are mediums of representation constituted by literalised poetic figures of speech’ (Chu 68). Chu draws upon Darko Suvin’s (1972, 1979) classic definition of science fiction as the fiction of ‘cognitive estrangement’ in its creation of a universe outside the everyday world that the author (or the reader) inhabits. Chu takes on Suvin’s formulation, only to turn it ‘inside out,’ arguing that science fiction must not be conceived of as nonmimetic in nature. In his words: The objects of science-fictional representation, while impossible to represent in a straightforward manner, are absolutely real. . . . Instead of conceptualizing science fiction as a nonmimetic discourse that achieves the effect of cognitive estrangement through ‘an imaginative framework,’ I conceptualize science fiction as a mimetic discourse whose objects of representation are nonimaginary yet cognitively estranging. (Chu 3)

In this argument, the conventional tropes and devices of science fiction, ranging from extraterrestrials to telekinesis, from teleportation to interplanetary warfare, allow the representation of those aspects of reality that elude representation. Chu’s provocative work, thus, blurs the boundaries between literary realism and science fiction, ‘what most people call “science fiction” high-intensity variety of realism, one that requires exorbitant levels of energy to accomplish its representational work insofar as its referents (e.g., financial derivatives) challenge simple representation’ (Chu 74). This blurring of boundaries between literary realism and science fiction— reconfigured as a ‘high-intensity variety of realism’ (Chu 74)—is useful in comprehending the appeal of popular science fiction narratives as points of reference in discussions about the experience of living through extreme climate events, such as the orange skies of San Francisco and Blade Runner 2049. Steven Shaviro (2018) draws upon Chu’s arguments to make the case for science fiction’s ability to engage with climate change, writing: The changing climate is what Timothy Morton calls a hyperobject: something that is indubitably real (i.e., not just a human projection), but that also exceeds, even in principle, our ability to grasp and comprehend it. . . . Hyperobjects such as climate and capital are in fact the privileged objects of science fiction. . . . Chu argues that science fiction is in fact a fully ‘referential mode of discourse,’ but one ‘whose referents defy literal representation’ (10). It is not

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that sf estranges us from everyday physical and social reality, but rather that sf provides as accurate a representation as possible of objects that are altogether real but estranging in their essence, and therefore not directly representable. (Canavan et al. 428)

How might such an analytical framework help us consider the representation of the disaster in contemporary Indian science fiction, which—as stated earlier—‘[springs] from the nexus where environment, society, and technology come together—the point where place, people, and human construction of both the material and nonmaterial meet’? (Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 15). The following section will engage with two texts from the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic—Samit Basu’s Chosen Spirits and Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s Analog/Virtual: And Other Simulations of Your Future—to consider the same. SIMULATIONS OF YOUR FUTURE ‘Utopias and dystopias are histories of the present,’ write Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley, and Gyan Prakash (Gordin et al. 1). Considering the nature of dystopia, they further observe: In a universe subjected to increasing entropy, one finds that there are many more ways for planning to go wrong than to go right, more ways to generate dystopia than utopia. And, crucially, dystopia—precisely because it is so much more common—bears the aspect of lived experience. People perceive their environments as dystopic, and alas they do so with depressing frequency. Whereas utopia takes us into a future and serves to indict the present, dystopia places us directly in a dark and depressing reality, conjuring up a terrifying future if we do not recognize and treat its symptoms in the here and now. (Gordin et al. 2)

Kim Stanley Robinson, talking about climate-oriented science fiction, has further pointed to its ‘obvious’ relationship with dystopic fiction, ‘because the possibility of causing the sixth great mass extinction event in Earth’s history is all too real,’ and therefore science fiction must play the role of ‘sounding the alarm by the way of dystopian cautionary tales’ (Canavan et al. 427). Both Chosen Spirits and Analog/Virtual are set in the dystopic register, the former a novel set in a Delhi of a near-future, and the latter a set of connected stories set in a future Bengaluru renamed ‘Apex City,’ run by a shadowy tech-giant called the Bell Corporation. Even though climate change and disaster forms part and parcel of both narratives, neither text was published and marketed as cli-fi. This chapter does not seek to establish them as such. This chapter seeks to explore the nexuses of ‘environment, society, and technology’

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(Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 15) that elude ‘simple representation’ (Chu 74) and find themselves articulated in the language of science fiction. Inequality is part and parcel of the narrative of climate change, with marginal communities affected in a disproportionate fashion. In India, where the ‘richest 1% holds over 40% of the national wealth’ (Mint) and ‘22.3 per cent of the country’s higher caste Hindus own 41 per cent of the country’s total wealth and form the richest group, whereas 7.8 per cent of Hindu Scheduled Tribes own only 3.7 per cent, or the lowest wealth share of the country’s assets’ (Marar), questions of inequality are integral to narratives about climate change or climate catastrophes. Both Basu and Lakshminarayan take on the question of inequality head on in their dystopic universes. The climate crisis does not present itself overwhelmingly in the lives of the protagonists of Samit Basu’s novel, even as it is framed by the same. Privileged in her casteclass origins, Joey exists in a bubble where the climate crisis presents itself in the shape of news about climate refugees: Today’s news crisis is the discovery of an automated ship in the Indian Ocean swarming with East African climate change refugees, clinging on to the deckless craft like ants in the rain, preferring to risk incredible dangers crossing to unknown lands instead of being slaughtered by European vigilante pirate crews. Her brother’s clearly messed up the family TV content filters. (Basu 9–10)

Filtering the disaster away is not only a possibility but a necessity for Joey’s family, for all that it has paid the price for a sinking economy and authoritarian set-up in the shape of her parents’ jobs, ‘her parents have to be sheltered with filters: she and Rono must protect them from the psy-op epidemic of confusion and rage that still threatens to engulf the whole country, hoping all the while that the Residents’ Association’s guards keep the street outside their balcony free of blood’ (Basu 10). Residents’ welfare associations are a familiar presence in the lives of the residents of Delhi’s gated communities in the present day, noted for their role as the custodians of ‘spatial purification’ and the construction of ‘middle-class’ identities through a ‘process of othering’ and ‘[sacralization of] their living space and neighborhood while concurrently condemning the outer world’ (Roy Chaudhuri and Raghunathrao 11). In Basu’s dystopic Delhi of the near future, the segregationist logic of urban gated communities of the present expresses itself in armed militias serving as guards, constituted of young, impoverished men from the ‘outside’: ‘Most of the guards are very young, boys displaced from some burned-out village, or tossed out of some horrific brain-wipe camp, and pressed into service’ (Basu 23). Basu leaves it up to the readers to imagine the reasons behind their displacement. In another brief line later on in the narrative, Basu briefly touches upon the presence of armed guards in Film City, ‘Film City is on

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the Delhi-Uttar Pradesh border, a favourite destination for culture-outrage vandals, rape gangs, crowd-sourced flash-robs and fundamentalist lynch mobs. Rumours have been doing the round for months that the warlords who rule Uttar Pradesh are planning an organised invasion’ (Basu 39). The armed and displaced guards of Delhi’s gated communities and the privileged workspace of Film City ensure segregation between the lives of those irrevocably touched by the everyday experiences of disaster, and the lives of those who can keep away. The segregationist aspirations of the elite become clearer in an exchange between Rudra and his brother, Rohit, after Rudra refuses an opportunity to work for the ‘access-Brahmin’ Chopra’s slavery app: Storms are coming. We don’t know what they are. . . . The walls are going to crack, because a tide of people will try to break them, just billions of people who are useless, lost in the world, people who are angry and desperate to survive: they’re going to try to take everything down with them, burn it all. Climate change will break walls. The robots will break walls. New diseases, tech disasters, all these things. They’re all coming, all at the same time, until one day there’s only one wall, and the people inside it are gods, and the people outside it are monsters, or dead. (Basu 159)

Rohit has no illusions about the all-pervasive power of their dominant caste origins—‘We might not believe in caste, but caste believes in us’ (Basu 157), he tells Rudra—or the nature of inequality. He conceives of the conflict between the haves and the have-nots in mythological proportions. The walls of Rohit’s description are not simply the physical walls of the residents’ welfare associations. In the ‘spatially purifying’ (Roy Chaudhuri and Raghunathrao 11) logic of Rohit’s metaphorical walls, it is power and privilege that determines who will survive the unending chain of disaster, and who will be left outside to guard it or to die. ‘Spatial purification’ (Roy Chaudhuri and Raghunathrao 11) is also part and parcel of the organising logic of Lakshminarayan’s Apex City, which runs based on a so-called Malthusian Manifesto and thinks nothing of ‘culling’ the bottom 10 percent of the society in the aptly named ‘vegetable farm’: Every year, when the bottom ten percent was culled from society, Bell Corp’s Malthusian Manifesto ensured that there were sufficient replacements to join the workforce, employing seventy percenters from the Repopulation Wards or twenty-percenter children. Unfortunately, they couldn’t always ensure that the skill sets of the incumbents matched the open requirements. (Lakshminarayan 114)

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Apex City stands in a post-disaster universe, where the haves and the have-nots are divided into two categories: the Virtuals and the Analogs. Those who live within the walls of Apex City, and those relegated outside. The first story, The Ten-Percent Thief, features the Analog resistance leader Nayaka, whose simple act of resistance is the theft of jacaranda seeds: Trees. I’ve never touched one before. They’re the exclusive right of the top one percent. The Arboretum can only be accessed by the top twenty percent. The seventy percent in the middle are allowed Hyper Reality gardens, the occasional houseplant. I’m only given the right to breathe. And barely. She is a member of the bottom ten percent, exiled in shame. (Lakshminarayan 10)

In sharp contrast, John—the high-performing Bell Corp executive in Monsters Under the Bed—must fix his opinions if he is to make it to the top 20 percent and forever leave behind his Analog origins, ‘[with] its dusty streets and pod-housing, its roadside stalls and paper-money transactions, its promiscuity when it came to marriage’ (Lakshminarayan 15). The ‘monsters’ under John’s bed are but the skeletons of his Analog past, which includes his living Analog parents whose very existence he must deny in order to claw his way up. If stealing jacaranda seeds mark an act of rebellion for Nayaka, the Champion of the Analogs, then John’s quiet longing for the open skies and the ‘elaborate experiences’ (Lakshminarayan 16) that he might have access to in the future is an incentive for him to empty himself even more of his Analog past. The Ten-Percent Thief informs the readers at the very onset that the ‘Bell Corp’s system of governance came as a welcome relief to the ruins of an erstwhile civilization,’ because ‘[it] seemed optimal—even utopian—for a world divided along social and communal lines, faced with the threat of dwindling resources and hostile climate, to be redesigned’ (Lakshminarayan 10). This ‘redesigned’ world of Bell Corp stands in sharp contrast with what is termed the ‘Outside,’ constituted of Eco-Socs, Agro-Socs, Aqua-Socs, and so on—that is to say, cooperative societies that operate under different principles than that of Apex City, or other Bell Corp-governed cities. The Persona Police speaks of immigrants from these societies who ‘were used to cooperative societies, egalitarian forms of governance’ (Lakshminarayan 114). The Be-Moji Project has an intra-company dispute over the sharing of technological resources related to water supply and purification as the Bell Corp braces for future droughts:

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‘Why would we lose our upper hand in trade negotiations by giving the Outsiders tech solutions for free?’ ‘The aftermath of this disaster will affect all of us. Imagine the refugee crisis if Outside Socs can’t sustain their cities.’ ‘We don’t harbour refugees.’ ‘It will only be a matter of time before this impacts us in Apex City.’ (Lakshminarayan 221)

The Seven-Year Itch reports a breakdown in trade agreements between the Delhi Aqua-Soc and Apex City as the former struggles to barter adequate resources in return for ClimaTech Solutions. The Bell Corp, as Lakshminarayan envisions it, is a logical successor of the twenty-first-century technological giants. Apex City bears traces of ‘smart city’ projects in India and elsewhere, such as the now-abandoned Quayside Smart City project proposed by Alphabet Inc.’s Sidewalk Labs in Canada. It also bears traces of sprawling industrial estates such as the so-called Foxconn City in China, with its emphasis on productivity and constant surveillance of employees. In the ‘smart’ governance offered by Bell Corp, democratic processes do not exist. ‘Solutions’ to survive droughts and other extreme climate events are proprietary products to be bartered at an appropriate cost, as opposed to be shared as a part of a common good. The imprint of caste is everywhere in Apex City. If Chosen Spirits is explicit about caste and power, Analog/Virtual—in a manner appropriate for Bangalore, India’s so-called Silicon Valley—chooses to articulate the same through the Bell Corp’s ‘Meritocratic Manifesto.’ The text highlights bits and pieces of the manifesto, where the corporation declares a civilisation ‘free from discrimination’ and celebrates ‘merit’: Bell Corp declares that civilization is free from discrimination. A universal system of Merit determines an individual’s worth to society. We are a Meritocratic Technarchy. We are the future of the human race. – from the Preamble to the Bell Charter on Human Rights (Lakshminarayan 12)

The language of merit has long been critiqued by scholars of caste in India. Newman and Jodhka, in a qualitative study of twenty-five human resource managers of large firms in New Delhi and the National Capital Region that employ a vast number of workers, pointed out that all their interviewees argued that ‘workers should be recruited strictly according to merit’ (Newman and Jodhka 4125). In their piece, Newman and Jodhka point out the pitfalls of this language of merit, that erases caste discrimination and claims a strictly post-caste society without accounting for the construction of merit:

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The language of meritocracy has spread around the globe along with the competitive capitalism that gave birth to it. Largely gone is the notion that patrimonial ties, reciprocal obligations, and birthright should guarantee access to critical resources like jobs. That ascriptive characteristics continue to matter—now dressed up as ‘family background’ rather than caste—hardly causes the managers we interviewed to skip a beat. They are convinced that modernity is the future of their firms and the future of the country. It calls for the adoption of labour market practices that the advanced capitalist world embraces, and a blind eye to the uneven playing field that produces merit in the first place. (Newman and Jodhka 2131)

Ajantha Subramanian, in her study of the rise of engineering education in India and the emergence of the ‘Brand IIT,’ considers the ‘[production] of newly consolidated forms of upper-caste affiliation’ in the engineering institutes of repute, and argues that the ‘leveraging of merit must be seen as an expression of upper-caste identitarianism that attempts to forestall progress toward a more egalitarian society and derives its legitimacy from a larger global politics of ascription’ (Subramanian 3–4). Renny Thomas, in an ethnographic study set at Bengaluru’s prestigious Indian Institute of Science, similarly points to the employment of the language of ‘passion,’ ‘merit,’ and ‘interest’ while speaking of their entry into scientific studies, even as they identify as ‘casteless beings’ as a ‘strategic tool to avoid questions of reservation and inclusion’ (Thomas 8). The Bell Corp’s brand of meritocracy, thus, cannot be understood simply in terms of global capitalism and meritocracy, but also in terms of the nexus of caste and merit in India. It is fitting that Apex City is none other than Bengaluru, home to India’s so-called Silicon Valley and the beneficiaries of the rise of engineering education in India. The Bell Corp’s attempt to ‘repair historic divisions’ such as ‘caste, class, religion, race, nation’ with ‘a system of meritocracy’ (Lakshminarayan 192–93) is but a manifestation of the sort of ‘upper-caste identitarianism’ (Subramanian 3) that Subramanian identifies in her work. Who qualify as Virtuals, and what is the demographic make-up of the Analogs? How does caste operate in the more egalitarian Outside that battles climate disasters and struggles to barter technology with Apex City? Analog/Virtual offers no concrete answers to these questions, but there are sufficient glimpses of Bell Corp’s brand of meritocracy for the reader to pursue these questions. The motif of walls as a symbol of inequality is not unique to Basu or Lakshminarayan’s work—the walled township of Prayaag Akbar’s (2017) Leila is governed by a Council whose symbol is a pyramid, a visual reminder of hierarchy and oppression, while the protagonist in Goutam Bhatia’s (2020) The Wall is obsessed with the need to see what lies behind the wall that encloses the city of Sumer, with its neatly planned circles of hierarchy and

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division of power. The wall makes visible the segregationist logic of ‘spatial purification’ (Roy Chaudhuri and Raghunathrao 11) that drives India’s elite. When Nayaka steals jacaranda buds, or when John the self-loathing Analogturned-Virtual imagines the skies with quiet longing, Lakshminarayan’s text is made literal, forcing us to grasp the materiality of the privatisation and consumption of natural resources by India’s elite at the cost of others deemed primitive and backward, such as India’s indigenous communities, or those marked as ‘outsiders.’ The armed guards in Basu’s novel, standing guard in the gated communities with their ever-changing modern weaponry, stand testimony to the weaponisation of India’s working classes and those from marginalised castes/communities in the process of elite segregation, while the use of present tense helps establish a sense of here and now. Both Basu and Lakshminarayan, in their construction of Apex City or the Delhi of the future, thus, help make literal the nexus between caste, capital, and climate change in modern India. CONCLUSION This chapter has sought to engage with the question raised by Amitav Ghosh about the potential of science fiction to engage with a topic as urgent as climate change in the twenty-first century. It has sought to ask why tropes and images drawn from science fiction lend themselves to the articulation of the everyday experiences of disaster in the twenty-first century. Despite Ghosh’s apprehension about science fiction, the chapter has drawn upon contemporary scholarship to argue that science fiction makes accessible experiences that are nonimaginary and yet elude simple representation. In its engagement with Samit Basu’s Chosen Spirits and Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s Analog/ Virtual: And Other Simulations of Your Future, the chapter has explored the manner in which the two texts make visible the nexus between caste and capital in the era of climate change. Despite their stated dystopian registers, the two texts under discussion are not without glimpses of resistance. Nayaka, the jacaranda thief, and her people orchestrate a coup that strikes at the heart of Apex City’s technological mastery, destroying Bell Corp’s surveillance databases on ordinary citizens. Raja and Laxmi’s lives in Cyber Bazaar—the aptly renamed Nehru Place—similarly thrives at the heart of another resistance that Rudra plunges into headlong: He tells her about Solboxes that let families trade solar power directly with their neighbours, about dronejacking sweatshops and illegal 3D printing factories that could compete with the Chinese if they didn’t have to pay bribes, about

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criminal- only servers, identity theft centres, malware startups, tech-pyravikar cartels aligned with caste mafias in Uttar Pradesh, fake ID publishers and maverick gene-hackers, Gujarati cryptocurrency forgers and Dravida Nation spies. He tells her about other cities under Delhi’s skin, city-states with their own internets, their own currencies, their own economies. Not just the fortress-paradise cities of the rich, but watering holes for the very poorest. (Basu 198–99)

Even a world after disaster is not a world without people, without hope. WORKS CITED Basu, Samit. Chosen Spirits. Simon & Schuster India, 2020. Canavan, Gerry, et al. ‘Symposium on Science Fiction and the Climate Crisis.’ Science Fiction Studies, vol. 45, no. 3, 2018, pp. 420–32. Chu, Seo-Young. Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation. Harvard University Press, 2010. Das, Srijana Mitra. ‘A Colonial Mindset Thought Technology Could Control Nature—That Caused Climate Change.’ The Times of India, https:​//​timesofindia​ .indiatimes​.com​/a​-colonial​-mindset​-thought​-technology​-could​-control​-nature​-that​ -caused​-climate​-change​/articleshow​/80885929​.cms. DoctorSbaitso. ‘San Francisco Looking Like Blade Runner / Mars / Chernobyl.’ 2020. YouTube, https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=dSreOPz0Zcs. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Penguin Books India, 2016. Gordin, Michael D., et al., editors. Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility. Princeton University Press, 2010. Lakshminarayan, Lavanya. Analog/Virtual: And Other Simulations of Your Future. Hachette India, 2020. Marar, Anjali. ‘Upper Caste Hindus Richest in India, Own 41% of Total Assets; STs Own 3.7%, Says Study on Wealth Distribution.’ The Indian Express, February, 14, 2019, https:​//​indianexpress​.com​/article​/india​/upper​-caste​-hindus​-richest​-in​-india​ -own​-41​-total​-assets​-says​-study​-on​-wealth​-distribution​-5582984/. Matthew Scheuerman. ‘Everytime I Mention the Fact That We Are Fast Approaching a Cyberpunk Future Where Our Lives Resemble Dystopian Fiction, There’s Someone Who Scoffs and Says “It’s Not That Bad.” It’s That Bad.’ @mordecaidesign, September 10, 2020, https:​//​twitter​.com​/mordecaidesign​/status​ /1304056081442836483. Mint. ‘India’s Richest 1% Holds over 40% of National Wealth: Report.’ January 20, 2020, https:​//​www​.livemint​.com​/news​/india​/india​-s​-richest​-1​-holds​-over​-40​-of​ -national​-wealth​-report​-11579534691272​.html. Nakamura, David, and John Wagner. ‘Trump Mocks 16-Year-Old Greta Thunberg a Day after She Is Named Time’s Person of the Year.’ Washington Post, https:​ //​www​.washingtonpost​.com​/politics​/trump​-mocks​-16​-year​-old​-greta​-thunberg​-a​

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-day​-after​-she​-is​-named​-times​-person​-of​-the​-year​/2019​/12​/12​/fc66f406​-1cda​-11ea​ -8d58​-5ac3600967a1​_story​.html. Newman, Katherine, and Surinder S. Jodhka. ‘In the Name of Globalisation.’ Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 42, no. 41, October 2007, pp. 4125–32. Oliver-Smith, Anthony, and Susannah M. Hoffman, editors. The Angry Earth: Disaster in Anthropological Perspective. Routledge, 2020. Roy Chaudhuri, Himadri, and Sujit Raghunathrao Jagadale. ‘Normalized Heterotopia as a Market Failure in a Spatial Marketing System: The Case of Gated Communities in India.’ Journal of Macromarketing, September 2020, p. 0276146720957382. Science Not DogmaTM. ‘Fiction Meets #ClimateCrisis Reality Today in SanFran.’ @ScienceNotDogma, September 10, 2020, https:​//​twitter​.com​/ScienceNotDogma​ /status​/1303916187336585217. Shaviro, Steven. ‘Symposium on Science Fiction and the Climate Crisis.’ Science Fiction Studies, vol. 45, no. 3, 2018, pp. 420–32. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5621/ sciefictstud.45.3.0420. Accessed 2 Feb. 2024.  Subramanian, Ajantha. The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India. Harvard University Press, 2019. Terry. ‘SF Today Fits Really Well with Blade Runner 2049 Music #apocalypse2020 #SanFrancisco Https://T.Co/UhRl6qe8RB.’ @terrythethunder, September 10, 2020, https:​//​twitter​.com​/terrythethunder​/status​/1303880459449896960. Thomas, Renny. ‘Brahmins as Scientists and Science as Brahmins’ Calling: Caste in an Indian Scientific Research Institute.’ Public Understanding of Science, vol. 29, no. 3, April 2020, pp. 306–18. Tollefson, Jeff. ‘How Trump Damaged Science—and Why It Could Take Decades to Recover.’ Nature, vol. 586, no. 7828, October 2020, pp. 190–94. Venture Capital. ‘@realDonaldTrump Said America’s Cities Are Burning. The #ClimateDenierInChief Owns This. #TrumpsAmerica Cc @GretaThunberg Https://T.Co/OYpC0Qz8Qc.’ @kelly2277, September 11, 2020, https:​//​twitter​.com​ /kelly2277​/status​/1304128573654151174. ———. ‘@realDonaldTrump Sends Troops to the Southern Border for a Fake Caravan or to DC to Gas Peaceful Protestors . . . but He Won’t Send Them to California to Help the Firefighters . . . #DerelictionOfDuty #ResignNowTrump.’ @kelly2277, September 10, 2020, https:​//​twitter​.com​/kelly2277​/status​/1304087458724929543. Whiteley, Andrea, et al. ‘Climate Change Imaginaries? Examining Expectation Narratives in Cli-Fi Novels.’ Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, vol. 36, no. 1, February 2016, pp. 28–37.

NOTES 1. At the time of writing this paper, the former US president’s Twitter handle is inactive following a suspension and subsequent restoration. Trump prefers his own social media platform, Truth Social, instead. 2. Chosen Spirits was republished by Tordotcom in 2022 as The City Inside. This chapter confines itself to the 2020 edition of the book that was published in India.

Chapter 4

Magic Realism and Trauma A Study of Comingling of Spaces in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island Nilanjan Chakraborty

Amitav Ghosh’s concern with environmental disaster started with The Hungry Tide (2004) when he had represented the fragile ecosystem in the novel through the apocalyptic cyclone that strikes the Sundarbans and destroys much of its ecology, forcing Piya, the US-based researcher, to stay back in the region to reconstruct it. Ghosh revisits the area in his novel The Gun Island (2019), this time with a more prolific sense of a disaster that encompasses a large time and space, moving from the Sundarbans in Bengal to Venice. The novel is a sequel to The Hungry Tide, and it is an experimentation in form as Ghosh devises a new language of novel writing to represent the trauma of environmental disaster that affects every being of this planet. It can be argued that The Gun Island devices the technique of magic realism to capture the psycho-mystical space that Ghosh represents in order to represent the trauma associated with an impending doom. And like the prequel, this novel also delves into the cultural unconscious by using myth as a major narrative to guide the narrator across spaces, traversing across the real, the mystical, the mythical, and the psychological. The Hungry Tide hinges around the myth of the Bon Bibi and The Gun Island centres on the folktale of Manasa Devi. Manasa Devi is a folk-based goddess in Bengal, and she is considered to be the goddess of snakes. It is believed that she has the power to punish the detractors by unleashing the brutal force of her ‘pets.’ Jan Vansina terms the transmission of oral culture as ‘historical consciousness’ that determines the way communities receive that oral narrative to orient its cultural praxis (13). Ghosh represents the trauma faced by the narrator and the other characters in 55

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the novel in terms of their way of negotiating with the ‘undefined’ happenings that occur around them as a result of the various forms of disaster that cumulate from the larger environmental crisis in the twenty-first century. Amitav Ghosh’s epistemic and ideological concern with the environment is reflected in The Great Derangement, where Ghosh finds a new subjectivity in nature which is trans-epistemic and trans-real in its implications: On the face of it, the novel as a form would seem to be a natural home for the uncanny. After all, have not some of the greatest novelists written uncanny tales? The ghost stories of Charles Dickens, Henry James and Rabindranath Tagore come immediately to mind. But the environmental uncanny is not the same as the uncanniness of the supernatural: it is different precisely because it pertains to non-human forces and beings. The ghosts of literary fiction are not human either, of course, but they are certainly represented as projections of humans who were once alive. There is an additional element of the uncanny in events triggered by climate change, . . . This is that the freakish weather events of today, despite their radically non-human nature, are nonetheless animated by cumulative human actions. (Ghosh, The Great Derangement 42–43)

The novel begins with the narrator’s negotiation with the tale of the Bundooki Saudagar (The Gun Merchant). The narrator notes that ‘The origins of the story can be traced back to the very infancy of Bengal’s memory: it was probably born amidst the original, autochthonous people of the region and was perhaps sired by real historical figures and events’ (Ghosh, Gun Island 6). The tale is communicated to Kanai, the narrator, by his Aunt Nilima. Nilima says that a boatman had told her about the tale. The legend goes that the Merchant was plagued by snakes, storms, and droughts because he refused to become the devotee of the goddess Manasa. When the merchant tries to conceal himself inside an iron chamber in an island called Bonduk-dwip (Gun Island), the goddess chases him over there. The merchant narrowly escapes a fatal snake bite and flees to the high seas. He is captured by pirates, and the goddess promises that if he becomes her devotee then she will release him from the pirates. The merchant follows the instructions and after being released he makes a shrine in the name of goddess Manasa and earned the name Bonduki Sadagar or the Gun Merchant because of the vast fortunes he made. This tale sets the narrative in motion as Kanai goes in search of the Gun Island that makes him chart out the course of the merchant, thereby negotiating with the various challenges of climate-related disasters that are threatening to put the survival of the human species on earth in serious danger. This tale becomes a part of the subconscious construct of Kanai. He internalises the tale as a

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part of his own existence and the existence of the nature around him. The tale of the Gun Merchant and the goddess Manasa becomes the central motive around which the narrative of the disaster unfolds, thereby creating a bridge between the mythic wisdom and the environmental challenges of the contemporary times. Hopkins and Sugerman state: First you have to have the period of disaster, chaos, returning to a primeval disaster region. Out of that you purify the elements and find a new seed of life, which transforms all life and all matter and the personality until finally, hopefully you emerge and marry all those dualisms and opposites. Then you’re not talking about evil and good anymore but something unified and pure. (143)

Ghosh’s narrative brings together the narrative of trauma and that of myths to look into the threats of environmental disaster that is impending on the human race as a cataclysm to happen. Kanai meets Professor Giacinta Schiayon, or Cinta, which starts the quest of Kanai to find the various pieces of disaster happening at the various parts of the world, and those pieces are held together by the mythical tale of the Bundook Sadagar. Sugerman and Hopkins’s contention that myths hold together a reality that is ‘unified and pure’ is represented in this novel through the myth of Manasa Devi and the Gun Merchant. The myth interconnects the world of telepathic visions, collective trauma surrounding the environmental disasters, and mythical wisdom with the real spaces of corruption, interborder traffic movement, and refugee problems. The real and the telepathic unite in the vision of the trauma which results from the disasters happening at multiple levels. In the novel, telepathy and intuitions play an important role in determining a space that is yet to be given a rational explanation. Cinta reports to Kanai that she seemed to have the intuition of the accident that her husband and daughter experienced in Italy. Cinta says to Kanai, when the two meet in Kolkata, that she seemed to have a strange foreknowledge of the whole thing. Cinta says, ‘I knew that somewhere there was a record of my call and the time when it was made. I knew that if anyone ever examined the reports carefully, they would see that I had called the police more than an hour before the accident was reported’ (Ghosh, Gun Island 42). The telepathic vision of Cinta is a time travel since she believes that she heard her daughter’s voice over the telephone after she was killed in the accident. This brings the contention of magic realism in the narrative of the novel, which helps the Ghosh devise a new language that challenges the boundaries of the ‘real’ to represent the collective consciousness of trauma that binds the characters across time, space, and contexts. While discussing the historical genealogy of magic realism, Frantz Roh observes that the form was a kind of ‘magic of being’ (9), implying a certain of an intrinsic relationship that is established between two apparently

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contradictory ideas—the magical and the real. Guenther notes that ‘The juxtaposition of “magic” and “realism” reflected the monstrous and marvellous Unheimlichkeit [uncanniness] within human beings and inherent in their modern technological surroundings’ (35). The genealogical development of the technique of magical realism shows that the form reacted against the bourgeois association with social realism of the nineteenth century. In one of his interviews in 2015, Ghosh says, ‘Novel is no treflecting reality but creating reality, where language is used constitutively like clay.’ Ghosh’s construction of a new language in a novel is perhaps borne out of the necessity to reflect a reality which is not in congruence with the traditional notion of the ‘real.’ The impending disaster of the environment that Ghosh talks about in the novel is interspersed with multi-dimensional realities involving myths, cultural unconsciousness, and telepathic connections with time and space. This is where Ghosh creates a paradigm shift in constructing a form that involves the tenets of magic realism, which is to extend the boundaries of the real in order to critique the bourgeois structures of power that seeks to feed on power from those very structures of the real. The notion of the real in the classic realist sense involves an organic relation with the chronology of time and space. In Ghosh’s narrative, the time-space continuum is spread across a mythical time, real time, and time interconnecting human telepathy and nature. At the insistence of Nilima, Kanai goes to visit the shrine of the Gun Merchant in one of the deserted islands of Sunderban. He sees some symbols in the shrine in the form of concentric circles, which he later discovers as signs of islands spread across Southeast Asia, in which the Gun Merchant had gone to do trade. There is a note of bewilderment in Kanai since he knows that he is negotiating with a tale that is outside the memory of general history. He observes: Equally puzzling was the absence of the things that I had most expected to see—guns and muskets. There was only one suggestion of a weapon, in a panel that included a helmeted figure, armed with an elongated object, something that could have been a musket or a spear. I guess that the image was a representation of a European pirate (or harmad as they were known in Bangla). The figure was certainly armed, but I could not be sure that this weapon was a gun. (Ghosh, Gun Island 71)

This description of the Gun Merchant, as constructed in the shrine, creates a time-space continuum that is outside the usual cognition of the real. The shrine is a depiction of an oral culture that is hidden from the general people and therefore this puts the narrator in a certain privileged position, as he is one of the few interlocutors of its meaning to the outside world. Kanai hears the tale of the Gun Merchant from one of the local young men called Rafi. Rafi tells him that he had heard from his father and grandfather that the Gun

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Merchant had trade relations with the Southeast Asian islands, but he was always running away from the wrath of Manasa Devi as he had refused to worship her. He took shelter in places like ‘Land of Palm Sugar Candy’ (Taalmisrir-desh) and ‘Land of Kerchiefs’ (Rumaali-desh) and finally he was told to take shelter in the Gun Island since there were no snakes over there. This narrative brings to focus a certain idea of a disaster that is to befall to any one if they fail to abide by the code of the sacred. Eliade notes that myths often try to create the ‘dialectic of the sacred’ since the sacred preserves the note of authenticity in the tale. He adds, ‘The sacred is qualitatively different from the profane, yet it may manifest itself no matter how or where in the profane world because of its power of turning any natural object into a paradox by means of a hierophany [i.e. manifestation of the sacred]’ (Eliade 30). The Gun Merchant’s constant fear of being obliterated by the goddess is paralleled to the perennial anxiety of Kanai to exist in a world that seems to be moving out his notions of the real and the substantial, getting substituted by telepathic connections and a mysterious connection that is signalling the end of the world though climate change. Rafi points out that he was running away from Kanai a moment before because there was a cobra chasing Kanai from his back, which he failed to notice. Rafi says, ‘It was right behind you. When you came out of the dhaam, I could see it behind you. Its hood was raised and its head was above your shoulder. I’ve never seen it like that before; it never comes out when I’m here and I leave it alone too’ (Ghosh, Gun Island 76). Rafi’s sighting is not confirmed from any other source as nobody has seen the snake apart from him, not even Kanai. And yet the real intersects with the tale: the king cobra comes out right in front of Kanai before Tipu (son of Fakir from the Hungry Tide) kills it but gets bitten by the snake as well. The image of the snake becomes a recurrent motif in the novel as it becomes the symbol of the intrusion of the non-rational into the space of the rational. The snake is a tool of Manasa Devi to force people into her fold, and the world of the myth intrudes the world of the characters through the snake that Kanai envisions at important junctures of the novel. Amitav Ghosh’s politics in this novel is to construct a notion of the ‘unreal’ to piece together a phenomenon that is yet to get an overall overarching explanation for its constituent incidents. Global crisis arising out of various environmental disasters are explained in terms of a local phenomenon and they are seen as standout incidents in the popular imagination of the masses. Ghosh mentions the disasters of the Aila (a coastal storm that destroyed the Sunderban in 2009) and the flooding of Venice in the novel, but he wants to interconnect these incidents as one overarching phenomena: climate change. However, Ghosh interconnects these disasters in terms of a global unconscious where telepathic conversations across time, space, and beings create a remote ‘strangeness’ that interconnects the various phenomenon related to

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the climate change, thereby establishing an organic relation between the various events of the global disaster. Kanai meets Piya, who is a researcher on freshwater dolphins and who survived the storm in Hungry Tide, protected by Fakir, and Piya explains the environmental disaster affecting the Sunderbans. Piya says that the dolphins now show erratic behaviour in terms of movement in the river because of the ‘changes in the composition of the waters of the Sundarbans’ since the river waters have become too saline (Ghosh, Gun Island 92). Ghosh creates a dialogue between the world of rational explanation and that lies beyond the understanding of the natural laws of science. When the snake had come from behind Kanai, Rafi said that Kanai must have ‘disturbed’ the creature, thereby pointing toward an imbalance in the equilibrium. The same misbalance is seen in the intrusion of the saline waters in the river water and in both the cases, human colonisation or intrusion is responsible for the disturbance of the harmony. Even though the incidents are apparently disconnected from each other, they represent the same crisis: the crisis of eviction. Jacques Lacan notes that ‘For the signifier, by its very nature always anticipates on meaning by unfolding its dimension before it’ (86). Lacan’s signifier is the yet-to-be-formed subjectivity that is borne out of the subject’s abject disavowal of the self. In the case of this novel, the signifier is the environmental disaster, acting as the abject self that interrogates the very nature of the segregation between the self (bio-life) and the Other (the environment). Ghosh wants to give a multi-layered dimension to this notion of disaster by interconnecting the various events that happen across the world on the basis of cause and phenomenon. Piya’s description of the whales going astray brings to Kanai’s mind the image of the beached whales. Piya talks about the ‘oceanic dead zones’ where oxygen content is so low that creatures cannot survive in those zones, and Piya says that such zones are increasing alarmingly across the globe. The entire incident of the cobra and the conversation of Piya submerges Kanai into a space of a ‘collective unconscious’ where he realises that every incident has a bearing in the way human species survive on the planet. Kanai writes: It was as if some living thing had entered my body, something ancient that had long lain dormant in the mud. I could only think of it in analogy to germs or viruses or bacteria, yet I knew it was none of those things: it was memory itself, except that it was not my own; it was much older than me, some submerged aspect of time that had been brought suddenly to life when I entered that shrine—something fearsome, venomous and overwhelmingly powerful, something that would not allow me to be rid of it. (Ghosh, Gun Island 103)

The memory that Ghosh talks about is the collective memory of the species that shares the guilt of destroying the planet and hence the guilt produces in

