wang lung went in the fifth month on his horse
to the funeral of the second wife of the daughter of the
duke. in her palm her death had been foretold to the
exact phase of the moon. though it was spring the time was really
autumn the season was really winter was still.
a wooden age. the chief mourner was descended
from the emperor, was born when her mother was still
asleep so that when she came to she screamed &
forever hated her. they lived in the provinces rooted,
pervasive as grass. calamities surrender to their own accord.
will you attack the king with just footmen & chariots?
she dug deep into the earth unto the autumnal spring
and sat on its beaches and sang of her dead mother.
all this being a flagrant corruption of the manuscript.
take the silk utensils locusts keep the body fresh for 2
months after death before the burial there being no
impropriety in miscommunicating the death in such a ways
demonstrate your grief and then be silent. bury it again with
no mistakes in the ritual in a separate grave overlooking
a separate bay with flowers suchlike. discard no praise no blame
dress the corpse meet the bride travel to the western seaboard with
its older tribes. respect but kill. keep old friendships. here
the force is small the leaders hungry their warlike practices
only show. the 13th cycle of winter the 3 yr the 17th radical see the essays
on astrology by the learned and recently deceased mr.y.
wang lung wondered at the terms appropriate to narrate
the death of a princess, her soul's investiture
now passing to her daughter's husband and further
east past the mountain-ranges where the people
all helped pay in southernwood for the burial-(is there an error
in these texts on these sites or dates?). the mathematicians
calculated this as the dynasty's early years using the eclipse
and the odd usage of the phrase "paying interest on the moon".
the news of the death of the sovereign left the fort slowly
heavily, passing as a procession, past warring dukes
who now questioned every edict. propriety breeds presents.
the lord of the altars raised a powerful faction, breaking
each rule of the fourteen kinds of subordination accelerating
catastrophe, and soon here, an army this, an army that and there
sequels to covenants. affect the people by virtue, ravel the silk
you cannot lay down fire.a pantomime of insects. gather
the river's fish for the great sacrifice of atonement. the ruler this
and the ruler that, it wears one out. hunters have no rules no
husbandry. you cannot without without preparation nor
without anxiety. a house and tablet for the second wife
breaks the rules. the duke tells his feather weavers to
write his story even as the enemy crosses the suburb.
compassion is imperilled. the grain is in the locust's heart.
peace means to change.
wang lung's daughter goes to the harem at the statutory age
her sense of her worthiness makes her appear, twice,
in the classic. unseasonable as the undertaking was
covenants needed to be upgraded , more silk, more jade
she arrogates to her dignity as she thinks fit. the phrase
might mean more than seizure, certainly less than torture
the smearing of the lips of the daughter with the blood
of her victim. does this phrase mean son or hostage?
autumn is the seventh month. the sense of a hurried meeting
remains through all the sycophant's commissions. she built
a city while meditating, and a temple for her brother.
verily it is said the queen progresses the constellation
he was mated and then announced king in the temple.
let the sword separate the virtues and clan-bloods
merit for generations does not come simply
which river which fathers which officers which city
feet deep in snow?- which duke's suburb, on whose chariot
light and nimble may be your ancestors in ambuscade
smitten and cut to pieces hanging upside down as meat
in the mouth of crows. in every month an army
and a chronicle unconcluded. in spring the army entered.
in her virtue she did not covet territory the thread
of her karma light as muslin. discord amongst themselves
and secret dissatisfactions and so defeated. a lively
prejudiced account in the Book of . of course this tattoo
is a verb though it cannot be rendered. cross hostage princes
appear in each other's father's eyes. take your curved chariot
out of the temple. fill your mouth with the air of different countries
maintain your vigor. repentance is for the mature, the aged.
in the manner of killing he retained all propriety
feeding all tutelary deities, all fetuses of sons unborn.
every army must contribute a hundred pigs and fowl.
what use is it to curse a depraved man from field to field?
let the tablets tell their lies in stone. wang lung
omitted no ceremony that would have been appropriate
to the assassination of his brother at the meeting place
of the socalled jasmine river. he borrowed the fields
and symbols and the exchange of lands. the tripod
in the temple was a bribe. the roof of thatch
the chariot of grass, the millet is clean,
the historiographer of the interior, of ancient designation
thought of states that their roots reach wide
but their fruit be small else the horse will lie entangled
in its yoke. if you married above your state
the minister accompanied the husband, modest
reverent mindful of being untouched and returned
perhaps even if the crops fail or freeze. sacrifice
to keep locusts away. the sage's pencil must sometime
be pruned. the uncertain speculations of youth
the walled cities of childhood (whose spirit
possesses the centre?) step on the square to left then right
in the fishscape's battalion. the arrow on his shoulder notwithstanding
the child-bride fought. a sacrifice is unseasonable in fall
when insects forsake burrows. was he killed in a quarrel
about a bird or a woman sitting on the back of the shaman-officer?
what auspice of virtue be this be- what marks on the body
here one cannot mention the dead's name else an incestuous commerce
indulges. don't hunt with fire in winter. bury your heart in jade.
the greed reaches to the person. as he did not like the gift
and felt insulted, he felt he must invade according to the rules
of old precedence. he attacked covertly, and won, bloodless.
wang lung in the nimble army in the suburb, ardent, at peace
in the harmonious troop. if they must win it is because the army
can dance. divine the odds of the doubt and the produce of the union.
the exit gives its names in contempt. the signification must lie
in the epigraph. covenants in autumn presage death of the marquis.
your weight in the scale is inappreciable. the error of the day
of the entering of the death. a bad king's contracts increase disorder.
every officer lies in his virtue and his fear. cross the river
in order for on the other side lies defeat. let the mandarin live
by his nine unrepentant, unavenged calamities in its granary of ice.