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Kanai a sense of deep anxiety in defining the relation between the individual and the collective. Jung notes ‘the great psychic danger which is always connected with individuation . . . lies in the identification with the ego consciousness with the self. This produces an inflation which threatens consciousness with dissolution’ (145). Ghosh critiques the capitalist intervention toward extreme individuation in line with Jung and suggests that the rational concerns of a market-driven culture produces the disconnect with the mystical realties of nature which can only be interpreted if one is able to create that bridge between the conscious and the unconscious. While explaining the features of magic realism, Chanady notes, ‘In contrast to the fantastic, the supernatural in magical realism does not disconcert the reader, and this is the fundamental difference between the two modes. The same phenomena that are portrayed as problematical by the author of a fantastic narrative are presented in a matter-of-fact manner by the magical realist’ (24). Ghosh’s language in the novel comes close to the magic realist fiction, but his magical realism is centred around a deep understanding of the organic relationship between nature and individuals, which has been under stress due to capitalist aggression on possessing resources. Piya informs Kanai how a local industry is polluting the waters of the riverines. This capitalist aggression is the main reason behind the divorce between man and environment, causing the various disasters across the globe. Toni Morrison, in an interview with Evans, says that magical realism provides ‘another way of knowing things’ (342). The ‘another way’ is a resistance to the bourgeois construction of a rationalist reading of reality. Magical realism, as a mode of representation, seeks to provide a narrative that stretches the possibilities of the real and extends the cognitive understanding of what can be seen as the real. Amitav Ghosh extends the scope of the magical realism by interconnecting myth with the narrative of the disaster to showcase how the myth of Manasa Devi and the Gun Merchant provides an anticipatory clue to what is about to happen with the world if nature is continuously exploited for human purposes of material acquisition. Zamora and Faris observe: Texts labeled magical realist draw upon cultural systems that are no less ‘real’ than those upon which traditional literary criticism draws—often non-Western cultural systems that privilege mystery over empiricism, empathy over technology, tradition over innovation. Their primary narrative investment may be in myths, legends, ritual—that is in collective (sometimes in oral and performative, as well as written) practices that bind communities together. (3)

Gun Island produces a culture that intersperses time and space to construct a consciousness that pervades the ritualistic, mythical, and the performative,

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and crosses over to the global crisis of climate change. Amitav Ghosh needed a language that will crisscross the two apparently dichotomic spaces: myth and global environmental crisis. The global crisis is so huge that spaces are brought closer by the danger of environmental collapse. Piya informs Kanai over email that fishes have died in the rivers of Sunderban: ‘a huge swarm of them lying dead on a mud bank’ (Ghosh, Gun Island 108). On the other side of the globe, Kanai goes to meet Cinta to attend a conference on global environmental crisis in Los Angeles, and there he sees massive wildfires raging in the outskirts of the city. Kanai says, ‘But that morning nobody looked either at the hills or the sea; every eye was drawn in the same direction, towards the northeast, where a dark cloud had reared up above the horizon, taking the shape of an immense wave, complete with frothing white top’ (Ghosh, Gun Island 121). The two narratives of disaster meet at the point of a common crisis that binds the human species together. The meeting point of the disaster is the myth of the Gun Merchant itself. When Kanai dismisses the myth as just another ‘story,’ Cinta says: In the seventeenth century no one would ever have said of something that it was ‘just a story’ as we moderns do. At the time people recognized that stories could tap into dimensions that were beyond the ordinary, beyond the human even. They knew that through stories was it possible to enter the most inward mysteries of our existence where nothing that is really important can be proven to exist—like love, or loyalty, or even the faculty that makes us turn around when we feel the gaze of a stranger or an animal. Only through stories can invisible or inarticulate or silent beings speak to us; it is they who allow the past to reach out to us. (Ghosh, Gun Island 127)

Amitav Ghosh’s politics of the magic realist asserts the dimensional qualities of stories—reaching out to a consciousness that is beyond the reaches of the limited cognitive field of linguistic communication. The myth of the Gun Merchant opens up the possibilities of finding a discourse that joins the mythical wisdom with the notion of the real. Rafi points out to Kanai in Venice that then symbol of a circle with eight lines crisscrossing on its surface is actually a symbol of spiders which could have been the pets of goddess Manasa too, much like the snakes. While in Venice, Kanai realises that the Gun Merchant could have visited Venice since Venice was the centre of global trade in the seventeenth century. It could well have been that the Gun Merchant escaped to Venice to run away from the spiders and snakes of Manasa Devi. While scanning through the pages of the a book in a shop, published in 1592, Kanai moves into a state of dream as he imagines the myth of the Gun Merchant being retold in the voice of the merchant himself, a story that involves the ‘animals, trees, flowers, spirits, . . . spiders, cobras,

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sea snakes’ as Kanai realises ‘that I, like the Gun Merchant, had entered the dreamtime of the book; that he was somewhere near me’ (Ghosh, Gun Island 208). Philip Swanson observes that the magic realist language of Garcia Marquez ‘must be a political question, utilizing the oral style . . . challenging the hegemony of the alien, dominant, imported culture [of the colonizer]’ (12). Like Marquez, Ghosh interprets the Eurocentric discourse of the real with much critique. The oral strand in the myth of the Gun Merchant exposes Kanai to a reality which is much beyond the scope of the immediate reality to explain the causality of the events happening around him. Ghosh rejects the linearity of narration and appropriates an oral-style narrative that challenges the principle of causality in plot development. The construction of the narrative is done around an inexplicable but possible interconnection between telepathic visions and real happenings. Watt notes that realism functioned out of the bourgeois belief that linearity of experience is the only causal experience: ‘the novel’s realism does not reside in the kind of life it presents, but in the way it presents it’ (89). Catherine Belsey added that realism contributed to the constructionist attitude of bourgeois values: ‘Realism is plausible not because it reflects the world, but because it is constructed out of what is (discursively) familiar’ (47). The magic realism in the novel by Ghosh problematises the very essence of what is real by not just delving into a more psychological reality but a psycho-mythical reality where the collective unconscious of embedded in the cultural memory of mankind talks to the present through telepathic conversations, dream-like visions and through an interventionist past. Wallace Fowlie, while explaining the techniques of the painting of Salvador Dali, said that the Surrealists found out that ‘conscious states of man’s being are not sufficient to explain him to himself or others’ (16). Maybe the tipping point of the global crisis surrounding around an environmental apocalypse is so huge that a magic realist language is needed to depict that crisis. Amitav Ghosh notes: Global warming’s resistance to arts begin deep underground, in the recesses where organic matter undergoes the transformations that make it possible for us to devour the sun’s energy in fossilized forms. Think of the vocabulary that is associated with these substances: naphtha, bitumen, petroleum, tar and fossil fuels. No poet or singer could make these syllables fall lightly on the ear. And think of the substances themselves: coal and the sooty residue it leaves on everything it touches; and petroleum—viscous, foul smelling, repellent to all the senses. (Ghosh, The Great Derangement 98)

Ghosh seeks to find the organic relation between the various events that contribute to the disaster of the environment. And in trying to find that relation, Ghosh delves into a psychic sphere where the intrinsic connect between

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nature, the supernatural, and the human subconscious create a narration of telepathic impulse. Ghosh creates a space where incidents are shown to be linked in terms of a universal phenomenon and every incident seems to be an individual product of the larger macrocosm of the disaster that threatens to wipe off the human species. Kanai says, ‘To lose sight of that was to risk becoming untethered from reality; chance was the very foundation of reality, of normalcy’ (Ghosh, Gun Island 184). Ghosh’s fictional world in this novel is founded on the notion that the intuitive structures the notion of reality. It is intuition that helps Piya to know about the oncoming disasters in Sunderban, it is intuition that connects Cinta to her daughter after the death of the girl in an accident, and it is intuition that makes Kanai have a vision of a snake while sitting in an aeroplane, causing much anxiety among his fellow travellers who think that there is indeed a snake in the aircraft. And above all, it is intuitive wisdom that connects Kanai to the Gun Merchant in their collective wish to find a world free from dangers, whether divine or environmental. Elleke Boehmer says, ‘Drawing on the special effects of magic realism, postcolonial writers in English are able to express their view of a world fissured, distorted, and made incredible by cultural displacement’ (235). The question of displacement is a major issue in Gun Island and that is where Ghosh locates the symbiosis of his narrative on disaster. Amitav Ghosh says, ‘In accounts of the history of the present climate crisis, capitalism is very often the pivot on which the narrative turns. . . . However, I believe that this narrative often overlooks an aspect of global warming that is of equal importance: empire and imperialism’ (Ghosh, The Great Derangement 117). In Gun Island, one of the most important issues is the refugee crisis, which is a result of some environmental crisis. In this novel, Rafi and Tipu are the refugees who travel all the way from Bangladesh, to India, to Pakistan and Afghanistan, and finally land up the coast of Italy by crossing the sea from Syria. In this transit, however, Tipu is separated from Rafi, only to be located later when he comes to Venice on a boat from Syria. Kanai notes that the entry of refugees in Europe from Syria is a subversion of the imperialistic designs of Europe itself: ‘that tiny vessel represented the overturning of a centuries-old project that had been essential to the shaping of Europe’ (Ghosh, Gun Island 304–05). He further adds that Imperial Europe had the control over arms and information—a privilege which it no longer enjoys and hence the incursion of refugees threatens the very institutions that made Europe a successful coloniser. The disaster that Ghosh talks about is not just a disaster at the environmental level, but the disaster is also at the level of human dislocation. The disaster that Amitav Ghosh portrays is therefore located at multiple levels. But the discourse of the disaster is bound by the narration of dislocation. Rafi is a refugee in Venice, the dolphins in Sunderban are evicted

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from their homeland, whales are beached, and the shipworms eat through the wooden bridges, destroying them as they enter Venice since the lagoon’s waters are too warm for their survival. All these are interconnected by the myth of the Gun Merchant, who was perennially on the run to escape the unleashed snakes of goddess Manasa. Marie Vautier notes that ‘Magic realist works, however, bear witness to their liberation from a teleological and homogenous historical discourse and to an acceptance of postcolonial heterogeneity with regard to historiography and to myth’ (205). The postcolonial location of Ghosh as a novelist is on the map of the Diaspora. In this novel, too, the characters are Diasporic in their location, identity, and experiential coordinate. This Diasporic experience contributes to the way they see myths functioning as a contour of history formation. While Kanai dismisses Manasa’s myth as ‘story,’ Cinta sees it as an oral narrative contributing to the historiography of the times. The magic realist form helps in putting these diverse narratives of mystical experiences on a single platter where there is an organic interconnection between the environmental disaster and the mythical wisdom associated with the apocalypse. Sangari observes: Marvellous realism answers an emergent society’s need for renewed self-description, and radical assessment, displaces the established categories through which the West had construed other cultures either in its own image or as alterity, questions the western capitalist myth of modernization and progress, and asserts without nostalgia an indigenous preindustrial realm of possibility. (162)

Amitav Ghosh’s postcolonial politics in this novel are directed at how the erstwhile Empire and its imperialistic designs cause the present crisis through climate change. The issue is raised as to how the capitalist venture of the imperial capitals would have led to such acquisition and industrialisation that led to the exploitation of earth’s resources. The myth of the Gun Merchant is a pointer to those acquisitive intentions of the trading class which led to the crisis of misuse of power toward the exploitation of natural resources. Ghosh’s depiction of the refugee crisis as an extension of the climate change and crisis creates a kind of post-history, an ideological stance that seeks to create an imagined period after the closure of recorded history. Ghosh’s story of the Gun Merchant, the shrine, the telepathic visions and conversations, and the interconnection between the various events of natural disaster are all in the realm of a post-history, outside the domains of recorded narratives of historical consciousness. Derrida says, ‘The massive exclusion of homeless citizens from any participation in the democratic life of States, the expulsion or deportation of so many exiles, stateless persons, and immigrants from a so-called national territory, already herald a new experience of frontiers and

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identity—whether national or civil’ (101). The mythical text that Amitav Ghosh uses in his novel contributes to this notion of the post-history. The myth itself is located outside the computations of rational time and that produces the narrative of a timeless location. Though the myth, the various voices of disaster meet: the wrath of the goddess on the Gun Merchant, refugee status of Rafi and Tipu, the environmental disasters in Sunderban and elsewhere as also the personal tragedy of Cinta due to the accident of her husband and daughter. The myth is post-history of disaster, ideologically and politically connected to the present crisis. The narrative junction between myth and a proto-history is reached when Cinta offers the hypothesis that the Gun Merchant could well have reached Venice in search of fortunes, and the entire quest could have been triggered by an environmental upheaval like a storm. Cinta starts off by explaining that the phrase ‘Dwiper bhetore dwip,’ or island within an island, which is mentioned in the symbolic diagrams related to the Gun Merchant, could mean Venice because in the sixteenth century, along with Jewish people, people from Asia and Africa were also made to live in ghettos. The ghetto could be the island within the island of Venice. In addition to that, Cinta says that in classical Arabic, Venice is related to three apparently unrelated things—hazelnuts, bullets, and guns, because all of them etymologically root from the same source, ‘Banadiq.’ Cinta observes that ‘In Arabic “Banadiq” became “al-Bunduqeyya” which still remains the proper name for Venice in that language’ (Ghosh, Gun Island 136). Cinta later points out that the Gun Merchant had a companion called Captain Ilyas and the symbols in the shrine at Sunderban had a calligraphy which Cinta interprets as the letter Alph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Therefore, Cinta puts forward the hypothesis that Captain Ilyas was a Jew, and he met the Gun Merchant in Goa, which was the capital of the Portuguese empire in Asia and a major hub of Portuguese trade. It may have been so that the two would have ended in Venice after travelling through Maldives and Egypt. Their escape could have been triggered by the little Ice Age of the seventeenth century as temperatures dropped across the world creating environmental issues on the sea, thereby making Captain Ilyas and the Gun Merchant as environmental refugees. This is a proto-history based on legends, myths, and putting together probabilities, but Cinta believes that such proto-histories have the power to shape the narration of the past. Isidore Okpewho observes that ‘It [myth] is simply that quality of fancy which informs the creative or configurative powers of the human mind in varying degrees of intensity’ (69). In Okpewho’s politics, there is a direction toward an archetypalisation of myths. The ‘fancy’ that Okpewho talks about is the human mind’s efforts to find connection between the archetypes to construct a general meaning related to a certain set of myths. Cinta’s observation on the Gun Merchant shows this effort to find a grand scheme in the archetype

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of eviction and journey. To an extent, this politics of archetypalisation has a reductionist purpose. It reduces the myths to a certain structural uniformity in order to generate meaning at a macro-narrative level. Cinta’s proto-history tries to interconnect history with myth, but even more significantly, she tries to give a legend a sense of verisimilitude with a certain reality—the reality of capitalist expansion and movement of the trading class to ensure that expansion. This cross-nation and transnational transit also has the backdrop of the fear of eviction, as the Gun Merchant believed that he will be admonished by the goddess Manasa if he fails to syncretise the sacred with his own existence. Sir Richard Burton observed ‘the kind of history I have dealt with in these pages—i.e., migrations and settlements of different peoples, oral evidence is obviously the most important source’ (26). In the novel, Amitav Ghosh delves into the history of migrations through the legend of the Gun Merchant and also raises the contemporary issue of refugee crisis that leads millions of people stateless and prone to state oppression and eviction. Alagoa and Williamson also state that ‘What is required for the historian to proceed in the manner prescribed by Collingwood, that is, to obtain answers from the documents or evidence at his disposal by asking questions and thinking about the evidence. In this case, oral tradition is the document from which the historian extracts the answers which constitute the final historical product’ (279). Amitav Ghosh is blurring the lines between history and fiction by putting oral histories as a major source of fictional narrative. The Gun Merchant’s anxiety in escape is reflected in the fear of becoming political prisoners as far as Tipu and Rafi are concerned. Their disaster lies in the fear of eviction as the state refuses to allow any more refugees to enter the State of Italy from Syria in the fear of demographic and religious changes in the region. When Kanai goes to the sea to receive Tipu, who is onboard a ship, he sees many placards with slogans like ‘No human is illegal,’ ‘Climate migration = invasion,’ and ‘Immigrants are all God’s children.’ Obviously, there is no singularity in the way the migration is seen. Some can see it through the macroscopic level of exclusion of citizens from their political sphere, but some see it as a danger of their own exclusion from their territorial supremacy. The ethics of the disaster is formed through the exclusion of the Other and this is what Ghosh seems to critique in this novel. The danger of the disaster is so impending on humanity that magic realism is needed to grasp its full connotation that exists outside the traditional ethics of cognition. Kanai observes ‘In a few moments it [the sea bed] was filled with a glow, of an unearthly green colour, bright enough that we could see the outlines of the dolphins and whales that were undulating through the water’ (Ghosh, Gun Island 282). Later Piya says that this was a case of bioluminescence caused by some species of dinoflagellates which migrated there due to climate change. Cinta finds this as a moment of a new change, a moment of intuitive wisdom as she dies to find her union with her

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daughter. Intuition is a strong faculty that creates a juncture of time and space, making being and presence fluid. It is the narrative of the disaster that causes this fluid existence to exist in various dimensions of time and space. WORKS CITED Alagoa, E.J., and K. Williamson. Ancestral Voices: Historical Texts from Nembe, Niger Delta. Jos, 1983. Barton, John. Reading the Old Testament: Method in Biblical Study. Darton, Longman & Tod, 1984. Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. Methuen, 1980. Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors. Oxford University Press, 1995. Chanady, Amaryll Beatrice. Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved Versus Unresolved Antimony. Garland, 1985. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Routledge, 2018. Eliade, Mircea. Patterns in Comparative Religion. Sheed and Ward, 1958. Evans, Mari. Black Women Writers: Arguments and Interviews. Pluto, 1985. Fowlie, Wallace. Age of Surrealism. Indiana University Press, 1960. Ghosh, Amitav. Gun Island. Penguin Random House India, 2019. ———. The Great Derangement. Penguin Random House India, 2016. ———. ‘Amitav Ghosh on Language in Fiction.’ PTI, March 15, 2015, https:​//​w​ .google​.co​.in​/amp​/s​/p​.business​-standard​.com​/article​-amp​/pti​-stories​/amitav​-ghosh​ -on​-language​-in​-fiction​-115031500372​_1​.html. Guenther, Irene. ‘Magic Realism, New Objectivity and the Arts during the Weimar Republic.’ Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Duke University Press, 1995, pp. 33–73. Hopkins, Jerry, and Danny Sugerman. No One Here Gets Out Alive. Plexus, 1980. Jung, C.G. Man and his Symbols. Arkana, 1990. Lacan, Jacques. ‘The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious.’ Translated by Jan Miel. Modern Criticism and Theory, edited by David Lodge and Nigel Wood, Pearson Education, 1988, pp. 79–105. Okpewho, Isidore. Myth in Africa. Cambridge University Press, 1983. Roh, Frantz. ‘Magic Realism: Post Expressionism.’ Translated by Wendy B. Faris. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Duke University Press, 1995, pp. 15–31. Sangari, Kum Kum. ‘The Politics of the Possible.’ Cultural Critique, vol. 7, 1987, pp. 157–86. Swanson, Philip. The New Novel in Latin America: Politics and Popular Culture. Manchester University Press, 1995. Vansina, Jan. Oral Tradition as History. The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Vautier, Marie. New World Myth: Postmodernism and Postcolonialism in Canadian Fiction. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998.

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Watt, Ian. ‘Ian Watt on Realism and the Novel Form.’ Realism, edited by Lilian Furst, Longman, 1992, pp. 87–94. Zamora, Lois, and Wendy B. Faris. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Duke University Press, 1995.

PART II

Migration, Displacement, and the Cosmopolitan Gaze: The Monolingualism of the Disaster Imagination

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Can Disaster be Known in the Light of Language? Unity and Possibility of the Future in Shaktipada Rajguru’s Dandak Theke Marichjhapi Joydip Datta and Samrat Sengupta

The subject of this current study is the geopolitical disaster (Rastogi 159) of Indian partition and its delayed effect in the lives of forcefully evicted refugee population coming from East Pakistan, particularly those belonging primarily to the marginalised caste and class. They were often placed in temporary settlements such as refugee camps or forced to squat illegally in the railway stations or across railway lines. In the aftermath of partition in the decades of the 1950s and 1960s, a continuous flow of refugees started happening in West Bengal, a large number of whom belonged to the lower caste population, mainly agricultural labourers and artisans who were economically destitute and poorly educated (D. Sen 211–37). These populations were placed in temporary settlements such as refugee camps or squatted across the railway lines and stations as illegal occupants, always under the threat of ‘lawful’ eviction from the government. According to the policies of the Government of India, a large number of people living in camps were decided to be rehabilitated in the region of Dandakaranya, which was launched as a project in December 1957 (U. Sen 52). B.C. Roy, the chief minister of West Bengal during that period, nationalised the refugee problem and pushed the onus of managing resources for the refugees upon the central government (U. Sen 39–41). They decided to push this population from the camps gradually to places such as Dandakaranya or Andaman (U. Sen 49), adding the refugees as cheap 73

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labour to these underdeveloped areas. Dandakaranya happens to be a vast tract of land spread across three states: Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, and Andhra Pradesh (D. Sen 219; Gupta 20). The trajectory of refugees moving from East Pakistan through railway stations and roads to camps and then eventually to Dandakaranya was infested with invisible and unspeakable disaster. By the early 1970s, lack of proper arable land, irrigation facility, and habitable conditions discouraged and demoralised a large number of people living in Dandakaranya to leave the place and attempt to return to West Bengal. They targeted the Marichjhapi island of Sundarban area in South 24 Parganas of West Bengal as an alternative place for rehabilitating themselves through their own efforts. However, the existing Left Front government in 1978 and 1979 made every effort to send this population back to Dandakaranya (Pal 11), failing which made them take means of violence through police by cutting off their supply chain for food and livelihood, drowning their boats, severing them from the rest of the world, and allegedly massacring the protesting refugees (Pal 14–15; Gangopadhyay 64–67). The experience is full of unspeakable horror which added onto their existing suffering. Such events were attempted to be suppressed by the Left Front government (Mandal খ, ঘ-ঙ) pushing it out of the discourse or serious discussion. However, we shall focus on a very early literary attempt to depict the incident of movement and eventual dispersal of people from Dandakaranya to Marichjhapi in a novel called Dandak Theke Marichjhapi (From Dandak to Marichjhapi) by Shaktipada Rajguru (1986/2008) which focuses on the unspeakable destitution and suffering of the underclass and undercaste refugees. They were in motion from East Pakistan to Dandakaranya to Marichjhapi without adequate support of the government and supply of basic human rights including assurance of food, shelter, and livelihood.1 The continuous denial of every means of life pushes them eternally to the paradigm of death and suffering, making their experience beyond language. While most of the postcolonial scholarship attempts to locate the effect of disaster on previously colonised nation and their population and acknowledges the hopeless condition of the people pushed to the margins by colonialist history, this novel focuses on representation of suffering. In this chapter, we shall consider such suffering in terms of silence and unrepresentability in place of supposedly correct representation of suffering of people from the postcolonial nation-state, suturing the gap in history. Literature is a vehicle of communicating this impossible possibility of representation, as literary work explores the unsaid and the unspoken within language. The horrors of displacement, homelessness, and death therefore grip and occupy the narrative in a way that cannot be reduced to communicable denominations. While what happened could be historically traced, the trauma of violence and suffering produces the subjectivity of characters in a novel where death has little

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difference from life. The novel adapts the classic realist mode with omniscient narrator, but in language shows how language itself may fail to articulate the future and desire of the displaced population. Unlike Pallavi Rastogi (2020) or Sourit Bhattacharya (2020) who attempt to locate how literature represents disaster or trauma, the present chapter would deal with how a classic realist literary work indicates disaster to be an immanent possibility in the lives of the displaced and disenfranchised and how such disaster fails language and temporality. While literature deals with the future of catastrophe and how catastrophe is represented in future or trauma is dealt with the characters after it is over ‘through its temporal distancing from the Event’ (Rastogi 8), in this novel there is an absolute lack of the language of futurity that exposes the displaced population to eternal hopelessness and endless suffering. Disaster does not end as such and is not a temporal event in history. Nishikanta, one of the main protagonists of the novel, after being pushed to complete hopelessness and totality of absence of all essence of life, utters in a situation where in Marichjhapi the refugees were locked and quarantined and medical facility could not be accessed: ‘Can they stop the path of death? Nobody can! Eh! The door is always open. Why feel scared? Let us be spared! [in Bangla it is “baichya jaite de” where baichya means “to live” suggesting that to be spared is to live, but ironically here death will spare them from further suffering]. Isn’t life and death same?’ (Rajguru 132). The most common way disaster is manifested is in a subjective mode to measure loss, pain, and suffering which gets historically embodied and is substantially clarified by numbers (of the time of the event or number of people getting affected, etc.). This mode of investigation gives a chronology to the disaster, and experiences crystallise largely in a historical direction. Yet the limitation of this kind of interpretation is unable to address the ruin in the effect of disaster. As a subject, the time in the face of disaster has been calculated chronologically and historical interpretation tries to grasp it by the memories and remembrances of those who were passing through it. The chapter is an attempt to assemble the key elements from Maurice Blanchot’s thoughts on disaster as a method for understanding a text. It is significant that Blanchot’s writing is carried out on the ground of deconstruction and refusal of a fixed philosophical context and a semiotic core (Bruns XV). The strategy of the chapter is to engage with Blanchot’s seminal work The Writing of the Disaster (1980/1995) and to consider it as a method to explore the text Dandak Theke Marichjhapi (From Dandak to Marichihapi) (2008) by Shaktipada Rajguru. The Writing of the Disaster has no specific arrangement, whether in terms of structure or reason. Rather, the preference of the text addressed a number of propositions that cut cross each other, which the chapter dares to consider as a method. It is unavoidable to deny the difficulties of reading the text and conjoin all propositions into a single chapter. To

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avoid this complexity, the chapter will consider the effect of some of the core aspects of the text to engage with the syntax of Dandak Theke Marichjhapi. The significance of this kind of engagement may shove us beyond the historical core of the text, and we will try to understand the syntax of the text in the light of disaster. Before we move into the details of the main portion of the chapter, we refer to the background of the specific text and explicate the reason behind choosing it to interpret and engage with the method of Blanchot’s writing. TEXTUALISING THE PHENOMENA OF REFUGEE LIFE IN THE CAMP The central theme of the text is explicating the journey of the refugees from transit camp to permanent settlement in Dandakaranya, the anxiety of the new settlement, and finally, moving to Marichjhapi in West Bengal, expecting a new kind of hope in their life. The refugees here largely represent particular marginalised caste groups (mainly Namashudras and Poundra Kshatriyas) (Mandal গ), who largely migrated from East Pakistan in the later phase after the Partition of India and took shelter in different types of relief camps. Initially, the government built different types of camps for temporary shelter of the refugees and each camp had its own separate character according to its function for the rehabilitation of the refugees. We find the government built three types of camps for temporary shelter of the refugees: the transit camps, the worksite camps, and the colony camps. Beside these three, there was Permanent Liability Institute (popularly known as P.L. Camp) and Women’s Camp, which operated separately (Refugee Relief and Rehabilitation Department 13). Actually, the transit camp was built for temporary purposes where the refugee families took temporary shelter by minimum government assistance of primary relief like food, clothes, cooking materials, and blankets. Finally, the camp administration arranged a place for permanent rehabilitation of the refugee families (Refugee Relief and Rehabilitation Department 13). The debates on the question of refugees in Bengal is deeply engaged with the process of migration2, rehabilitation of the refugees3, the memory of the journey and growing up in the new settlement4, their engagement with politics5, and the caste issue.6 The common trend of this debate is to articulate the subject of refugees by considering the Partition as a historical event and facts of refugee life interpreted according to the chronological direction of the event. However, as an event of study, the Partition has been represented as a disaster upon refugee life. Hence, scholarly engagement has tried to document the trauma, violence, and struggles faced by the refugees and create a new kind of people’s archive. Behind the

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engagement of experiences of the Partition, life as a refugee has been considered as a historical subject, whereas the meaning of the disaster is interpreted in terms of what happened in the past. The departure of Shaktipada Rajguru in Dandak Theke Marichjhapi (From Dandak to Marichihapi) is in its attempt to intervene in the understanding of the experience of refugee life as a historical continuation. He begins by exploring different ontological positions of the refugees in Mana transit camp where life is workless, is of beggary, lassitude, and undecidability with respect to the future (Rajguru 2). The policy of rehabilitation in West Bengal was to disperse the agricultural refugee families to the outside of the state and Dandakaranya project was planned to rehabilitate them permanently. Mana transit camp was set up for temporary shelter of the refugees, who would permanently be rehabilitated in Dandakaranya. However, the text phenomenally describes the new temporary condition as a ruin of their past experiences of life and movement into an uncanny condition (the word uncanny in original German may mean unhomely, and therefore home may act here as a metaphor of security and belonging which the people in the camps lack). Let us cite Rajguru’s important character Girija, whose father Nishikanta was coming from Faridpur, Bangladesh, where he was a shopkeeper. He had a small shop in the local market and few paddy fields through which he meted out his basic expenses of life. But experience of Partition not only incurred loss to his past ways of life; rather, the new condition is like an exile in an empty place where, life continues through begging (Rajguru 8). THE TEMPORALITY OF DISASTER AS ‘LIVED TIME’ The meaning of the disaster from the perspective of Blanchot’s interpretation is not about the historical core; rather, he talks about the prolonging of a particular kind of experience of suffering. Yet the meaning of disaster here carried out a separate concept of time enumerated through suffering, which he designates as lived time (Blanchot 11). Suffering has been articulated as continuum and un-power of the being, where life is to ‘suffer’ in a spatial condition without articulation of its end. Actually ‘suffering’ itself is a different kind of situational reality which cannot be expressed in simple narrative. The artistic and scholarly work on disaster in a postcolonial situation may conceptualise disaster based on its articulation in its aftermath as suggested by Pallavi Rastogi (8). However, in the writing of disaster as lived time, the temporal movement toward an end of suffering seems impossible. Disaster is atemporal—outside the sequentiality of time, but for the marginal life beyond the security of the nation-state it is also a never-ending sequence—an always already. In this sense, interpretation of the disaster corresponds to a separate

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form of silence which stands in lived time and is immemorial (Blanchot 12). It is beyond the structure of memory and remembering that assumes the end of a particular moment or time. The refugee population in the novel is seen to be in the never-ending cycle of suffering, always grappling to find an end, trying to be hopeful and positive, but incessantly overcome by death and suffering, each moment of disaster being a wait for the arrival of another such moment. Disaster constitutes their subjectivity in a different way. Karmen MacKendrick, in his book Immemorial Silence, argued that the concept of the silence in Blanchot’s writing has paradoxical rigor which pertains to a space into which he writes and that which he cannot preserve in his writing (18). He interprets the concept of silence as a temporal evocation of absence within every mode of time that is implicated in the eternal recurrence (MacKendrick 19). However, disaster in Blanchot is not an objective artifact to be identified like fear which has a specific resource and object; rather, it is the ruin of everything (Blanchot 1) of the past and is connected to silence, madness, and death. When asked why they left Dandakaranya and the government scheme for rehabilitation, Nishikanta in the novel responds that they have arrived at Sundarban in West Bengal to die, to receive the last sleep in their motherland (Rajguru 120). We can observe apparently a certain madness occupied Nishikanta (Rajguru 120), yet what he said cannot be marked untrue. Madness spoke the proper language in disaster, and death was their ultimate destiny as well as destination. Blanchot’s articulation of disaster produces a different way of thinking about the being, but his way to understand the condition through language at the same time distances from Heidegger. For him, the unknown of the disaster which could be known in the light of the language is not in conformity with a certain unity; rather, it is destitute of power and separate from unity (Blanchot 16). Therefore, discourse after the ruin of the past experience cannot provide a time to memory of which informs activity, development, coherence, or presence of a wholesome life. Such discourse after the ruin of the past can be provisional and about passivity and silence. The idea of disaster has drawn from the events of Second World War— concentration camps, Hiroshima, and the Holocaust—which substantiate the notion of ruin to the facts of history, and the effects of these events question the notions of history and time. In the subcontinent, the effect of the war is phenomenally absent but colonialism imposed the modern and Western knowledge on indigenous narratologies of precolonial times which override the violence of colonialist expansion on ‘those left out of World-history’ (Guha 4). The postcolonial departure through phenomenological analysis of the ‘everyday’ of the (erstwhile) colony by Ranajit Guha questions the condition for production of history and the state, which supplies a content to analyse the subcontinent (15). Modern state and its apparatuses for Guha in his reading of Hegel is the material unity needed for the world spirit to

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express itself across time and space. However, Guha, instead of employing an overarching value of the narrative of world history beforehand (which is actually the movement of the singular Hegelian spirit), prefers historicality as a process (7–23). This process through the prose of the world, constituted by everyday experiences of the subcontinent, will connect the individual I with the collective we (Guha 17–18). This phenomenological connection of the being with the other beings having similar everyday experiences is for Hegel a stage that comes before the prose of history, and this will provide a concrete forward movement to time as the world spirit. But Guha puts this stage before history as a limit to history, where chance plays an important factor than historical determination, and the prose of the world provides the subject the freedom to act with respect to the world they encounter (22–23). The phenomenological connection of the being with the world in a postcolonial context (for people apparently without a history or still living in the waiting room of history) then focuses more on the language or representation of the past in semantic direction which makes the possible ground to interpret unity and movement beyond the state. The method of Blanchot based on disaster or ruin of everything brings up the question of language in a separate way. His concept of ‘lived time’ has no such definite indication about the collective future, and it has no sense of continuation of the past. Rather, it suggests that the language in disaster is in a temporal condition which can incorporate either passivity of the being or silence. Such passivity is expressed when refugee women like Jamuna or Suravi escape from the city of Raipur where they were trafficked for sex work as they attempted to move out of the uneventful and hopeless forest of Dandakaranya. They were moving toward the Sundarbans like their families from Dandakaranya: ‘They have no idea of how and where some whirlwind has scattered them. They are floating like straws under a strong flood. They don’t have any address today’ (Rajguru 102). As this vulnerable population was getting destroyed by the state through restriction of their movement, the author comments that ‘This bloody struggle will never be inscribed in history’ (Rajguru 135). However, this silence is not simply historical, but of the epistemic possibility of being inscribed as positive historical artifacts. Actually, silence in Blanchot’s proposition is a concern with what goes on outside the boundaries of thought, and it cannot be separated from language (Bindeman 135). The disaster reveals a kind of silence which Blanchot designates as an unspoken thought (4). So the question is, in the mode of silence, how can the concept of disaster help us to interpret, or engage with, the core question of the text? First, the prose of the world as enumerated in the text is incapable of moving toward a concrete and unified narrative of history. Second, it can neither be completely delineated as everyday experience or process of historicality (as in Guha) through which the refugee individuals can relate with others to form

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an identity and sense of being. Rather, their sense of being is scattered by the experiences of the disaster which cannot be adequately captured or expressed in language. Their experiences are like accidents—catastrophic and fragmentary—beyond temporality itself. Third, the experience of encountering with the state cannot provide these tentatively stateless people with a sense of collective belonging (connecting the I with the we) and a common time with concrete past and future. Their past was destroyed by catastrophic displacement after Partition and lack of proper empathy and scheme for sustainable rehabilitation from the state. They were treated as a burden to the resources of the state (U. Sen 46; D. Sen 219) and were attempted to be used for developing underdeveloped spaces like Dandakaranya through their labour than giving proper rehabilitation (Gupta 20; Dasgupta 53). Their movements were restricted and when they attempted to improve their condition by their own effort they were evicted and pushed back to places designated by the state. All these are described in the novel and also come up in books and studies which discuss events such as Marichjhapi (see endnote 1). We see how the encounter of these people with the apparatuses of the state, which in a bio-political arrangement is supposed to be life affirming, actually becomes an agent of oppression, massacre, and disenfranchisement. Therefore, in terms of the state, these people cannot situate themselves to history. In a conversation with a man called Jadupati, Surabhi, one of the central characters of the novel, was narrating the possibility of their eviction from Marichjhapi. When Jadupati asked if there is no law of the land which may protect them, she replies with fire in her eyes, ‘There is no law for us. We are outside the inscriptions of man’ (Rajguru 123). The statement is significant not only because it suggests their negative relationship with the state but also with language and writing. These refugees are outside humanity and also the calculation of the state. They are nameless in the copy books of the prose of the world. This acute crisis can be related to Blanchot’s description of the experience of disaster as atemporal and may also be compared with disenfranchised people of the Second World War, pushed to the other side of life. EXPERIENCING DISASTER BEYOND LANGUAGE The central figure of Rajguru’s writing is the camp refugee after the Partition of India, and the phenomenon of uncertainty define their destinations. He explicates the phenomena of refugee life and their suffering in a particular spatio-temporal condition. The text talks about a particular kind of experience of the being which corresponds to lassitude, anxiety, and fear in a different spatial condition. However, the description of the whole journey of refugees is in an unknown situation with respect to their early experiences of

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life. We can discuss about such unknown becoming of refugees in the Mana transit camp or rehabilitation in Malkangiri (southern part of Orissa), both of which were environmentally new for the refugees. The narrative of the new space, the myth of the Malkangiri as a space of abandonment and alienation, wild animal attack, geographical interiority, and uncanniness crystallise the concept of the ruin of everything in their life. We can see how the effects of Partition appear as a disaster for a particular occupational group, who largely belong to the lower caste category. If we focus on the phenomenal core of the text, the primary attention is to explain the destination or home of the refugees, which correspond with their suffering of life in every movement of the journey. The situation in the Mana camp (Rajguru 2), travelling to the new settlement (Rajguru 22–25), environmental obscurity in Malkangiri (Rajguru 33–36), threats from outsiders (Rajguru 90–94), and finally search for a new destination all constitutes such mode of relentless suffering. Beyond this interpretation of the whole journey of the refugees, the author of the text tries to unfold the suffering in the homeless condition and address how refugees attempted to find possibility in their life under such an uncanny condition. The concept of homelessness is philosophically perceived in the dwelling character of the Being, and in Martin Heidegger, it indicates outside the language of the Being (247). Hence, the meaning of destiny or homecoming examines the language in which its essence dwells with the others. However, disaster methodically is considered as the unknown of the life, in Blanchot it is what ‘dissuades us from thinking of it’ (5). Yet it conceives as outside the boundary of thought or a kind of silence in terms of ‘to be speak (9). Karmen MacKendrick has pointed out that the silence in Blanchot is a method to speak of silence, or it is the condition of speech (18). So, the disaster does not carry out by understanding the language of being. Rather, it would be understood by language without the presence of the being. The way Blanchot interprets the disaster, there time is differently perceived to understand the present. In other words, his articulation of suffering is not borne into the present or does not make itself known in the present. We can make the point that Blanchot’s formulation of disaster is difficult to track by the discipline of history because it appears without beginning or end (15). It has a kind of sudden character which would interrupt our reason, speech, and experience, and relate them to a form separate from unity (Blanchot 16). Here we may interrogate on what is meant by suffering for the refugee life and how we make sense of it. The pattern of interpretation of the refugee question is usually associated with the crisis of the contemporary time or obligation of the state in terms of how to rehabilitate or repatriate them. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has pointed out the paradoxical existence of the refugees after the Second World War where they challenge the very idea of rights of man conferred by the nation-state by being thrown out