reprisal upon reprisal, like lightning the armies
scatter rice, disrespectful to the duke's temples, tearing
the princess' chariot. any man can be a husband but there is only one
father, one mother, one prevision, one confederacy. drunk
she stole the flag cherishing eclipse and resentment
becoming a lone prisoner, refusing the marquisate, the sacrificial
epaulets. one understands the text only by proposing error.
the moon in its epicycle wants exactitude and remonstrates.
the coffin arrived in the seventh month of fall.
the burial was in winter, the mourning was forever
though he was an evil man brought to an evil end.
conjunctions are proper to the classical; poor lord
in deference to majesty do not stay quiet at home
but renew the great crimes and friendships and the common
wickedness between the states. these bodies stay
in no coffin. she sees with only half her eye.
equal concubines must have equal sons and eunuchs and cities
and governments. these narratives retire no justice.
in autumn build a reception to house the base murder.
mourning must feel as an absence. all dead soldiers
are remembered here as heroes. a trisyllabic name
is barbarous and must suffer withdrawment. the object of the meeting
is to repeat the crime, to bury for a second time.
marriages are recorded not burials not internments
at the beginning of the battle her heart lay agitated
as a crooked spear, after fulness comes absolution
under neither the tree of heaven nor state does the bridge
to the city of heaven pass over the enemies' gravestone.
ancestors have been boiled and slandered, revenge is no vagary
great officers hazard enterprise, describe restoration increase
both flower and root in all the eleven directions & generation
multiply prisoners and spoils feasts and detainments
eat the navel of the hour feed victims perpetually to altars
extinguish enemy lineage make stars fall as rain as wheat
but an inch from the dowager the stars retreated reascending
waiting patiently for troops and the real or pretended invasion.
sow vigorously your virtue abroad. at home in the season of melons
she was bestowed the robe of the general. she had wrestled the large boar
packed full of assassins. blood was the preponderant covenant spilt.
in the war chariot she took the longer road to deceive, to pursue
the flying enemy. wang lung covered his horses in tiger skin
to make extinct for the first time a heaven, to flood it
to hold great sacrifices of condolences throwing field of millet
into the plague. swift was ruin. he killed with a single slap.
praise or blame is futile in such. gain a harem but lose the state.
the king was bound in a rhinoceros hide and his hands
and feet pickled. let critics condemn who ever heard them
but mostly the print is silent, extinguished.
when men are full of fear their breath flares up
and makes real such monsters. citizens have a doubled heart.
make compassion, but act, speak, assert. you can neither
douse the flame from afar nor approach it.
make inroads into spring. there is nothing in the circumstances
inconsistent or dilatory. in snow's winter there stay many deer.
artful but worthless he feasted the guards got them drunk
killed whom he pleased. history lies fine underneath the print.
three feet turtle attack red deer gathering at the city's end.
in gazing-in the particular gold leaf he missed the whole
the palanquin, the harem's daughters and their parasols and cooks.
the war is a pantomimic dance that never tires, it asserts its rude joy
over all calamity. the sun photographs the mountains waving at the sky.
the temple's pillars stay painted red. ancestors within were fed.
the punitive expeditions of punishment is justice by default.
sacrifice by moonlight, the beating of drums, offerings of victims.
a woman of virtue and ability. a state that does not know to dance
does not know to make war, to surprise by stealth. spirits flee
the temple walls. this city is in winter, its grain insufficient
its insects in plague, even horses bolt the stables.
graphic but fabulous the tales of tribes at boundaries:
those last conquered are set upon the next outsider.
corpses grow in rain feeding upon imagination's dark archive
historiographers of the interiors must force reason
a serf with money is still indentured in an absent hour.
every autumn a daughter is buried, age seven being the cutoff
for the historical record. the younger ones are still too much
in the womb's marine heaven. tablets commend succor
for children-marquis' culmination. if one's heart holds no flaw
how may he regret childlessness, posterity has other ways.
carriages and horses and feet and diagrams, other original dignities
new tablets will be put in old temples, even oceans age
armies are cast away, the spirit changes, new milfoils
prophesy anew, storks fly in augury. cook for your rulers
offer in sealskin, leather carriages and the cold metal of symbol.
the text conceals the manner of death in rare display
of dilatory euphemisms. but all men have relatives
and horses and jade and taxes and immigrants are in stake.
that year in spring there was no rain in the fourth month
by the rain of the sixth the new army had moved in.
the lack of rain was no calamity but an auspicious kindness.
the threat was as of the locking of the boat on a placid lake
his cheek lost color, an incursion followed, the spirits strained.
what robe will you wear in the coffin? the tortoise divines.
discriminate is the guilt. the heir-daughter walls her grief.
relentless is the fable. in fall lies the eclipse, hour of dispossession
read the clouds. assassins are not to be played with. spirits vomit.
in a grand display the flags loom. families are criminals together.
they allowed her to burn her coffin, returned her silk.
if you are resolved, don't pretend to be humble; choose strength
or alliance. morning awaits evening. do honor to virtue and the punishments.
secure succession. invade the great temple to make sacrifice of the 5th yr in it
and to interpret its tablet. the charioteer will betray & mystify.
the tribes of the east will rise. the prince lay dead unclaimed, deceived
unsceptred, inadmissable, obtrudant.