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of every possible rights of the human and reduced to ‘the mere fact of being humans’ (Agamben 116–17). The paradoxical existence in the widest sense is more important for Agamben and related to diverse issues of sovereignty, rule, power, state, inclusion and exclusion, and state of exception. However, Blanchot’s departure does not directly engage with the question of refugee; rather, his conceptualisation of suffering or silence makes an opportunity to interpret this question beyond ontology. Herein, the significance of the text Dandak Theke Marichjhapi (From Dandak to Marichihapi) has phenomenally represented suffering, silence, and death of the refugees. The author is not from the refugee family; therefore, we cannot say that the text is a reflection of his lived experience. But the text engages with the phenomena of the refugee life in a particular way and unfolds the most fleeting, unexpected condition in a different spatio-temporal relation to which they are pushed without choice. If we look into the general construction of writing, both the texts of Blanchot and Agamben have their own ways to interpret the meaning of suffering and life. But Blanchot’s construction of writing is in a totally different direction, both philosophically and methodically, and is incoherent to be assimilated to a common line of argument. WRITING THE REFUGEE LIFE AS DISASTER Dandak Theke Marichjhapi is a story of the collective experiences of a particular category of refugee, who were permanently rehabilitating in Dandakaranya. In this sense, the text essentially has an oral form, which corresponds to a space where the experiences assemble and communicate to others. However, such experience is not depicted in terms of concrete positivity and belonging but in terms of absence of history and language. Though Rajguru is not a refugee or a person from the Dalit caste experiencing camp life, his work in certain ways anticipates the Dalit refugee narratives of relentless suffering and unfathomable passivity and silence of refugees from marginalised caste and class such as Manoranjan Byapari (2016) or Jatin Bala (2018) who were pushed outside the paradigm of life and human rights into death and perpetual erosion of meaning. The cardinal point is affirming the possibility of the story, not only as a simple categorical depiction of refugee life and their process of rehabilitation. Rather, collective experiences unfold in the obscurity of life, which we can interpret through Blanchot’s proposition of suffering and silence. In the subcontinent, the phenomenon of casteism has been deeply attached to a collective suffering past for the marginal caste people, but here the text incorporates caste issues indirectly in terms of refugee life and suffering as the people in camps were predominantly from subjugated castes. The phenomenon of past for these subjugated caste Dalit

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refugees has been constituted generationally in terms of collective suffering and now as refugees they are treated as burden for the nation-state. Hence, Blanchot’s formulation of the disaster corresponds to interpreting the text, not simply in the historical context of the Partition of India in 1947 and the process of refugee rehabilitation. But phenomena of suffering uncover the language in which we can interpret the story of the collective experiences with regard to history and time. Mathew Gumpert refers to Blanchot in his book The End of Meaning: Studies in Catastrophe and comments that the accidental nature of catastrophe is an irruption, interruption, and disruption of the everyday (xvi). Accidents or catastrophes apparently appear to be counter to essence but it itself is a kind of essence of all events for Gumpert. In Greek tragedy, for example, accidents are suggested to happen anywhere and to anyone, an imminent possibility (Gumpert xvi–xxiii). If we connect passivity and interruption as characteristics of disaster and assume such accidental events out of joint of time and language, then disaster is also a misreading of time. Disaster is an impossible possibility in the scheme of time. The refugees in a postcolonial nation like India constitutes that exteriorised inside—they are within the space of the nation-state but outside its time. The recognition exposes the moment of disaster for the refugees, when in the end they realise their absolute absence of home and future, and that experience pushes them to passivity and silence. Their past and future were destroyed always and already. On one hand they witness disaster as an accident, as an exception to the flow of time; on the other hand, they recognise the universality and presence of disaster as an omnipresent possibility for them. It is a moment of anagnorisis or recognition as we have in Greek tragedy. However, unlike Greek tragedy or an event like 9/11 Gumpert refers to, we need to read such geopolitical disaster like movement of homeless poor and lower caste refugees from the point of view of the nation-state and its inarticulable other. About the Marichjhapi disaster Tushar Bhattacharya comments, ‘Marichjhapi did not fell from sky. It was not confined in secret chamber. But the scheme of displacing the refugees was kept secret’ (31). Such is the Agambenian paradox of the nation-state. Disaster is imminent as well as accident for the Dalit refugees in India. They are unwanted and considered a burden to state resources, and they are beyond the homogenous empty time of the nation-state that claims to connect all citizens into a unified historical temporality. The refugees under perpetual experience of disaster are pushed out of the everyday and are passive for not having a concrete, collective, shared future or having it only in the form of death and catastrophe. The novel ends with the words: ‘These scattered group of people were floating down. They had no idea where they were moving like straw in flood in search of shelter. They were lost in search of some unknown land where they will again build their home’ (Rajguru 134). These lines suggest

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absolute loss of future and home for a dispersed population beyond the security of a nation-state, who are pushed outside temporality and language, in absolute passivity and precariousness. CONCLUSION The refugee movement from Dandakaranya to Marichjhapi depicted in the text has suffered different kinds of silencing—one is the political silence imposed initially by Congress and Communist Party of India (Marxist) governments in power, respectively. The latter wanted to push the refugees outside the state and look at them simply as a problem to resource management. The party in power did not want a lot of fuss about the Marichjhapi event. Then we have historical silence of underrepresenting the Dalit refugees who were not considered while partitioning the country, or were inadequately acknowledged as legitimate citizens claiming proper rehabilitation suitable for their occupation and culture. Rather, they were looked at as cheap labour to be employed to develop uninhabitable and underdeveloped areas of this country. Finally, we have epistemological silence of not being able to represent disaster which operates beyond the historical temporality or the narratives of future possibility. It is beyond ontology and opposite to the being situated and grounded properly in language, in the prose of the world. It dwells in passivity and beyond the communicable language, in the experiences of relentless suffering and death. Death becomes the core of understanding the predicament of this population and their relationship with the nation-state and history. Pallavi Rastogi, taking up the clue from Neil Lazarus’s book Postcolonial Unconscious (2011), argues that the vital issues of disaster and its effects in the postcolonial nations have been obfuscated by the bigger concerns of multiculturalism or transnationalism focused in postcolonial literary studies (5–6). Yet her attempt has been ‘to create a narratology for disaster in formerly colonized parts of the world’ (Rastogi 7). We are here claiming an impossibility of such narratology, or assuming narration of disaster as an articulation and expression of the impossibility of itself. Our key hypothesis resides on epistemic silence and passivity of the victims who are without future. We are trying to posit this literary text as an anarchive7 of experience beyond language and history that would help us think in terms of the limits of the history founded on creation of nation-states. The difference of postcolonial nation-states and their understanding at the limits of Hegelian world historical totality is here eroded by Blanchot’s concept of silence and passivity for those who fall outside history through their experiences of disaster. Or perhaps we may also say that for them disaster itself is constituted

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through statelessness and lack of being situated to a historicality. They are outside the everyday of the nation-state. WORKS CITED Agamben, Giorgio. ‘We Refugees.’ Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, vol. 49, no. 2, 1995, pp. 114–19. Bagchi, Jasodhara, and Subhoranjan Dasgupta (eds.). The Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and Partition in Eastern India. Stree, 2003. Bala, Jatin. Shikarchhera Jiban: Udbastu Jibaner Dalil. Gangchil, 2018. Bandyopadhyay, Sekhar. Caste, Protest and Identity in Colonial India. Oxford University Press, 2011. Basu, Sibaji Pratim. ‘Mobilising the Migrants: The Role of the UCRC in the Indian State of West Bengal—A Critical Assessment.’ Vidyasagar University Journal of History, vol. VI, 2017–18, pp. 20–31. Bhattacharya, Sourit. Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel on Catastrophic Realism. Palgrave, 2020. Bhattacharya, Tushar. ‘Mukhomukhi Marichjhapi.’ Oprokashito Marichjhapi, edited by Tushar Bhattacharya, pp. 30–62. Bindeman, Steven L. Silence in Philosophy, Literature, and Art. Brill Rodopi Publication, 2017. Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster, translated by Ann Smock. University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Bose, Pradip Kumar, editor. Refugees in West Bengal: Institutional Practices and Contested Identities. Calcutta Research Group, 2000. Bruns, Gerald L. Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Byapari, Manoranjan. Itibritte Chandala Jiban. Dey Publications, 2016. Chakrabarti, Prafulla Kumar. The Marginal Men: The Refugees and the Left Politics Syndrome in West Bengal. Naya Udyog, 1990. Chatterji, Joya. The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–1967. Cambridge University Press, 2007. Dasgupta, Pannalal. ‘Dandakaranya Ghure Duti Pratibedan.’ Marichjhapi: Chinno Desh, Chinno Itihash, edited by Madhumay Pal Gangchil, 2000, pp. 47–57. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, translated by Eric Prenowitz. University of Chicago Press, 1998. Gangopadhyay, Sunil. ‘Marichjhapi Somporke Joruri Katha.’ Marichjhapi: Chinno Desh, Chinno Itihash, edited by Madhumay Pal Gangchil, 2000, pp. 64–67. Guha, Ranajit. History at the Limit of World-History. Columbia University Press, 2002. Gumpert, Matthew. The End of Meaning: Studies in Catastrophe. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. Gupta, Shaibalkumar. ‘Dadakaranyer Udbastu.’ Marichjhapi: Chinno Desh, Chinno Itihash, edited by Madhumay Pal Gangchil, 2000, pp. 17–32.

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Heidegger, Martin. ‘Letter on “Humanism.”’ Pathmarks, translated by Frank A. Capuzzi, edited by William McNeill. Cambridge University Press, 1998. Lazarus, Neil. The Postcolonial Unconscious. Cambridge University Press, 2011. MacKendrick, Karmen. Immemorial Silence. State University of New York Press, 2001. Mandal, Jagadish. Marichjhapi: Noishobder Antarale. Sujan Publication, 2002. Pal, Madhumay. ‘Sotyere Lou Sohoje.’ Marichjhapi: Chinno Desh, Chinno Itihash, edited by Madhumay Pal Gangchil, 2000, pp. 9–16. Rajguru, Shaktipada. Dandak Theke Marichjhapi (1986). Sera Doshti Upanyash. Juthika Bookstall, 2008. Rastogi, Pallavi. Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century. Northwestern University Press, 2020. Refugee Relief and Rehabilitation Department. Manual of Instructions for the Guidance of Officers of the Refugee Relief and Rehabilitation Department. 1954. Sen, Dwaipayan. The Decline of the Caste Question: Jogendranath Mandal and the Defeat of Dalit Politics in Bengal. Cambridge University Press, 2018. Sen, Uditi. Citizen-Refugees: Forging the Indian Nation After Partition. Cambridge University Press, 2018.

NOTES 1. For further discussions on refugee migration from Dandakanranya to Marichjhapi, see books such as  Chinna Desh, Chinna Itihash, edited by Madhumay Pal (2000); Marichjhapi: Noishobder Ontorale by Jagadish Mandal; and Oprokashito Marichjhapi, edited by Tushar Bhattacharya (2010). 2. For further details, see Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–1967 (2007). 3. See Pradip Kumar Bose, Refugees in West Bengal (2000). 4. For more details, see Jasodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta, The Trauma and The Triumph (2003). 5. For further details, see Prafulla Kumar Chakrabarti, The Marginal Men (1990); Sibaji Pratim Basu, ‘Mobilising the Migrants’ (2017–2018); and Dwaipayan Sen, The Decline of the Caste Question (2018). 6. See Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Protest and Identity in Colonial India (2011). 7. For further discussion on anarchive, see Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever (1998), 79.

Chapter 6

Fear of Refugee and Disaster Monstrosity, Risky Body, and Moral Panic in Exit West Sk Sagir Ali

INTRODUCTION In Exit West (2017), the spatial dimension of the narrative embodies the geopolitical disaster and its consequences with the paradoxical notion of home caught up by violence as militants overthrow the government during civil war. Through a series of enchanting door portals, transporting them between the Greek island of Mykonos, London, and northern California, two young lovers named Saeed and Nadia embark on a journey of love and passion, while grappling with issues of commitment, betrayal, and the harsh realities of the global geopolitical refugee crisis. Undertaking arduous journeys to escape the war-torn countries of their origin, Saeed and Nadia are poignantly portrayed amid the complexities of migration, with the pictures of drones and helicopters, air strikes with collateral loss of life, and having no electricity or running water. This picture brings a similarity to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, leaving hundreds of thousands of people fleeing from their home to a temporary camp in Poland with temporary housing and medical supplies, and some other refugees who have found shelter in Hungary, Belarus, Slovakia, Moldova, Romania, and other parts of Europe. Europe’s double standards and hypocrisy with refugees of colour are evident as they did not allow Rohinga, Syrians, and some people from the Middle East and Africa, largely arriving through Greece and Italy using unauthorised boats. This selective empathy toward Ukrainian refugees is dangerous as it empowers otherisation and Islamophobic racism. 87

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In Exit West, Saeed and Nadia’s mutation and migration warps their everyday life in a war zone, where they live with fears of sniper fire and armed soldiers at checkpoints under the incessant surveillance from helicopters and drones. While Saeed, a sensible son of a university professor, works at an ad agency and keeps a beard, Nadia drapes herself in full black robes and works in an insurance company, rides a motorbike, lives alone, enjoys vinyl and psychedelic mushrooms, and doesn’t pray to God as a believer. Here both Saeed and Nadia become, in terms of their practical approach to religion, embodiments of the contingent, multiple, and diverse discourses of Islam which is negated at the outset in governmental narratives of the risky migrant subjects unified by their shared criminality. The story of the lovers Saeed and Nadia as their unnamed city in the Middle East comes under the clutches of radical Islamist militants makes them feel trapped and vulnerable to the brutality of the militants; everyday violence becomes their own survival. They come together at an evening class on product branding and corporate identity. Hamid begins the novel by saying that, ‘In a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, a young man met a young woman in a classroom and did not speak to her’ (9). British Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid in his novel makes use of a surrealist apparatus of portals, the black rectangles which works like magical wormholes that enable thousands of people to ‘[slip] away’ (123) from the economic insolvency and ‘murderous battlefields’ (123) of their native country to the West with security. Drawing on Jeffery Cohen’s ‘Monster Culture’ and monstrosity with risky body, I will try to unlock all those loci that are situated as distant and distinct but originate within. FEAR OF MONSTROSITY During the French Revolution, and from the ancient times, kings, queens, court life, the clergy, and the nobility have been monstrified, chronicled as molochs and vampires, as evident from Saint Just’s political thought (Foucault). While human augmentation is satisfactory as it answers to the needs of increased effectiveness and efficiency, disruptive transformation has been generally regarded as monstrous—thus resulting in moral panic over a threat (Cohen; Graham). Jeffery Cohen in ‘Monster Culture’ locates the boundaries of monstrosity with the variegated cultures that produce the monstrous from their own ontological fears, desires, anxiety, misunderstandings, conquests, selfimposed boundaries, struggles with difference, and search for structure and order. Cohen suggests that the monstrous offers an escape from its ‘hermetic path, an invitation to explore new spirals, new and interconnected methods

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of perceiving the world’ (7). In Exit West, Hamid explores the notion that the monster continually finds a way to evade capture (Cohen 6). He delves into the conventional understanding of societal norms and reimagines the impact of shifting global landscapes and imaginary escape portals, shedding light on the deeper implications of the contemporary refugee crisis. Through the lens of spatial creation and the origins of fear, the novel addresses the presence of violent borders and their potential consequences. The privileged citizens’ mobility rights over migrant human rights and the politics of fear is resounded in Achille Mbembe (Necropolitics), the contemporary critic of the European liberal landscape and its exclusionary bordering politics. Mbembe questions the ground of predatory border practices by nation-states in the name of security and liberalism: One of the major contradictions of liberal order has always been the tension between freedom and security. Security now matters more than freedom. A society of security is not necessarily a society of freedom. . . . It is feared that the dream of a self-transparent humanity, stripped of all mystery, might prove to be a catastrophic illusion. For the time being, migrants and refugees are bearing the brunt of it. (Mbembe, Necropolitics 104)

Under such conditions, the liberal defence for the freedom for the privileged section under the rubric of protection authorises the militant use of ‘security’ to exclude the migrant monster in the name of public safety. By turning a blind eye to human rights, the selective structural border practices by nation-states bring to the fore the infliction of death and suffering en masse as if these clandestine risky bodies are from the faulty line of the fence. Like Mbembe, Hamid also finds the structural tensions of the policies that are tabled to keep the ‘illegal’ immigrant at bay in an attempt to save ‘real’ refugees as perfidious. Hamid reflects on the construction of Saeed and Nadia as refugee monsters inoculating disintegration into the European order and underscores this as the consequence of the unwavering recitation of the rhetoric of the ‘risky body’ (Aradau 252–54) immersed with a moral panic that transfigures risky bodies into moral danger (Giuliani 97). Nadia and Saeed find their situation in London which is quite strange and foreign: The news in those days were full of war and migrants and nativists, and it was full of fracturing too, of regions pulling away from nations, and cities pulling away from hinterlands, and it seemed that as everyone was coming together everyone was also moving apart. Without borders nations appeared to be becoming somehow illusory, and people were questioning what role they had to play. (Hamid, Exit West 92)

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On a microscopic level, Saeed and Nadia’s vignettes to San Francisco, Sydney, Tokyo, and other parts of the world reflect on the global planetaria in disjuncture and its suffering of all sorts of phobias. An elderly lady in Exit West, who devotes her entire life in the same house in California, finds everything around her on the move, as if when she goes out it seems she has migrated, and everyone migrates. It seems to her as if they stay in the same house their whole lives, because they don’t have options to go other ways. The narrator succinctly argues, ‘We are all migrants through time’ (Hamid, Exit West 121). Every time they displace themselves to recreate the homeland, Saeed and Nadia inhabit a new beginning not with the ‘anguish’ but the ‘joy’ of being borderless of which Nadia is ‘feverishly’ yearning for (Hamid, Exit West 57). Their precarity underlines the vicissitudes of social life that demonstrate how these spaces are subjected to structural, symbolic, and direct violence of abstraction as a spatially mediated condition of social life—as what David Farrier argues as ‘postcolonial asylums’ that are inflated with refugees: Refugees had occupied many of the open places in the city, pitching tents in the green belts between roads, erecting lean-tos next to the boundary of wall houses, sleeping rough on pavements and in the margins of the streets. Some seemed to be trying to recreate the rhythms of a normal life, as though it were completely natural to be residing, a family of four, under a sheet of plastic propped up with branches and a few chipped bricks. Others stared out at the city with what looked like anger, or surprise, or supplication, or envy. Others didn’t move at all: stunned, maybe, or resisting. Possibly dying. (Hamid, Exit West 21)

This picture takes us to David Farrier’s account of the ‘camp in the city’ (73) of refugees who are unwelcome within the boundaries of nation-state. CAMP LIFE In analysing the last lines of Farrier’s argument, one is tempted to see the camp as a space of dissolution of expectations and the dissolution of the fantasy of the dream life in liberal Western cities. The temporary nature of the dwelling thus symbolically posits the ephemerality of discourses. While this may turn out to be an uneasy proposition for fixed identities, thoughts, and structures of existence, we are shown how the novel exploits this proposition as a deconstruction of liberal presumptions like the nation-state and exposes the contingent and constructed nature of the narratives of the same. The city where Saeed and Nadia stay turns into a camp, and they find themselves as refugees in the Mykonos camp after getting through a magic door for the first time, in London, and then in the cabin in Marin, California. In the hall

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in London, they use a shared bathroom with other refugees and secure a room of their own. Nadia wishes to take a shower, an essential ‘act for the rhythms of a normal life’ (Hamid, Exit West 21) that will protect her from the tropes of bareness and monstrosity they witness. These tropes only tenuously resonate with Zygmunt Bauman’s study of the refugees and asylum seekers as vulnerable with the ‘vulnerability of our position’ (Strangers at Our Door 16). The form of dehumanisation and the death in life at last ferry them to the American West—California—as the penultimate destination for the protagonists, and they like hundreds of migrants are intimidated to flee their homelands in search of a membership of an individual in a state through citizenship and enweave their relation with immediate civil society through the hyphenated legal subjectivity. The structural curtailment of rights from secure freer life that have been ‘draining the refugee of their essential humanity’ (Behrman 21) underpins the protection system and facilitates the tacit assumption of the ‘suffering body’ recognised as the primary legal resource for ‘undocumented immigrants’ which Fassin calls ‘biolegitimacy’ that placed compassion as the cornerstone for care provided. But the bleak picture of the locality around Marin in Exit West seems to sustain old and new walls and camps, forms of spatial segregation, deportation, detention, and differential inclusion of racialised citizens and migrants: not just in Marin but in the whole region, in the Bay Area . . . the apocalypse appeared to have arrived and yet it was not apocalyptic, which is to say that while the changes were jarring they were not the end, and life went on, . . . , and plausible desirable futures began to emerge, unimaginable previously, but not unimaginable now. (Hamid, Exit West 125)

GEOGRAPHY OF MONSTROUS VIOLENCE In Exit West, the geography of violence becomes evident during the journey undertaken by Saeed and Nadia, particularly in London. The devastating death of Nadia’s cousin, who had come to visit his family from abroad, stands as a heart-wrenching example. He was one of eighty-five victims torn apart by a truck bomb, leaving behind only fragments, with the largest piece being his head and two-thirds of an arm (Hamid, Exit West 24). Similarly, Saeed’s mother meets a tragic end when a stray heavy caliber round pierces through their family car’s windshield, claiming a quarter of her head as she searches for a misplaced earring (Hamid, Exit West 47). This arbitrary violence not only annihilates the ‘body’ but refers to the locus of space, as the narrator argues that ‘geography is destiny’ (Hamid, Exit West 13). Migrants arriving from other countries are blamed for the gradual economic and social collapse

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of Europe, fanning out virulent diseases and conspiring terror attacks. They are the dangerous and risky Other (Aradau; Salerno 374). Judith Butler contends that, after 9/11 in the United States and the West, the sense of risk today is part and parcel of the avowal of our ‘fundamental dependency on anonymous others. . . . No security measure will foreclose this dependency; no violent act of sovereignty will rid the world of this fact.’ Notwithstanding the fact that ‘there are ways,’ as Butler goes on to say, ‘of distributing vulnerability, differential forms of allocation that make some populations more subject to arbitrary violence than others’ (Precarious Life xii), no adequate political and public consciousness of the truth that violence consequently strikes vulnerably on a vast scale has been executed to this day. Establishing this argument in a more philosophical vein, I take the paradoxical figure of the Neighbour with the works of Emmanuel Levinas and Slavoj Žižek. Both of them idealise the Neighbour as an Other who lives in close proximity, physically. To Levinas, s/he is an Other-whom-I-can-look-in-the-face, and whose Otherness is basically a ‘non-allergic presence’ (199). Levinas contends that an extreme ethical interpellation constitutes the face of an Other with a transcendental urge for an absolute responsibility toward the Other’s humanity. Levinas further argues: ‘The “resistance” of the other does not do violence to me, does not act negatively; it has a positive structure: ethical’ (197). Unlike Levinas, Žižek delineates an utterly different inference with this kind of relationship of Otherness. Žižek goes against the thesis of neighbourliness as a central ethical relationship. The Neighbour, to him, proclaims an uncanny with Freud’s notion of the Nebenmensch (the neighbour) as the figure of the Other placed at the ‘impossible intersection of family and society.’ Žižek negotiates Levinas’s idea by postulating that, ‘The neighbor as the Thing means that, beneath the neighbor as my semblant, my mirror image, there always lurks the unfathomable abyss of radical Otherness, of a monstrous Thing that cannot be “gentrified.”’ Their physical presence as the face of the Neighbour showcases as an unsettling figure. Though the face resembles them to be like me, what lurks beneath the prospect of the face is a mask that coats the Neighbour’s primary monstrous self or ‘the abyss’ of the Neighbour’s Otherness. The Neighbour under the Žižekian self-presentation is ‘an irritant’ as their adjacent Otherness of knowing another human being with ‘apparent’ self-reflexivity along the commandment: ‘the call to love the neighbor as yourself,’ and what it implies ‘about the nature of self-love and, by extension, about subjectivity’ (Žižek 136). In The Politics of Friendship (1994), Jacques Derrida invites us to re-think the friend/enemy dichotomy, and Žižek has foregrounded the fierce recoil the neighbour enkindles, as incorporated in articles with the titles such as ‘Neighbors and Other Monsters,’ ‘Smashing the Neighbor’s Face,’ and ‘The Only Good Neighbor is a Dead Neighbor!’ Perhaps the two modes of dealing with the Other indicated here are also approaches that are oriented

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toward the question who is Otherised. If the Muslim subject bears a responsibility to the Other, it cannot but see its approach tarnished by the exclusive monstrosity of the same. On the other hand, the government as the Self looks upon the monstrosity of the Other as exclusive and monolithic. Both these approaches are strongly required to be applied equivalently by both subjects to ensure a common ethical meeting ground absent in the locale of the novel. MORAL PANIC AND FEAR OF MUSLIM REFUGEES Mohsin Hamid’s characters are born of the present global refugee crisis, as Hamid in an interview finds these splintered narratives in the story: ‘I wanted to open up lots of different models so that readers would see some part of themselves in those characters’ particular stances on the doors—and therefore, hopefully, on migration’ (Gall). His portrayal of empathy with brief vignettes of suffering of refugees, who are susceptible to falling within the category ‘illegal,’ to restore the human right, of how human lives are ephemeral challenge the binary division of panic/normalcy, empathy/violence, citizens/immigrants, tolerance/intolerance, hospitality/vulgarity to include more globalised positions and perspectives. With the influx of immigrants, like the lovers Saeed and Nadia from the unnamed city in the Middle East, the novel destabilises readerly entry into the self-interested ‘appropriative empathy’ (Wood 289) from the work of ‘strategic empathy’ (Keen 96) with the issues of ethics, morality, and responsibility. The narrative of Exit West, thus, opens the possibility of reasoning otherwise by ceding mastery at the cusp of what can be called ‘the uncanny moment when we are made to feel not at home with the text or in ourselves’ (Eaglestone 175). With the affective transactions of an appropriative humanitarian impulse, Hamid’s narrative of the shock and fear take us to the fairly identifiable characters living normal lives until the violence of civil war breaks out with the Western news reports of bombings, terrorist attacks, violence, and war in the Middle East. The narrative further ruminates over this conceptualisation of precarity located within emancipatory praxis aiming to expose the structure of panic and anxiety to the challenge of modern nomadism, mobility, and other forms of transitory affiliations and dwelling. This is significant in the sense that it reinforces the differential economy of ‘fear’ and ‘anxiety grounded in postcolonial power relations under the praxis of associating figures of Islamophobia with ‘moral panic’ (Giuliani 13). The economy of monstrosity sustains the practices of bio-political control and Islamophobic ontologised condition of the migrant animalisation with the dualisms of organic/inorganic, culture/nature, human/animal, human/nonhuman, civilised/barbarian, centre/peripheries of the globe in understanding

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of the calculus of disaster and refugees. Focusing on the genealogy of the body monstrous, de-subjectivation, and bio- and necropolitics of the images of death and disaster, Hamid deciphers the structures of moral panic with the monstrification of refugee under the garb of violence and the politics of hatred with nation-state’s exclusionary practices, as the narrator mourns: Perhaps they [Saeed and Nadia] had grasped that the doors could not be closed, and new doors would continue to open, and they had understood that the denial of coexistence would have required one party to cease to exist, and the extinguishing party too would have been transformed in the process, and too many native parents would not have been able to look their children in the eye, to speak with head held high of what their generation had done. (Hamid, Exit West 96)

In this contemporary age, where the religious/secular divide with the religious visibility (beard, burka, hijab, prayer) in public life unsettles the European secular modernity, anti-immigrant xenophobia and new Islamobhobic racism are enjoying an unprecedented surge since the interwar period in Europe. It is also connected with the ‘verrechtsing’ as a right-wing turn of European politics (Mudde, ‘The 2012 Stein Rokkan Lecture’), and to anti-Muslim and anti-immigration politics of fear in our ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman, Liquid Modernity). The surge of the ‘third wave of extreme right’ from around the mid-1980s (Mudde, The Ideology of the Extreme Right) has foregrounded some sizeable scholarship of the anti-immigrant right-wing populist parties, sometimes called ‘xenophobic populist parties’ or ‘radical right populist’ with a broader ideological-political spectrum. However, the debates about the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, and xenophobic forces have gathered momentum following the terrorist attacks but mostly after the 2015 refugee crisis and the anti-immigration politicians led by Donald Trump and right-wing groups across the globe. Penning on the response of Europe to Afghan asylum seekers, Tazreena Sajjad succinctly states, The construction of migrants as victims at best, and as cultural and security threats at worst, particularly in the case of Muslim refugees, not only assists in their dehumanisation, it also legitimises actions taken against them through the perpetuation of a particular discourse on the European Self and the non-European Other. (40)

Saeed and Nadia, being refugees from a Muslim country in England, are new essentialised Other in post-9/11 world order. Nadia is ‘always clad from the tips of her toes to the bottom of her jugular notch in a flowing black robe’ which easily can be appraised as a sign of her devoutness, but she is a non-believer, and she did not need to wear them even in their own city,

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when she lived alone, before the militants came, but she chose to, because it sent a signal, and she wished to send the ‘signal’ (Hamid, Exit West 30) of the male gaze and harassment which is initially suggested. Hamid chronicles some changes in Saeed’s practice of religious piety throughout the text. Although Saeed at first offer prayers occasionally, it gains momentum after his mother’s death, and after the demise of his father, he starts praying daily. Hamid sketches his prayer, When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another, and out of this Saeed felt it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity’s potential for building a better world, and so he prayed as a lament, as a consolation, and as a hope. (Hamid, Exit West 117)

Saeed’s prayer and piety bring a strong parallel to the need for a new cosmopolitan turn characterised by transnational relations, marital migration, and transnational modes of cohabitation (Beck). While professing on the stereotyping Muslims and Islam, Hamid succinctly suggests that ‘Islam is not a race, yet Islamophobia partakes of racist characteristics’ (Discontent and Its Civilizations 220). To Hamid, Muslims have their own different versions of Islam, nevertheless, ‘Islamophobia represents a refusal to acknowledge these variations, to acknowledge individual humanities, a desire to paint members of a perceived group with the same brush. In that sense, it is indeed like racism’ (Discontent and Its Civilizations 220–21). Refugees with such bodies at risk and forms of discrimination herald the new era of post-socialism with the eventual success of liberal capitalism that propelled to the neo-liberal economics and global free trade with all the incipient policies within. Such monster-refugee formations within the inner structural and historical cognition of modernity ends up in racial discrimination through the racial and other prejudicial ideologies and biological racism of the post–World War II. While the monstrosity of the ‘other’ remains a predominant responsive kernel of most Western nation-states surrounding the refugee that appears in Europe and the United States beyond the frontiers of the known civilisational order, another oppositional set of hospitable and asylum norms is discernible when the host nation is confronted with the influx of refugees who come from nearby European nations and thereby pre-empt the monstrosity imagination by appealing to the kinship of racial and ethnic identities. Going back to the ipseity of the Other in Levinas’s discourses, such a response from the liberal

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Western nation-state is a deliberate reflection on the fundamental unwillingness to look beyond the pale of dominant juridico-political narratives of the Other—a move that deconstructs the soundness of the ‘liberal’ in liberal democracies. Instead, it is micronarratives that are made to look essential to the task of recovering ethical standards of conception and judgement as real political action that happens outside the boundaries of the state in Alain Badiou’s understanding. The recent influx of refugees from Ukraine to the other host nation-states of Europe have evinced a differential treatment—both in terms of the geopolitical gesture of conditional legal asylum as well as the overall populist response to the precarity of those who have been coerced to leave their homelands in Ukraine owing to the ongoing war with Russia. These asylum seekers have been largely welcomed with open arms, and many European nations have in fact legislated legal and juridical reforms to ensure that the refugees do not have to undergo the similar procedures of statist and geopolitical profiling as they merge with the common population of the host nation-states. Derrida’s notions of conditional hospitality and the formation of the neo-liberal democracy are largely informed by his own experiences as an outsider (a Jew and an Algerian) in the host nation of France. The very fact that the politico-ontological conditioning and creolisation of the ‘monstrosity of the other’ is premised upon a set of racial, geopolitical, and ethnic prejudices is proven time and again by the differential treatment meted out to European peers on the one hand and the racial, ethnic or religious ‘other(s)’ on the other hand. Hamid’s Exit West strikes a more poignant note when we consider the contemporaneity of the novel’s ethical and political stakes in a geopolitical climate wherein the crises and existential fissures of the modern nation-states are ironed out through the mechanisms of conditional hospitality and differential treatment to the migrant ‘others.’ CONCLUSION My reading of Hamid’s Exit West contends the absence of statehood, nationality, and citizenship within the precarity and violence in the camps life in Mykonos, with the subsequent passages to London and Marin with instantaneous transfer between different locations, if not worlds, and this becomes affective spaces of inimicus and hostis as postulated by Greek philosophers, the binary of friend/enemy in The Concept of the Political (1932) by Carl Schmitt, and even post–World War II conceptions of ‘totalitarian enemy’— the ‘terrorist’ as described in Nomos of the Earth (1950). Expanding the meaning of migration, which opens up the possibility of more analogous to the spatialised concept of monstrified ‘expendable subjects’ as showcased by Mbembe (‘Necropolitics’), Asad, and Butler (Frames of War) with the

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ontological mutability of the human subject, the struggles of the refugees resonate deeply with urgent conversations about colonial history under the patterns of imperial and neo-liberal control of the Global South and the subsequent closing of borders uncritically. Such choices of the limits of humanist approaches produce migrants and natives in emerging under fraught language of charity/hospitality, and outcry over the reformist language of security and border control only to find the ‘[reel] from crisis to crisis’ (Ticktin 263) as Exit West imagines. Hamid’s narrative cartography with Saeed and Nadia locates that ‘the faces and buildings had changed but the basic reality of their predicament had not’ with the ‘denial of coexistence’ that would bring doom on the natives sardonically ‘sham[ed] into civility.’ The contours of the global fear of nurturing human relationships with radical hopefulness of Hamid resonates with Judith Butler, as the world is ‘given to me because you are also there as one to whom it is given. The world is never given to me alone but always in your company. Without you, the world does not give itself. We are worldless without one another’ (‘We are Worldless Without One Another’ 71). WORKS CITED Asad, Talal. On Suicide Bombing. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Aradau, Claudia. ‘The Perverse Politics of Four-Letter Words: Risk and Pity in the Securitisation of Human Trafficking.’ Millennium: Journal of International Studies, vol. 33, no. 2, 2004, pp. 251–77. Bauman, Zygmunt. Strangers at Our Door. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016. ———. Liquid Modernity: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. Beck, Ulrich. ‘Beyond Class and Nation: Reframing Social Inequalities in a Globalizing World.’ British Journal of Sociology, vol. 58, no. 4, 2007, pp. 679–705. Behrman, Simon. ‘Legal Subjectivity and the Refugee.’ International Journal of Refugee Law, vol. 26, no. 1, 2013, pp. 1–21. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso, 2004. ———. Frames of War. When Is Life Grievable? New York: Verso, 2009. ———. ‘We are Worldless Without One Another: An Interview with Judith Butler [With Stephanie Berbic].’ The Other Journal: An Intersection of Theology and Culture, June 26, 2017. https:​//​theotherjournal​.com​/2017​/06​/26​/worldless​-without​ -one​-another​-interview​-judith​-butler/. Cohen, Jeffery Jerome. ‘Monster Culture.’ In Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Cohen, Stanley. Folk Devils and Moral Panics. MacGibbon and Kee, 1972.