Showing posts with label indian politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label indian politics. Show all posts
Monday, December 28, 2009
Saturday, November 28, 2009
naming the other's face
that we choose to call them terrorists, that terror is the dominant face, mode, mood. if we say it saddens us, depresses us, rather than terrifies, how may 'we' differently act; or, even, what might it take to just acknowledge the simple panicked, feeling (& yet also the need & finding of refuge) of the desire for pure animal's flight-
a mood does not belong to parcellable time-- hence the condemnation of the holocaust-denier, but no equivalent condemnation of the imperialism/colonialism-denier; or the fact that slavery was unfortunate history (& hence & thus fortunately passed), but no term exists for the perpetualism of the racism-denier, for (s)he who denies that race pervades us still
2. a key political question for the next half century & beyond is if the united states (& to a lesser extent the eurostate) will accept to peacefully & non invasively, non abrasively decline-peace depends on all countries' maturity on this-& india, china, etc would do well to accept that we are going to be very largely very poor for much longer, for centuries perhaps, a longer period than anyone's decline
a mood does not belong to parcellable time-- hence the condemnation of the holocaust-denier, but no equivalent condemnation of the imperialism/colonialism-denier; or the fact that slavery was unfortunate history (& hence & thus fortunately passed), but no term exists for the perpetualism of the racism-denier, for (s)he who denies that race pervades us still
2. a key political question for the next half century & beyond is if the united states (& to a lesser extent the eurostate) will accept to peacefully & non invasively, non abrasively decline-peace depends on all countries' maturity on this-& india, china, etc would do well to accept that we are going to be very largely very poor for much longer, for centuries perhaps, a longer period than anyone's decline
Monday, February 16, 2009
aanchalik dalits, naming & insult
Nikhil Govind
On Name Calling
INTRODUCTION
1. EUROPEAN BILDUNGSROMAN
In this paper I will concern myself with a single narrative of self-attestation- that of Joothan written by Omprakash Valmiki in 1993 (trans. by Arun Prabha Mukherjee, 2003). This type of narrative will, for the purposes of this present paper, be de-linked from the more specifically genetic matrix of the European Bildungsroman. I however do want to begin by speculating in a preliminary way in this first part of the introduction on the possible - if only through difference- linkages between the canonical European Bildungsroman and the novel I discuss. This is partly because I believe that later in my project I do hope to more explicitly return and rethink the modes of commutability between these frames of reference- for example, those involving both certain thematic elements (the labor of memory) as well as narrative strategies (delay, fragmentation) within a complex calculus of correlation and departure from the model of individual subject formation as envisaged in the classical nineteenth century European Bildungsroman.
Thus for example, in relation to this question of self-formation one might begin with the influential theorization offered by the literary scholar Franco Moretti in The Way of the World (Moretti 2000). In the chapter on the Bildungsroman in European Culture Moretti explicitly writes in the very first footnote to the chapter that his work cannot accommodate the non Europeanized Russian novel (i.e. he can write of Pushkin and Turgenev, but not Tolstoy or Dostoevsky) due to “ the persistence of a marked religious dimension (be it the “politico-national” version of War and Peace, or Dostoevsky’s ethico-metaphysical one), which attaches meaning to individual existence in ways unthinkable in the fully secularized version of the Western European Bildungsroman.” (Moretti 63 2000). Later in my project I am invested in precisely these “ethico-metaphysical” aspects of the Russian novel- so for me Moretti leaves out rather too much. But at the same time, one may also take some issue with the way Moretti uses any of these multivalent terms – politico-national, ethico-metaphysical etc, even with reference to the Western European Bildungsroman. The assumption that Dickens, for example, is less politico-nationalist is deeply questionable- one may mention his many opinionated responses to imperialism, especially to charged events like the 1857 “mutiny”. It is also important to challenge Moretti for these reasons - for the hint of purity and insularity that is supposed to mark the Western European Bildungsroman- disinfected as its form is supposed to be from religion, politics, nationalism, ethics, metaphysics- presumably in the name of a purely secular, urbanized, purely self-evolving European citizen. One may remember that Moretti had also excluded the American novel “ where, in addition, “nature” retains a symbolic value alien to the essentially urban thematics of the European novel” (Moretti 563 2000).
In the European Bildungsroman the act of naming itself is often a proof of the achievement of a certain definition and ground of stability. For example, a David Copperfield, in the retrospective moment of self-writing, provides a backward-moving security. At the end of the novel he is a person with a name, an individual one, one who, in the very having of a name, indexes (as the very English phrase of “has achieved a name for himself”) a certain social success. The name thus individuates and provides a foothold for posterity by leaving an individual textual trace. It is from the point of the named moment that retrospectively the “unhinged” past is narrativized and engineered into a telic pattern. Coherence then may be made legible as occurring within the process of narrativisation or memoration, or in an indefinite, yet firmly positable future. This holds true no matter how individually unhinged many moments in David Copperfield’s life may have been. It may be arguable if, likewise, in the naming of A House for Mister Biswas, a large gift has not already been given to the Mister Biswas, notwithstanding the many individual tragedies of his life and death. This moment of naming is thus not only a self –directed calling but one that is uttered by the public- David Copperfield, earns a name for himself in a double movement- he recognizes and “hails” himself only in the moment of his recognition by respectable bourgeois society as Citizen Copperfield, with a respectable wife and respectable employment- it is from the achievement of this moment that the past finally yields to narrativization and full capture.
2. THE LITERARY AND CRITICAL CONTEXT OF JOOTHAN
However, for the purposes of this specific paper I wish to explore two aspects-which are surely significant for any model of self representation, Bildungsroman or otherwise. These polyvalent aspects are naming and speech/voice, and their mutual inflection. As stated I will not, in this paper, keep “looking back” to see how these concepts might have inflected or digressed from the canonical European Bildungsroman. I will limit myself to discussing the single novel Joothan. Joothan belongs, among other categories, to the genre of the so called “dalit novel”. “Dalit” is the self-given name of castes in India that have been understood to have been “depressed” for a long historical period- the term “depressed” was the colonial categorization of such “oppressed” classes/castes. Dalit literature was often opposed to lalit literature- the latter serving as the all-purpose metonymic for traditionalist Sanskrit poetics and literatures.
Dalit literature has been confronted since its very beginnings with this predicament of the presumed impassability of the categories of the “individual” versus the “social”. The important Maharashtrian critic Sharankumar Limbale, in his Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature (2005), writes:
It has been charged that Dalit literature is propagandistic, univocal and negative; that it does not represent the individual person; and that excessive resentment is heard in Dalit literature … because Dalit writers have presented their anguish and their questions in their literature, their literature has acquired a propagandist character (Limbale 56: 2003).
This binary between the individual and the social is as well worn in the literary criticism pertaining to the major regional Indian languages as it was for a long time in the Anglo American Academy. In reference to the same set of terms, Omprakash Valmiki, the author of Joothan, has himself written in his book on Dalit aesthetics:
The Dalit literary moverment is not just a literary movement. It is also a cultural and social movement. Dalit society has been imprisoned for a thousand years in the dark mist of ignorance, deprived of knowledge. Dalit literature is the portrayal of the wishes and aspirations of these oppressed and tormented Dalits. (Valmiki 97: 2001).
One can thus see how vexed and fraught any notion of autobiography is going to be in the face of such overdetermination. Dalit literature is forced to resort to the position of calling into doubt any authenticity of the upper caste writer- for if the upper caste writer’s writing is to be disarmed as an oppositional force, it is often through the mode of questioning his entire life’s legitimacy. One would be unwise to categorize such a rhetoric as a simple and gratuitous ad hominem attack. What is staked is the whole discourse of self representation in all its details- in this paper I will only discuss naming and voice, but many other aspects (the scope of language, art and imagination itself in their very limit or in their redemptive value, the notion of the human and the animal) are subsumed under this. For example, Valmiki writes:
Dragging and cutting dead animals- how will non Dalits write about this experience of Dalits with the power of imagination… only the horse, tethered to its stall after a whole day’s exhausting labor, knows how it feels, and not its owner… Freedom is the highest aesthetic value. Equality, freedom, justice and love are basic sentiments of people and society. There are many times more important than pleasure and beauty. (Valmiki x: 2001).
Dalit theorists argue that it is this quotidian aspect that they know best that makes them the best “realist” writers- and realism is simply assumed to be the highest literary mode and value. To them realism is less a simple adequation of representation to its object, but rather a specific level of the objectness of the object itself. One cannot be a realist writing about “flowers”, no matter how accurately or “realistically” one describes it- the flower turns into paper, it isn’t the res of reality enough. Only the skinning of the dead animal is res enough. And yet the power of this res is precisely the spontaneous transmutation of this most res-ness of the everyday to the most non material- i.e. the abstractable notion of suffering and its linguistic representation (Wankhade 316: 1992).
There are also the allied notions of the witnessing of this suffering, of this everydayness res.
Dalit writers who write autobiographies so that not only our history will stay alive but also our true portrayal of wrongdoers… personal experience brings out reality in a striking way… Ambedkar and Periyar spoke and wrote on the day-to-day experiences of the Dalitbahujan cases. (Valmiki xii: 2001).
ANALYSIS OF GENERAL THEMES IN JOOTHAN
The subtitle of Joothan- A Dalit’s Life- itself complicates simple readings. How is the accent distributed between “Dalit” and “Life”, especially as the indefinite article of “A” persists- are specific reading practices being invited or invoked? This is in some contrast to the European Bildungsroman, with its proper name (David Copperfield, Madame Bovary, Wilhelm Meister). It is perhaps even in some contrast to the variations available in “high” Hindi- the subtitle of Sachidanand Vatsyayan’s (“Agyeya”) important Hindi novel is Sekhar: A Life. Here, perhaps the English translation, “life” does constitute a fair semantic horizon, or perhaps it may signal a specific set of genetic protocols, or invite specific reading practices.
In Joothan, however, it seems that it is the mechanisms of a related series of affects (clustered, one might say around categories like insult and anger) that constitute the motor of the narrative, even if this narrative seems also to parallel a pseudo self making of the protagonist. As we shall see, this self making never quite gets off the ground, and is often violently arrested, or made to regress, precisely by the potency of the insult, which assumes a magical power akin to a curse.
In other words, dalit novels often have no immunity against being unnamed. Joothan by Valmiki is actually a case in a double unnaming- joothan refers to the generic leftovers of the brahminical sacrifice which food alone the dalit is supposed to eat- and this act of eating, never innocent in Hinduism, is what defines and names the dalit. The low caste is he who eats the leftovers of the higher castes, and, in the circular movement of such understandings, he is low caste (or technically, outside the caste system except insofar as he is the receiver of the leftover)- because he eats the food of the higher, twice-born castes. A conventional reading, purblind to the poignancy of what may be at stake here, may read this universalized self naming as a simple gesture to collectivity- this at least would be interpreted as a possible motivation of such a universalizing gesture. But the generic self- naming points further to the impossibility of the subject to rise to a personal name. Valmiki writes:
They did not call us by our names. If a person was older than we were, then he would call us “Oe, Chuhre [Chuhra being the name of the caste- unlike conservative Hindu rationalizations of caste names being simply an instrumental naming of occupation, Valmiki nowhere betrays this occupational sense, and it is clear from the novel that his family has to perform diverse, often unpaid occupational roles].” If the person was younger than we were or of the same age, then he would call us “Abey Chuhre”(Valmiki 2003 2).