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Eaglestone, Robert. Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas. Edinburgh University Press, 1997. Foucault, Michel. Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France 1974–1975. Verso, 1999. Farrier, David. Postcolonial Asylum: Seeking Sanctuary before the Law. Liverpool University Press, 2011. Fassin, Didier. ‘The Biopolitics of Otherness. Undocumented Immigrants and Racial Discrimination in the French Public Debate.’ Anthropology Today, vol. 17, no. 1, 2001, p. 3. Gall, Amy. ‘We Can’t Go Back: Mohsin Hamid on Exit West.’ Barnes & Noble, March 7, 2017. https:​//​www​.barnesandnoble​.com​/review​/mohsin​-hamid​-exit​-west​ -interview. Giuliani, Gaia. Monsters, Catastrophes and the Anthropocene: A Postcolonial Critique. Routledge, 2021. Graham, Elaine L. Representations of the Post/Human. Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture. Rutgers, 2002. Hamid, Mohsin. Discontent and Its Civilizations. Riverhead Books, 2015. ———. Exit West. Riverhead Books, 2017. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford University Press, 2007. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, translated by Alphonso Lingis. Duquesque University Press, 1969. Mbembe, Achille. ‘Necropolitics.’ Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, 2003, pp. 11–40. ———. Necropolitics, translated by Steven Corcoran. Duke University Press, 2019. Mudde, Cas. ‘The 2012 Stein Rokkan Lecture—Three Decades of Populist Radical Right Parties in Western Europe: So What?’ European Journal of Political Research, vol. 52, 2013, pp. 1–19. ———. The Ideology of the Extreme Right. Manchester University Press, 2000. Sajjad, Tazreena. ‘What’s in a Name? “Refugees,” “Migrants” and the Politics of Labelling.’ Race & Class, vol. 60, no. 2, 2018, pp. 40–62. Salerno, D. ‘Risky Subjects in Time of Terror. A Semiotic Perspective on the Security Discourse in Europe.’ Versus, vol. 123, no. 2, 2016, pp. 363–84. Ticktin, Miriam. ‘Thinking Beyond Humanitarian Borders.’ Social Research: An International Quarterly, vol. 83, no. 2, 2016, pp. 255–71. Wood, Marcus. Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography. Oxford University Press, 2002. Žižek, Slavoj. ‘Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.’ In The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, edited by Mark C. Taylor and Thomas A. Carlson, 134–90. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Chapter 7

Systemic Strategies of Identity Constructions and Deliberate Exclusions Understanding the Socio, Economic, and Political Circumstances of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar Rajeesh C. Sarngadharan

INTRODUCTION This chapter examines how the Myanmar state inclines toward ethno-centric nationalism which deliberately creates cultural and ethnic differences and is prone to exclude certain identities, particularly Rohingya Muslims, featured by dissensions in terms of their cultural and ethnic origins. The core intention is to explore the process of exclusion of Rohingyas from a specific national identity. The findings show that Rohingyas’ access to the national identity can be undermined by the perspectives of the majority, who claims straightforward sense of national identity. In addition, this work notes the historical evolution of Rohingya Muslim identity from the pre-colonial time to the post-independent era with a number of skirmishes and scuffles. It is found that through various processes of exclusion, Rohingyas in Myanmar are being compartmentalised and restricted to live in an enclave-like situations. Even the squeezed socio-political, cultural, and economic lives inside these enclaves are supervised. It makes them socially deserted, culturally discriminated, economically marginalised, and politically under-represented. 99

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The study employs historical and analytical methods to dig out the connection between the historical evolution of Rohingyas and their present-day status. There are several factors, including socio, cultural, political, and economic, that play pivotal roles in determining the status of any groups in a society. Here, identity is crucial as it determines the quality of citizenship and civic life people enjoy. On conferring citizenship, identity matters and it re-determines political, legal, and cultural positions of all communities within the state system, and it will, of course, be more important and mirrored in a multi-faith and ethnic state. If identity gaps exist between populations of diverse origins, that will result in developing antagonistic cultures. While culture plays a key role in the development of each identity, territories demark each identity as legal or illegal, native or non-citizen, national or alien, insider or outsider. It is also clear that there is a formal or accepted political mechanism that draws territories or lines between separate sects of people in societies. The primary criteria for deciding whether an individual is a legally approved entity can be the socio, cultural, and ideological similarities based on commonly sanctified traditional norms, virtues, and behaviours within a particular boundary. Such inclusion or omission, based on similarities and differences, defines the economic and cultural comfortabilities of people within state and society. Identity is a multi-dimensional concept that involves as many components and patterns as we might expect. Conceptually, one could define identity as the process of construction of meaning on the basis of a cultural attribute or attributes. But at the same time, it differs in the case of a person or community of persons or communities, since they have various systems of personalities and attributes. In self-representation and collective belonging, these multi-dimensions and pluralities are a source of inconsistency. It again stresses the fact that identity must be differentiated from meanings that are constrained. When social and structural agents internalise or externalise subjects, differences and similarities exist, coming into the limelight. Exclusion or inclusion may be rational, but it allows the subjects to build their interpretation around this externalisation or internalisation. Discourses on identity-driven citizenship are invariably relying on national form and location. Citizenship relies on specific biological, cultural, and ideological presuppositions, explicitly or implicitly, that have designed and re-shaped ideas of what it means to be a citizen or not a citizen. Differences to nationally well-represented identities definitely draw a clear line between potential and troublesome. A dissension between three forms of identity construction can be explored here to illustrate these points vividly; mainly, legitimising identity, which is instigated by the existing social and cultural institutions to extend their power. Second, because of their ‘devalued’ positions by the supremacy of major identities, the resistant identity is introduced by marginalised actors. Third, the project identity that occurs as a result of a

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situation in which social agents create a new specific identity that is expected to alter their role and status in society and change it. The main goal of this change would be to transform the entire social system. It makes clear that there are always rationale and legal attempts made by individuals and social actors to make a particular identity more reflective and dominating in society. In practice, the legitimised systematic set up carries on with its single identity domination on others, and it could be able to rationalise the sources of structural domination (Etzioni). So legitimising the identification process still discriminates and splits all societies irrationally. It is clearer that in the case of resistant identity, because of isolation, it faces long and unequal exclusion in social, economic, and political spaces; a particular identity based on specific ethno-nationalist sentiments appears and maintains its dominant position. These days, as ever, the foundations and meanings of identity are disputed, examined, and argued, specifically, in a society where demographic, ethnic, political, and geographical features are evident in differences. Because of dissentions, some groups face alienation and unfair exclusion in social, economic, and political spaces (Gibney). Castells refers to this process as the exclusion of the excluders by the excluded. At all levels, interpretations of identity are contested, discoursed, and debated. Precisely, socio, cultural, political, and geographic attributes would play a pivotal role in determining national identity and citizenship, and these can decide who can come in and who should go out. In order to justify the hypothesis, this chapter considers only identity exclusion as a deliberate social and systemic process initiated by the majoritarian government. It is believed that all citizenship freedoms and rights enjoyed are directed at pursuing a lesser challenge to life in an individual’s public and private spheres. Here, the public domain refers to the relations and relationships of persons with government, including civil society, the economy, and the state. In order to lead a comfortable human life, the private sphere applies to freedom and space. But the societies that adopt different modes of life and culture from the dominant one is completely regulated, monitored, and governed by the institutions of the state. It is an historical process which forms systematic exclusion of ‘other’ identities. At the same time, day by day, the situation of refugees migrating to other countries and engaged in relentless political battle to get into the refugee rights circle seems to be worsening (Cheung). The host country may welcome them, but they will be alienated and deserted from large social and economic streams of life. Here we take up the case of Rohingyas, who have been constantly tortured and expelled by the Myanmar government and received by the Bangladesh government with squeezed refugee welfare benefits. The life of Rohingyas in Myanmar is compartmentalised or confined to living in an enclave-like circumstances, where there is no space for inclusion, by different exclusion

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mechanisms. Within these enclaves, even the squeezed socio-political, cultural, and economic lives are monitored and exclusively monitored by state authorities. It leaves them mentally discarded, socially discriminated, culturally oppressed, and politically under-represented, which reflects an internal colony-like situation and selective apartheid of state policy toward Rohingyan Muslims. Although we consider democracy to be a safer choice for a multi-racial or precisely pluralistic society, Southeast Asian countries’ postcolonial political histories exemplify the fact that states are inherently incompatible with the notion of cultural plurality. As a complicated socio and state structure, many of these countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations region find multi-cultural groups that add more discomfort to the very idea of the notion of nation. So, the policymakers are more comfortable only with a fewer number of social categories. At the same time, some scholars question the level of social recognition and acceptance that hold up majority communities toward other minority elements in the society (Sohel). It is not liberalism, but the rigidity that defames political traditions and ideals in that particular social structure. This is because social systems are strongly prejudiced, and majorities often see minorities as strangers and immigrants. At the same time, minor identities who face oppression and suppression often retaliate through peaceful means. The political, cultural, and psychological demands usually made on the state by any minority could also pressure the state to intensify its muzzling behaviour on the minorities. Demand for more political representation, devolution of power, right to self-determination, protection, and promotion of cultural attributes and practices, psychology of cultural clash between majority and minorities, etc., put the state in a dilemma. Among them, the xenophobic distrust of minorities by the majority is the most important. Cultures that rely on diversity face inherent contradictions and risks in majority-minority relationships. This chapter examines how growing cultural and ethnic dissensions in the case of Myanmar are likely to include and exclude such cultural groups represented by differences in terms of their social, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds (Bond). The key goal is to study the mechanism of alienation of Rohingya from a particular national origin, that is, Burmese. An academic observation shows that the access and reach of Rohingya to a national or Bamar identity can be ignored by the majority dominance, which argues that the only identity which stays and seems loyal to the nation is majority. The historical evolution of Rohingya Muslims from the pre-colonial period to the post-independent era has been distinguished by a variety of skirmishes and scuffles. It reaffirms the fact that the complete dominance of the numerically powerful dominant identity will again disregard the attempts of minorities to claim national belonging. In Myanmar, majority regimes intruded into social,

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economic, cultural, and political space of Rohingyans and made them live an oppressed minority life. EVOLUTION OF IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION AND SOCIO, ECONOMIC, AND POLITICAL CIRCUMSTANCES OF ROHINGYA MUSLIMS IN MYANMAR The aim of this section is to examine and contextualise the isolation and discrimination that the Rohingyas have been facing and subjected to in pre-colonial and colonial environments. It presents an investigation into the authoritative attitude of the post-independent Myanmar government, its policy on minority, regulated by racial and political inclusion (Ullah). The underlying dilemma of the current political system lies in the state’s treatment of disputed identities or contradictory identities by systemic infringement of rights and racial inequality and exclusion. The effort in the following subsections is to historicise the processes of establishing and unmaking ethnic borders from pre-colonial to postcolonial times in Myanmar. This will emphasise the study of the complexities of power equations established by the state between the majority and minority communities that challenged the existence of the Rohingyas, derailed their attempts to regain socio-political rights, and worries of migration caused by displacement. Leaving aside the existing paradigm of the conflictual majority minority scenario and the hegemonic structure of the nation-state, Muslim Rohingyas were the inhabitants of the Arakan state in the period preceding pre-colonial times. The pre-colonial life of the Rohingyas in Myanmar centres around many discourses and viewpoints (Zarni and Brinham). One observation started with the valid point of Rohingya’s ancestral origin, which dates back to the mediaeval period, when Arab and Persian merchants arrived in Myanmar and settled in the regions of Lower Burma and Arakan at the beginning of the ninth century. Muslims had a relatively dominant influence in the northern part of Arakan from the twelfth century onwards, but their geographical extension to the mainland was minimal, so Rakhine became a major concentration of the Muslims of those periods. A distinct spatial identification and sociological creation of another united entity was provided by the geographical separation of the Arakan state from the central provinces of Burma via Arakan Yoma. There are historical stories which suggest that during the pre-colonial period, Arakan was geographically congruent with Myanmar. This claim is based on the Mrohaung Kingdom’s life as a separate political unit (Charney). Although having no close association with the then-predominant kingdoms in Burma, Bengal, the Irrawadian Delta, and India’s Mughals, historical documents

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point to a significant phenomenon when the Arakan state came into conflict with that of the Muslim Bengal empire. One such occurrence happened in 1406, when King Meng Soamwun of Arakan was forced to seek refuge in Ghiasuddin Azam Shah’s (Sultan of Bengal) because of international hostility and invasion of the former state. It was only in 1430 CE that, with the cooperation of Sultan Jalaluddin Mohammad Shah, Ruler Soamwun was able to consolidate his military and political strength to re-capture his throne and restore his regime. In their alliance with Arakan emperor, the Sultan of Bengal’s diplomatic and military assistance became a defining element; this was further strengthened by the fact that Arakanese rulers were predominantly Mohamedanised in their attitudes and ideological constructions while professing Buddhism. The rapid improvement in the alliance led to the initiation of Arakanese kings to follow their current Muslim titles. In 1459 CE, when the Arakan state set out to invade Chittagong, another military development took place and remained under its control until 1666, when the Mughals effectively integrated into its system. Thus, the relationship between the Kingdom of Mrauk-U and Muslim Bengal remained cordial and flourished between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. As two strains of Buddhism, Hinduism, Animism, and other belief systems find a conductive atmosphere for survival and sustenance, with no major threat to their life, the influential aspect of such partnerships might pursue new views of religious exchanges and tolerance. The disastrous incident that marked the breakup of the social equilibrium happened in 1784 when, under Bodawpaya, the Burmese Kingdom invaded the Arakan state and defeated and simultaneously integrated into Central Burma’s Ava Kingdom. Disorder seized the lives of Arakanese, prompting them to revolt against the authoritarian existence of the kingdom of Burma. Historians’ accounts of tyranny describe the horrendous experiments of the Arakanese, when those who failed to pay income or taxes were violently massacred. Similarly, about three thousand employees pushed into the reconstruction ventures of Meiktila Lake went missing in another fateful event, and such events were repeated in the years 1790 and 1797 CE. They were forced to flee to the then-British colony of Bengal for their lives by systematic oppression. The ancient antagonism was then cemented between the King of the Burmese and the people of Arakan, which may be the starting point for potential conflicts. While British colonisation was exploitative, and after the fall of Siraj-ud-Daula of Bengal at the Battle of Buxar, its expansionism reached its zenith; the colonial government wanted to venture its territories into Burma beyond Bengal. Consequently, in 1824, the British colonial government in Burma sought support from the Arakanese for secession through numerous wars. Arakan, Tenasserim, Pegu, and Upper Burma became part of the British

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colonial government in 1885. As a result of the colonial strategy, Arakan was configured as the buffer zone. In reality, the British were swift to instrumentalise the notorious divide and rule policy centred on arbitrary constructions of ethno-religious and cultural bifurcating lines in the following years, thus erupting new avenues of ethnic strife and becoming difficult to curb the mushrooming of internally aggrandised differentiations (Frydenlund 83). Whereas the pillars of the colonial authority were founded on the destruction or complete abolition of traditional monarchical governance and it was abolished in Burma, it was replaced in the 1920s by a limited power regime known as Parliamentary Home Rule. About the fact that Burma was governed by the British from its office in colonial India, and from 1886 until its expulsion in 1937, the former was regarded as the province under the same office for administrative conveniences. This administrative setup stimulated the exchange of labour as plantation employees traded on an intra-regional basis, only to be shunned when Burma emerged as an autonomous body separate from the British India colonial government; at the same time as this political occurrence, the interruption of the population revolution throughout colonial rule involving the Indian and Chinese diaspora was marked. In some situations, even after the end of British authority over Burma, many Indian labour forces chose not to return to their homeland. In addition, Japanese misadventures in Myanmar led to the establishment of new ethnic borders, which could be best analysed by Aung San’s attempts to spearhead the movement for national independence. Initially, Aung San and his followers were inclined to the Japanese anti-imperialist initiative, effectively discovering this as a favourable atmosphere to thwart British rule in Burma. One of the aims was to establish a homogeneous Mahabama or Greater Burma, as they found that the British supported the notion of Arakanese and other minorities as a barrier. Eventually, the Japanese invasion and ethnic minority allegiance to the British contributed to the former’s dismantling of its defensive approach to the numerically and socially vulnerable population. In order to add more issues, the Burma Independent Army systematically shed the blood of minorities, especially Rohingya. On the other hand, the British used ethnic antagonisms as weapons to exacerbate divides that they protected and encouraged at one stage, leaving as their political interests required new political categories. Colonial governance systems and their politics of discrimination created preconditions for the indigenous battle for independence. The British are responsible for inculcating nationalist fervour for minority combat, disowned during the initial process to take responsibility. The onset of World War II left the British to fight in conflicts, and Thailand and Burma became part of the demarcation of lands comprising Karens. There are sources in this modified scenario that point to the suspected lobbying of Rohingya leaderships for the

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unification of the Arakan state with East Pakistan during the 1947 Partition fiasco, but such attempts remained in the moribund state. In the mid-twentieth century, problems for Rohingya identity started with the granting of independence from the British to Burma in 1948, when the new state vitalised the development of homogeneous values for nation-state construction, while the Rohingya were victims of xenophobia. As the demographic accumulation of Rohingya in the frontier regions led to new ways of borderland politics, citizenship was refused and identified as stateless at the same time (Ahsan Ullah). While extreme social, political, and cultural rights and privileges were guaranteed to them, the post-independent Myanmar government seemed to be intentional in implementing the ‘other’ Rohingya agenda. It was also a fact that at the time of state creation, some ethnic groups, including the Rohingya, requested regional autonomy from the central government. Some have gone so far as to claim independence from the mainland. The state’s constitutional provisions and repressive apparatuses were infused with Bamar majority chauvinism in response, which essentially created a new cultural structure within the country: Bamar as ‘US’ and Rohingyas as ‘THEM’ (Matthews). In fact, the responses and retaliations of some of the militant Rohingya groups caused a severe phase of the situation (Holliday). Neither accommodation interventions nor assimilation efforts were made to incorporate the Rohingyas; instead, the Rohingyas were compartmentalised as a threat to the cohesion of the state. Because of its systemic disparities and in-built limits, the State of Myanmar dedicated itself to isolating and crippling the citizens of the Arakan province by numerous legal actions. Even in the social system and composition of Myanmar since independence, these separation efforts have been evident. In view of this fact, scholars argued in more depth that the Burmese governments have vindicated a dual and contradictory strategy that reflected rather heterogeneous elements of cultural homogeneity for national unity. They added that the British government’s divide and rule policies actually helped the minority in colonial Myanmar but left the majority desperate (South and Lall). However, Aung San and influential post-independent figures such as U Nu, Anti-Fascist Peoples Freedom League, one of the architects of Burma’s national liberation struggle and a personality remembered for their liberal stance toward religious minorities, stood for national unity by the adoption of further assimilation. In addition, these liberal minds urged national unification by a globally integrated society, education system, and popular and regional languages instead of culturally divided space between each group that had arbitrarily created tribal, cultural, and ethnic divisions. Demographically poor in representation, through their political leadership, the Muslims in Myanmar had revealed their declining roles to the national leadership in the post-independent society. The nationalistic approach

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embedded in racial animosity and Islamophobia was seen by them as the infringement of their civil rights that Aung San had facilitated for them. In comparison, the majority cultural policy smelled of minority leaders to purge them and wash away their cultural and ethnic distinctiveness. Minorities, especially Rohingyas, were shoved to the outskirts of the national narrative of the state even within the first three decades of independence, and consequently, Bamar dominated Burmese society. The general belief regarding Rohingyas among Burmese people is that during the anti-colonial war they had allied with the British, and so any compromises with Rohingya Muslims were considered impractical. Bamar’s dominated state system used religion as a method by which they constructed problems of belonging in order to enforce their cultural agenda. The Rohingyas, being Muslim, were represented as ‘other’ because they did not follow Buddhism, the country’s prevailing faith, according to a historian (Ansar). The Rohingyas were considered ‘outsiders’ and inferior, justifying an exclusion from rewards reserved for ‘insiders.’ Even in the framing of the Constitution of the Union of Burma, the underlying existence of the Myanmar nation, reflecting anti-Muslim feelings from its creation as an autonomous state, has been repeated. In the course of providing voluntary secession rights, it explicitly discriminated against the Mon and Arakanese. Thus, the country’s very first constitution has literally inculcated the seeds of the mechanism of othering. For instance, on condition of their absolute political, legal, and cultural allegiance to the Burmese regime, some of the major ethnic groups were nonetheless given provincial autonomy. The Constitution allowed some of the major identities, including Shan, Kachin, Karen, Karenni, and Chins, to obtain a legal status—the Union of Burma’s constituent unit. In the case of groups like Mon and the Arakanese, such political and cultural considerations did not happen. Except for the case of Christians in Kachin province, even minorities, including Hindus and Christians, have not suffered pervasive socio-cultural and political negligence from the administration. In the case of Muslims, it is more spurious, coupled with long legal and political negligence that forced Muslim minorities to live in mixed circumstances. In addition to the limited and weak constitutional representation of minorities, Myanmar’s various governments were concerned with the habit of excluding these particular minorities from political and legal committees, which were supposed to be used as a platform to demand more resources for their respective provinces. The presentence of Rohingya Muslims in the 1947 Panglong Agreement, for example, was abysmally poor. The existence of multi-cultural identities and their diverse interpretations of the newly independent system and government working was the necessity of this agreement (Walton). Muslims from the area of Arakan were not invited, but Rakhine Buddhists were granted the

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right to attend the agreement. In short, for a long time, the state agenda was the exclusion of minorities and the attempt to disable them with less political and social recognition. From such legal platforms, the Rohingya Muslims were formally excluded, although at the same time, in the original stages, the parliamentary representation of Muslims was not obstructed. The British accommodation policies and harmonious relations with some of the early Burmese leaders were able to represent the Myanmar parliament to minorities, especially the Rohingyas. Later, on the grounds of identity disputes, certain electoral rights to challenge elections and occupy constitutional offices were also minimised. The weakening of democratic principles and the advent of military governments in 1962 have also seen the constitutional scenario in Myanmar. The goal was to establish a democratic structure dominating Bamar, in which minorities had to negotiate at all levels. By overthrowing a democratically elected regime, politically motivated military leaders seized control of the entire state on March 2, 1962. But their intervention was justified as an attempt to restore order in an increasingly chaotic policing scene. Basically, the root causes of this military occupation were two: first, the disappointments of radical right-wing Burmese parties with respect to the British policy of positive discrimination against minorities and its continuity in post-independent Burma; and second, the persistent demand for the formation of separate political units within Burma by Rohingya Muslims from other ethnic minorities. Furthermore, the Burmese troops were regularly embroiled in scuffles and skirmishes with minorities living on the porous boundary line. Thus, the military leadership projected these minorities as a possible challenge within the country and resisted all political efforts to satisfy the need of minorities for provincial demand. At the same time, the military was perceived by minority leadership as an instrument used by the government to annihilate the region’s minority and advance Burmese nationalist agendas. It was not only Rohingya Muslims; ethnic groups such as Shan and Karenni were also asked about their commitment to the Burmese regime. Following the military coup and the establishing of the military-controlled political and civilian structure, a multitude of anti-minority initiatives were vindicated in order to regulate the political demands of minorities, particularly on the border side (Hlaing). The face of the military government and budgetary allocation for the social, economic, and cultural development of minorities was reduced by Burmese majoritarian chauvinism. Under the leadership of General Ne Win, the military was granted total power to deal with minority protesters and, by breaching all human rights, it followed a stricter strategy. The military government went to the extreme of bringing amendments to the citizenship law of the land later in the year 1974. They criticised the colonial government

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for granting minorities a great deal of preference and discriminating against Burmese identities in some legitimate actions (Ganesan and Hlaing). Citizenship law drawn up by the British during the colonial era weighed citizens belonging to minorities better with reservation in any political, administrative, and cultural space, but mistreated Burmese ethnic groups, according to the opinions of military leaders. In the colonial era, military leaders criticised minorities for their adherence to a foreign government and believed that it made Burmese communities have a poor presence in regional self-government. The militia government agreed to scrap certain relevant provisions from the Citizenship Act in response and revised it. Through the Burmese ethnic representation in administrative and legal operations, the cultural and politically driven reforms made to the Constitution brought about substantial systemic and systemic changes. The military juntas were tasked with more cultural nationalist programmes at the national and regional levels, splitting the administrative division into two: demographically Burmese populated and controlled divisions, and ethical minority-dominated states. According to the expectations of political geography, the government’s goal was to extinguish the political speech of ethnic minorities where they are more demographically accustomed. The borders of the Frontier District, recognised as minority areas with provincial autonomy by the colonial and early civil government of Burma, were again divided into small parts. The goal was to geographically split them and politically make them powerless. In addition, it led to the bifurcation of central Burma, a region with a greater Burmese population, into divergent regional divisions with more political representations. The result, however, was nationwide protest, and the scenario was marked by occasional outbreaks of public protest, non-cooperation with economic government policies, and, of course, ongoing insurgency activities. In the development of identity fragmentation in Myanmar, it should be noticed that a pro-Bamar identity policy has also been introduced by the military governments, which seems to be effective in sustaining anti-Rohingya sentiments among the general population. In order to protect the lives of Bamars from minority attacks, the military was branded as a protector. Such efforts caused the public to demand further military presence on the border sides, and the government of Myanmar subsequently militarised its border lines in the name of protecting its border areas. When we see the Myanmar Army Tatmadaw’s effort to build military bases and facilities near Rohingya villages, such acts will be explained. Nevertheless, it is claimed that some of the Rakhine region has been totally militarised by justifications for maintaining autonomy and stability, controlling growth plans, and improving power. The social and cultural isolation of ethnic minorities from the mainstream has created the present status quo. As a result, the burgeoning military

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power and presence over the state of Rakhine had a significant effect on the everyday life of the Rohingyas. Following the dramatic changes made to the 1974 Constitution, the militia government pursued numerous measures and policies in the name of uniting the country, dealing with secessionists and insurgencies, and supporting and maintaining Buddhism as the only religion of the state. With these aims in view, the military proceeded to abolish Rohingyans’ social and political organisations. This latest mission of diluting ethnic integration with national state policies has adversely affected Myanmar’s peace. In 1977, an anti-minority agenda was carried out by military acts such as Operation Nagamin or Dragon King Operation, resulting in the arrest and killing of many Rohingya. The government argued that the action was inevitable for the country’s stable existence and needed to check the identities of all citizens’ reconciliation (Ahmed). At the same time, on November 16, 1977, the Ministry of Home and Religious Affairs reported that the action had arrested infiltrators who had unlawfully filtered into the country. Long before the census was completed, the State of Myanmar ordered its officials to launch the process of confirming evidence of identity, naming of foreigners to be expelled and registration of residents. Drawing heavily on the Rohingya’s constructed persona as an outsider or foreigner to the Arakan regime, during Operation Nagamin, the military junta expended much of its authoritative intellect to redefine the problems of Muslims as prior to the time of military rule. The projection of the exclusionary nationalist standpoint of the military and its organised policies contrasted with the ethics of the constitution of a nation-state marked by demography. The horrendous outcome of the Nagamin operation described the policy of the state as that of supporting the humanitarian crisis. Violations of human rights and extreme internal displacement caused two hundred thousand Muslim Rohingya to take refuge in neighbouring Bangladesh linked to the state by Naf River. By 1978, the aggressive stance of the Burmese military junta toward the Rohingya ethnic religious population became evident by state-sponsored exclusionary schemes (Bhatia et al.). In 1982, when the military junta regime under General Ne Win destroyed the socio-existential realm by promulgating Burma’s Citizenship Law, aimed at enforcing its fragmented strategy of exclusion, the vague and nuanced trajectory of the Burmese government’s policy toward the plight of the Rohingya was exacerbated. Despite this rule, the restriction was constitutionally codified for further marginalisation or systematic negation. Such codification through legislation mechanism was devised by the government to wedge possibilities for the flourish of Rohingyan identity dispersal. At the altar of an exclusive postcolonial state and nation building, the distinctive

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Rohingyan identity that earned maturity through experiences for centuries in the Arakan state was demolished (Devi). In the law of citizenship, the sustained shame and expression of hatred was internalised, when it created three types of citizenships that are citizens, associate citizens, and naturalised citizens based on their ancestral affiliation with the state. In addition, all three requirements had colour recognition as blue, pink, or green to determine their status established by the state. While scrutinising the endemic discrimination of Burmese Citizenship Law, political project integration made the ethnic nationality of Kachin, Karen-ni, Karen, Burmese, Chin, Rakhine, Kaman, Shan, Mon, Zerbadee, and Burmese as ‘People’ through this law; the tangible argument for the provision of registration as national races was extracted from their ancestral presence in the state prior to 1823, the year of advancement of British colonialism (Grabowsky). Before the stipulated benchmark year of 1823, those who refused to provide accurate records or facts relating to the inhabitation of their forefathers were relegated as ‘associate residents.’ The designation of associate citizens was derived from the fact that certain people who were eligible to acquire credentials under the Union Citizenship Act of 1948 could not, however, process the law’s criteria under 1982 (Thomson). In this category, individuals were guaranteed the aforementioned citizenship rights provided their paternal lineage lived and settled in the state prior to 1948, which resulted in the expulsion of the British colonial government; the third group within the statute is designated as ‘normal citizens.’ In addition to historical membership, the three types of citizenship also required the candidate, aged eighteen years and older, to be of good moral character and to be able to speak any of the national languages. Legal provisions and the removal of Rohingyas from the ethnic races or group initially allowed the State of Myanmar to refuse citizenship. The Rohingyas found themselves in the enigma of their future in this compromised scenario; this was due to the difficulties involved in providing conclusive proof of the domicile records and their migration evidence prior to the establishment of British administration in the state of Arakan. The notorious Citizenship Registry scheme proved useless for the children to protect their nationality as their parents were unable to attain the same, and these developments were aimed at leaving them stateless. Not only were the Rohingyas dangerous to the politicization of citizenship norms, even those who might obtain ‘normal citizen’ status were supposed to perform duties. Manipulation of citizenship processes in compliance with the feasible systems of government by self-interested politicians in power casting and re-casting. Rohingyas’ weaknesses begin with their statelessness, as they are held apart from the public goods and welfare structures. Nevertheless, despite the rejection of citizenship, the Rohingya were permitted to cast

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their vote in the 1990 national election. In comparison to the awarding of permits to engage in elections for Rohingyas, the prolonged state policies of human rights violations and ethnic segregation proved costly for Rohingyas while nearly two hundred political organisations were proscribed. The state’s notoriety came to the fore shortly after de-registration as townships of border areas such as Rathidaung, Maungdaw, and Buthidaugh had to face the brunt of state-sponsored Operation Pyi Thaya or Successful Nation. According to empirical data from 1991 and 1992, Rohingyas comprising nearly 270,000 people requested asylum in Bangladesh for fear of persecution. Even after two decades, almost half a million people of Rohingya ethnic origin were forced to flee their livelihoods recently in 2017 and eventually faced state-orchestrated violence and destruction of lives and land, as Rohingyas made a mass exodus to Bangladesh in such a militant-rising atmosphere and living in temporary camps situated in their southeastern provinces. An emerging second power lies primarily in the role of monks in the orchestration of conflict from a complex substanding of Myanmar’s ethnically polarised political conundrum. In spitting venom of anti-Muslim feelings, the Ma Ba Tha group of religious hardliners has been involved; another notable was the founding of the 969-movement starting in 2014 with its declared aim of exterminating expected propaganda of the expansion of Islam. From time to time, the United Nations has voiced its concern for the Rohingyas, and the Burmese militarised state acts have been regarded as a textbook example of ethnic cleansing (Schonthal). In reaction to increasing foreign criticism of the military regime, the state referred to displaced persons as those who were unable to offer sufficient evidence of their identity. In dealing with acknowledgment of the role of Rohingyas in the province, a comparative study of the 1947 Burma constitution and that of 1982 stands distinct. The former is distinguished by the notion of participation, while the developments of military hegemony in state relations have shifted the previous position from exclusion to annihilation. A critical study of the military junta’s identification talks in Burma leads to the development of arbitrary demarcations for communities based on Burmese history and cultural history (Wade). Thus, on an instrumentalist basis, state power over personality formations created a skewed history of the people of Burma. The history of prevalence was practically configured as tales recounted by the state and its elites. Ironically, ethnicity was not the true causal element as an independent variable in the state versus Rohingya dispute, but it is the questionable state-sponsored imaginary nation-state development project focused on inclusionary-exclusionary conceptions of statehood and nationhood (D’Costa). Achieving citizenship for Rohingya would be a marker of acceptance of their status within the State of Myanmar.

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CONCLUSION Under the modern state system, minority religious and ethnic groups were subjected to selective discrimination, especially in postcolonial states, or were forced to increase struggles to constantly remind the state of their marginalisation and call for an inclusive society with a holistic approach to greater integration of institutions. The state has left no room for dispute in terms of their existence as illegal in the case of the Rohingya in Myanmar. The racist mindset of the state is based on the assumption that the Rohingya have a distinct cultural and political culture that is incompatible with the majority. It encouraged the government of Myanmar to lay down its policies against Rohingya. The long years of neglect have contributed to socio-economic stratification and disproportionate access to the services of the state. The seclusion of the identity of Rohingya as the other and intentional systematic efforts to undermine their region’s life have also led them to reorganise themselves to preserve their distinctive identity. The Muslims associated themselves with the history and geography of the Rakhine state by preferring the name Rohingya and thereby sought to legitimise their struggle for autonomy. Against this context, as a distinctive group, the Rohingya tend first and foremost to have their roots in a protest movement that originated from a historical moment of separation and has since been strengthened by their mutual deprivation under the military regime. In brief, gaps in identity and inconsistencies between two cultures in cultural values made the life of Rohingyas in Myanmar deplorable. In this case, thus, personality can be seen as the product of self-construction and externally placed variables. This chapter shows that the Myanmar state’s non-recognition and mistreatment of the Rohingyas are framed by the cultural supremacy of dominant Bamar and subordination is subjected to the Rohingyas, and the Rohingyas appear to be oppressed within the State of Myanmar. Eventually, the state has projected its country and state-building phase decided by the interplay of power sharing across the buildings of us and them in the whole discourse of selective marginalisation of Rohingya. The shifting socio-political, cultural, and economic conditions produced an inverse position and divided the Rohingyas into state enclaves. They are categorically degraded as socially divided, culturally connected, politically disadvantaged, and economically disadvantaged by such a classification. These plights are the products of Myanmar government and societies de-liberate political, cultural, and economic policies and attitudes. The policies of the Bamar-controlled and Buddhist-favoured Myanmar government have essentially deteriorated the Rohingya space. In giving citizenship and delegitimising the ‘other’ as foreign, identification plays an unavoidable part. In fact, the postcolonial era

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has shown that Rohingyas were not treated as people and that political power played a crucial role in reinforcing the conventional ethnic-religious cleavages in which rights flowed to those community identities listed in the imaginations of the nationalist. The long unresolved problems of statelessness will remain in future and other complexities, until and unless the Rohingyas are given political privileges/rights. WORKS CITED Ahmed, Imtiaz. ‘The Rohingyas: From stateless to refugee.’  Dhaka, Bangladesh: University of Dhaka, 2009, pp. 285–301. Ahsan Ullah, A. K. M. ‘Rohingya Crisis in Myanmar: Seeking justice for the “Stateless.”’ Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, vol. 32, no. 3, 2016, pp. 285–301. Ansar, Anas. ‘The Unfolding of Belonging, Exclusion and Exile: A Reflection on the History of Rohingya Refugee Crisis in Southeast Asia.’ Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, vol. 40, no. 3, 2020, pp. 441–56. Bhatia, Abhishek, et al. ‘The Rohingya in Cox’s Bazar: When the Stateless Seek Refuge.’ Health and Human Rights, vol. 20, no. 2, 2018, p. 105. Bond, R. ‘Belonging and Becoming: National Identity and Exclusion.’ Sociology, vol. 40, no. 4, 2006, pp. 609–26. Castells, M. The Power of Identity. UK: Wiley Blackwell Publications, Ltd., 2-11, pp. 17–19. Charney, M. W. ‘Rise of a Mainland Trading State: Rahkaing Under the Early Mrauk-U Kings, c. 1430–1603.’ Journal of Burma Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 1998, pp. 1–33. Cheung, Samuel. ‘Migration Control and the Solutions Impasse in South and Southeast Asia: Implications from the Rohingya Experience.’ Journal of Refugee Studies, vol. 25, no. 1, 2012, pp. 50–70. Devi, Konsam Shakila. ‘Myanmar under the Military Rule 1962–1988.’ International Research Journal of Social Sciences, vol. 3, no. 10, 2014, pp. 46–50. D’Costa, Bina. Nation building, Gender and War Crimes in South Asia. Routledge, 2011. Etzioni, A. The Spirit of Community: The Re-Invention of American Society. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994, pp. 212–13. Frydenlund, Iselin. ‘Buddhist Islamophobia: Actors, Tropes, Contexts’ in The Brill Handbook on Religion and Conspiracies, (eds.) Dyrendal, Asbjorn, Asprem, Egil, Robertson, David G. Leiden: Brill, 2019, pp. 279–302. Ganesan, Narayanan, and Kyaw Yin Hlaing, eds. Myanmar: Sate, Society and Ethnicity. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2007. Gibney, M. Who Should be Included? Noncitizens, Conflict and the Constitution of the Citizenry. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 17–18. Grabowsky, Volker. ‘Exploring Ethnic Diversity in Burma.’ Anthropos, vol. 103, no. 2, 2008, pp. 594–96.

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Hlaing, Kyaw Yin. ‘Understanding Recent Political Changes in Myanmar.’ Contemporary Southeast Asia, 2012, pp. 197–216. Holliday, Ian. ‘Addressing Myanmar’s Citizenship Crisis.’ Journal of Contemporary Asia, vol. 44, no. 3, 2014, pp. 404–21. Matthews, Bruce. ‘Religious Minorities in Myanmar—Hints of the Shadow.’ Contemporary South Asia, vol. 4, no. 3, 1995, pp. 287–308. Schonthal, Benjamin, and Matthew J. Walton. ‘The (New) Buddhist Nationalisms? Symmetries and Specificities in Sri Lanka and Myanmar.’ Contemporary Buddhism, vol. 17, no. 1, 2016, pp. 81–115. Sohel, Md. ‘The Rohingya Vrisis in Myanmar: Origin and Emergence.’ Saudi J. Humanities Soc. Sci, 2, 2017. South, Ashley, and Marie Lall. ‘Language, Education and the Peace Process in Myanmar.’ Contemporary Southeast Asia, 2016, pp. 128–53. Thomson, Curtis N. ‘Political Stability and Minority Groups in Burma.’ Geographical Review, 1995, 269–85. Ullah, Akm Ahsan. ‘Rohingya Refugees to Bangladesh: Historical Exclusions and Contemporary Marginalization.’ Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, 2011, pp. 139–61. Wade, Francis. Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim ‘Other.’ Zed Books Ltd., 2017. Walton, Matthew J. ‘Ethnicity, Conflict, and History in Burma: The Myths of Panglong.’ Asian Survey, vol. 48, no. 6, 2008, pp. 889–910. Zarni, Maung, and Natalie Brinham. ‘Reworking the Colonial-Era Indian Peril: Myanmar’s State-Directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims.’ Brown J. World Affairs, 24, 2017, p. 53.

PART III

Disasters and Other Heterotopias: Disaster Poetics and the Re-writing of the Postcolonial Nation-State

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Re-imagining Disaster Capitalism through Fecopoetics and the Literature of Waste Fyatarus and the Beyond of the Empathy Machine in Select Short Stories by Nabarun Bhattacharya Swayamdipta Das

The chapter shall attempt to understand the ways in which fecopoetics and the literature of waste and scatology might help us understand the ways in which the normative empathy machine of Western cosmopolitan capitalism might be subverted and a differential aesthetico-political and ontological register of be-ing and be-coming might be reinstated to critically punctuate the smug contours of the neo-liberal public sphere and the different modalities of its self-fashioning. While disaster imagery in South Asian literary canons has often been studied to refer to the ways in which the cultural and geopolitical matrices of the postcolonial nation-state might be read anew in terms of the ‘event’ of the disaster, there is a palpable critical lacuna surrounding the affective mechanisms that the South Asian nation-states and their collective imaginations often resort to in the face of disaster and disruption. The chapter shall attempt to read two short stories by Nabarun Bhattacharya to understand the ways in which the disaster imagination and the concomitant affective onto-political mechanisms of the cosmopolitan empathy machine might be strategically subverted to refer to newer modalities of subjective embodiments and agentive materialities. 119

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One of the key elements of the affective cultural mechanism of ‘disaster capitalism’ and the ‘shock doctrine’ is its ability to evince a set of a priori affective and ontological reactions from the subjects that correspond to the normative and conditioned currency of the bio-political regime of liberal capitalism. The cooption of docile subjects and their emotional and affective realms is thereby akin to a bio-political act of appropriation and digestion. Disaster capitalism thus feeds upon a politico-ontological passage of ingestion that Jacques Derrida refers to as ‘carnophallogocentrism.’ The radical alterity of the subject and its ‘unmappable’ affective ‘selves’ are thereby ingested and incorporated by the overwhelming overtures of disaster capitalism vis-á-vis a conditional empathy machine that renders the ‘otherness of the radical other’ into the ‘sameness’ of the feeling ‘self.’ The Fyatarus defy the tropes of the ‘human’ per se; they gesture toward the trans-human and the ways in which the definitives of the Nietzschean ‘ubermensch’ could be reversed and rewritten to re-ascribe the ‘human’ in terms of an opposition to the constatives of Enlightenment thinking and its insistence upon the transcendental and the proper. ‘What are these fyatarus then? I don’t know exactly what species they are of. But they are very special. Understand? You’ll see in History, many great men have devised various plans to build the humans anew. I think all those plans and efforts have ultimately given us the fyatarus’ (Bhattacharya, ‘Fyataru’ 139). The Fyatarus ability to fly at will gives them the opportunity to launch aerial attacks upon the city via their scatological and excretory weapons of destruction and disaster. Whenever they encounter the scene of a smug urban cosmopolitan consciousness giving in to the tropes of globalisation and capitalist modernity, the Fyatarus inflict their weapons of excretory waste upon that scene of docile modernity. In a telling scene in ‘Fyataru,’ Madan initiates D.S. into this peculiar performative of excretory and scatological destruction: - See that three-storied building there. We’ll land up on its roof. - Why? - Will smoke a biri. The antennae, you see that, we’ll rip the cables apart. Slam and break. - Why, what’s its fault? - Why do you have to ask so many whats and whys—why bray so much? Just do what I tell you to do. The people who were watching cable TV in that area suddenly found the picture gone for some unknown reasons. The local cable operator was called up. They climbed up the stairs of the three storied building, lighted the area, and found out that chunks of bricks were used to damage the antennae, the burnt end of a biri was lying around and also the foul smell of a piss full of country liquor. (Bhattacharya, ‘Fyataru’ 141)



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The Fyatarus’ propensity to defecate in public spaces overturns some of the assumed registers of civility, aesthetics, and cultural dissemination that are generally assigned to the post-liberal public sphere in democratic nation-states. The insistence on the excretory rather than the productive (or, by extension, the assimilative) spaces and mechanisms overturns and subverts the dialectic mechanisms that dictate the contours of our civil society and the ideological and visible markers of our public spheres. The instruments of revolution no longer hark back to the liberal tokens of protest and resistance; they enact a differential space of ‘be-ing’ and ‘be-coming’ through a fecopolitical meontology that insists upon the excremental excesses and wastes to subvert the assimilative and carnophallogocentric overtures of neo-capitalist liberal societies. The disruption of a satellite television network in the urban metropolis and the concomitant enunciation of a filthy excremental excess in its place, ‘the foul smell of a piss full of country liquor’ (Bhattacharya, ‘Fyataru’ 141), disrupts the smug and comfortable passages to neo-liberal capitalist globalisation that satellite and television networks posit for the urban postcolonial consciousness, and reinstates a differential path to a different affective register that is conditioned by feelings and aesthetics that are too radical to be assimilated and conveniently ‘ingested.’ DS has his initiation into the activities of the group by learning the motto of the Fyatarus: ‘The initiation for the fyatarus is breaking and smashing, tearing and slamming, and pissing . . . no wounding and killing. Just frightening. Making the place dirty. Rampaging stuff. The fun’s there’ (Bhattacharya, ‘Fyataru’ 141). The scene of debris and destruction not only entails a certain re-ordering of the status quo, but it also connotes a reclaiming of the logic of late capitalism through a reversal that celebrates the excretory and scatological excess ‘matter’ instead of the utilitarian tropes of neo-capitalism. The literature of waste, or the registers of a new aesthetic register in the form of fecopoetics, evinces a differential structure of feelings and empathy that run parallel to the radical contours of the political and ontological uncanny. The literature of garbage and waste blurs the usual distinctions between useful and non-useful matter and thereby raises important questions about the subsistence of our civilisational tropes vis-á-vis utilitarian capitalism in the face of a postapocalyptic world order: Waste raises a central question related to thresholds: when does an object become waste, and is waste emptiness? The threshold between usefulness and nonusefulness in the wastescapes postapocalyptic texts foreground becomes blurred. . . . Waste in these narratives is most paradoxical and triggers a re-connection with the materiality of things, a rediscovery of the matter in objects. (Bragard 480)

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This leads us to contemplate anew the agentic capacities of waste and filth ‘matters’—elements of our corporeal and bio-political bodies that have been ignored and rendered insignificant in cultural and political discourses. The return to the bowels and the filth of our corporeal and bodily ‘selves’ might help us reinstate the terms of our engagement with the world, and also concomitantly evince a new affective order of feelings and sentience that cannot be easily appropriated by the hegemonic order of capitalism and cosmopolitan globalisation. Societies are structured around the control and regulation of excretory matters; Nabarun’s Fyatarus disrupt the safe disposal of the agentic ‘matters’ into the realm of the invisible and thereby enacts a return of the corporeal and ontological ‘uncanny.’ According to Susan Signe Morrison, We discipline our excremental bodies through actual bodily training (such as potty training, learning where and when it is proper and improper to defecate) and we discipline our minds by negating our animal selves . . . Bakhtin points out the importance of the material bodily lower stratum and what he calls the ‘grotesque body.’ Excrement was a relic of ‘gay matter,’ ‘an intermediate between the living body and dead disintegrating matter that is being transformed into earth, into manure’ . . . Carnivalesque excrement functioned both as the material sign of abundance as well as humiliation; a magical medicine as well as corruption; renewal as well as death. Excremental images, understood in a richly complex way by contemporaries, have become coarse and debased as we have stripped them of their ambivalence. Bakhtin suggests that our modern estrangement from excrement is neither natural nor inevitable. (6)

The group of flying Fyatarus and the waste-ful warmongers of the city mostly consist of sections of the urban community who are subject to the most precarious conditions of life and dwelling—they are the abject excesses who are either discarded or rendered invisible in the ‘bhadroloki’ spaces of the urban public sphere. This precarious lot regains their agential impetus from the war cry of ‘fnyat fnyat snai snai’ (Bhattacharya, ‘Fyataru’ 145) and their ability to carry with them the filth and fecologically potent matter from the debris and dumpsters of the city: All the fyatarus of Howrah. They live in dirty alleys and slums like land snails in a colony. You give them free space and they are like the king—oh that sound, that roar . . . A swarm of flying women wearing nylon-sarees and holding stuff like sweepers’ brooms, broken cooking stoves, rotten potato curry in an earthen pot, soup made of the discarded parts of a goat, etc. suddenly flew past DS, making their shrill war-cries. (Bhattacharya, ‘Fyataru’ 145)

These abject ‘other(s)’ who carry with the scatological and excretory excesses of the urban metropolis invoke a differential aesthetic and politico-ontological



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kernel of resistance and ‘play.’ These broken and filthy ‘waste matters’ generally evince a feeling of disgust and unease. The onto-political and aesthetic interpellative register that conditions us to conceive of matter through a utilitarian or a transcendental lens preempts the radical agential field of be-ing and be-coming that ‘waste matters’ and scatological excrements often evoke; the collective structure of feelings and sentience that conditions our response to the disaster event/imagery is thus always already ill at ease with its abject and excremental ‘other.’ The war cry of the Fyatarus to disrupt the smug indolence of the elite bourgeoise ‘bhadrolok’ class and their claims to a certain cosmopolitan globality is augmented by their use of weapons that evince a foul and differential order of things—piss that smells of country liquor, rotten potato curry, soup made of discarded parts of a goat, and so on. The substitution of the utilitarian, the aesthetic, and the transcendental (the keystone of global capitalism and its worldling) by the discarded, excremental, foul, and the aesthetic ‘uncanny’ leads to a counter-intuitive trajectory that gestures toward the revolution-to-be in terms of the ‘other’ site to the Enlightenment values and its means of codified emancipation. The metaphysics of a differential order of anti-transcendalist being and subjectivity is evoked by these instruments of war. Sean Christopher Hall talks about this ‘other’ site of metaphysics that has eluded Western philosophy and the self-fashioning of our ‘being’ for the most part of history thus: In other words, have we produced a metaphysics and made an ontology (or series of ontologies) in the Western tradition though which we can sustain ourselves in the face of something much darker and more basic that lurks beyond or behind what we take to be our immediate and oft stated philosophical horizon? Have we only constructed metaphysical systems and made ontologies that seem to bode well? . . . Maybe it is because of a deeper metaphysical need we have for clear forms of individuation (as opposed to ambiguity), sameness (as opposed to otherness), order (as opposed to chaos), identity (as opposed to difference), system (as opposed to randomness), law (as opposed to anarchy), connections (as opposed to disassociations), and structures (as opposed to kinds of formlessness). (2–3)

The Floatel, which serves as the site of the ‘disaster’ in the story, is the centre of the elite urban consciousness that relentlessly sustains itself by feeding off the labour of the precarious subaltern classes of the city. The repetitive references to meat-eating by the rich and elite bourgeoise ‘bhadroloks’ in the text conjures images of both physicalist exploitation as well as the epistemic violence inflicted upon them by acts of socio-cultural appropriation and co-option (something akin to the Derridean notion of carno-phallogocentrism): ‘everyone placed on their plates the sock-draped tandoori legs, tandoori breast, tandoori stomach, tandoori liver, tandoori seenah, tandoori thighs, fried tandoori

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nose, tandoori eyes, tandoori hair with rice noodles, tandoori bleeding heart, tandoori nerves, tandoori lips, tandoori armpit, and others and was eating them happily’ (Bhattacharya, ‘Fyataru’ 146). It is in this scene of smug and exploitative consumption that the Fyatarus inflict their subversive weapons of revolution and anarchy. The scene of disaster thus invoked in the text doesn’t run parallel to the smug a priori contours of the ‘shock doctrine’ as defined by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine; it rather evinces a differential responsive gesture from the onlookers which disallows them from harking back to any of the responsive registers of the empathy machine conditioned by the constatives of neo-capitalist cosmopolitanism: Just about that time, like a bolt from the blue, some weird stuff started falling from the sky—including human shit, human piss, an entire attaché case (with the alphabets D S grafted on either sides), broken stoves, sweepers’ brooms, rotten potato curry with the weird goat-head soup, discarded toothbrush, exam scripts, the leftover hair collected from the salon, bed pan, etc. (Bhattacharya, ‘Fyataru’ 146)

One of the peculiar features of this scene of ‘disaster’ is its subtle substitution of the act of politico-ontological ingestion and carnophallogocentrism (the smug consumption of the tandoori parts) with the excremental and scatological waste matters—an inversion from the metaphorical site of ingestion to the order of excretion. This prefigures the creolisation of a differential site of an ‘other’ aesthetic and politico-ontological order wherein those matters and subjective states that have eluded the grasps of ingestion return back to haunt the carnophallogocentric order of the ‘self.’ The ‘event’ of this disaster cannot be pre-empted by the corridors of the bio-political regime—it gestures toward an ‘uncanny’ that refuses easy appropriations and the finite response mechanisms of the ‘disaster spectacle’ of global capitalisms. The Fyatarus’ act of storming into gated communities with the filth and waste matters that the urban elite city-dwellers discard and refuse to acknowledge as a part of their material and corporeal reality becomes an act of positing the un-sacred sublimity immanent in trash and waste matters onto a scene of complacency, reiterative ideological embodiedness, and a mind-body dualism that engages in the gatekeeping of classist, casteist, and ethno-centric identity status quos. As Susan Signe Morrison suggests, ‘The body is the primary and original site of physical organization. If the body is a text with its own narrative structure, what does it mean when it is written with excrement? . . . This negation, a form of discipline, manifests itself in an aversion to examining certain aspects of our material selves, most clearly evident in our bodily emissions’ (6). Moreover, the sense of closure that the disaster doctrine of neo-liberal, cosmopolitan capitalism gestures toward is further thwarted by the sudden



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appearance of these excremental ‘others’—the scene of the disaster remains unmappable and is incapable of generating the same cathartic effect in the subjects (and the readers) that the affective mechanisms of our interpellative order (and by extension, the empathy machine) would want them to fall back upon. The return of the excremental and scatological ‘other’ in the form of a Bakhtinian carnivalesque subversion of the normative order is further portrayed by Nabarun Bandopadhyay in his short story, ‘Fyataru in Spring Festival.’ In the short story, DS, Madan, Purandar Bhat, and other Fyatarus from the Telipara slum decide to disrupt a spring festival party at the Himgiri apartments, where the ‘filthy rich families’ (Bhattacharya, ‘Fyataru in Spring Festival’ 19) live and surround themselves with all the obscene markers of class and social privilege. The immediate cause of the revolt of the Fyatarus against this gated community is the sudden exclusion of Nabani Dhar, a writer of obscene and lewd subversive literature (Im-Fragile-Potent, Shadow in Petticoat, Senility of the Saint). The strategic exclusion of filthy and obscene writings and markers from the closeted community of Bhadroloks also hints at the ways in which the self-fashioning of the sovereign communal ‘self’ is always already built around a negation or a no-saying to the excremental and waste-laden part of its own corporeal and ideological ‘other.’ The Fyatarus’ plans to disrupt the spring festival party are a strategic way to reinstate those ‘other’ abject agentive selves and corporeal embodiments that have been excluded and left out from the visible contours of the normative public sphere. The inebriated slum-dwellers of Telipara attacked the gated community of Himgiri residents and sabotaged the spring festival party with stone-pelting and bombs. Even with the intervention of the police forces, little could be done to resurrect the spring party and reinstate the festive mood: A big crowd consisting of boozed up people, women and children went towards Himgiri. . . . A sudden noise came from outside. The doormen had closed the doors from fear. People came crashing on the gate. . . . The clamour turned into howls. Stones came pelting by, along with bottles and containers. Instead of talking full form the celebration trembled at the car park—who knew what was happening, roars came from outside. Beat them up, beat them. On everyone’s request the secretary had attempted to reach the gate but that very moment, a mini bomb banged at the gate. Crashing sounds. (Bhattacharya, ‘Fyataru in Spring Festival’ 22)

The trio of DS, Madan, and Purandar had successfully gate-crashed the spring party by invoking the subversive zeal of the residents of the uncouth and filthy quarters of the city. As the trio celebrate their victory at Nabani Dhar’s flat, the images that they concoct also inevitably end up referring to

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the excretory mechanisms of an inverted system wherein the scene of ‘disaster’ evokes a set of responses that no longer hark back to the ‘shock doctrine’ of neo-liberal capitalism; rather, they gesture toward a certain opening, an unconditional space of hospitality built around a radical politico-ontological aesthetic register that conditions our be-ing and be-coming in terms of a differential corporeal embodiedness and ‘sentience’: ‘Up its arse with the spring festival! It has been a complete flop! Fucked right left and centre! My bum is on fire!’ (Bhattacharya, ‘Fyataru in Spring Festival’ 23). The scatological and excretory tools of the Fyatarus also embody the ‘other’ site of Eurocentric modernity and its modes of civility and division of labour. The disruptive attacks of the airborne Fyatarus specifically on those spaces that uncritically eulogise and perform the tropes of cosmopolitan modernity (the Floatel and the spring festival party) work to gesture toward a newer form of social and onto-political belonging. In its desperate attempts to reclaim those public spaces and communal performatives, the Fyatarus point toward the radical democracy-to-come. According to Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha: [The Fyatarus] defy the normative logic of civilised status quo, and register the agonies of the ‘small voices of history’ produced by the modernist logic of growing accumulation by dispossession. Nabarun, therefore, epicalises the dirt, the discarded margin or the non-civic commoner. His fictional protagonists, Fyatarus, dwelling in the filth, swear by the political philosophy to dirtify, to threaten the establishment and to destabilise the status quo. (117)

The scene of dirtyfication and excretion not only threatens the status quo of cosmopolitan modernity and the terms of its carnophallogocentric ingestion of matter and subjectivity; it also subverts the tropes and constatives of the Western ‘disaster imagery’ and, by extension, the finitudes of the normative dystopic imagination. Fredric Jameson’s claim that, ‘[i]t seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism’ (xii) brings into question the inability and the finitude of the Western dystopian imaginations to account for a future(s) that doesn’t reiterate the constatives of the socio-cultural logic of late Western capitalism, and thereby all dystopic imaginings become an extension of the Western paranoia regarding the rise of alternate heterotopias and trans-European political subsystems that refuse to be co-opted within the hegemonic regimes of post-humanist futurity of late capitalism and Western geopolitical subsystems. The post-dystopic imagination that Nabarun conjures through the excretory and scatological images of the Fyataru soldiers preempts any collective attempts to return to the finitudes of the disaster imagery and the conditional empathy machine repeatedly invoked by Western



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neo-liberal cosmopolitan subsystems and their interpellative networks. This counter-aesthetic assemblage of non-utilitarian, filthy, and excretory excess becomes a surplus and a spectral presence in the urban milieu, forever disrupting the smug contours of the postcolonial nation-state and its proclivity to erase and exclude other temporalities, aesthetic registers, and agentive materialities that refuse to be co-opted or appropriated by the visible networks of global capital and its neo-liberal facade. Naomi Klein, in her book The Shock Doctrine, opines that the neo-liberal capitalism depends upon the shock doctrine (the manipulated staging of disaster imagery) to reiterate the status quo by creating an affective realm of response systems and empathy kernels that weed out any radical elements and contingent feelings and affective states from the system: Believers in the shock doctrine are convinced that only a great rupture—a flood, a war, a terrorist attack—can generate the kind of vast, clean canvases they crave. It is in these malleable moments, when we are psychologically unmoored and physically uprooted, that these artists of the real plunge in their hands and begin their work of remaking the world. (21)

However, a reversal of the disaster imagery and a strategic intervention in the workings and affective contours of the collective ‘empathy machinery’ might create those fissures and ruptures that may aid us in reimagining the beyond of the neo-capitalist cosmopolitical milieu. WORKS CITED Bhattacharya, Nabarun. ‘Fyataru,’ translated by Sourit Bhattacharya. Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry, vol. 2, no. 1 Supplement, November 2021, pp. 136–49. ———. ‘Fyataru in Spring Festival,’ translated by Debadrita Bose. In Nabarun Bhattacharya: Aesthetics and Politics in a World after Ethics, edited by Sourit Bhattacharya, Arka Chattopadhyay, and Samrat Sengupta. Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 17–23. Bragard, Véronique. ‘Sparing Words in the Wasted Land: Garbage, Texture, and Écriture Blanche in Auster’s In the Country of Last Things and McCarthy’s The Road.’ ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 20, no. 3, summer 2013, pp. 479–93. Hall, Sean Christopher. ‘Holy Shit: Excremental Philosophy, Religious Ontology, and Spiritual Revelation.’ International Journal of Žižek Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, 2021. Jameson, Fredric. The Seeds of Time. Columbia University Press, 1996. Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine. Penguin Books Ltd, 2007.

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Morrison, Susan Signe. Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Purakayastha, Anindya Sekhar. ‘Fyataru as Political Society: Nabarun Bhattacharya and the Postcolonial Politics of the Governed.’ In Nabarun Bhattacharya: Aesthetics and Politics in a World after Ethics, edited by Sourit Bhattacharya, Arka Chattopadhyay, and Samrat Sengupta. Bloomsbury, 2020.

Chapter 9

War, Religion, and Terror Syed Shamsul Haq’s Two Novellas Blue Venom and Forbidden Incense Mohammad Shafiqul Islam

Syed Shamsul Haq, one of the foremost poets and writers of contemporary Bengali literature, is a household name in Bangladesh as well as for enthusiasts of Bengali literature worldwide. He is justifiably called an ambidextrous writer who has contributed extensively to enriching the realm of Bengali literature. The poems and novels that he has written on the Liberation War of Bangladesh have widely enjoyed warm reception. Out of many, two of his short works of fiction titled Neel Dangshan and Nishiddha Loban—both on the 1971 War of Independence—are among the most read novellas. As part of the series, Library of Bangladesh published Blue Venom and Forbidden Incense, translations of Neel Dangshan and Nishiddha Loban, respectively, among other works, in 2015. The books were launched at Dhaka Hay Festival, which is now known as Dhaka Literary Festival, in the same year. Saugata Ghosh has translated the novellas, whereas Arunava Sinha, an award-winning translator, edited them—Arunava is indeed the series editor of Library of Bangladesh series. Translation of the novellas is so beautiful that readers have a feel of reading the books in the original. The Library of Bangladesh has taken a praiseworthy initiative to showcase Bengali literature in English translation for global readers. Dhaka Translation Center, a sister concern of the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh, is at work to take this noble mission forward. Both the novellas portray the glaring images of horror of the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh. Then East Pakistan, Bangladesh was oppressed in numerous ways, and the Bengalis were deprived of their basic rights. At last, the 129

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Pakistani military launched a crackdown on innocent Bengalis in the dead of night on March 25, 1971. They killed men, women, and children indiscriminately as if they were shooting birds. Rounaq Jahan, a well-known scholar and critic from Bangladesh, gives an account of the war: ‘On March 25, 1971, General Yahya abruptly broke off the negotiations and unleashed a massive armed strike against the population of Dhaka, the capital city. In two days of uninterrupted military operations, hundreds of ordinary citizens were killed, houses and property were destroyed, and the leader of the Awami League, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was arrested’ (247). Without any hint to the war, the Pakistani army executed the attack on the Bengalis at night on March 25, which is known as one of the darkest nights for the people of Bangladesh. It is rare in history that such kinds of sudden attacks are perpetrated upon an ethnic community that has all the rights to protest repression on them and deprivations year after year. As the Pakistani army started killing people and destroying the country, the Bengalis in East Pakistan tried to put up resistance—as a result, a war broke out. The war brought catastrophe on the victims on such a wide scale that it is not often comparable to any other war in human history. Farah Ishtiyaque asserts that the ‘War turned out to be the breakdown, the collapse of humanity’ (304). It was an illogical war that Pakistan fought against Bangladesh, because the Pakistani government did not comply with people’s verdicts in the general election of 1970, in which a majority of seats were won by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s party. They were supposed to hand over power to Bangladesh, but they waged war instead. The war continued for nine months, quite a long time when the cases of killing, looting, raping, and destroying properties took place widely. Although Bangladesh won the war and earned independence, the country lost millions of lives. According to Tulshi Kumar Das et al., ‘this independence was gained after the country witnessed one of the worst genocides in world’s history’ (15). In world history, such genocides seldom happen, because the cruelties shown by Pakistani army were extreme and killings and incidents of rapes were beyond what people could imagine. They further note that Bangladesh became independent ‘at the cost of colossal sacrifice during its 1971 Liberation War against Pakistani forces’ (Das et al. 1). The sacrifice of the Bengalis, both men and women, in the war is beyond measure. The Bangladesh War of Independence was the war of immense sacrifices of the Bengalis, among whom the women were the worst sufferers, as they were abducted from homes, taken to barracks, incarcerated for months, and then raped repeatedly every day by Pakistani soldiers. In his two novellas, Haq addresses this violence against women. Surviving victims witness that Pakistani soldiers also killed many women after raping and torturing them. Yasmin Saikia, a writer and scholar, recounts the stories of the women

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victims of the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh. She states that the brutalised women ‘were of varied ethnic, class, religious and social backgrounds . . . housewives, school and college students, professional women and sex-workers were victims of violence. Their ages ranged from twelve to fifty-seven’ (278). Saikia conducted several interviews of women, victims of the 1971 War, for her research, recording their traumatic experiences. Among them, one articulated her experience to Saikia: ‘In her story we hear the voice of a young Bengali Hindu girl who was brutalized and tormented by her neighbours and family friends, who used the occasion of the war to victimize her. We learn from her that after the war her life did not take a better turn, but rather that she was made to pay dearly for her victimization in 1971’ (281). Some people from East Pakistan helped the Pakistani army find pro-Liberation people to kill them. These people, known as razakars, meaning betrayers, also handed over Bengali women to Pakistani soldiers who raped them for months, subsequently killing many of them. Those who are alive still bear the traumatic memories of being raped and tortured in 1971. Relying on Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, Suzannah Linton mentions that in the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh, ‘a possible three million people lost their lives, ten million fled across the border to India and 200,000–400,000 women were raped, leading to approximately 25,000 pregnancies’ (194). The people of Bangladesh had to sacrifice enormously to gain independence. The Pakistani army and their aides unleashed ruthless brutalities against the Bengalis. Brownmiller, an American author, journalist, and activist, carried out extensive research on the war, especially on violence against and victimisation of women in the war. Her book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape is widely read as a reliable source of information about war and violence. In the book, she speaks about the Liberation War of Bangladesh, giving an account of how the Pakistani army perpetrated barbaric oppression upon the Bengalis and violated women of the country. Among several references to violation of women in the war, Khadiga’s experience that Brownmiller includes in her book is placed here: Khadiga, thirteen years old, was interviewed by a photojournalist in Dacca. She was walking to school with four other girls when they were kidnapped by a gang of Pakistani soldiers. All five were put in a military brothel in Mohammedpur and held captive for six months until the end of the war. Khadiga was regularly abused by two men a day; others, she said, had to service seven to ten men daily. (Some accounts have mentioned as many as eighty assaults in a single night, a bodily abuse that is beyond my ability to fully comprehend, even as I write these words.) At first, Khadiga said, the soldiers tied a gag around her mouth to keep her from screaming. (82–83)

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In the nine-month-long war, Pakistani soldiers carried out wide-scale rapes and enacted repression. They violated and oppressed women of all ages— from young girls to grandmothers. Indeed, the women were the most affected in the war, because the Pakistani army took it as a strategy to rape them and break down the mental strength of men and therefore ravage the whole country. Lisa Sharlach’s account of how women and children were tortured in the Bangladesh War of Independence is terrifying as she states that Pakistani ‘soldiers killed babies by throwing them in the air and catching them on their bayonets, and murdered women by raping them and then spearing them through the genitals’ (95). Pakistani soldiers committed such horrendous acts of violence throughout the nine-month war, in which women and children were the most affected. It is a sheer display of terror when the Pakistani soldiers killed children throwing them into the air. And for the victims of wartime rape, the postwar period was fraught with ostracisation, indignity, shame, insecurity, stigmatisation, marginalisation, deprivation, trauma, and silence—in a number of cases, family members also abandoned them. As Sharlach observes, ‘Rape may even be a shrewder military tactic than murder because rape is difficult to prove, there is no corpse left as evidence, and war crimes tribunals and domestic courts seldom prosecute soldiers for rape’ (90). This observation is relevant to critique genocides happening anywhere in the world. Even the Pakistani soldiers used this tactic of raping Bengali women to cause huge physical and mental damage and destroy the morale of the people of Bangladesh. Sharlach argues that rape must be considered a crime of genocide, the case which is overlooked by tribunals in different countries. The soldiers who commit the crime of rape in the war are not usually prosecuted by courts. More depressingly, rape victims do not become interested in proceeding through courts in fear and anticipation of more disgrace and shame, because ‘The rape survivor’s victimization continues long after the initial sexual assault. Post-rape trauma is compounded by “the second rape” of becoming a pariah in one’s own society and even one’s own family’ (Sharlach 90). This particular observation is befitting in critiquing the condition of the raped women in the 1971 War of Independence in Bangladesh. The raped survivors were given the honorific ‘birangana’ by the government in order to accommodate them to the society with proper dignity, but actually they were more ostracised; even their own family members denied to accept them. Nayanika Mookherjee articulates that upon return to their own villages, ‘the “war heroines” were confronted by sanctions and constant khota (sarcastic/censorious remarks evoking the unpleasant events which I refer to as scorn)’ (434). The victims of rape continued to go through their traumatic experiences, and their families endured the stigma as well. The society took the cases of rapes in the war as if the victims were responsible for this. It is the traditional patriarchal mindset that women being

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raped—no matter under what circumstances—are taken for granted as bringing disgrace to their own families and communities. Antara Chatterjee rightly observes that ‘The trauma of the nation . . . is enacted through the trauma of the family’ (137). The raped women and girls endured the unbearable violence perpetrated upon them, and then their families were forced to bear the stigma—finally, the impact fell upon the whole nation that was traumatised by the unprecedented atrocities of the Pakistani army and their collaborators. There has been ample research on how women become easy targets of soldiers for rape; there are fewer examples of war in the word in which women have not been violated. Megan Mackenzie rightly observes, ‘Wartime rape has been a part of warfare throughout history’ (417). If one looks back to the wars and conflicts between countries or communities anywhere in the world, one can see that most of the armies were involved in violating women and girls of their enemy. In the war of Bangladesh independence, violation and torture of women took place more massively. As Brownmiller points out, ‘The rapes were . . . systematic and pervasive’ (85). Wartime rape is common because almost all the military forces involved in any war rape women as part of their strategic objectives.  Feminists interpret wartime rape in several ways, and the phenomenon has also been theorised. Jonathan Gottschall states that ‘the feminist theory of wartime rape is also a pressure cooker theory; in this case, however, the pressure that builds is not libidinal in nature but misogynistic. Under this theory, men in patriarchal societies are conditioned to distrust, despise, and dominate women’ (130). Men usually perpetrate the crime of rape upon women out of their sexual passion, but wartime rapes are the outcomes of far-reaching strategies designed prior to war. Feminists also find the misogynistic nature of men through which they tend to control and subjugate women. Gottschall further notes that ‘mass rape is said to cast blight on the very roots of the afflicted culture, affecting its capacity to remain coherent and to reproduce itself’ (131). This observation is drawn to the strategic rape theory that the army follows during war. Wartime rape is also an exhibition of power and supremacy. Soldiers commit crimes of mass rapes in war to demoralise their enemies, shake their culture, and torment the whole population, especially dehumanising the women. Such kinds of rapes are executed in order to cripple a culture and a nation. Widespread rapes are committed in war more as a tool of military strategies rather than as an individual desire for a female body. It is, too, considered a display of male domination over women as well as violence committed by the powerful against the weak. In her book Mass Rape: The War against Women in BosniaHerzegovina, Alexandra Stiglmayer articulates as Gottschall quotes her: A rape is an aggressive and humiliating act, as even a soldier knows, or at least suspects. He rapes because he wants to engage in violence. He rapes because

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he wants to demonstrate his power. He rapes because he is the victor. He rapes because the woman is the enemy’s woman, and he wants to humiliate and annihilate the enemy. He rapes because the woman is herself the enemy whom he wishes to humiliate and annihilate. He rapes because he despises women. He rapes to prove his virility. He rapes because the acquisition of the female body means a piece of territory conquered. He rapes to take out on someone else the humiliation he has suffered in the war. He rapes to work off his fears. He rapes because it’s really only some ‘fun’ with the guys. He rapes because war, a man’s business, has awakened his aggressiveness, and he directs it at those who play a subordinate role in the world of war. (qtd. in Gottschall 133)

This is indeed the appropriate observation about wartime rape committed anywhere. Although the scholar has made such a powerful observation from her exploration of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the picture is representative, because most of the soldiers who commit rapes intend to destroy their enemies. Women become victims easily as the soldiers despise women and its result is the rape. They also take pleasure by humiliating and subjugating the women of their counterparts. Above all, it is the male aggressiveness or patriarchal mindset that induces the troops to execute such heinous crimes in the war, and this may be looked at from a socio-cultural perspective. Wartime rapes are therefore considered more of socio-cultural rather than biological phenomena. The mindless acts of violence, destructions, and killings were committed by Pakistani army and their collaborators, some Bengalis and Biharis in East Pakistan, because West Pakistan did not want to hand over power to the elected representatives of people under the leadership of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, known as Bangabandhu, Friend of Bengal. Besides, Pakistanis considered the Bengalis their enemies, because the Bengalis, they thought, follow Hindu cultures. In the 1971 war, the Pakistani army and razakars spread the propaganda that through united Pakistan, they wanted to preserve dominance of their religion. Their religion would be tarnished if secession takes place—such propaganda were circulated among common people as well. West Pakistanis wanted to resume their domination over East Pakistanis and continue depriving them of their basic rights as they had been doing so since the 1947 Partition. In order to resume their exploitation in East Pakistan, they launched an armed attack on the Bengalis. As Caf Dowlah claims, ‘The liberation war of Bangladesh began by all means with the all-out armed assault on unarmed civilians of Dhaka city by the Pakistani military in the early hours of March 26, 1971’ (61). International scholarship also reveals the heinous intentions of Pakistan government to force Bengalis to remain under their control. Instead of responding to people’s demands, they hatched conspiracies and therefore decided to launch an armed attack.

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Both Blue Venom and Forbidden Incense reveal how war brings untold miseries to individuals, families, communities, or even a whole nation. Although the novellas recount snippets of the major event, readers can have a glimpse of the widespread atrocities of the Pakistani army upon the people of Bangladesh. In Forbidden Incense, Haq describes how Pakistani army perpetrated torture upon the Bengalis: ‘They dragged university professors from their homes and shot them dead. The Hindu professors—they first tortured with bayonets and then killed’ (68). Pakistan had a clandestine motive to cripple the nation by killing intellectuals, poets, writers, and university professors so that the country can never rise again. With the help of collaborators, they identified pro-Bangladeshi and progressive poets and professors and tortured them to death. On top of that the occupiers also killed common people mercilessly as Haq depicts the condition, ‘bodies strewn all around the open square of the marketplace, bodies clutching in death at fences, lying face downward in the lane, which sloped away from the square. Rows upon rows of corpses’ (Forbidden Incense 91). This is how the Pakistani army turned this part of Bengal into a shroud of deaths and destructions. They did not spare anyone, not even children and old people. Atrocities were so extreme that the people around the world, except a few countries, came forward to criticise Pakistan. As the Pakistani army killed people indiscriminately, dead bodies were found lying on streets and floating on river water. In context of the killing of innocent lives by Pakistani army, Haq writes, ‘There are stories of bodies floating down the river, their hands and legs tied, the blood sucked from their veins with needles’ (Forbidden Incense 68–69). The Bengalis, however, fought back and the gruesome war continued for nine months. Bangladesh was born at the cost of, as scholars like Brownmiller, Rounaq Jahan, and many others confirm, three million lives and honour of two to four hundred thousand women. Blue Venom and Forbidden Incense capture some days of ordeal in the lives of a few people in the war. As Haq describes the war, ‘What else can explain the events that have taken place since the night of the twenty-fifth? What else, but insanity can explain a modern, well-trained army swooping down upon sleeping citizens in the dead of the night, setting fire to marketplaces and reducing entire colonies to rubble with shelling?’ (Blue Venom 28). Bangladesh, no doubt, emerged through the gruesome 1971 Liberation War, in which the Pakistani army did everything toward the goal of ethnic cleansing. At some point, people began to lose their faith because of the range of atrocities as reflected in Forbidden Incense: ‘If there was someone above, do you think my parents would have been killed, my sister raped or your brother lying dead in the market?’ (102). One of the major characters of the novel expresses his inner thoughts when he witnesses his family member being killed in front of

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him. Although Bangladesh won the war, the country was hugely affected, losing thousands of valuable lives. This was one of the most horrible wars that claimed a great number of people and disgraced a vast number of women and girls of Bangladesh. Blue Venom is the story of a young man, an employee in a private firm, who undergoes harrowing experiences only because he is a namesake of the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam. Arrested on March 27, he is taken to a torture cell where inhuman oppression continues until he dies. It is worth noting how ignorant the Pakistani soldiers were, and how illogically they tortured the people of Bangladesh. Without confirmation, they take the young man as the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam. The soldiers ask him question after question as it happens to the accused: ‘Name?’ ‘Nazrul Islam.’ ‘Kazi Nazrul Islam?’ ‘Yes, Kazi Nazrul Islam.’ (Haq, Blue Venom 10)

All these questions are fine, and the young man confidently responds to them, but confusion arises when an officer asks him, ‘And when did you start writing poetry?’ (Blue Venom 10). He has never written poetry in his life as he is not a poet, but the soldiers think that he is lying to save himself. Interestingly, a lot of information about the young man matches the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam’s. It should be made clear that Pakistani army was furious about the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam as his poems and songs inspired the Bengalis to fight for freedom. The character named Nazrul in the novella is quizzed as if he were taken on remand for a crime. A flurry of questions are thrown at him only to make him concede that he is the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam, even though he is really not. After asking him questions on many other issues, the officers frequently come back to the issue of poetry writing, and then Nazrul Islam is taken aback. In reply to some questions of the Pakistani officers, Nazrul Islam falls into trouble, since the questions are so tricky that both positive and negative answers add to his agonies. When he expresses his concern about his family and fears what might happen to his life, and tears roll down his cheeks, an officer says, ‘Yet you, the same you, are so fearless in your poem!’ (Blue Venom 26). He still cannot understand why they are pressing him to admit that he writes poetry. In one moment, an officer opens a snippet cut out of a newspaper in which a few lines of a poem are written in English—below is written Kazi Nazrul Islam as the poet. The young man now begins to laugh loudly as he understands, for the first time, he is wrongly captured, and feels that he will surely be released soon. He audibly cries out, ‘You have made

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a big mistake’ (Blue Venom 26–27). The soldiers now begin to torture him physically, with an officer landing a sharp kick on his stomach after a few slaps on the face. He loses his consciousness and blood streams out of his ear and nose. The war brought a drastic change to every place in the country, especially its capital city Dhaka. The overall situation of the city of Dhaka changed so severely that everything appeared unfamiliar to its citizens. As Haq describes the city: ‘The probable has moved into the realm of the possible and the city he has known so well has turned overnight into a place where anything, no matter how unlikely, can come true’ (Blue Venom 28). The next day, a new officer appears and begins to quiz Nazrul the same way as before. The more he wants to say that he is not the poet, the scale of torture escalates. They ask him to sign a statement and tell him that by doing this, he will be free. The statement is, ‘I, Kazi Nazrul Islam, declare unequivocally that I am shocked and distressed at the seditious activities of Bengalis. . . . I urge all Bengalis to desist from the path of armed insurrection and cooperate fully with the loyal soldiers of the state. I urge all of you to uphold the dignity of the symbol of the star and crescent, defending it with all your might’ (Blue Venom 32). Such a bizarre statement makes Nazrul Islam think how foolish all these soldiers are. Failing to figure out if he should laugh or cry, Nazrul repeats that he cannot sign because he is not the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam—they begin to beat him mercilessly. At one stage, ‘A hailstorm of kicks and blows begins to rain upon him till he loses count of time. But like every other torture, this too comes to an end, and he is cast upon the floor and left to bleed, alive and conscious’ (Blue Venom 33–34). Once Nazrul thinks that if he really signs the document, he will be able to meet his family, the torture will stop, but ‘He cannot fathom who or what is stopping him from signing the document, providing him with immense strength to put up with the brutal torture’ (Blue Venom 36). As the situation begins to turn beyond control, Nazrul feels an inner strength to resist, and he does not know from where the strength comes. In Haq’s words, ‘Nazrul stares back placidly, surprised at his own nonchalance. A second self within him seems to be controlling his actions and he feels only the urge to obey the commands of that unseen self’ (Blue Venom 37). In one moment, the interrogator grabs Nazrul’s hand and presses a burning cigarette against his flesh. Nazrul loses consciousness now and then, and ‘Every time he comes round, he is asked the same question. His answer remains the same as before and the beating renews with fresh ferocity’ (Blue Venom 38). They pour water through a pipe to flood his stomach, and then he regurgitates all the water out. He loses consciousness every time they do this, and he is now in a stage