One can see thus how naming the caste serves both to de individuate the individual into the collectivity of caste, but also equally and simultaneously serves to individualize the caste against normative collectivities like the abstract citizen of liberal humanism or nationalism. Furthermore, this naming is always a voiced naming. The experiential weight of being called a chuhre is different from just reading of histories which might speak of chuhres being oppressed. It is voice, “calling”, that gives this immediacy- the calling of the insult chuhre, and the not-calling of the individual name. This may not be necessarily due to a generalized immediacy of voice over text per se- however one might choose to speculate on the power of the voice, it is worth pointing out the enormous number and variety of times that this existential morpheme of insult gets repeatedly staged. Throughout the novel- indeed the novel often seems a repetition and elaboration of a single trauma in a single form- the protagonist gets close to someone (a mentor, friend, colleague, lover, employer) hiding (sometimes deliberately, sometimes inexplicitly) his caste till at some point the narrative interlocutor-figure reveals it (the insult, the non name name, for example chuhre or chamar or even the “real” caste name) through, and as, insult. Then the single caste-word-name, uttered sometimes without comment, and often even without enunciatory emphasis (for example, contempt, or wonder, or a feeling of betrayal) collapses the protagonist’s ego- he is literally reduced by that “hailing” into a mere name, one thus exposed retrospectively of a past that now seems fabricated or unreal. Because this event happens face to face, the protagonist cannot hide fast enough, or deny or protest adequately enough. He is reduced to wordlessness, and it is this moment that also collapses time, and strings the various lit events of this uttered naming as an indexical chain that undermines the scaffolding (and it is this moment in which the protagonist realizes that almost everything is now reduced to or recognized as mere scaffolding) and returns him to the moments of his childhood and early youth when this incident used to repeatedly occur. In a certain sense then, the journey to the city had been to get away to where the name could not so easily be discovered- and the learnings of city life and formal education lull the author into thinking he has escaped his past and origins. But at every crucial turn this “lie” is exposed - and thus the past is relinked, relived, and made material for an auto-narrative, perhaps thus making it the anti bildungsroman, where the past can no longer just be shaped into a pattern, either in his individual life(time), or in the gulf of generations stretching back into prehistoric time, in the unfathomable ritual beginnings of the dalit-status. The narrative requires both the remembered voice of naming but also requires as its motor the forgetting of the name- and this chain of event and forgetting and recovery and exposure is what constitutes the movement of the novel.
In the novel, Valmiki does not name his father (simply calling him Pitaji), and his mother and brothers and sisters are also just called that. Much of the poignancy of dalit literature lies in the act of learning to write, for this knowledge now creates an indefinable gulf between the protagonist and his family. His family, and most of his fellow dalits will never be able to read the book he has written. This is a point to which the author repeatedly returns realizing that it is in the naming of the several characters and his experiences with them over time that constitutes his narrative- but his family would be frozen in a land he has left forever, and some of this is indexed by the fact that only the people who participate in his growth are given individual names in the novel. The family itself is only called by kinship terms, and most of them do not return to the book after the early childhood village sections.
The author’s name Valmiki is itself fraught with much semantic accumulation. Here again, the entire caste had taken on this name of Valmiki in the nineteen thirties to escape from the extreme stigmatization of the word chamar- this latter being their specific caste name. But to their keen shame, the word chamar was the most common, and universally understood generic name for untouchables in all India. The protagonist is continually reminded of this throughout the novel- in spite of the renaming, all the upper castes keep the memory of the original name. In choosing the name Valmiki, they were of course caught in the understandable but nevertheless inescapable bind of both claiming Sanskrit’s greatest and first poet as theirs (Valmiki was of course also revered in Sanskrit tradition as Adi Kavi)- this is even as the entire thrust of dalit politics was against the ruinous effects of Sanskrit political and ritual theory. Furthermore, Valmiki has always been represented even within the Sanskrit tradition as being a “primitive”, a former thief, who was only “saved” by Brahmins- so when Omprakash Valmiki expropriates this symbol, he is choosing a particularly potent symbol.
There are further layers of meaning and reading- the novel was published in 1993, at the very height of the Ayodhya movement and the rise of a conservative Hindu party to federal power- this is even as Dalit parties were beginning to enter the political mainstream in the face of the Congress consensus breaking down. The eighties and nineties also witnessed new historical developments like the recruitment of Dalits as a new “lumpen proletariat” for events like the 1984 anti Sikh riots- this is simultaneous with their new demonization as the unfair beneficiaries of the Mandal Commission which increased the percentage reserved for depressed castes in federal employment. If one goes further back in the twentieth century, one would also remember that this historical renaming was squarely in the center of one of the most vexed political projects of South Asian nationalism. One may recall Gandhi’s insistence on renaming Sudras as Harijans, or children of God. This renaming was immediately unpopular and considered patronizing by the numerous dalit intellectuals including the great dalit champion Bhimrao Ambedkar (who, famously, had himself changed his name to a Brahmin one- we have seen figures like Ambedkar and Periyar repeatedly referenced in this book). It may also be noted that even today “hurling” a caste name as an insult is a non cognizable, non- bailable offence under the Indian Penal Code in many states of India.
The question of thus being insulted is also intimately tied to the question of labor- not, as said, merely as a rationalization of a non- hierarchical question of the economic division of labor, but actively, as a particularly powerful tool of power. Some of the loss in translation into English is not merely the mimetic sociological representation of different dialects spoken by different castes- such a loss is inevitable in any translation and may not merit more than a passing comment on linguistic diversity for its own sake. But the greater loss in the flattening of language in English prose is the entire honorific system which is crucial to the language of communication between lower and upper castes in South Asia. The physical postures of address (if address was possible at all, for sometimes even the shadow of the lower caste was considered polluting) often involved not looking directly at the upper castes, looking at the floor, not turning one’s back, placing the palm of one’s hand before one’s mouth, speaking in a low voice etc. This richness of physical self abasement was minutely paralleled by a linguistic system of honorifics whereby the whole syntax and sociolinguistics involved in such “non standard” Hindi changed to a very considerable degree. Much of this honorific system is flattened when converted to standard or even written Hindi (Bhatia 1987). Thus the loss of “voice” constitutes a fundamental site of the loss of not just a neutral socio-linguistic register, but equally a political one- for voice served as a template of power both in its simple physicality (i.e. the low, soft voiced, modest, tentative phoneme) as well as its in its semantic and syntactical modes of address to social and ritual superiors. In most north Indian languages, downstream from Sanskrit, the question of voice is associated with linguistic voice- active or passive forms of speech. Thus one can address social superiors only in the passive voice and only in the third, and not second person. This shift leads to a whole series of syntactic maneuvers- the entire declensional and conjugational system change (Gonda 1966 Kellogg 1995). This encoding of the ritual-social by the linguistic is not sufficiently noted by the translator- the brief comment the translator of Joothan, Arun Prabha Mukherjee makes is with regard to the simple diversity of local dialect-“ The speech and conversations of his family and villagers are in local dialect.” (Arun Prabha Mukherjee xlvii 2003).
However, he aptly notes the significance of how the adult varies from the child- for the educated adult speaks in (perhaps ironically or understandingly, or then again, perhaps not) in a literary sanskritised Hindi even as the child speaks “dialect”. These abrupt shifts are what give sharpness to the sudden switches of memory and time-lapses- it is in the unexpected abutment of the high hindi with the dialect that the “child within” is accessed, a fossil that can nevertheless scream in disarticulate dialect pain. Thus unlike the Joycean maneuver in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man of linguistic registers progressing as a child goes through developmental stages, in Joothan, the point is rather the resilience of childhood, especially in its mode of hailing – the voice of Oe chuhre (or in wider equivalence in contemporary Hindi speaking North India, calling lower class men like waiters in dhabas as chokre (boy), or even the American practice of the early century of calling the adult African American not just nigger, but also “boy”), which always reduces the protagonist in age to a child/young adult. As noted before, this simple naming-hailing- the caste name itself being neither sanskritized Hindi nor village dialect- nevertheless reduces the adult to child, indeed to speechless silence.
This mode of address is especially pernicious when an authority figure uses it disparagingly. If one of the aims of the European bildungsroman was pedagogy- the child using his limited resources and resilience to learn from the world and to finally find success in it up to the point where he has “made” his name (David Copperfield but also Sekhar : A Life), the dalit child’s learning experience is compromised from the beginning by the fact that it is the very figures of pedagogy and trust who abuse by name- the teacher in the government school ostensibly set up to allow Dalits a chance in the new Indian democracy; the literary editor introducing him to new ways of looking at language; the employer in a public sector socialist undertaking where he finds employment through affirmative action or positive discrimination. Thus almost every classic site of the landscape of post-colonial India ends up subserving the opposite of pedagogical transformation. It is not a merely a rhetorical point when Dalit writers speak of the pampered “life” of the upper caste literary establishment- the dalit writers seems to have to need much more resilience and with much fewer materials to be able to carve out a “life”- for much of the time he has to be content and discontent with writing on “ A Dalit’s Life”- where dalit does not represent or index merely a genotype, but also the entirety of a behavioral and psychological mode of interactivity with a hostile politico-literary establishment.
ANALYSIS OF SPECIFIC SCENES FROM THE NOVEL
In a very early scene of the novel, Valmiki’s identity as a new student (among the very first in his caste) in the school becomes continually undermined as he is made to sweep the classroom floor every morning. This sweeping tires him, and often causes him to miss the class itself. Thus he notes that one day:
I went to the class and sat down quietly. After a few minutes the headmaster’s loud thundering was heard: “ Abhey, Chuhre ke, motherfucker, where are you hiding your mother?”
I began to shake uncontrollably. A Tyagi boy shouted, “Master Sahib, there he is, sitting in the corner.”
The headmaster pounced on my neck. “ (Valmiki 6 2003).
Here we see how the concept of gratuitous humiliation underwrites the exploitation of labor. It is as if the entire power of caste can be emblematized in this simple act of hailing the caste. This leaves the protagonist in a perpetual vulnerability to insult, leaving him no available counter response that would give him any sense of self worth. Later in the novel, being teased by boys in his hostel for his used clothes, he works hard to save money to buy a new uniform. He washes this uniform with great care, but having no iron, had to go to a dhobi (a washerman). A dhobi in Hindu society is often looked down upon as belonging to a fairly menial caste- as one who performs labor of low worth, both monetarily and ritually- nevertheless even this dhobi – perhaps in fear of economic censure by higher castes- insults Valmiki, revealing the interanimated nexus of labor and status.
I asked him for help. He told me to come to his house in the evening. I took the uniform to his house that evening. As soon as his father saw me, he screamed, “Abey Chuhre, where do you think you are going”. His son was standing next to him. I said, “ I need to have the uniform ironed.”
We don’t wash the clothes of Chuhra-Chamars. Nor do we iron them. If we iron your clothes, the Tyagis won’t get their clothes washed by us. We’ll lose our roti.” He had answered me bluntly. His reply crushed me. I left without saying a word. My heart was heavy. I lost faith in God. One can somehow get past poverty and deprivation, but it is impossible to get past caste. (Valmiki 21 2003)
What is spectacularly pernicious about caste is the ability of the entirety of its affective history to be invoked by the calling of a single name. As Valmiki tells us, for all the ameliorative rhetoric and institutions of the school, college, literary journals, respectable employment etc, the internal history of the stabilized subject can never be written for all it takes for it to be entirely sabotaged is one’s surname. What one is up against is not merely the regressive political formations of the twentieth century, but an immeasurable history, distended unto an infinity- it is against this that self formation and self naming seems to flounder. When Valmiki falls in love with a Brahmin woman, and courts her over a long time, he has to initially hide his full name. When he finally admits it, she cannot believe it, and accuses him of cheating and being false to her. He had to “convince” her that he was not lying.
Savi appeared grave. Her eyes were filled with tears and she said tearfully, “ You are lying, right?”
“No, Savi, it is the truth. You ought to know this.” I had managed to convince her.
She started to cry, as though my being an SC was a crime. She sobbed for a long time. Suddenly, the distance between us had increased. The hatred of thousands of years had entered our hearts. What a lie culture and civilization are.” (Valmiki 113 2003).