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when he begins to hallucinate—his wife and children flash before his eyes and he talks to them. A new officer gives Nazrul an option: if he writes a poem, not very long though, then he might be released, and he does not need to sign the statement anymore. He deeply ponders over how a poem is written and sees his wife in a hallucination, but he does not find any idea of a poem as he has never written any poem in his life. The men in khaki, Pakistani soldiers, frequently enter the torture cell inquiring of the poem Nazrul is supposed to write, but their fire of anger blazes him as he refuses to yield to their illogical demands. ‘He is knocked down to the floor and his kneecap broken with a short, stout stick’ (Blue Venom 54). Then they keep asking him if he will write a poem as the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam, but he repeats he is not the poet. They gradually break his other kneecap, right and left elbows at the joint, pull his hair out, and continue kicking him across the stomach. Now his body is taken out of the room and cast into an open square, eventually digging a hole in the ground for him. Haq ends the novella thus, ‘He hears the faint crack of his spine snapping and his chest feels very warm. He can hear a jackal howling far away. Without ever having written a single poem, he, the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam, is kicked into the hole for having refused to write one last poem. His eyes stay open till the very end’ (Blue Venom 55). This is unnerving and ominous, but such atrocities and mayhem took place in the War of Independence. Forbidden Incense, another novella in the same book, is the story of a young woman named Bilkis who lives in Dacca, the former spelling of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. The spelling was changed formally from Dacca to Dhaka in 1982. Facing hurdles in Dacca during the war, she now wants to go back to her village home at Jaleswari. As her husband has been missing for many days, she has desperately tried to find him but in vain. Losing her husband is excruciating for her as she expresses her mental state: ‘But with Altaf gone, I have lost my fear and my grief too. I have shed no tears since I heard that Khoka has been killed and that his corpse is lying in the market with nobody allowed to touch it’ (Haq, Forbidden Incense 87). One day she starts for Jaleswari where she will meet her family. The train stops at Nabagram, which is about five miles from Jaleswari. After several attempts, she comes to know that the train will not move further, because a bridge ahead has been uprooted. A muffled atmosphere is also existing in Jaleswari and around as the military has reached there. She collects some information about her village from the stationmaster—the situation is not safe for the pro-liberation populace. Still, she has to go as her mother, brother, and sister live there, and she deeply feels the need to see them. After losing Altaf, her husband, she is desperate about reuniting with her family. Bilkis begins to walk by the railway track to go to Jaleswari, but after a few moments, she figures out that someone is following her. It is Siraj from

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Jaleswari who accompanies her all the way to the village, when she can see that an eerie silence reigns all around. Getting to the village in the dark, they come to know that military has shot dead many people in the marketplace. Bilkis is worried about her family although Siraj collects some information about her family. Her mother and sister have crossed over the river to go to India, but she is still concerned about her brother whom she calls Khoka. Siraj gets the news that Khoka is among the ones who were brutally killed by the military. They have not eaten anything in so long, so they look for some food in the house but to no avail. Instead of staying at Bilkis’s house, they move forward for a safer place to stay. Going to Alif Mukhtar’s house, they come to know that Khoka is also killed by the military. They have kept all the dead bodies near the marketplace with a message of warning that no one should touch the bodies and give them a proper burial. Bilkis feels an excruciating pain deep inside her heart, recalling memories with each and every member of her family, especially with Khoka. Bilkis vows to find Khoka’s body and give him a decent burial. Siraj forbids her because he knows how perilous it would be, but she persists. She says, ‘I want to evade capture so that I can give Khoka a decent burial and prove that he is not a pariah whose body can lie unclaimed and dishonored’ (Forbidden Incense 93). At last, they crawl to the place where dead bodies are amassed in rows, the scene which must be unbearable for any human being on earth. Bilkis decides to bury all the dead bodies there, and they can bury only a few at night because it is not possible to dig a large grave within a short time. They hide inside a jute godown which is extremely dark, damp, and a probable abode of snakes. ‘The moment they entered it,’ as the writer describes the godown, ‘was like being singed by hot flames. Their senses were assailed by the strong smell of jute till they felt dizzy. The darkness ahead of them was impregnable’ (Forbidden Incense 101). The way how Bilkis braves to bury the dead bodies facing the armed soldiers suggests women’s contributions and sacrifices in the war. The next day, the Biharis and military discover that some dead bodies were buried last night, so they fire a few rounds of shots and furiously warn dire consequences to the ones who violate their commands. The next night, as Bilkis and Siraj resume their work—Bilkis also finds Khoka’s body—four armed orderlies capture them and bring them to the torture cell. Indescribable and inhuman torture goes on, and Siraj—actually Pradip, the name that Mansoor, a pro-Liberation War fighter, gave him for safety—is killed so mercilessly that Bilkis becomes speechless. Seeing Bilkis, an educated and beautiful young lady, the Pakistani major in charge of the camp approaches to ravish her. The major digests the story of Bilkis and Pradip being siblings, and he takes Bilkis for a Hindu. He asks Bilkis in obscene words, ‘Tell me, do Hindus bathe every day? Is it true that Hindu women stink? Do they keep

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their private parts clean? I am told that Hindu cunt resembles a bitch’s. It’s difficult to extricate oneself from it once the job is done. Is it true? How long do you think you’ll be able to hold me inside you?’ (Forbidden Incense 117). Bilkis remains silent all the while as the major continues to oppress her with obscene remarks. This particular segment may be analysed through Amita Malik’s account of Pakistani soldiers’ barbaric acts against the Bengali nation in general and their ugly attitudes to women in particular. Malik gives a detail in her book titled The Year of the Vulture: Hum ja rahe hain. Lekin beej chhor kar ja rahe hain. (‘We are going. But we are leaving our Seed behind.’) He accompanied it with an appropriately coarse gesture. Behind that bald statement lies the story of one of the most savage, organized and indiscriminate orgies of rape in human history: rape by a professional army, backed by local armed collaborators. It spared no one, from elderly widows to schoolgirls not yet in their teens, from wives of high-ranking civil officers to daughters of the poorest villagers and slum dwellers. Senior officers allowed, and presumably encouraged, the forced confinement of innocent girls for months inside regimental barracks, bunks and even tanks. (qtd. in Sharlach 95)

These remarks indicate that Pakistani soldiers had a nefarious plan to destroy the morale of the Bengalis, raping the women and impregnating them, the military tactics through which they wanted to expedite ethnic cleansing. Behind wartime mass rape, there is, too, an evil thought to ‘dilute an ethnic community’s bloodline’ (Sharlach 101). The major and other characters representing the Pakistani army have the same attitudes toward women as if they came to destroy the nation, dishonouring women and killing people indiscriminately. Bilkis, designing a trick, places a condition that she wants to burn Siraj’s dead body first, and then he allows Bilkis to do what she likes. After burning Siraj’s body in the pyre, she sets her own body on fire and clasps the major’s body tight. His mental condition is described thus, ‘Possessed by atavistic terror, his body trembled one last time’ (Forbidden Incense 121). It is a sliver of smile for the pro-Liberation readers that a cruel Pakistani major also dies at the end of the novella. The novella ends thus: ‘Her own body now turned into an incandescent firebrand, Bilkis continued to press his body against the pyre’ (Forbidden Incense 121). Haq, a master writer, weaves the tales of the Liberation War with his great skills of storytelling. Both the novellas, Blue Venom and Forbidden Incense, depict the fresh images of the war. The writer shows how Pakistani army and their collaborators launched brutal atrocities upon the Bengalis. The two powerful works are capable of showing the extent of oppression Pakistani army perpetrated upon very simple and guiltless people like Nazrul Islam, Pradip,

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Bilkis, Khoka, Alif Mukhtar, and other hundreds and thousands of Bengalis. The evil intents of the Pakistani army to destroy the Bengali nation, their language, and their culture were extreme, and they were moving ahead with their mission, killing thousands of people and torturing and violating women and girls. In both novellas explored in this chapter, the Pakistani army shows their hatred to the Bengalis in general and Hindus in particular. Attitudes to Pradip and Bilkis as Pradip’s sister expose their religion-based fanatic outlook, which is also held by their collaborators among the Bengalis, who are known as razakars, anti-Liberation, and pro-Pakistan forces in Bangladesh. Haq’s two novellas, therefore, successfully capture the terror and anarchy created by Pakistani army, their atrocities in the name of religion, and above all the nine-month-long war that finally gifted independence to Bangladesh, but at the high cost of lives. WORKS CITED Brownmiller, Susan. Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. Ballantine Books, 1975. Chatterjee, Antara. ‘Remembering Bangladesh: Tahmima Anam and the Recuperation of a Bangladeshi National Narrative in Diaspora.’ South Asian Review, vol. 35, no. 3, 2014, pp. 131–48. Das, Tulshi Kumar, et al. ‘Revisiting Geographies of Nationalism and National Identity in Bangladesh.’ GeoJournal, 2020. Dowlah, Caf. The Bangladesh Liberation War, the Sheikh Mujib Regime, and Contemporary Controversies. Lexington Books, 2016. Gottschall, Jonathan. ‘Explaining Wartime Rape.’ The Journal of Sex Research, vol. 41, no. 2, 2004, pp. 129–36. Haq, Syed Shamsul. Two Novellas: Blue Venom and Forbidden Incense, translated by Saugata Ghosh, edited by Arunava Sinha. Bengal Lights Books, 2015. Ishtiyaque, Farah. ‘Suturing the Memories of the Liberation War of 1971: The Narrative Poetics of Sorayya Khan’s Noor.’ European Journal of English Studies, vol. 19, no. 3, 2015, pp. 301–14. Jahan, Rounaq. ‘Genocide in Bangladesh.’ In Centuries of Genocide: Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, edited by Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons. Routledge, 2009, pp. 245–65. Linton, Suzannah. ‘Completing the Circle: Accountability for the Crimes of the 1971 Bangladesh War of Liberation.’ Criminal Law Forum, vol. 21, 2010, pp. 191–311. Mackenzie, Megan. ‘Securitizing Sex?: Towards a Theory of the Utility of Wartime Sexual Violence.’ International Feminist Journal of Politics, vol. 12, no. 2, 2010, pp. 202–21. Mookherjee, Nayanika. ‘“Remembering to Forget”: Public Secrecy and Memory of Sexual Violence in the Bangladesh War of 1971.’ The Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 12, no. 2, 2006, pp. 433–50.

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Saikia, Yasmin. ‘Beyond the Archive of Silence: Narratives of Violence of the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh.’ History Workshop Journal, vol. 58, 2004, pp. 275–87. Sharlach, Lisa. ‘Rape as Genocide: Bangladesh, the Former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda.’ New Political Science, vol. 22, no. 1, 2000, pp. 89–102.

Chapter 10

Global Catastrophe, Local Residues Re-Thinking The ‘Global-Local’ Dynamic in Imagining Catastrophes Through Bishnu Dey’s ‘Cassandra’ Poems Subhayu Bhattacharjee

On our first encounter with the thought of disaster, the usual response is to find ways of its mitigation or aversion. Both these notions follow from the presumption that human agency can and must be located in prompt action in the wake of an unprecedented rupture of normalcy. However, as critical theorists, we also need to find in common sense equivocations the persistence of intellectual deadlocks. Thus, for instance, the aforementioned idea of action-oriented response to disaster is rooted in the humanist bias of control and legitimacy over the ‘environment’ in the strictest sense of the term, regardless of its innocuous and urgent appeal. In fact, it would only be a reiteration of the anthropocentric bias if one were to find in the agency of mitigation discourses the anxiety of averting threats to the human Self in the act of preserving the Other. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Bruno Latour has characterised ‘Nature’ as a discursive category in the following phrase: ‘There has never been any other politics than the politics of Nature, and there has never been any other nature than a Nature of Politics’ (28). Even if a wholesome solution to the intellectual prejudices of our discursive standards is not readily available, it would not be any exaggeration to suggest that one could begin probing into these entrapments of the mind—investigating 143

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the starting points of discourse. With this aim in focus, the present study will attempt to turn the critical lens on the philosophical implications of investigating catastrophes. The focus would be to look into the answers to questions such as the revelation of the complexities of the affected Self during disasters, the continuities between the normal existing status quo in the ‘pre-disaster’ period and the so-called unique event of Catastrophe—the Event which initiates the dynamic interactions between the ‘global’ and the ‘local,’ the Event that surpasses complacent modernity and so on and so forth. The last two issues mentioned here actually set the template for the philosophical musings of this analysis. Catastrophic imminence, as we find in and through issues of climate change, global pandemics, etc., actually reconfigure the borders and boundaries of national sovereigns and point rather to the disaster of the commons. Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic also stemmed from a similar notion, with satellite images gradually showing enlarged red dots on the world map. However, on a more critical level, the question of the nation-state does not seem to merely vanish but, in some cases, emerges with greater force. To cite an example from the pandemic experience, the vaccine crises across nations with sovereign decisions, statist technologies, and governmentality impacting the same was a reality amid a global catastrophe. As Jason Moore points out in his definition of the ‘Capitalocene’ as a critical rejoinder to the Anthropocene: A global network of exploitation that could produce an ‘ecological gap’ between the national economies that generated a great deal of wealth without subjecting their own countries to excessive impacts, and the countries of the rest of the world whose economies were burdened by a heavy footprint on their territory. (250)

Hence, in other words, the already existing gaps and divisions among nation-states so surreptitiously covered by the unifying discourse of globalisation since the 1990s seems to be unpacked by the so-called unprecedented phenomena of catastrophes. Following Badiou’s appreciation of the real political Event, the catastrophe initiates the authentic political action outside the domain of sovereign politics (Kapila 40). It launches a scathing critique of the liberal-bourgeois political discourse which has been echoed time and again in sanctioned forms of resistance, protests, and critique. Another philosophical dimension worth considering in our analysis of conceptualising catastrophe is its relationship to the critique of modernity. Catastrophes, in exposing geo-spatial differences in terms of capacities and in differing scales of vulnerability end up projecting modernity itself as a document of violence in an echo of Benjamin’s view of civilisation. The incompetence of smaller nations in the ‘developing’ world to cope with

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catastrophic encounters also needs to be read alongside the unequal roles of rich and poor nations in contributing to global disasters like climate change. What follows is a story of complete crippling of national sovereignty both through the accentuation of catastrophes and the already-existing political anomalies which have contributed to the hitherto concealed uneven nature of national capabilities. In this vein, the argument of modernism being a concurrent philosophical critique of the social breeding ground of modernity could also be investigated from the perspective of the persistence of the ‘national’ (qua the ‘local’) in the midst of the latter’s global dimensions. The present study also ventures to read modernism as a literary current differentially by closely reading two poems by the renowned Bengali poet Bishnu Dey, who was a self-avowed admirer of one of modernism’s stalwarts, T.S. Eliot. The thrust of the reading lies on locating the essentially localised flavour that modernism acquires in these poems. As opposed to Sayan Bhattacharyya’s reading of the poems which finds in them the trans-mobility across various cultures and socio-literary climes as one of the abilities of the lyric form to transcribe internationalist ‘totality’ (50–56) as a rejoinder to Lukacs, the study under concern resists the disappearance of the ‘local’ either as the ‘national’ or as the ‘cultural’ (in opposition to the ‘global’) in Dey’s poems. This generates the need for studying critique itself as a text which is (con)textual. It also vouches for an understanding that if modernity itself is deemed to be a crisis of civilisation, some are more unequally placed to shoulder the burdens of its doom. Finally, the reinstatement of the ‘local’ in times of global crises makes the critique of modernity or ontological differences of critical scenarios across geographies not only an economic phenomenon but also a cultural recipe. The case that is sought to be argued in the course of analysis of Dey’s poems is that certain cultures (even national cultures) are better equipped and/or positioned to refrain from an uncritical submission to modernity’s principles. The progressivist presumptions regarding an entire caboodle of concepts—History, Time, etc.—might just be threatened by the onslaught of catastrophes although the backlash thus perceived might be a Western-styled approach to the event. The presence of self-reflexive critical consciousness about modernity and the acceptance of catastrophes in the ambit of historical time might come to represent a wholly different worldview in other cultural standards of perception and philosophical tradition. Therefore, where common sense assumptions would have us believe that catastrophes, by and large, are unprecedented ruptures, an exercise of de-colonising epistemology enables us to see the differences of its implication in the cultural standpoint of Hindu ethos, for instance, via Dey’s poems. Not in the inevitable aftermath of disaster alone but in the very conceptualisation of the same do we find the veil of uniformity brought about by cultural globalisation being lifted to reveal

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subtle ‘local’ assertions that would have otherwise been smothered by the hegemony of the ‘global.’ In fact, as will be shown at the end of our analysis of the two poems in consideration, the exposure of the humanist bias even in our responses to disaster as hinted at earlier finds a more appropriate position in the Hindu view of time as yuga. This, along with other recuperations, will constitute the rethinking of global disasters, catastrophes, and crises as fundamentally shaped by localised considerations of the context of poetry even when in its ‘totality’ it does share a world-picture. Last but not the least, the concluding section will also attempt to lay contemporary non-literary grounds for the persistence of the ‘local’ in global catastrophes so much so that the literary rationale is not shown to be existing only in imaginary vacuum but also draws strength and support from its milieu. The English translations of Dey’s poems have been borrowed from Sayan Bhattacharyya’s own translation as included in his re-reading of the two poems, the very piece from which it departs. The two poems are regarded as the ‘Cassandra’ poems written in two different collections separated by a gap of six years. Both tend to adapt the Greek myth of Cassandra as the foreteller of destruction in a modern context. 1947 CASSANDRA POEM The first ‘Cassandra’ poem written in 1947 (following Indian independence) appears in the collection entitled The Mudflats of Sandeep. The general tenor of the poem is one of anxiety laced with fateful consideration about the depredation of humanity. Opening with the fateful presaging of human disaster, the stanza playfully evokes the contrast between the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ worlds which face the same crisis. The stanza examines this comparison by proceeding from the use of the personal/universal pronoun (‘us’) to the qualification of the same through the deployment of the qualifier—‘some of Us.’ It reads: Say, Cassandra, has there ever been Such a calamity? Save for a few, we all wonder (Bhattacharyya 52)

After the depiction of global and universal calamity, it also ponders on the common plight of all: Save for a few of Us, we all crawl Into the golden pot that hides Truth’s face (Bhattacharyya 52)

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While the transcultural image of the prophetic Cassandra whose classical European image is held upright in translation, the stanza from the beginning makes a case for the resurgence of the local amid global adoptions and recognitions. In a typical modernist fashion (again, therefore, as part of a global canon), the first two lines declaim the aversion and negligence of the privileged few within the nation (conspicuously, the English equivalent of the word desh does not emerge in Bhattacharyya’s translation). However, the last couplet, in prophesying the dreadful progress toward doom for the whole of humanity, keeps the idea of the privileged few in the global space, as being less affected, intact. The question that can be raised regarding our swift association of the ‘few’ in the last couplet with the ‘developed’ nations of the world finds its equivocation in the stanza that immediately follow. The second stanza opens with the lament regarding the truth about ‘Us’ not being a ‘developed’ nation. The corresponding lines posit two different instances of illusory sovereignty for such a nation. First, the lack of opportunity and the consequent loss of interest in self-governance is the result of what Partha Chatterjee calls the ‘rule of colonial difference’ in highlighting how the colonial experience actually exposed the shadowy dimensions of universalist liberal Western discourses and posited the incompetence of colonial subjects to rule as a systemic feature. Added to this measure of crippling was the fact that common disaster of humanity was also a force to reckon with for such a nation with no experience of ruling itself. The narrator juxtaposes both these instances of the maiming of sovereign authority and shows how the insistence upon a ‘universal’ problem is in reality a testimony of the exacerbation of the plight of a few nations on the global map. The reference to the ‘world crashing on [our] heads’ is a powerful indicator of the burden of global alignment for the developing nations of the Third World as it is conceptually and historically related to years of exploitative global realignment. Moments of global ‘crises’ expose the wounds of history and thus, far from being unique, showcase the return of the past as the uncanny re-turn. Although Dey’s poem is far removed in time from the concerns of the Anthropocene and its emergencies, it does shed enough light on the uneven and unequal nature of global relationships that are brought to light in the context of catastrophes. The succeeding lines also provide a revised interpretation of the issue of this revelation when the poet writes: Misrule drags us now out onto the sunlight, which undresses Our naked selves and our infected wounds. (Bhattacharyya 53)

Here the disaster of global proportions coupled with misrule brings out the wounds inherent in the history of Third World nations binding them to the

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very colonial past that is sought to be removed and forgotten through independence. The distinction made by Fannon between independence struggles and ‘national liberation’ finds expression here. Catastrophes expose the limits of temporal linearity that modernity heralds forcing us to reconsider the resurgence of the past. A deeper inter-textual reading of the 1947 poem would reveal the poem’s postcolonial response to fashioning of national identity in representative Western discourses of the nineteenth century. Philip Leonard’s reading of Nietzche’s discourse on national identity makes the philosopher a spokesman for a kind of national identity which results out of a refinement of existing global systems and values. Nietzche’s appreciation for classical Greece, for example, was rooted in his notion of the Hellenic competence for enriching cosmopolitan attributes (Leonard 4–6). For such a fashioning of national identity, the ‘national’ persists in a global climate through the affirmative gestures of enrichment and refinement. In the context of the post-1945 milieu, and more so, as Dey’s poem would have it, in the case of the Third World subjected to the violence of European Enlightenment, the corresponding ‘national’ persistence takes place through the contrasting attributes of deprivation and incompetence. The gradual, consistent, and irreversible exploitation of the Third World exposes its vulnerability to a much greater degree in global crises and hence unmasks the politics of globalisation as consistent with global politics since the Enlightenment. As a discourse of national identity, Dey’s paradigm not only counters the liberal Western constructions of it but also emerges as its perverse image. The final stanzas of Dey’s 1947 poem again apparently attempt to undercut the explicit currents of national persistence in the preceding lines by quickly resorting to the question of humanity as a whole. This is further bolstered by the allegorical reference to the ‘Sun’ and the ‘Sun-lit land’ which shows the purview of the narrator’s imagination to be beyond the confines of the local space: Will we die of hunger and of plague? Humanity’s lacking in the Sun-lit Land (Bhattacharyya 53)

This could also be interpreted as being a reference to a global space unified in its vulnerability to Nature’s caprices. However, the reference to ‘Sun-worship’ and ‘mantras’ which ‘[we] all have chanted’ as vain acts of redemption and sustenance of life complicates the all-too universalist affiliation of the stanza. While such acts of preservation are shown to be illusory, they certainly indicate a concern for ‘local’ survival in the times of global doom. The ‘we’ in the following lines might not refer specifically to the national populace but it certainly indicates greater concern for a geo-spatial

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cultural collective which is not in any way a ‘global’ community since the actions described are culture specific: Is it the Sun that will, then, be our scourge? We all have chanted mantras, crouched indoors (Bhattacharyya 53–54)

The untranslatability of culture-specific practices and idioms in the poem run counter to the translatability of the Cassandra myth as a global metaphor. The persistence of localised forms of imagining disaster in Dey’s poem can probably be accounted for through the immediacy of the local experience of disaster, no matter how much one is concerned with its global implications. Therefore, poetic discourse becomes an elucidation of experiential agency that precedes the intellectual analysis of global interconnectedness as the root cause of catastrophic globalism. 1953 CASSANDRA POEM The other ‘Cassandra’ poem in concern in our study comes in a collection entitled I Have Named It Gandhar Flat in 1953—three years into the founding of the Indian Democratic Republic. One of the major differences that might be initially perceived between the two at first glance is the stark absence of political signifiers (‘nation,’ ‘developed,’ ‘rule’) in the 1953 poem. In fact, the second ‘Cassandra’ poem adopts a holistic approach to the modernisation of the myth. Its lyrical quality is wholly built upon allegories, mythical resemblances, and full-blown prophetic warnings. The transition worth considering is what forces us to consider the two poems as two distinct modalities of thinking about the persistence of the trace of the ‘local’ in global themes. Where the first poem of 1947 had made poetic equivocations about the undeniably political logic of such persistence, the second poem of 1953 instead locates the basis of conceiving ‘globality’ in essentially ‘local’ culture-specific concepts—both philosophical and cultural. This tends to question the presumption that the reaction to modernity in the West exclusively conditions critical discourses that have even contemporary significance such as the Anthropocene. Such a view remains oblivious of other spaces including postcolonial spaces which have historically and culturally enshrined tools to sustain criticality in modern times. In other words, the fact that Oriental discursive frameworks can lay an equally authentic claim to globalist ways of thinking about the world which predates their modern counterparts in twentieth-century Anglo-American academia is often bypassed.

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Global apprehensions tend to inevitably suffer from Eurocentric biases. The rationale for making a claim as broad as this will be found in Dey’s poem. The use of the Sanskrit equivalent for time (as it has been observed earlier, this constitutes an essential element of modern progressive understanding historical teleology)—yuga—is an important indicator of postcolonial equivocation. Disaster imagination often involves the reconfiguration of the concept of ‘time’ to respond to the limitations of this teleological discourse by revealing the pattern of cyclical returns of the past. Another cross-cultural example can be cited here for better understanding. The constant periodical floods and droughts in the Canudos region in Brazil—the site of Antonio Conselheiro’s uprising against the first Brazilian Republic in 1897—is a case in point. Meditating on this, Carlos Fonesca writes: The series of droughts and floods that periodically strike the region are presented [by da Cunha] as imposing a circular temporality that defied the linear progressivism of the First Brazilian Republic, on whose flag one finds a statement of modernity: ‘Ordem e Progresso.’ (9–10)

Catastrophe creates a universal signification of ‘circular’ time with periodic ruptures as opposed to the mechanistic view of time which needs to categorise itself in geo-spatial zones. In doing so, the latter paradoxically shows ‘local’ differences to be indispensable while forming the basis of modernity. The Hindu worldview of yuga/kala is founded on the same understanding of the messianic transition of time in and through catastrophic events. In this way, a universal signifier in catastrophic imagination finds its early exponent in the Hindu view of temporality that predates the critical foundations of the twentieth-century critical discourse on modernity from the point of view of environmental humanities. In the poem, the corresponding line which incorporates the said concept occurs after a long denouement of post-apocalyptic images and the narrator’s subsequent resolve to move on despite the avalanche of afflicted humanity. The synopsis of the corresponding lines translates into the firm conviction regarding humanity’s revival and the start of a new phase of life as the natural consequence of transitory deluges in the Hindu worldview. Although Bhattacharyya’s translation retains the untranslated word (yuga), his analysis is too obsessed with internationalist preoccupations of the poem and leaves its culture-specific connotation untouched. The reference to the sun that occurs in this poem is also significant from the perspective of the ‘cyclical temporality’ spoken about earlier. The narrator reflects upon the dichotomous image of the sun that provides light to all and makes harvests grow while in an almost Janus-like posture:

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But forgets whom, and by how much, he harms When he stops life’s song and begins dealing death (Bhattacharyya 57)

In this respect, conceived philosophically, the event of disaster does not correspond to a unique occurrence without precedence. It involves the reinvestigation of the past in terms of what had earlier been invisible in it. It performs the aletheic function of rendering the invisible visible though a new appearance of the already visible thereby becoming similar to the role of art in the Heideggerean sense (Mitchell 60). The muted aspect of natural existence renders it vulnerable to human exploitation whereas the catastrophic reaction to such exploitation brings to light the latent natural agency that had been passed over. Thus, like the exposure of inherent geo-political differences as highlighted in the 1947 poem, the catastrophic event in this context also lays bare the past in an unfamiliar light—the uncanny past impossible to recognise. The intervention of the past again as a puncturing of linear progress of time is akin to the karmic positing of human history in which the sins of the past have equivalent ramifications in the present. Needless to say, the poem in ‘totality,’ as Bhattacharyya would have it, moves closer to a culture-specific analysis of catastrophe. Toward the end it attempts to do so both through the literal incorporation of culture-specific terms and the conceptual consolidation of ‘local’ cultural signifiers. At the beginning of the poem, the narrator represents an innate desire to integrate himself with the universal literary tradition of modernism by assimilating the figure and myth of Cassandra as a universal cultural icon of doom: I, Cassandra, sleepless. Walk these streets; Priyanan—father—averts his dim eyes; (Bhattacharyya 56–57)

The universal iconisation of other Trojan heroes is also attempted as in the succeeding lines: Is that Hector, tied To the chariot’s wheel-rim? (Bhattacharyya 56–57)

Unlike the first Cassandra poem, this conscious insistence on universalisation stemming from Dey’s affinity for Western modernism, however, gives way to the resurgence of ‘local’ culture-specific forms of imagining catastrophes. In fact, as a gradual realisation of the resurgence of the ‘local’ it can even be argued that the second stanza also makes some of its implications manifest albeit in concealed forms. To cite an instance, the narrator describes the

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blood-stained field of bloody destruction perceived by Cassandra as the reddening of the ‘dark-haired head’ of youthful virility. He writes: Who, in the street dust, lies?—The hyacinth youth Whose dark-haired head the cruel road has bloodied? (Bhattacharyya 57)

Irrespective of the universalisation of Cassandra as the symbol of prophetic doom, the colours used figuratively in these lines undoubtedly connote historical events centred around the ‘nation’ (the localised substitute for the ‘global’). The poem, in this context, could be compared with its 1947 counterpart so as to remind the reader of the latter’s association with the struggle for political liberation and its aftermath—the birth of the new nation-state. In other words, the complementary nature of the erotic and thanatic impulses in the idea of death qua sacrifice at the time of the birthing of the new nation finds its echo in 1953 in the exclusively thanatic implications of ‘blood’ in the postcolonial situation—a disillusionment with national circumstances and the unfulfilled aspirations of the erotic sacrifice in 1947. This, of course, is in line with Dey’s canonical location in the Bengali literary tradition as one of the icons of the ‘post-Tagore’ generation of Bengali poets who were deeply influenced by Marxist ideology. Regarding the nature of the postcolony as an inchoate reflection of authentic liberation was therefore not unusual in their poetry. Nevertheless, to us, as far as the study is concerned, what is more important is to see how a socially conscientious commentary as this, despite its ideological underpinnings, invokes a reinstatement of the ‘nation-state’ even in the midst not only of global references but also of global predispositions—a trait which shows how the very thinking of the political is itself (con)textual. Whereas the first poem had reaffirmed the value of the ‘global/universal’ toward its ending by pointing to the equivalent metaphor of ‘humanity,’ the 1953 poem actually makes or offers little resistance to the resurgence of localised discourse in its fashioning of catastrophic encounters. Perhaps the absence of explicit political categories in the 1953 poem as mentioned earlier in this section can be accounted for in terms of the aporia of the local-cultural which disturbs the desire for assimilation itself in accordance with Eurocentric parameters of judgement of what constitutes literature on catastrophes or ‘catastrophic literature’ as a canonical label. Even in the absence of explicit political categories, the milieu of the context in which the poem takes shape can be aptly discerned. One of the closest resemblances between Western political theory and the catastrophic agency of universalisation can be found in Marxist theory. This is so because Marx’s call for universalising the class of the proletariat

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(‘Workers of the World Unite’) is a consequence of the climactic deadlock of capitalist crisis. However, Dey’s poem introduces to us a discourse of catastrophic imagination wherein such universalisation remains stunted owing to the cultural persistence of localised idioms that are hard to dismiss as simple superfluous superstructural elements. This is so because the thinking of crisis itself cannot be divorced from the context of its conception. CONCLUSION Both the poems illustrated in this chapter attempt to point out two different modalities in which global imagining of catastrophes takes stock of its essential contextual intricacies—the socio-political exposition of the same in the first poem finds its supplement in the philosophic-cultural lingering of the second. Having described what the poems reinstate and having accounted for the inevitable nature of thinking through the lens of the readily accessible ‘local’ the consequences of global catastrophes, we could pause to reflect on whether such a mode of thinking has parallels in the contemporary non-literary domain. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought out the significance of the ‘local’ again in the thinking of global threats. Two ways strictly pertaining to governmental and statist technologies of handling the event have already been pointed out in the introductory section. However, as far as the question of mitigation is concerned, the rise of localised forms of resistance measures including quarantine, provision and supply of food and basic materials, etc., cannot be ignored. While the statist technologies of countering the threat were televised and broadcasted, the execution of plans at extremely localised community levels determined the success or failure of national or global mitigation. Concurrently, the issue of realisation of the extent of damage also had two levels of manifestation. While daily reports of global damage or even national damage were available in broadcasting mediums and the internet, the indelible footprint of immediate damages such as a death in the neighbourhood or the overnight issue of restrictions in an entire apartment were an altogether different form of experience. It would perhaps not be an overstatement to presume that the latter actually made the former recognition of damage sound plausible. In situations like these, the immediacy of the ‘local’ undoubtedly calls for greater introspection and academic research on global catastrophes and disasters will do justice to the rationale for re-thinking the significance of the ‘local’ in non-academic spaces.

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WORKS CITED Bhattacharyya, Sayan. ‘Re-reading Two Poems by Bishnu Dey in a Time of Exponentially Growing Crises.’ South Asian Review, vol. 44, no. 1, 2023, pp. 50–59. Crockett, Clayton, and Jeffrey W. Robbins. Religion, Politics, and the Earth: The New Materialism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and its Fragments. Princeton University Press, 1993. Fonseca, Carlos. The Literature of Catastrophe: Nature, Disaster and Revolution in Latin America. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Kapila, Shruti. Violent Fraternity: Indian Political Thought in the Global Age. Princeton University Press, 2021. Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, translated by Catherine Porter. Harvard University Press, 2004. Leonard, Philip. Nationality Between Poststructuralism and Postcolonial Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Mitchell, Andrew. Heidegger Among the Sculptors. Stanford University Press, 2010.