It is also this question of naming and insult that mediate the temporality of the retrospective writing of one’s history. Indeed, the point can be made that insults may well grow in power over time- that every new horizon that the successful Chuhra subjugates (for example by becoming a famous writer highly regarded by numerous audiences and critics alike), only adds to the sharpness of the inevitable insult that is peering over every corner. To be more widely known is also to be more widely known as a Chuhra writer- and while to a certain audience this information is part of a goodwill that only increases one’s regard and respect for the writer, to many other audiences there is an extra edge of harshness that only a combination of insult and perhaps envy and resentment brings. Time and time again- indeed the very flesh of much of the narrative emplotment- is Valmiki attempting to progress in life according to all the conventional and required bourgeois norms (becoming an engineer etc) only to be humiliated in every dinner party by at least one of his new peers or their wives. This is a familiar dalit narrative- as Omprakash Valmiki reminds us with his several invocations of Ambedkar in the text- from at least the days when Ambedkar with his two doctorates in two different disciplines (in sociology from Columbia University, New York and in economics from the London School of Economics, as well as post doctoral work in Germany) came home to India only to be made to sit in corner rooms separate from all the higher castes.
It is however worth dwelling further on how precisely this immediacy of insult collapses narrative time from the past moment of insult to the present moment of writing. The act of writing brings back this insult which remains undiluted by time- indeed it is the very essence of the novelistic experience, constituting its primary mode of interiority and subjectification. It is through insult that the very language shifts from the sanskritized Hindi of the adult self to the village dialect of his childhood, whose pain and now incompleteness he relives again. In contrast, the beatings which the child is continually subjected to, cannot quite retain their pain after all these years- or rather, it is the referential significance of pain (as too, labor) as humiliation that constitutes subjectivity. The dalit subject, without name, nameless even in the tale of himself, even in the autobiographical mode, is constituted by the repeated iterations of an insult- the insult is at the center of his inability to self constitute. It is what abolishes childhood, or at least childhood as separate from adulthood (and likewise other dyads like the urban as different from the rural, the sanskritised hindi from village hindi), for the insult short circuits these binaries and always scathes in the present tense. Childhood can never be evaluated as a whole, or even as truly retrospective, or as a site for nostalgia, recompense, or even a trauma that one can dissociate from. This is why even when the narrator keeps interrupting the childhood narration with his present reading of events, it does not seem jarring in the least- rather we can see quite clearly the co-evolution of the child and adult selves in the moment of narration.
Finally, and briefly, this question of naming does not limit itself to the subject alone. Valmiki does not name the village he comes from- even the spatiality of the rural is remembered only as an interlocking system of caste and power. This is how the novel begins:
Our house was next to Chandrabhan Taga’s cattle shed. Families of Muslim weavers lived on the other side of it. Right in front of the cattle shed was a little pond that had created a sort of partition between chuhra’s swellings and the village. The pond was called Dabbowali….On one side of the pit were the high walls of the brick homes of the Tagas. At a right angle to these were the clay walls of the tow or three homes of the Jhinwars, another untouchable caste. (Valmiki 1 2003).
How easy it is to contrast this with the very names of the metropolii that populate the text, where the mere evocation of those proper names mine a rich semantic load, already implicating one in a whole series of plotted histories, stretching back to a long but finite and narrativizable time- Delhi and Kolkatta, but even the Chandrapur Ordnance Factory where Valmiki worked. It is against the privileged complacence of this calm voice of self naming that the dalit protagonist must stake his claim to language and literary-historical identity.
ps: One may end by remembering that even Ambedkar felt this clearly- for this logician of state representation nevertheless resorted often to a continual history/myth-writing, even a final self-conversion. His narrative enterprise thus reminds us of how ill at home the subaltern still is in the routinized and banalized norms of electoral and representative democracy and how much power and inflationary violence still has to teach us about the truer needs of sovereignty in this land of not just elite but also of a pacifist gandhian nationalism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bhatia, Tej K. A History of the Hindi Grammatical Tradition: Hindi- Hindustani Grammar, Grammarians, History and Problems. Leiden: E J Brill, 1987.
Gonda, Jan. A Concise Elementary Grammar of the Sanskrit Language. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1966.
Kellogg, S H. A Grammar of the Hindi Language. Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1995.
Limbale, Sharankumar. Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature: History, Controversy and Considerations. Translated by Alok Mukherjee. Hyderabad; Orient Longman, 2005.
Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso, 2000.
Valmiki, Omprakash. Jhootan: A Dalit’s Life. Translated by Arun Prabha Mukherjee. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
-------------------------- Dalit Sahitya ka Saundaryashastra. Delhi: Radhakrishna Publications, 2001.
Wankhede, M.N.” Friends, the Day of Irresponsible Writing is Over.” In Arjun Dangle, ed., Poisoned Bread: Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature, pp 314-323. Translated by Maxine Bernsten. Bombay: Orient Longman, 1992.
On Name Calling
INTRODUCTION
1. EUROPEAN BILDUNGSROMAN
In this paper I will concern myself with a single narrative of self-attestation- that of Joothan written by Omprakash Valmiki in 1993 (trans. by Arun Prabha Mukherjee, 2003). This type of narrative will, for the purposes of this present paper, be de-linked from the more specifically genetic matrix of the European Bildungsroman. I however do want to begin by speculating in a preliminary way in this first part of the introduction on the possible - if only through difference- linkages between the canonical European Bildungsroman and the novel I discuss. This is partly because I believe that later in my project I do hope to more explicitly return and rethink the modes of commutability between these frames of reference- for example, those involving both certain thematic elements (the labor of memory) as well as narrative strategies (delay, fragmentation) within a complex calculus of correlation and departure from the model of individual subject formation as envisaged in the classical nineteenth century European Bildungsroman.