Chapter 11

The Vanishing Dead Memory, Necropolitics, and the Modern State Debamitra Kar

The exegesis of death differs considerably when the event is transformed from an individual to a collective experience. The primary consideration of death as a loss of an individual and an individual loss results into three kinds of theses, which have been the long associated with metaphysical enquiry: the issue of immortality and the possibility of an afterlife, mourning and memory, and the fear and anticipations of death. Apart from the last one, the first two can be seen as transformative processes, in which the perception of death is usually associated with the other and not the self; as Socrates said that death for the self does not exist, and death of the other can be mourned, which is a restorative and regenerative action (27–28). The premises of such metaphysical query is based upon the thesis of the existence of an individual subject, who has lived an informed life and can be mourned; in short, his death is grievable. However, subjecthood is a concept that is multi-dimensional: legal, political, economic, social, and cultural; subjectivity alters when any of these indices change. Thus, death of every subject is naturally not equally grievable—even the customary mourning can be restricted. Death, under such circumstances, as this chapter would argue, becomes an excess, a repetition which can be the normative parameter in describing a power dynamics in a collective group. Based on these arguments, it can further be explored if death can be used as a device of control for a political community like the state which houses different levels of subjectivity but forces a homogenised identity which is legally verified and culturally promoted. Even if one believes that the 155

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post-Westphalian nation-state were built on the principles of rationality and jurisprudence, it could never ensure a similar degree of subjectivity to all its citizens. The analysis of bio-politics and governmentality is premised upon these various sites and moments of disjunctions that occur between these various kinds of citizenships that the state uses to crystallise its power. The citizenship itself is a moment when the bare life and the citizen’s life interact within a controlled environment, giving rise to rights to life and livelihood as the determining factors of citizenship. But bio-power never allows death to become a matter of choice for the individual. In fact, in his seminal study titled, The Spirit of Terrorism, published after 9/11, Jean Baudrillard pointed out that death as a choice unsettles the state enterprises for the existence of the present capitalist society depends on the creation and perpetuation of the idea of the unlimited happiness forever. This is not to be confused with eudemonism, or Plato’s idea of happiness coming from the wellbeing for all but rather on the idea of a self-preservation and happiness for ‘myself’ which is the ultimate unit of consumption. Hence, in such a society a conscious choice of death can only be exercised by madmen, psychologically unstable, ‘fanatics of perverted cause, themselves manipulated by some evil power’ (Baudrillard 53). Moreover, death for a greater cause is unexplainable because the state always ensures that death is rationalised and fully explained so that it does not disturb the flow of power according to the hierarchical channels, allowing the state to decide whom to mourn and whom not to; one does not mourn on their own, for there can be no higher thought than the perpetuation of the state or its machinery. Thus, ‘our death is an extinction, an annihilation; it is not a symbolic stake. Herein lies our poverty’ (Baudrillard 65). Enhancing Baudrillard’s idea of the poverty of symbolism in death, I would like to explore the same idea from a slightly different perspective. In Ismail Kadare’s The Traitor’s Niche, the town square houses the head of the traitor, usually the most important vizier, who chose to oppose the ruler. This is constant process, as heads are changed constantly, for states, as we know, never run out of traitors, and their punishment must be visible to the people who come to the square and mumble in hushed voices about the possible reasons behind the punishment and marvel at the unblinking eyes of the head. At such moments, the keeper of the head, Abdulla muses: The head, now free of human limbs, seemingly useless appendages, appeared slightly worthier of taking its place among the ancient symbols and emblems of the square. At these moments, Abdullah would be seized by a thrilling paroxysm of self-destruction, an obscure subconscious desire to throw off the ungainly tangle of his limbs and become only a head. (Kadare 4–5)

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Abdullah becomes the archetypical citizen who desires the final consensual adjustment, which is to be reduced to a serviceable body. Death for the individual is a means to become the citizen, someone who is finally allowed to enter into the ambits of statecraft, becoming useful to the state as a part of the propaganda. What Abdullah unconsciously leads one to is the modern vision of the state, which is ultimately dependent on such images of death, the sources of power residing in the necropolitics. The images of death are not new to statecraft. In his seminal study, titled Necropolitics, Mbembe speaks about the ‘nocturnal body’ (15) of the nation, rescheduling the moment of conceiving nationhood. Critiquing the Foucauldian timeline of building of nations, he states that assumptions of bio-power rests on Western subjectivity where the citizenship debate rests on rights and privileges of a select few versus the lack of it for the others, Mbembe speaks of the colonial expansion as one of the factors of building nation-states. He argues that the moment when nations were consolidated in the West, their economy was dependent on the colonial exploitation and therefore, meaningless deaths and disasters needed to be organised in the Third World countries. Thus, it was not simply capitalism in its industrial form, which arguably has roots in enlightenment and rationality, but rather extending it to include capitalism that is dependent on its ‘nocturnal’ form, namely the exploitation and killings of the others. This necro-capitalism, present from the very beginning, is actually the building principle of the neo-liberal economy that is ultimately breeding a state that views death as the only metaphor of subjectivity. Thus, the traitor’s niche is the site where the state asserts its being. To continue, we may add in the aphoristic manner, that if bio-power is about ‘make live and let die’ (where ‘make live’ means making life more liveable, a quality of first world subjectivity, it is a society of discipline) necro-power is all about ‘let live and make die,’ where being is abandoned to a life without means whereas the state power is engaged in imposing death as the tool for maximising profit and control. He writes that necro-power is: sovereign power that is set up for the maximum destruction of persons and the creation of deathscapes, unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life which confer upon them the status of living death. (Mbembe 7)

Hence, concentration camps, war zones, perpetual conflicts, genocides, and manmade ecological disasters are necessary and mandatory aspects of sovereignty of the modern state. But it is not only in these representations of sovereignty that necro-power can be perceived; its roots can be traced to the capitalist economy which today intensifies as neo-liberalism and

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globalisation. A fantastic fictional expression of this can be sought from Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, where Changez is labelled as a janissary of the Western world by Juan Bautista, the old owner of a publishing house in Chile. Hamid’s text is significant from two aspects: first, it has been quite well-read—that too from the perspective of a reverse immigrant novel; secondly, it operates as the narrative of a Homo economicus which is joined with the narrative of cultural exclusion in post-9/11 America. Janissaries were Christian boys captured at a young age and trained to become loyal soldiers of the Muslim army who were the greatest force at that time. Changez realises the analogy perfectly well; he was the: modern day janissary, a servant of the American empire at a time when it was invading a country with a kinship to mine and was perhaps even colluding to ensure that my own country faced the threat of war. Of course I was struggling! Of course I felt torn! I had thrown in my lot with men of Underwood Samson, with the officers of the empire, when all along I was pre-disposed to feel compassion for those, like Juan Bautista, whose lives the empire thought nothing of overturning for its own gain. (Hamid 152)

What Changez realises as the power of finance, which has brought him all the way to the United States, is ultimately the necro-power which can destroy age old business practices and plunge lives of certain people to a state of perpetual precarity. Now the sudden change in Changez’s status from a valuable ally to a possible enemy is not only a change in governmentality alone but is also tied with global economy. In the interesting studies by Marina Gržinić and Šefik Tatlić, who extensively rely on Santiago Lopez Petit’s study of global mobilisation of the capital, and Fatmir Haskaj, capitalism in its present neo-liberal form has been identified as necro-capitalism. Gržinić and Tatlić argue that the changes in the state policies under neo-liberalism—which warrants for depoliticisation, de-universalisation, de-regulation, and privatisation—are all methods by which subjects are treated as ‘death subjects’ rather than living citizens. For instance, intrusion of market into personal spaces, opening of markets, and exposing the individuals toward it so that they vie for indirect private wealth, withdrawal of welfare policies, complete dissolution of social, medical, and pension rights, coupled with border aggression, creating state of exception, xenophobic predilections in a mass scale, and a rise of turbo-fascism—all these can be seen as a pattern that gradually creates a nation-state where life itself is an abandonment, death becomes the normative equivalent of life. Haskaj writes, ‘To abandon life is simply to ignore it, or to exclude segments of the population from any share of the social product’ (8). The shift in sovereignty of the state from bio-power to necro-power has an obvious effect on the indices of memory and mourning, which are such

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activities that can be performed both individually and collectively, bringing us to a point both spatial and temporal where the subjective self is persuaded to enter into a symbiotic or divergent relationship with community consciousness. This community is a society of the controlled, and while ‘the disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, . . . the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in continuous network’ (qtd. in Haskaj 11). Here death is an excess, a normative parameter, hence memory is contrived and narrativised into a state propaganda. Under such circumstances the state-controlled archiving of memories or the lack thereof can be significant sites where the state hegemony shall operate or come into conflict with the citizens opposing that. One of the many methods of such hegemonic control is the disappearing of the dead body either by recognising it as the martyr’s body or by de-recognising it as the militant’s body—arguably both these two methods of recognising and de-recognising adheres to the central paradigm of deindividualisation that necropolitics practises. If one significant aspect of 9/11 and its aftermath, the protracted war against terror, was the making of the cartesian divide of the world into ‘us’ and ‘them,’ the other was the constant documentation and memorialisation of death. The repetitive images of the planes striking into the building, the march of soldiers, the stories of valour and death, and then of camps, detention centres, and images of war in Afghanistan—death ceased to be something individual, rational, or experiential. As the mushrooming of images blurred the divide between the fact and fiction, dead bodies started to cohabit our living selves: they invaded our drawing rooms, personal spaces, private relations, and individual narratives—they overwhelmed our collective unconscious. The growing predilections toward a collective xenophobia is perhaps a proof of this fact that death was the token by which individuals interacted, subjected, and negated themselves toward the politics of the necro-power, by which both the dead and the living lost their agency and their grievability, becoming death subjects. The dead body thus becomes a complex phenomenon. It is not simply a body that is precarious; its precarity is the condition by which the state’s ideological parameters also consolidate, necro-power percolates into the representation, narratives, and aesthetics. If we borrow from Sartre’s ontological understanding that the being is a strange combination of being-in-itself (i.e., solid and permanent and given) and being-for-itself (a non-being, in state of flux, becoming something else), the ideas can be extended to the body of the dead, which is both an object, which can be tortured and violated, in that instance death is a given certainty, or can be projected as the subject or agent who chooses to die for the greater good of the community, in which case death becomes the consensual internalisation of the necro-power. The sacrificial body, writes LaCapra, ‘typically combines oblation and victimization’

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(55). The body of the scapegoat or pharmakos can be imagined as torn, mutilated, destroyed, and thrown out of the city gates, or resplendent, glorious, and transcendental, memorialised in mausoleums—in each case the death ensures the continuity of the community life. The example of the first case can be found in the prototype of Oedipus, the ‘guilty innocent’ who blinded himself and self-decreed his exile, for it is his victory over the sphinx that saved the city, it was his sin that brought the plague, and it is his sacrifice that would expunge it. He is ‘at once sovereign and outlaw, sacred and sinful and guilty and innocent, poison and cure, blessed and cursed’ (Eagleton 134). The second case is best reflected in the musealisation of the dead. The war memorials do not show the body of the war victims; it symbolically remembers the acts of sacrifices, the body of the soldier being metonymically replaced by the helmet and the gun, or the coffin covered by the national insignia, or just become names in plaques or graves with names. Such dead bodies can be paraded and forgotten as the burning at stakes show, or vanished and remembered, as war memorials show. Interestingly, in both cases the acts of torture and mutilations are not remembered. Again, tortures and state-sponsored execution happen away from the public eye— people disappear and never come back. In fact, if their bodies resurface, the integrity of the state institutions are put into question. Anyone of our generation would remember the consequences of the Abu Ghraib pictures being circulated in media. The pyramid of bodies for the first time disturbed the image of the freedom-loving superpower questioning the extent and nature of violation of human rights permissible in war. Thus, the state would require the expendable (in this case the killable), who is both the metaphoric extension of the community, or the metonymic substitute of the community. The ability to kill can be seen as an autophagic response of the state, whereby it kills the ‘foreign bodied’ (read ‘others’) to ensure its own health. Or, from a slightly different perspective, it shows how the state may cannibalise its own members to maximise the profit in an economy where capital leads to accumulation of more capital. Don DeLillo’s Falling Man reflects both the autophagic and cannibalistic tendencies in an interesting manner. In the narrative that moves around the loss of the known world as existed before 9/11 and the reaction of the protagonist couple Keith and Lianne, the former has escaped from the tower and the latter fights the fear of loss of memory, who restore their failing conjugal relationship and domestic happiness. Instances of xenophobic reactions (read autophagic reactions) are registered in the novel, particularly in episodes where Lianne adversely reacts to the musical preference of her neighbour, a woman who listens to the music of the Middle East. But the recurrent image used in the novel is that of the falling man whose genealogy can be traced to

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both fiction and facts. The falling man is represented in the fiction as a performance artist David Jainak, who performs the acts of falling from buildings in the streets of Manhattan and is constantly arrested. The peculiarity of the act of ‘falling’ as Jainak performs is that it is never complete; the man is not fallen, but falling, he is caught midway in his action, almost like the photograph taken on September 11 by the Associated Press photographer Richard Drew. It showed the real-life falling man, who jumped from one of the towers to escape the possibility of being burnt alive. The photograph was later withdrawn from circulation because the man jumping to his death complicated the image of innocence that was invoked in the aftermath of 9/11 in the national reconstruction discourses. The identity of the man in Drew’s photograph was never established, for the plight of the common man was to be translated into the glories of the people who gave up their lives, the failure of the state was to be contained and rationalised—it was not the moment to acknowledge the absence of hope but the translation of that absence into the paradigm of loss, a loss of lives, lifestyles, or freedom. Thus, the body vanishes. The towers remain even in their absence. However, when the state rejects not only the other but also its own, the performance of Jainak in the novel can be counted as an act of resistance toward the process of translating personal grief to public rhetoric. The image of the falling man recurs at the end of another novel, now in terms of a pictorial representation in a flip book of a nine-year-old. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer begins with the burial of an empty coffin of a 9/11 victim, Thomas Schell. The narrative revolves around the experiences of a nine-year-old son, Oskar, who tries to create a memory of his father through all the different clues, or remnants of his father that he could amass. A key, a handwritten note, a voice record, and the letters of his estranged grandfather who lost his power of speech after the Dresden bombings—these memorabilia are what ultimately remains with him that help him recreate his father’s memory. In the final climactic moment of the novel, Oskar with the help of his grandfather pulls up the empty coffin of his father and fills it with all the letters that were written to his father by his grandfather who could never send them to his son. The empty coffin now becomes a receptacle of memory, individual grief, where a simple name on the plaque becomes a subject with a history and family, grieved and mourned. Oskar imagines changing the scheme of things in his memory. So, the falling man in his flip book returns to the building and disappears inside it, and his father never leaves home but stays at his bedside telling him the story of the sixth borough, the magical heartland of New York. This implicit resistance to musealisation of death could be an answer to the state policies that make death institutionalised, repeated, and internalised. Trauma, which creates the subjectivity around a lack, necessarily comes

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into conflict with memory which attempts to overcome this lack by creating an alternate narrative. Thus, the state’s insistence to revive and recreate the trauma can be resisted through this individuated and personalised memorialisation processes. I would like to conclude with the assertion that memory is the only means of resistance, which turns these deaths into grievable events, removes their precarity, and makes them individual. As the collaborator in Waheed’s novel rued that the living is condemned to tell the stories of the dead—if hope is to be found, it is to be found in the counter-hegemony of remembering, universalisation of loss, and reassertion of an alternate subjectivity. WORKS CITED Baudrillard, Jean. The Spirit of Terrorism, translated by Chris Turner. Verso, 2003. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2006. DeLillo, Don. Falling Man. Picador, 2011. Eagleton, Terry. Holy Terror. Oxford University Press, 2005. Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Penguin, 2006. Gržinić, Marina, and Šefik Tatlić. Necropolitics, Racialisation and Global capitalism: Historicization of Biopolitics and Forensics of Politics, Art and Life. Lexington Books, 2014. Hamid, Mohsin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Viking, 2007. Haskaj, Fatmir. ‘From Biopower to Necroeconomies: Neoliberalism, Biopower and Death Economies.’ Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 20, no. 10, 2018, pp. 1–21. Kadare, Ismail. The Traitor’s Niche. Vintage Classics, 2011. LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. John Hopkins, 2001. Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics, translated by Steven Corcoran. Duke University Press, 2019. Socrates. The Axiochus: On Death and Immortality: A Platonic Dialogue, edited and translated by E. H. Blakeney. Fredrick Muller, 1937. Waheed, Mirza. The Collaborator. Penguin, 2011.

PART IV

Pandemics, Public Health Disasters, and Bio-political Regimes of Control

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Marked by Disposable Deaths Mourning and Community in Times of Pandemic Shinjini Basu

In early 2020 when the coronavirus pandemic was still in its initial stages in Europe, the European Journal of Psychoanalysis brought out an entire issue titled ‘Coronavirus and Philosophers.’ The exponential increase in the number of the dead was still a few weeks away. What emerges as a more immediate concern in the pages of the journal is the governmental overreach, using the pandemic as a pretext to regulate the civic space and to curtail civil liberties. Four years and millions of deaths later, that early doubt about the scale of the disaster has proved pitifully wrong.1 COVID-19 had been a global health emergency of such catastrophic proportions that it is now difficult to decide whether the governmental overreach or the governmental shortcomings and abdication of responsibility toward public health was the greatest concern raised by the pandemic. However, even if philosophy fell short of gauging the extent and intensity of the disaster it could anticipate some of its longterm ethical and political implications. After the initial scepticism comes the irrefutable ‘reality’ of the pandemic, but that has not restored confidence in the actions of the state; rather it has intensified what Roberto Esposito calls a ‘polarity,’ a semantic opposition between the ‘viral’ and ‘the lexicon of communitas’ (8). It points to a ‘biopolitical contamination between different languages—political, social, medical and technological—united by the same immune syndrome’ (Esposito 8). Esposito sees the ‘viral’ as the domain of bio-politics—the state treating its people as a statistically quantifiable and technologically manageable bio-mass. By turning bare life into the fulcrum of politics, the pandemic has provided unprecedented legitimation to the 165

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regime of bio-politics. A politics of bare life cultivates a logic of death—as life gets massified, so does death. Bare life itself is socio-economically stigmatised—not all life is the same to the state. Some lives are disposable, so are some deaths. The state tries to regulate how deaths are remembered to ensure how they are forgotten. The act of mourning has an important function in both remembering and forgetting. Both the state and the community have their own mechanisms of mourning and memory formation. Contrary to the lexicon of bio-politics employed by the state, how does the death of so many people leave a mark on the lexicon of communitas? How, if at all, does death shape the contours of community? Is a community too marked differently by different deaths? What role does the state play in this process of marking? I would try to look at certain historical instances of collective mourning and memorialisation to address these questions. I would argue that rather than widening the opposition between the state and the community, the political and discursive conceptualisation of disaster often fuses an essentialist idea of community with that of the state. At the same time, death is also the realm of radical alterity where settled notions of the community can be challenged and reconfigured to resist imposition and encroachment of the state. How does a community get marked? Does the question semantically presuppose a community to be an organic body that can be simultaneously, collectively, and uniformly marked by an event? Jean Luc Nancy points out that ‘community’ is conceived differently from ‘society’: while ‘society’ implies a simple association of its members and division of needs and resources, ‘community’ is often conceptualised as rooted in the claims of a shared identity (9). This particular formulation draws heavily from the concepts of Gemeinschaf and Gesellschaft that form the title of Ferdinand Tönnies’ seminal text published in 1887, roughly translated as Community and Civil Society. Tönnies proposes two contrasting forms of association: Gemeinschaf, the idealised ‘communal society’ brought together by Wesenwille or ‘natural will’ and traditional social roles as opposed to Gesellschaft, a ‘civil society’ created by rational will, typified by its modern bureaucracies and transactional organisations (95). All kinds of social co-existence that are familiar, comfortable and exclusive are to be understood as belonging to Gemeinschaft. Gesellschaft means life in the public sphere, in the outside world. In Gemeinschaft we are united from the moment of our birth with our own folk for better or for worse. We go out into Gesellschaft as if into a foreign land. (Tönnies 18)

With this thrust on organicity community is looked upon as a single thing, a ‘being-common’ or ‘being together’ (Nancy, The Inoperative Community 50).

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Nancy says that community is defined by ‘its organic communion with its own essence’ (The Inoperative Community 9), a definition he posits only to counter later. The ‘essence’ shared by the ‘being-common’ is frequently traced back to a time when a community was supposedly woven in a tighter fabric; its material body and spiritual being were united into this ‘essence’ which was reflected back to the community through its institutions, rituals, habits, and symbols. That community can be the Athenian city, the Roman Republic, the first Christian commune, or the so-called golden age of a Vedic community. In Western philosophy from Rousseau to Hegel, Nancy traces this ‘retrospective consciousness of a lost community’ (The Inoperative Community 10). However, according to him, ‘the true consciousness of the lost community is Christian’ (Nancy, The Inoperative Community 10)—at the heart of that idea of communion is the mystical body of Christ. The centrality given to ‘communion’ in the formation of community has the obvious allusion of the communion with the body of Christ. Through the intimacy of ‘communion’ immanence can happen: the divine can manifest through the corporeal. In a radical departure from the dominant view of community as being pre-modern and thus a purer and uncorrupted register of collective identity, Nancy believes that this kind of an immanent notion of community is a belated invention to cope with the ‘harsh reality of modern experience: namely, that divinity was withdrawing infinitely from immanence’ (10). Interestingly the only other way such absolute immanence—corporeal going back to its essence—is possible is death. Nancy continues: ‘This is why political or collective enterprises dominated by a will to absolute immanence have as their truth the truth of death. Immanence, communal fusion, contains no other logic than that of the suicide of the community that is governed by it’ (12). An obvious point of reference is Nazi Germany where Gemeinschaf becomes the cornerstone of the ideology of ‘Blood and Soil,’ an organic, racially defined communal body. In order to bring that idealised community back, its material body needs to be purged of those who are racial outsiders to the bond of blood and soil and of those within the community who do not satisfy or outright oppose the idea of such pure immanence. The logic of the purge is inseparably linked to a logic of suicide whereby the extermination of the other is not enough to ensure the perpetuation of the idealised community; even those, who are part of the communal self, need to be sacrificed time and again to protect and reaffirm a fragile immanence. For the state to partake of the same kind of absolute immanence death can play a vital role—it gives the state a chance to claim itself to be the manifestation of a communal essence. Individual deaths can be sublated—cancelled and preserved at the same time—in the community. Mourning can be a significant step in this process of sublation.

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Mourning has always played an important role in the constitution of the state. In Plato’s Laws there are numerous passages about the regulation of the forms and rituals of mourning, most of them are in the last few books—from Book IX to Book XII, devoted, according to Michel Naas, quite literally to the end of all things related to the polis (82). The burial of the dead establishes the ultimate sanctioning power of the state. Death is an experience that cannot be managed or programmed. Even after being assigned use-value by society (heroic death, sacrificial death, patriotic death), death still retains a ‘radical meaninglessness that cannot be completely subsumed’ (Fynsk xvi). Mourning is an act of identification with the dead; it is also an acknowledgement that a complete identification is impossible. It is recognition of passing as well as an act of remembering. Mourning can be an act of excess—it exceeds the control of the state since the state does not remember, individuals do, families do. At the same time, it exceeds the control of the individual as well in that it exposes the self to something that is permanently outside of it. Plato, forever wary of excesses, tries to regain control not by prohibition but through regulation of mourning. The state sets boundaries regarding whom to mourn, who can mourn, and how. For example, those convicted of wilful murder of a parent, a child, or a brother are to be executed ‘by the officers of the judges and magistrates’ and cast away from the city, naked, and ‘all the magistrates, acting on behalf of the whole State, shall take each a stone and cast it on the head of the corpse, and thus make atonement for the whole State’ (Plato, Book IX 873b). Death by suicide deserves a tomb but not a tombstone with a name. The nameless body is to be buried in a barren land on the borders of the city (Plato, Book IX 873d). The proscriptions also say that in instances of ‘natural’ death, the dead body should remain in the house only long enough to ensure that the person is actually dead; tombs are not to be erected in cultivable land, rather on land suitable ‘to receive and hide the body of the dead’ (Plato, Book XII 959a–e); the memorial mound on the body should be of a certain shape and size; loud mourning and lamentation with the body is prohibited outside the house; and the funeral party must meet outside the city before daybreak (Plato, Book XII 959a–e). The significance of these proscriptions is evident in their transgression, as Sophocles’s Antigone would remind us. She is ‘the prototype of the resistance of family to the law of the city, embodied by the despot that rules its destiny’ (Braunstein 70). If certain deaths are prohibited from mourning, the converse is true for certain others. In Book XII, Plato gives elaborate instructions regarding how officials entrusted with maintaining the law and order of the state as well as military heroes are to be buried with everyone in military garb and young boys singing ‘anthem.’ Interestingly, only hymns of praise are allowed, not dirge or lamentation. Those hymns are to be followed by music, gymnastics, and sporting contests (Plato, Book XII 947a–e). Michael Naas sees all the

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regulatory instructions as directed toward ‘the vanishing point at which there shall be no mourning’ (83). Clearly, rites of mourning become an affirmation of the end of mourning, forgetting rather than remembering the materiality death. Regulations regarding mourning are not unique to Plato. There were similar propositions in Xenophone’s Hellenica as well (Naas 84). However, in Laws, Plato seems to suggest that defining the relation of citizens to death is not merely a matter of state policy, but it is a philosophical undertaking to establish the superiority of the immutable soul over the mutable body: As in other matters it is right to trust the lawgiver, so too must we believe him when he asserts that the soul is wholly superior to the body and that in actual life what makes each of us to be what he is is nothing else than the soul, while the body is a semblance which attends on each of us, it being well said that the bodily corpses are images of the dead. . . . But to him who is dead no great help can be given; it was when he was alive. (Book XII 959a–b)

Accordingly, in both proscriptions and prescriptions of mourning, one finds that the corporeal body of the deceased vanishes from sight. Death as an event marking the end of the body is not given undue importance; it is important as an affirmation of living on of an essence. Pericles’s funeral oration recorded in Thucydides’s The Peloponnesian War says that ‘an honour should be given at their burial to the dead who have fallen on the field of battle’ (‘Funeral Oration’). However, prior to the dead eulogy is showered upon the ancestors. Then the polis—the city that is ‘equally admirable in peace and war’ (Pericles, ‘Funeral Oration’) with its institutions and laws—gets extolled. There is a call to sublimate individual grief into a collective recognition of ‘honourable death’ and the sorrow of the loved ones of the fallen into an ‘an honourable sorrow’ (Pericles, ‘Funeral Oration’). Not only do the fallen heroes provide an explicit model of virtue, but their death should also provide the model for mourning the dead which is not mourning but a celebration of the city. In fact, Pericles goes on to say that some of the bereaved parents who are young enough to have other children should be able to bear their sorrow better because not only the children of the future will help them forget the children that they have lost in the past but the city will be a double gainer: ‘She will not be left desolate and she will be safer’ (Pericles, ‘Funeral Oration’). The rites of mourning are a way of rhetorically organising the polis around the dead, not just the recently dead, but the dead ancestors, the lost community of Hellenic Greece. Interestingly, this funeral speech of Pericles is ridiculed with deadpan sarcasm in Plato’s ‘Menexenus.’ When Menexenus informs that the city

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council is about to choose a speaker for a public funeral to speak on the dead, Socrates retorts: O Menexenus! Death in battle is certainly in many respects a noble thing. The dead man gets a fine and costly funeral, although he may have been poor, and an elaborate speech is made over him by a wise man who has long ago prepared what he has to say . . . they steal away our souls with their embellished words; in every conceivable form they praise the city; and they praise those who die in war, and all our ancestors who went before us; and they praise ourselves also who are still alive, until I feel quite elevated by their laudations, and I stand listening to their words . . . and all in a moment I imagine myself to have become a greater and nobler and finer man than I was before. And if, as often happens, there are any foreigners who accompany me to the speech. I become suddenly conscious of having a sort of triumph over them. . . . This consciousness of dignity lasts me more than three days, and not until the fourth or fifth day do I come to my senses and know where I am. (Plato, ‘Menexenus’)

Even as Plato parodies Pericles, he follows the same order of eulogising the ancestors, then the government, and then the individual fallen hero in his prescribed format. His main objection to Periclean exuberance is one of over-embellishment, of turning death into a moment of uncontrolled passion. Instead, voicing through Socrates, Plato places his encomium in the context of a historical survey of the Hellenic world and within the rational order of government. Deaths are embedded within that rational order: Thus born into the world and thus educated, the ancestors of the departed lived and made themselves a government, which I ought briefly to commemorate. For government is the nurture of man, and the government of good men is good, and of bad men bad. And I must show that our ancestors were trained under a good government, and for this reason they were good, and our contemporaries are also good, among whom our departed friends are to be reckoned. (Plato, ‘Menexenus’)

The regulatory advice of Plato and the rhetorical flourish of Pericles both suggest a tension between the space of community and the civic space. The latter is created only in relation to and in contradistinction with the state while the former has a life beyond the state which the state tries to control. The shadow of the lifeless body falls between the two. The absent body of the dead is thus essential to the consolidation of a body politic. But how does the absent body leave its mark on community? The tension between the communal and the civic space vis-à-vis creation and suppression as well as erasure of memory can be located in instances closer to our own time. The First World War marked a watershed moment

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in establishing the aesthetics of public memorialisation. As soldiers died en masse during the war, their bodies were unceremoniously buried in mass graves strewn across Europe. There were many instances when fallen soldiers did not receive any burial for months or years, and rotten corpses piled up in battlefields. Geoff Dyer mentions that Sir Edward Lutyens, during his visit to France in 1917, was moved by these hurriedly constructed graves and was later responsible for many of the cemeteries for the fallen soldiers (12). It was perhaps for the first time that the aesthetic and architecture of public memorials for the dead became not just a matter of legislative debate but also of public discourse in England as by 1917 many associations and clubs came up across England to establish appropriate means of remembrance. One of the most significant outcomes was the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier—a monument that became the prototype for many later memorials commemorating collective deaths in catastrophic events—be it later war memorials like the ones after the Second World War, the Holocaust memorials, Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Arlington, or even the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero. Equally important was the aesthetics of public mourning put in place after the First World War; for example, it was the first anniversary of the Armistice Day when the ritual of two minutes’ silence was introduced to commemorate the dead. Hannah Arendt says in The Human Condition that monuments to the Unknown Soldier reflect not just a need to glorify but a need for revelation of an identifiable cause or agent of war. The frustration of no such identifiable something or somebody being known after four years of manslaughter inspired the erection of monuments to those whom ‘the world had failed to make known and had robbed thereby . . . of their human dignity’ (Arendt 181). The erection of memorial was an acknowledgement of the denial of memory. Yet every act of mourning is haunted by the inevitability of forgetting. As early as in 1919, still in the throes of the First World War, Siegfried Sassoon’s poem ‘Aftermath’ begins with the question, ‘Have you forgotten yet?’ The world has moved on since the ‘gagged days’ of the Great War. The gap in people’s mind ‘haunted’ by the horrors of the war has been filled with more quotidian concerns of peacetime. Even while reacting to the indifference of the world with bitter cynicism—‘But the past is just the same—and War’s a bloody game’—Sassoon cannot but repeat his question more emphatically: ‘Have you forgotten yet? . . . ’ (‘Aftermath’). The use of the preposition ‘yet’ is an acknowledgement of the fleeting nature of public memory, but the act of reiteration is also an appeal to remember. Later, in 1933, with the shadow of another war looming over Europe, Sassoon portrays forgetting not as a terrifying possibility but rather as a necessity of survival. In the poem ‘At the Cenotaph,’ the ‘Prince of Darkness’ stands ‘by the Cenotaph’ and utters respectfully a prayer for forgetfulness: ‘Make them forget . . . what this memorial/Means’ (Sassoon, ‘At the

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Cenotaph’). By now Europe has seen how memory can be weaponised to ‘Breed new belief that War is purgatorial’ (Sassoon, ‘At the Cenotaph’). The poem is about the Cenotaph War Memorial of London, originally commissioned by the British government to be part of Peace Day celebrations of July 19, 1919. It was initially a temporary structure designed by Lutyens, who also designed the later, permanent structure. The construction of the permanent structure began within a year of signing the Armistice. The Cenotaph seems to embody the Janus-face of mourning; it is supposed to memorialise the millions of unknown dead soldiers, but it is also a signifier of state triumphalism which tries to define, codify, and control collective memory. As a result, remembrance becomes an ambiguous choice between forgetting the event or remembering a version of it that helps fester an insidious cult of death.2 An act of remembering is sustained through many acts of forgetting. In London, the Armistice Day celebrations of 1921 were disrupted by the unemployed whose placards read, ‘The Dead are remembered but we are forgotten’ (Dyer 51). Dyer also writes about a communal cemetery in the village of Bailleulmont in France where, tucked away from the civilian graves, there is a group of military headstones, unusually made of brownstone. Here soldiers who were shot for desertion by their own army are buried (Dyer 53). Over three hundred English soldiers were executed for desertion, their graves outside public view; often even their families remained unaware of the true cause of their death. Deserters were consigned to collective amnesia even as a new aesthetic was being put in place for the public mourning of the unknown many. A similar and total amnesia is meted out to the millions of people who fell to the Spanish Flu that coincided with the First World War. The pandemic that killed around twenty million people worldwide continued to remain absent from public memory apart from situations like the present one when potential new pandemics make scientists, epidemiologists, and governments look for past instances. Between the prescribed and proscribed forms of death and mourning, where do the pandemic deaths fit in? In his posthumously published book Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone, David B. Feinberg, the American author and AIDS activist, writes about the AIDS epidemic in America: In those horrible times we have been forced to abbreviate the mourning process. How many people can you grieve for properly when everyone is dying? I wrote a novel for Jim Bronson, whom I barely knew. I wrote stories about my friends Saul Meissler, Glen Peter Pumilia, and Glenn Person. Now I am reduced to brief essays in memoriam. Eventually all will be reduced to nothing but a litany of names chanted at the Quilt, panels of cloth the size of a coffin. (198)

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By pointing out the reducing size of his commemorative acts, Feinberg quantifies the shrinking space of mourning per se not only imposed by the state but happening within the community. In terms of the sheer reach of contagion, the actual physical penetration of a pandemic within a community is quite deep. Also, it gives the regulatory regime of the state sweeping power and control from wider and micro partitioning of spaces and surveilling populations to controlling movements. In such a fragmented topography, the civic demarcation of the inside and the outside breaks down. The shadow that hovers over that topography is not just of the dead bodies but of infested bodies—infestation that can no longer be spatially contained to an outside. The fear of contamination necessitates swift disposal of dead bodies, in absence of loved ones and without rituals. Braunstein comments that this profanation of the corpse ‘points to an anti-erotic, thanatotic force’ (68). Giving a twist to Bataille’s proclamation that ‘Erotism is the affirmation of life, even in death,’ Braunstein claims that ‘Anti-erotism is the condemnation of death in the name of life’ (68). The corpse itself is an abject body; it is not an object in the sense that it does not establish a relation of desire and of meaning with the subject. It posits the threat of the collapse of all meaning. A dead body does not reveal the meaning of death; it exposes us to the materiality of death and confronts us with the eventuality of our own death. Julia Kristeva says, ‘The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. . . . Corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live’ (4). The abject disturbs identity, order, and system; that is why it needs to be completely excluded from the system. The only way death can be given meaning is by vanishing the body. However, it is wrong to place the abject in the realm of the primordial, outside the political. The human reaction to the abject is political and cultural. Studies of race relations, social discrimination, or untouchability show that revulsion to the abject is culturally conditioned and helps maintain mechanisms of political exclusion. In the fractured topography of the pandemic, different forms of the abject hardwired within the community coalesce with one another, expanding the cartography of exclusion. That is why exclusions are seamless, often without any territorial conflict between the community and the state. Even so, is our response to mass death due to the COVID-19 pandemic qualitatively different from the response of older times? One of the most recent philosophical disagreements coming out of the COVID-19 situation is between Giorgio Agamben and Jean Luc Nancy. Agamben called COVID-19 an ‘invented epidemic’ and said that it helps the state to expand the space and scope of exception (Agamben 2020). Four years and many waves of the pandemic across the world later, it would be facile and outright

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insensitive to call the pandemic an ‘invented’ one.3 That aside, how do we respond to his contention that the pandemic provides a ground for scaling up measures of exceptional state power? Nancy, on the other hand, says that the distinction between normativity and exception does not hold any more. We are living in times of perpetual exception; COVID-19 only brought it to the surface. In a sense what Nancy calls ‘the viral exception’ (‘The Viral Exception’ 27) mimics different forms of exceptions which have been already normalised within communities. Stuart Murray, commenting on America’s pandemic response, argues that it is the apotheosis of the state’s long-standing practice of sacrificial economy: ‘By this gamble, an economy of sacrificial exchange is preferable to losses in the American market economy. Some lives are expendable, of lesser value than others, and this valuation is patriotic’ (300). He further argues that this sacrificial economy has now culminated into a ‘suicidal state,’ drawing from Foucault’s 1976 lecture where he raises the haunting spectre of ‘an absolutely racist State, an absolutely murderous State and an absolutely suicidal State.’ In this lecture, Foucault talks about a condition in which the exceptional sovereign right of the state to take life or let live and the bio-political power over bare life are superimposed, and he asks, ‘How, under these conditions, is it possible for a political power to kill, to call for deaths, to give the order to kill, and to expose not only its enemies but its own citizens to the risk of death?’ It happens by establishing a ‘biological-type caesura within a population’ (Murray 300). According to Murray in the context of the American state, the caesura is created through its sacrificial economy. However, the same can be transposed to the mechanisms of most modern states. In India, the completely unplanned lockdown imposed with the warning of just a couple of days unleashed an economic disaster on the most vulnerable sections of its citizenry. The migrant workers, originating from various small towns and villages of India who come to metropolitan cities in search of livelihood, are the backbone of the unorganised economy of these cities. But as the lockdown prolonged, without any assistance from either the state or from a largely apathetic urban ecosystem, they were left to fend for themselves. Deprived of basic means of life, almost on the verge of starvation, the migrant workers started their long march back home. Even as the pandemic was raging, the front pages of newspapers started to fill with another set of dead bodies, that of workers dying of exhaustion of walking for days in the scorching heat of summer or run over by trains while sleeping on railway tracks during the night. These deaths were not collateral damages of the ‘viral exception’; rather, the ‘viral exception’ had exposed the caesura within population normalised by neo-liberal capitalism pursued by the state which reduces a section of its population to bare life in order to sustain an economic life for another. P. Sainath, the renowned journalist, compares it with the ancient medical practice of bloodletting:

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COVID-19 has given us a brilliant, thorough autopsy of neoliberalism, indeed of capitalism itself. The corpse is on the table, in glaring light, every vein, artery, organ and bone staring us in the face. You can see all the leeches—privatisation, corporate globalism, extreme concentration of wealth, levels of inequality unseen in living memory. The bloodletting approach to social and economic ills that has seen societies drain working people of the basics of decent and dignified human existence.

He questions further: How ready we are to discuss pandemics and the possible end of humanity. How reluctant we are to discuss the end of neoliberalism and capitalism. The search is on for: how quickly can we overcome the problem and ‘return to normal.’ But the problem was not about returning to normal. The ‘normal’ was the problem. (The cagier of the ruling elites have been bandying about the phrase ‘the new normal.’) (Sainath 2020)

One is once again reminded of Nancy that a community formed on the basis of immanence contains no logic other than that of suicide; it is the only way of achieving a fusion of its essence and its material body. It seems that the pandemic has fused the suicidal state with the suicidal community circumscribing the political possibility of community. This political possibility lies not in a ‘being-common,’ an organic body conceptualised on the basis of a shared essence but rather in a ‘being-in-common’ which is not based on communion or fusion into a unique collective identity. It lies in the inclination, the movement of the being toward something ‘in-common’ exterior to itself. Death is the ultimate exteriority since as an experience it can never be ‘ours.’ This creates a crisis of representation. Representation draws its meaning from the experience of the self. Bataille writes: ‘If it sees its fellow-being die, a living being can only subsist outside itself’ (Nancy, The Inoperative Community 15).This might imply that death can be accessed solely as the death of an-other. Nancy on the other hand argues that death eludes any such possibility of access; instead, it exposes us to our own finitude. Nancy defines finitude as ‘infinite lack of infinite identity’ (The Inoperative Community 15). Rather than communion, death can be an affirmation of singularity, of finitude. This exposure to infinite lack brings a whole new political dimension to community. Nancy postulates that thinking of community in terms of essence is a closure of the political since it imposes a common being upon the community foreclosing its exposure to what is ‘in-common’ yet separate: ‘Being in common has nothing to do with communion, with fusion into a body, into a unique and ultimate identity that would no longer be exposed. Being in common means, to the contrary, no longer having, in any form, in any empirical

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or ideal place, such a substantial identity, and sharing this (narcissistic) “lack of identity”’ (Nancy, The Inoperative Community preface). Coextensive to this political possibility of community is an alternative politics of mourning. In the introduction to Jacques Derrida’s Work of Mourning, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, the editors of the collection, write, ‘In mourning, the unqualifiable event is repeated; the proper name bespeaks a singular death and yet allows us to speak of that death, to anticipate and prepare for it, to read it’ (Brault and Naas 15). In these essays, obituaries written about friends and thus dealing with personal grief, Derrida constantly moves between singularity and repetition. The piece on Roland Barthes is titled ‘The Deaths of Roland Barthes’—‘How to reconcile this plural?’ Derrida asks. He answers by bringing questions of fidelity and responsibility to the act of mourning— the impossible choice between abrogating responsibility to the dead by speaking ‘of’ them, turning them into objects and withholding intervention, letting the dead speak for themselves through citations: But this excess of fidelity would end up saying and exchanging nothing. It returns to death. It points to death, sending death back to death. On the other hand, by avoiding all quotation, all identification, all rapprochement even, so that what is addressed to or spoken of Roland Barthes truly comes from the other, from the living friend, one risks making him disappear again, as if one could add more death to death and thus indecently pluralize it. We are left then with having to do and not do both at once, with having to correct one infidelity by the other. From one death, the other: is this the uneasiness that told me to begin with a plural? (Derrida 45)

Even in its singularity, death brings us back to the plural because only a being-in-common ensures a ‘being-separated’ and vice versa. Fidelity and responsibility constitute the first line of resistance against disposable deaths; it resists the sublation of death into collective sacrifice by bringing the singular, unique, and irredeemable loss into reckoning. WORKS CITED Agamben, Giorgio. ‘The Invention of an Epidemic.’ https:​ //​ www​ .journal​ -psychoanalysis​.eu​/coronavirus​-and​-philosophers/. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press, 1998. Benvenuto, Sergio. ‘Welcome to Seclusion.’ https:​//​www​.journal​-psychoanalysis​.eu​/ coronavirus​-and​-philosophers/. Brault, Pascale-Anne, and Michael Naas. ‘To Reckon with the Dead: Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Mourning.’ In The Work of Mourning, edited and translated

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by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. University of Chicago Press, 2001, pp. 1–30. Braunstein, Néstor. ‘The Return of Antigone: Burial Rights in Pandemic Times.’ In Coronavirus, Psychoanalysis and Philosophy: Conversations on Pandemics, Politics and Society, edited by Fernando Castrillón and Thomas Marchevsky. Routledge, 2021, pp. 66–76. Castrillón, Fernando, and Thomas Marchevsk. ‘Introduction: Of Pestilence, Chaos and Time.’ In Coronavirus, Psychoanalysis and Philosophy: Conversations on Pandemics, Politics and Society. Routledge, 2021, pp. 1–20. Derrida, Jacques. The Work of Mourning, edited and translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. University of Chicago Press, 2001. Dyer, Geoff. Missing of the Somme. Hamish Hamilton, 1994. Esposito, Roberto. ‘Cured to the Bitter End.’ In Coronavirus, Psychoanalysis and Philosophy: Conversations on Pandemics, Politics and Society, edited by Fernando Castrillón and Thomas Marchevsky. Routledge, 2021, pp. 28–29. Feinberg, David B. Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone. Penguin Books, 1994. Fynsk, Christopher. ‘Foreword: Experiences of Finitude.’ In The Inoperative Community, translated by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney. University of Minnesota Press, 1991, pp. vii–xxxv. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia University Press, 1982. Murray, Stuart J. ‘The Suicidal State: In Advance of an American Requiem.’ Philosophy and Rhetoric, vol. 53, no. 3, 2020, pp. 299–305. Naas, Michael. ‘History’s Remains: Of Memory, Mourning and the Event.’ Research in Phenomenology, vol. 33, 2003, pp. 75–96. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community, translated by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney. University of Minnesota Press, 1991. ———. ‘The Viral Exception.’ In Coronavirus, Psychoanalysis and Philosophy: Conversations on Pandemics, Politics and Society, edited by Fernando Castrillón and Thomas Marchevsky. Routledge, 2021, pp. 27–28. Pericles. ‘Funeral Oration,’ from Thucydides’s The Peloponnesian War. http:​//​www​ .wsu​.edu:​8080​/​~wldciv​/world​_civ​_reader​/world​_civ​_reader​_1​/pericles​.html. Plato. Laws, from Plato in Twelve Volumes, Volumes 10 and 11, translated by R. G. Bury. Harvard University Press, 1967 and 1968. ———. ‘Menexenus.’ https:​//​www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/1682​/1682​-h​/1682​-h​.html. Sainath, P. ‘We Didn’t Bleed Him Enough,’ https:​//​frontline​.thehindu​.com​/the​-nation​ /we​-didnt​-bleed​-him​-enough​/article32182775​.ece. Sassoon, Siegfried. ‘Aftermath.’ https:​//​www​.poemhunter​.com​/poem​/aftermath/. ———. ‘At the Cenotaph.’ https:​//​www​.poemhunter​.com​/poem​/at​-the​-cenotaph/. Tönnies, Ferdinand. Community and Civil Society (1887), Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, edited by Jose Harris, translated by Margaret Hollis. Cambridge University Press, 2001.

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NOTES 1. Most of the essays published in the journal have been compiled in a book titled Coronavirus, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy: Conversations on Pandemics, Politics and Society (2021). In the introduction to that text Fernando Castrillón and Thomas Marchevsky ask the reader to treat the text as an assemblage, something that takes shape not after but amid the ‘event.’ The text retains the first dates of publication of individual essays to ‘signal the severe fluidity and flux of the situation, and that any pronouncements concerning this event known as the coronavirus pandemic can only be understood in their temporal context’ (Castrillón and Marchevsky 2). 2. A May Day demonstration took place in front of the Cenotaph in 2000, organised mainly by anti-globalisation protesters, labour activists, and environmentalists. The inscription on the Cenotaph reads ‘The glorious dead.’ Under that inscription the protesters spray painted ‘Why glorify war?’ Keeping in view the double meaning coded into the structure of the Cenotaph, this act can be seen both as a historical misreading of the ‘meaning’ of the memorial or a radical rewriting of the history of the memorial itself. Even if the memorial is a solid structure, it continues as a protean act of mourning through such slippages. 3. In hindsight, some of the greatest living philosophers of our times come across as short-sighted at best and flippant at worst in their initial response to the pandemic. Sergio Benvenuto writes in the same journal: I am neither a virologist nor an epidemiologist, yet the idea has formed in my mind that— though over seventy, and hence among the most vulnerable—I have little to fear from the coronavirus for my health. ‘For mine,’ for mere reasons of probability, like when I fly on a plane: it could crash, but it’s highly unlikely. In fact, so far only around 3000 people worldwide have died as a consequence of the virus. Practically nothing compared to the 80,000 killed by common flus in 2019. Those who have died in Italy from the epidemic (over 50 at the moment of writing) are probably less than those killed in car accidents plus worker fatalities. In short, I am not so much scared of contagion, but I’m more concerned about the economic backlash for a country like mine, in constant decline since 1990s. After all, poverty kills too.

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Gendered Empathy and Its Impact on Efficient Pandemic Management Sudeshna Mukherjee

UNDERSTANDING EMPATHY THROUGH FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES The unprecedented death, distress, and despair brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic drew our attention to the notion of ‘empathy’ at personal and political levels. Leaders were evaluated for their empathic approach to ‘flattening the curve.’ Countries with women leaders at the helm of affairs seem to have handled the COVID-19 pandemic far more efficiently than their male counterparts, leading to a critical question on the gendered aspect of empathy. According to most empathy researchers, the essence of empathy is feeling what another person feels because something happens to them. This conceptualisation of empathy is equivalent to ‘affective resonance’ or ‘experience sharing’ in multi-component models of empathy (Wondra and Ellsworth 411–28). However, it does not include other processes that some empathy theorists believe contribute to emotion sharing, such as perspectivetaking, self-regulation, and mind perception (Wondra and Ellsworth 411–28). Thinkers and philosophers have tried to elaborate on the concept of empathy through myriads of concepts. However, Cuff et al., after meticulous analysis, defined empathy as: an emotional response (affective), dependent upon the interaction between trait capacities and state influences. Empathic processes are automatically elicited but are also shaped by top-down control processes. The resulting emotion is 179

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similar to one’s perception (directly experienced or imagined) and understanding (cognitive Empathy) of the stimulus emotion, with the recognition that the source of the emotion is not one’s own (16).

The definition mentioned here indicates that empathy includes both cognitive and affective elements. The definition further stresses that the emotions of the target and observer are similar but not identical. There is a self-other distinction maintained in empathy. Empathy is affected by both trait and state influences; behavioural outcomes are not part of empathy itself. Finally, empathy is automatically elicited but is also subject to top-down controlled processes (Cuff et al. 16–17). In his writing, psychologist Martin Hoffman (Empathy and Moral Development) succinctly summed up psychological research on ‘empathy’ through the twentieth century. His theory of moral development has provided the most comprehensive view of empathy. Hoffman focused on empathic distress in his writing. His theory includes five mechanisms and explains how an observer becomes distressed when observing a target’s distress. The five mechanisms are: a.  Mimicry: Empathy through mimicry involves a two-stage process. First, the observer automatically imitates the target’s emotional facial, postural, or vocal expressions. Second, afferent feedback from the imitated expression causes the associated emotional state in the observer (Wondra and Ellsworth 411–28). b.  Classical conditioning: Classical conditioning of emotions begins with situations that make us feel emotional even if we have never experienced them. c.  Direct association: When the observer sees the target’s emotional expression or situation, it reminds the observer of their past emotional experiences. Then, the observer feels their emotions during the actual experiences (Wondra and Ellsworth 411–28). d.  Mediated association: Observers learn about targets’ emotional experiences through a word in the mediated association. Observers then imagine the targets’ emotional expressions and mimic them, remember their own past experiences, and feel the emotions from the memories of both (Hoffman, Empathy and Moral Development). e.  Role-taking: When observers imagine themselves in the target’s situation or how the target feels, role-taking occurs. In role-taking, there is an active attempt to understand a target by bringing emotional memories or imagined emotional expressions to mind, whereas mediated association involves activating emotional memories or imagery more automatically (Hoffman, Empathy and Moral Development).

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Feminists, especially cultural feminists, have stressed particular feminine virtues. ‘Empathy’ is considered one such virtue. Empathy has three main components: imaginative projection, awareness of the other’s emotions, and concern (Strauss). The large body of research on evolutionary psychology and feminist research emphasise a tendency for women to show more significant empathic concern than men. The gender roles assigned to women make them more responsive toward caring, and that role demands what Hoffman has suggested (i.e., role-taking, or imagined emotional expressions to mind). Traditional Western philosophy has valued the universal dimensions of knowledge over particular dimensions (Radnitzky and Popper). Western philosophy’s focus on the ‘universal’ and feminist philosophy’s focus on the particular wedged the war on objectivity and subjectivity. For positivists, ‘objectivity is the view from “nowhere.” The knower detaches himself from his subjectivity so that his/her interests, biases, and prejudices do not distort his vision of reality’ (Tong). Feminist standpoint theorists have criticised this view. According to them, all knowers are ‘intersected.’ Their values inevitably colour their interpretation of the facts. Therefore, the key to obtaining knowledge is to identify those knowers whose ‘subjectivities’ or values provide the best (most accurate, truest) interpretation of the facts (Tong). In general, feminist standpoint theorists believe that powerless people see things better than influential people do. They claim that because the powerful have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, they do not consider the sexism, racism, and classism that prevails in their world. Empathy can be expressed in different ways. As mentioned earlier, it is both cognitive as well as affective. According to Strauss, psychologists have particularly distinguished cognitive from affective components of empathy (Strauss). The cognitive aspect of empathy stresses awareness of other person’s feelings which is better understood from a feminist subjective standpoint. In contrast, the affective aspect is an emotional reaction to others’ feelings (Hoffman, ‘The Contribution of Empathy’ 648). Although awareness of another person’s feelings is necessary for a sympathetic-affective response, it is insufficient. Strauss has defined empathy as ‘a sympathetic affective response, based on awareness or imaginative reconstruction of another’s feelings’ (Strauss). According to dominant Western philosophy, no individual can become a true self unless they separate themselves from others. Such a self is always on guard against the ominous ‘other,’ who may interfere at any moment. Ever ready for combat, an ‘autonomous man’ guards his rights vigilantly. Though free, isolated, hostile, fearful, competitive, and competitive, the autonomous man seems an unlikely candidate for moral responsibility (Held). In contrast

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to the self-hood of man, existentialist feminist Simone de Beauvoir, in her path-breaking book titled Second Sex, established the social, psychological, biological, and metaphysical construction of woman as perpetually ‘other.’ According to feminists, men’s experiences in the public world can be best explained by Descartes’s ‘I think; therefore I am.’ Feminist philosopher Lorraine Code contradicted Descartes by saying: Had our parents not taught us how to speak, we would never have learned how to think. One never becomes a ‘self’ by distancing from others. On the contrary, one becomes a self only in and through relationships with others. (367)

Women’s experiences have led them to consider that the existence, identity, and roles of the self depend on others. Feminist legal theorist Robin West stresses that women’s experiences, particularly their physical experiences related to ‘pregnancy’ and ‘intercourse,’ have taught them that human beings are essentially connected to rather than separate from others (West). Empirical research has strongly linked empathy to altruistic behaviour (Eisenberg and Miller). Empathy gives a basis for moral action. It is based not on how one would like to be treated but on how the other would treat us. However, empathy has been criticised by some moral philosophers as a source of moral action. Martin Hoffman celebrated empathy as the basis of morality; however, he emphasised that empathy is likely to be more assertive toward known people over those we consider lesser-known or unknown and different (Hoffman, ‘The Contribution of Empathy’ 667). David Hume and Adam Smith were among other Enlightenment philosophers who considered sympathy the basis of social life. However, in recent years, feminists have been elaborating moral theories that centre on empathy, often in contrast to a less-effective ‘justice’ orientation (Hoffman, ‘The Contribution of Empathy’ 667). Cultural feminists often valorise the traits and behaviours traditionally associated with women and praise women’s capacity to develop close human relationships like sharing, nurturing, giving, sympathising, and empathising. They stressed that the connection is not about separate selves signing social contracts but about women using their bodies to link separate families and generations together (Whitbeck). In The Reproduction of Mothering, Nancy Chodorow analysed the significant psychological consequences of mothering, where mothers are more likely than fathers to be the primary caretakers of young children. Girls can develop their gender identity like their primary caretaker, whereas boys’ sense of masculinity requires negating identity with their primary caretaker (Strauss). According to Chodorow:

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Girls emerge from this [preoedipal] period with a basis for ‘empathy’ built into their primary definition of self in a way that boys do not. Girls emerge with a stronger basis for experiencing another’s needs or feelings as one’s own (or of thinking that one is experiencing another’s needs and feelings). (167)

Radical feminists agree with cultural feminists that connection is women’s fundamental reality. However, radical feminists point to the darker side of the connection thesis. They claim that women’s connections allow for exploitation and misery. ‘Invasion and intrusion, rather than intimacy, nurturance, and care, is the unofficial story of women’s subjective experience of connection’ (West 29). According to Gilligan and Attanucci, women’s moral reasoning is more likely than men’s, employing an ‘ethics of care.’ These ethics of care say to ‘not to turn away from someone in need’ (Gilligan and Attanucci 73); rather than impersonal justice, they believe in acting ‘not to treat others unfairly’ (Gilligan and Attanucci 73). Gilligan and Attanucci mentioned research studies that show: The moral judgments of women differ from those of men in the greater extent to which women’s judgments are tied to feelings of empathy and compassion. (69)

Undoubtedly women are not a homogeneous category, and cultural variations and social location significantly influence empathic behaviour. However, it is evident that theoretically, women are better predisposed toward empathy due to the specific gender roles they are expected to play. DISPLAY OF EMPATHY DURING THE PANDEMIC BY WOMEN LEADERS Across the world, women are on the frontlines of the COVID-19 response, in various capacities, as heads of state and government, healthcare workers, carers at home, community leaders, and mobilisers, among other roles. Women leaders in several countries excel in the response, providing powerful examples of how women’s leadership and participation can bring more effective, inclusive, fair policies, plans, and budgets to address the pandemic (UN Women). The marginality of female-led countries (nineteen, less than 10 percent) often makes them invisible and unviable for studies. Supriya Garikipati and Uma Kambhampati, in their paper titled ‘Leading the Fight Against the Pandemic: Does Gender “Really” Matter,’ analysed data from 194 countries and tried to establish that female-led countries have indeed done better than their male-led counterparts. Since only nineteen

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countries had women leaders globally, the researchers used a ‘nearest neighbour’ method based on socio-demographic and economic factors, pairing female-headed Germany with the United Kingdom, Taiwan with South Korea, Norway with Ireland, and Hongkong with Singapore in terms of cases and deaths (Figures 13.1 and 13.2) (Garikipati and Kambhampati). The existing research on leadership patterns and pandemic management emphasised following leadership qualities in terms of their predisposition toward the gender of the leader. RISK MANAGEMENT Regarding risk management, male leaders believe in investing more and appear more risk-taking than females. Indeed, in the current crisis, several incidents of risky behaviour by male leaders (e.g., the election campaign and permission for Kumbh Mela by the Modi Government in India, irresponsible statements on social distancing by Trump in the United States and Bolsarno in Brazil) have been reported in the press. In their seminal work, Jones and Olken use the death of a leader as an exogenous variation in leadership and find that individual leaders can play a crucial role in shaping the growth of nations. Building on this, Besley et al. find that better national outcomes result in more competent leaders (specifically in education and skills). Most women leaders are more qualified than their male colleagues in many other countries. Women’s priorities are supported by their feminine values, classified as communal by prioritising preventive measures and factors consistent with high levels of disaster preparedness (Abele).

Figure 13.1.  Comparative data on COVID-19 death in comparable male and female-led countries, 2020. Source: Garikipati and Kambhampati.

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Figure 13.2.  Comparative data on COVID-19 death in comparable male and female-led countries, 2021. Source: Johns Hopkins University, Center for Systems Science and Engineering COVID-19 data, November 2021.

Women leaders’ prompt reaction and quick decision making capacities in the face of potential fatalities averted deaths. In most cases, they locked down earlier than their male counterparts in similar circumstances. ‘Women were less willing to take risks with lives but were more willing to accept risks about the early lockdown of economies’ (Garikipati and Kambhampati). Women leaders could be viewed as being more risk-averse than male leaders regarding human life; however, they were prepared to take more risks with the economy (Garikipati and Kambhampati). Ertac and Gurdal observed that in terms of risk attitudes, the women who like to lead and decide for the group are no different from women who do not wish to lead. However, men find that the ones who would like to lead tend to take more risks on behalf of the group. Similarly, studies examining confidence and associated behaviour among men and women find that men are more overconfident in success in uncertain situations than women (Niederle and Vesterlund). Women leaders generally possess good listening skills and the tendency to seek input and counsel for significant decisions. Their ability to connect enables them to envision a big-picture situation overview and be proficient in risk management.

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LEADERSHIP STYLE The narrative that women leaders are managing the pandemic better is mainly based on the political double-bind (Burns and Kattelman; Burns and Murdie). Political double-bind is a gender stereotype and scrutiny that men in power generally do not face. Women leaders, on the other hand, are expected to be both stereotypically masculine (‘act like a leader’) and stereotypically feminine (‘act like a woman’). Violation of either calls for stringent punishment for women leaders regarding public refusal (Windsor et al.). However, during a pandemic, the double-bind helped women to thrive in their capacity as leaders. A situation like the pandemic demands decisive action (seen as masculine traits) about health and human security (seen as feminine policy areas). Feminine-gendered traits, such as being caring and nurturing; being trustworthy (Barnes and Beaulieu); focussing on health, human security, education, and capacity-building (Barnes); and being better at anticipatory policymaking helped in ‘flattening the curve’ (Eagly et al.). Women’s leadership was transformational, emphasising capacity-building and resilience for citizens (Kutzin and Sparkes), ideal for withstanding shocks like pandemics. Women shared gendered experience and capacity to address crisis-solving personally put them in an advantageous empathic condition described by Hoffman as classical conditioning (Hoffman, Empathy and Moral Development). The pandemic situation offers women leaders a golden opportunity to utilise the double-bind by conforming to the gendered norms of being empathic and demonstrating their ability to be strong leaders in enforcing strict policies such as closing borders and mandating lockdown measures, as Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand did (Windsor et al.). On the other hand, men’s leadership is categorised as transactional, providing rewards for individual behaviour and procrastinating the innovation of solutions to the problems (Eagly et al.) like policy interventions such as stimulus payments to citizens as post facto interventions to alleviate the economic impacts (Windsor et al.). The study by Zenger and Folkman, published in Harvard Business Review, emphasises interpersonal skills, such as ‘inspires and motivates.’ According to the study, women leaders ‘communicate powerfully,’ prioritise ‘collaboration/ teamwork,’ and emphasise ‘relationship building,’ a necessary prerequisite for working for the community during duress. Their analysis showed that female leaders expressed more awareness of followers’ fears, concern for wellbeing, and confidence in their plans. According to Garikipati and Kambhampati, men prefer to lead in a task-oriented style, and women are interpersonally oriented. Consistent with this finding, women tended to adopt a more democratic and participative style and a less autocratic or directive style than men (Marcus

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et al.). The leadership styles of women leaders in the COVID-19 response have been described as ‘more collective than individual, more collaborative than competitive and more coaching than commanding’ (Zednik). There has been evidence of the decisive and clear communication styles adopted by several women leaders during this crisis, whether it was Norway’s Prime Minister Erna Solberg speaking directly to children or Ardern checking in with her citizens through Facebook Lives (Garikipati and Kambhampati). Policy speeches given by women world leaders during the pandemic’s peak have significantly helped shape the global perception that women leaders controlled the spread of the virus better than men. ‘These leaders have utilized familiar, pro-social, feminine frames in their speeches that align with the political double bind and resonate with citizens’ (Windsor et al.). Figure 13.3 quantifies the leadership qualities of both men and women and, after a 360-degree evaluation, ranked women better than men on almost all parameters. Men only marginally fared well in technical competency, a traditional forte of men to which women had restricted access. FEMININE SOCIAL-CULTURAL ECOSYSTEM AND PANDEMIC MANAGEMENT POLICIES According to Windsor et al., in their article titled ‘Gender in the Time of COVID-19: Evaluating National Leadership and COVID-19 Fatalities,’ acknowledged that although there is sound reasoning behind the previous narrative based on women’s leadership and policy priorities, the logic behind

Figure 13.3.  Leadership qualities of men and women leaders after 360-degree evaluation. Source: Zenger and Folkman.

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the narrative is far more critical. One has to appreciate the underlying factors that bring women to national leadership in the first place. They believed that women could attain national leadership positions in countries where core cultural values reward traits often found in women leaders, such as a long-term orientation, a collectivist (rather than individualist) focus, and fewer power disparities in society (Windsor et al.). They opined: Therefore, these countries have policy landscapes that enable leaders to consult with others carefully, weigh options, examine the larger policy/outcome picture of significant decisions, and manage risk effectively. Women who lead these countries can successfully manage crises like the Pandemic not because they are women but because they are leading countries more likely to elect women to the highest executive office in the first place and because those countries have policy landscapes and priorities that predispose them to manage risk better. (Windsor et al.)

The regime and governance system type often influence the leader’s and the country’s overall crisis response. Compared to authoritarian states, leaders of democratic countries are more empathic toward the requirements of their citizens during a crisis for the sheer fear of public retribution in the next election. The COVID-19 pandemic was no exception. Liberal democracies (free countries) generally produce more women chief executives than conservative and authoritarian non-democracies (not free countries) (Windsor et al.). The cultural factor most relevant to our inquiry is masculinity versus femininity (Geertz) in terms of ‘empathy.’ Countries that celebrate feminine traits prioritise having minimal role differentiation between genders, encourage sympathy for the weak, and elect women to multiple political positions (Inglehart et al.). If a woman-led country embodies feminine cultural norms, then by definition, there is broad societal support for policies that would benefit the public good. Other cultural features that align with feminine social norms include less power distance (more egalitarianism), less uncertainty avoidance, more collectivism, longer-term orientation, and more indulgence (e.g., basic needs satisfied; self-fulfilment needs met) (Windsor et al.). In the wake of a highly mutating COVID-19 virus, successful management depends on the ability of the policymakers to mitigate uncertainty and adapt strategies consistently updated with new information. It is not surprising that Erman and Medeiros, in their studies, found that cultures that tend to avoid uncertainty are associated with higher COVID-19 fatalities. On the other hand, countries more able to tolerate uncertainty were better able to handle pandemics and more likely to elect women leaders. Erman and Medeiros further find that cultures that promote individualism and long-term orientation are associated with higher COVID-19 fatalities. Tables 13.1 and 13.2,

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Gendered Empathy and Its Impact on Efficient Pandemic Management Table 13.1. Individual and state function mitigation policies Individual Behaviour Targeting

State Function Targeting

Curfew Health Monitoring Health Testing Hygiene Lockdown Public Awareness Measures Quarantine/ Self-Quarantine Restrictions on Mass Gatherings Social Distancing

Anti-Disinformation Campaign Closure and Regulation of Schools (Primary/Secondary) Declaration of Emergency External Border Restrictions Health Resources Internal Border Restrictions Task Force or Administrative Configuration Other (uncategorised policies) Restrictions and Regulation of Business Restrictions and Regulation of Government Services

Source: Windsor et al.

borrowed from Windsor et al.’s studies, show how cultural factors could play a role in a country’s ability to handle the COVID-19 pandemic and its election of women leaders. CONCLUSION Undoubtedly, women across the globe are at the helm of institutions carrying out effective and inclusive COVID-19 responses, from the highest levels of decision-making to frontline service delivery (UN Women). Research studies mentioned in the chapter proved beyond a doubt that countries with more a robust feminine culture, longer-term orientation, more indulgence, less power distance, greater tolerance for uncertainty, and more collectivism experienced fewer COVID-19-related fatalities (Windsor et al.). Compared to a man, empathic leadership by a woman has magnified the effects of cultural Table 13.2. Individual- and state-level behaviour target mitigation policies as a percentage of all state policies in women-led and men-led countries. Women-led Countries Bangladesh Germany Bolivia Finland Source: Windsor et al.

Individual Level 11% 25% 19% 23%

State Level 89% 75% 81% 77%

Nearest Neighbour Men-led Countries Bhutan United Kingdom Mexico Austria

Individual Level 25% 60% 73% 58%

State Level 75% 40% 27% 42%

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traits that are already beneficial to pandemic management (Windsor et al.; Garikipati and Kambhampati; Zenger and Folkman). Despite the visible success of the feminine leadership style, women worldwide remain significantly under-represented in many aspects of decision making. Gender-based violence and attacks on women in public life are also increasing (UN Economic and Social Council). According to UN Women: Women comprise only a quarter (24.9 percent) of members of national parliaments worldwide and 36.3 percent of elected officials in local deliberative bodies. Globally, as of 1 January 2020, only 21.3 percent of ministers are women. In only 30 cabinets worldwide, women comprise at least 40 percent of ministers. Women’s under-representation as health ministers is especially concerning: while women make up 70 percent of health sector workers, only 24.7 percent of the world’s health ministers are women, and they hold just 25 percent of senior roles in health institutions.

Women’s unequal representation at the decision making echelons puts the risk of women being overlooked in the development initiatives, scrutiny and monitoring of COVID-19 policies, plans and budgets, economic recovery, and future health resilience. Therefore, we need to bolster existing gender equality institutions and mechanisms in the pandemic response to ensure that gender equality concerns are embedded in the design and implementation of pandemic policy responses and budgets. We must recognise and remove barriers to women’s political participation by creating safe spaces for women leaders both online and offline. The world requires a more empathic approach toward accommodating women leaders in decision making positions to receive a more empathic cultural ecosystem and political response in governance. WORKS CITED Abele, A.E. ‘The Dynamics of Masculine-Agentic and Feminine-Communal Traits: Findings from a Prospective Study.’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 85, no. 4, 2003, p. 768. Barnes, T.D., and E. Beaulieu. ‘Women Politicians, Institutions, and Perceptions of Corruption.’ Comparative Political Studies, vol. 52, no. 1, 2019, pp. 134–67. Barnes, T. ‘Gender Quotas and The Representation of Women: Empowerment, Decision-making, and Public Policy.’ Rice University thesis, 2012. https:​//​ scholarship​.rice​.edu​/handle​/1911​/64632. Besley, Timothy, Jose G. Montalvo, and Marta Reynal-Querol. ‘Do Educated Leaders Matter?’ The Economic Journal, vol. 121, no. 554, 2011, pp. 205–27.

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Burns, C., and K. Kattelman. ‘Women Chief Executives: The Political Catch-22 of Counterterrorism.’ Contemporary Voices: St Andrews Journal of International Relations, vol. 8, no. 2, 2017. ——— and A. Murdie. ‘Female Chief Executives and State Human Rights Practices: Self-fulfilling the Political Double Bind.’ Journal of Human Rights, vol. 17, no. 4, 2018, pp. 470–84. Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering. University of California Press, 1999. Code, Lorraine. ‘Second Persons.’ In Science, Morality and Feminist Theory, edited by Marsha Hanen and Kai Nielsen. University of Calgary Press, 1987, p. 367. Cuff, B., et al. ‘Empathy: A Review of the Concept.’ Emotion Review, vol. 8, no. 2, 2014. Eagly, A.H., et al. ‘Transformational, Transactional, and Laissez-faire Leadership Styles: A Meta-analysis Comparing Women and Men.’ Psychological Bulletin, vol. 129, no. 4, 2003, p. 569. Eisenberg, N., & Miller, P. A. (1987). ‘The Relation of Empathy to Prosocial and Related Behaviors.’ Psychological Bulletin, 101, 910–119. https://doi. org/10.1037/0033-2909.101.1.91 Erman, A., and M. Medeiros. ‘Exploring the Impact of Cultural Variability on COVID-19-related Mortality: A Meta-analytic Approach.’ Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12, 2021. Ertac, Seda, and Mehmet Y. Gurdal. ‘Deciding to Decide: Gender, Leadership and Risk-taking in Groups.’ Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, vol. 83, 2012, pp. 24–30. Garikipati, Supriya, and Uma Kambhampati. ‘Leading the Fight Against the Pandemic: Does Gender “Really” Matter?’ Feminist Economics, vol. 27, no. 1–2, 2021, pp. 401–18. Geertz, C. The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books, 2017. Gilligan, Carol, and Jane Attanucci. ‘Two Moral Orientations.’ In Mapping the Moral Domain: A Contribution of Women’s Thinking to Psychological Theory and Education, edited by Carol Gilligan, Janie Victoria Ward, and Jill McLean Taylor. Harvard University Graduate School of Education, 1988, pp. 73–86. Harding, Sandra. The Science Question in Feminism. Cornell University Press, 1986. Held, Virginia. ‘Non-contractual Society: A Feminist View.’ In Science, Morality and Feminist Theory, edited by Marsha Hanen and Kai Nielsen. University of Calgary Press, 1987, 127. Hoffman, M.L. ‘Sex Differences in Empathy and Related Behaviors.’ Psychological Bulletin, vol. 84, no. 4, 1977, pp. 712–22. ———. ‘The Contribution of Empathy to Justice and Moral Judgment.’ In Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science, edited by Alvin I. Goldman. MIT Press, 1993[1987], pp. 647–80. ———. Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice. Cambridge University Press, 2000. Inglehart, R., et al.. The World Values Survey. 2005. https:​//​www​.worldvaluessurvey​ .org​/wvs​.jsp.

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Jones, Benjamin F., and Benjamin A. Olken. ‘Do Leaders Matter? National Leadership and Growth Since World War II.’ The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 120, no. 3, 2005, pp. 835–64. Kutzin, J., and S.P. Sparkes. ‘Health Systems Strengthening, Universal Health Coverage, Health Security and Resilience.’ Bulletin of the World Health Organization, vol. 94, no. 1, 2016, p. 2. Marcus, Leonard J., et al. ‘Meta-Leadership and National Emergency Preparedness: A Model to Build Government.’ Biosecurity and Bioterrorism, vol. 4, no. 2, 2006, pp. 128–34. Niederle, Muriele, and Lise Vesterlund. ‘Do Women Shy Away from Competition? Do Men Compete Too Much?’ The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 122, no. 3, 2007, pp. 1067–101. Radnitzky, Gerard, and Karl Raimund Popper (Eds.). Evolutionary Epistemology Rationality and the Society of Knowledge. Open Court, 1987. Strauss, Claudia. ‘Is Empathy Gendered and, If So, Why? An Approach from Feminist Psychological Anthropology.’ Ethos, vol. 32, 2004, pp. 432–57. Tong, Rosemarie. ‘Feminist Perspectives on Empathy as an Epistemic Skill and Caring as a Moral Virtue.’ Journal of Medical Humanities, vol. 18, no. 3, 1997. West, Robin. ‘Jurisprudence and Gender.’ The University of Chicago Law Review, vol. 55, no. 1, 1988, p. 3. Whitbeck, Caroline. ‘A Different Reality: Feminist Ontology.’ In Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy, edited by Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall. Unwin Hyman, 1989, pp. 51–76. Windsor, L.C., et al. ‘Gender in the Time of COVID-19: Evaluating National Leadership and COVID-19 Fatalities.’ PLoS ONE, vol. 15, no. 12, 2020, p. e0244531. Wondra, Joshua D., and Phoebe C. Ellsworth. ‘An Appraisal Theory of Empathy and Other Vicarious Emotional Experiences.’ Psychological Review, vol. 122, no. 3, 2015, pp. 411– 28. UN Economic and Social Council. ‘Review and Appraisal of the Implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and the Outcomes of the Twenty-third Special Session of the General Assembly: Report of the Secretary General.’ 2020. UN Women. ‘COVID-19 And Women’s Leadership: From an Effective Response to Building Back Better.’ Policy Brief No-18, 2020. Zednik, R. ‘A Shaken World Demands Balanced Leadership.’ Medium, April 15, 2020. Zenger, Jack, and Joseph Folkman. ‘Women Are Better Leaders During a Crisis.’ Harvard Business Review, December 30, 2020.

Index

9/11, 4, 8, 83, 92, 94, 156, 158, 159– 61, 171 Aila, 59 Agamben, Giorgio, 81, 173 Andaman, 73 Anthropocene, 2, 7, 144, 147, 149 Antigone, 168, 177 Apex City, 46, 48–52 apocalyptic, 3, 42, 44, 55, 91, 150 Arakan, 103–7, 110, 111 Arendt, Hannah, 171 Awami League, 130 Bangladesh, 8, 15, 16, 64, 77, 101, 110, 112, 114, 115, 129–36, 138, 141, 142, 190, 193 Baudrillard, Jean, 156 bhadroloki, 122 biolegitimacy, 91 Black Mirror, 41, 42 Burma, 103–10, 112, 114, 115 capitalocene, 3, 7, 144 carnivalesque, 125 carnophallogocentrism, 120, 124 catastrophic literature, 152 citizenship, 91, 96, 100, 101, 106, 108– 13, 156, 157

Climate Change, 7, 13, 14, 42–48, 52, 56, 59, 60, 62, 65, 67 cognitive empathy, 26 Communist Party of India (Marxist), 17, 84 conditional empathy, 1, 7, 120, 126 conditional hospitality, 96 corporeal reality, 124 cosmopolitan empathy machine, 119 Dali, Salvador, 63 Dalit, 15, 16, 19, 22, 23, 82–84 Dandakaranya, 15–18, 21, 73, 74–80, 82, 84 dystopia, 41, 46, 52, 126 East Pakistan, 15, 16, 18, 73, 74, 76, 106, 129, 130, 131, 134 enlightenment, 157 fecopoetics, 8, 119, 121 First World War, 170–72 Fyatarus, 6, 8, 119–26 Gemeinschaf, 166, 167 Gesellschaft, 166 Global South, 97 The Great Derangement, 43, 53, 56, 63, 64, 68 193

194

Index

Ground Zero, 171 Hegel, 78, 79, 167 Heidegger, Martin, 81 Hellenic, 148, 169, 170 Hiroshima, 78 Holocaust, 171, 178 homelessness, 81, 74 ingestion, 124, 126 Islamophobic, 87, 93 Jugantar, 20, 21 Kazi Nazrul Islam, 136–38 Latour, Bruno, 143 Left government, 17, 19, 21–23 Liberation War, 8, 16, 129–31, 134, 135, 139, 140 Manasa Devi, 55, 57, 59, 61, 62 Marxist, 17, 84, 152 Megamachine, 26, 28, 36, 38 Middle East, 4, 87, 88, 93, 160 Migration, 7, 8, 67, 76, 87, 88, 93–96, 103, 111 Monster, 48, 49, 88, 89, 92, 95 Morrison, Toni, 61 Mourning, 6, 9, 97, 162, 165, 167, 168, 176, 177 Myanmar, 2, 8, 99, 101–3, 105–13 Nabarun Bhattacharya, 6, 8, 119, 127, 128 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 9, 166, 173 necro-capitalism, 157, 158 necro-power, 157, 158–60

Patkar, Medha, 37, 40 pharmakos, 160 phenomenology, 78, 79 postapocalyptic, 121 postcolonial asylums, 90 post-humanist, 126 precariousness, 84 Rahman, Sheikh Mujibur, 16, 130, 134 Rakhine, 103, 107, 109–13 razakars, 131, 134, 141 realism, 3, 7, 43, 45, 55, 57, 58, 61, 63–65, 67 risky body, 88, 89 Rohingya Muslims, 99, 102, 103, 107, 108 Sassoon, Siegfried, 171 science fiction, 7, 41, 42–47, 52 Sen, Orijit, 7, 26, 27, 31 shock doctrine, 3, 4, 120, 124, 126, 127 South 24 Parganas, 74 Sunderban, 58, 59, 62, 64, 66 telepathic, 57, 58, 59, 63–65 Thunberg, Greta, 42, 53 transcendental, 92, 120, 123, 160 Trump, Donald, 42, 45, 94 Ukraine, 87, 96 uncanny, 2, 3, 56, 77, 81, 92, 93, 121– 24, 147, 151 United Nations, 112 Vietnam, 171 Vishnu, 28, 30–36 World War II, 78, 80, 81, 171

Oriental, 149

xenophobic, 94, 102, 158, 160

Panglong Agreement, 107 Partition, 6, 15, 23, 76, 77, 80, 81, 83, 85, 86, 106, 134

yuga, 146, 150

About the Contributors

Sk Sagir Ali is an assistant professor of English literature at Midnapore College, West Bengal, India. Pritha Banerjee is an assistant professor in the Department of English, Vidyasagar Metropolitan College, Kolkata, India. Shinjini Basu is an assistant professor at the Department of English, VisvaBharati University, West Bengal, India.  Subhayu Bhattacharjee is an assistant professor at the Department of English, Mirik College, India. Madhumita Biswas is an assistant professor of English at Khatra Adibasi Mahavidyalaya, Bankura, India. Dr. Nilanjan Chakraborty is an assistant professor of English in the Department of English, Panchla Mahavidyalaya, West Bengal, India. Rajeesh C. Sarngadharan is an assistant professor in the Department of International Studies, Political Science and History, Christ University, Bannerghatta Campus, Bangalore, India. Swayamdipta Das is a state aided college teacher in the Department of English at Narasinha Dutt College, West Bengal, India. Joydip Datta is a PhD scholar in the Development Studies Department at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. Mohammad Shafiqul Islam is a professor at the Department of English, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet, Bangladesh. His 195

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About the Contributors

ORCID is https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9880-4645 and his email address is [email protected].  Debamitra Kar is an assistant professor at the Department of English, Women’s College, Calcutta, India. Swati Moitra is an assistant professor at the Department of English, Gurudas College, University of Calcutta, India. Sudeshna Mukherjee is an associate professor at the Centre for Women’s Studies, Bangalore University, India. Samrat Sengupta is an associate professor in the Department of English at Sidho-Kanho-Birsha University, West Bengal, India.