Thus for example, in relation to this question of self-formation one might begin with the influential theorization offered by the literary scholar Franco Moretti in The Way of the World (Moretti 2000). In the chapter on the Bildungsroman in European Culture Moretti explicitly writes in the very first footnote to the chapter that his work cannot accommodate the non Europeanized Russian novel (i.e. he can write of Pushkin and Turgenev, but not Tolstoy or Dostoevsky) due to “ the persistence of a marked religious dimension (be it the “politico-national” version of War and Peace, or Dostoevsky’s ethico-metaphysical one), which attaches meaning to individual existence in ways unthinkable in the fully secularized version of the Western European Bildungsroman.” (Moretti 63 2000). Later in my project I am invested in precisely these “ethico-metaphysical” aspects of the Russian novel- so for me Moretti leaves out rather too much. But at the same time, one may also take some issue with the way Moretti uses any of these multivalent terms – politico-national, ethico-metaphysical etc, even with reference to the Western European Bildungsroman. The assumption that Dickens, for example, is less politico-nationalist is deeply questionable- one may mention his many opinionated responses to imperialism, especially to charged events like the 1857 “mutiny”. It is also important to challenge Moretti for these reasons - for the hint of purity and insularity that is supposed to mark the Western European Bildungsroman- disinfected as its form is supposed to be from religion, politics, nationalism, ethics, metaphysics- presumably in the name of a purely secular, urbanized, purely self-evolving European citizen. One may remember that Moretti had also excluded the American novel “ where, in addition, “nature” retains a symbolic value alien to the essentially urban thematics of the European novel” (Moretti 563 2000).
In the European Bildungsroman the act of naming itself is often a proof of the achievement of a certain definition and ground of stability. For example, a David Copperfield, in the retrospective moment of self-writing, provides a backward-moving security. At the end of the novel he is a person with a name, an individual one, one who, in the very having of a name, indexes (as the very English phrase of “has achieved a name for himself”) a certain social success. The name thus individuates and provides a foothold for posterity by leaving an individual textual trace. It is from the point of the named moment that retrospectively the “unhinged” past is narrativized and engineered into a telic pattern. Coherence then may be made legible as occurring within the process of narrativisation or memoration, or in an indefinite, yet firmly positable future. This holds true no matter how individually unhinged many moments in David Copperfield’s life may have been. It may be arguable if, likewise, in the naming of A House for Mister Biswas, a large gift has not already been given to the Mister Biswas, notwithstanding the many individual tragedies of his life and death. This moment of naming is thus not only a self –directed calling but one that is uttered by the public- David Copperfield, earns a name for himself in a double movement- he recognizes and “hails” himself only in the moment of his recognition by respectable bourgeois society as Citizen Copperfield, with a respectable wife and respectable employment- it is from the achievement of this moment that the past finally yields to narrativization and full capture.
2. THE LITERARY AND CRITICAL CONTEXT OF JOOTHAN
However, for the purposes of this specific paper I wish to explore two aspects-which are surely significant for any model of self representation, Bildungsroman or otherwise. These polyvalent aspects are naming and speech/voice, and their mutual inflection. As stated I will not, in this paper, keep “looking back” to see how these concepts might have inflected or digressed from the canonical European Bildungsroman. I will limit myself to discussing the single novel Joothan. Joothan belongs, among other categories, to the genre of the so called “dalit novel”. “Dalit” is the self-given name of castes in India that have been understood to have been “depressed” for a long historical period- the term “depressed” was the colonial categorization of such “oppressed” classes/castes. Dalit literature was often opposed to lalit literature- the latter serving as the all-purpose metonymic for traditionalist Sanskrit poetics and literatures.
Dalit literature has been confronted since its very beginnings with this predicament of the presumed impassability of the categories of the “individual” versus the “social”. The important Maharashtrian critic Sharankumar Limbale, in his Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature (2005), writes:
It has been charged that Dalit literature is propagandistic, univocal and negative; that it does not represent the individual person; and that excessive resentment is heard in Dalit literature … because Dalit writers have presented their anguish and their questions in their literature, their literature has acquired a propagandist character (Limbale 56: 2003).
This binary between the individual and the social is as well worn in the literary criticism pertaining to the major regional Indian languages as it was for a long time in the Anglo American Academy. In reference to the same set of terms, Omprakash Valmiki, the author of Joothan, has himself written in his book on Dalit aesthetics:
The Dalit literary moverment is not just a literary movement. It is also a cultural and social movement. Dalit society has been imprisoned for a thousand years in the dark mist of ignorance, deprived of knowledge. Dalit literature is the portrayal of the wishes and aspirations of these oppressed and tormented Dalits. (Valmiki 97: 2001).
One can thus see how vexed and fraught any notion of autobiography is going to be in the face of such overdetermination. Dalit literature is forced to resort to the position of calling into doubt any authenticity of the upper caste writer- for if the upper caste writer’s writing is to be disarmed as an oppositional force, it is often through the mode of questioning his entire life’s legitimacy. One would be unwise to categorize such a rhetoric as a simple and gratuitous ad hominem attack. What is staked is the whole discourse of self representation in all its details- in this paper I will only discuss naming and voice, but many other aspects (the scope of language, art and imagination itself in their very limit or in their redemptive value, the notion of the human and the animal) are subsumed under this. For example, Valmiki writes:
Dragging and cutting dead animals- how will non Dalits write about this experience of Dalits with the power of imagination… only the horse, tethered to its stall after a whole day’s exhausting labor, knows how it feels, and not its owner… Freedom is the highest aesthetic value. Equality, freedom, justice and love are basic sentiments of people and society. There are many times more important than pleasure and beauty. (Valmiki x: 2001).
Dalit theorists argue that it is this quotidian aspect that they know best that makes them the best “realist” writers- and realism is simply assumed to be the highest literary mode and value. To them realism is less a simple adequation of representation to its object, but rather a specific level of the objectness of the object itself. One cannot be a realist writing about “flowers”, no matter how accurately or “realistically” one describes it- the flower turns into paper, it isn’t the res of reality enough. Only the skinning of the dead animal is res enough. And yet the power of this res is precisely the spontaneous transmutation of this most res-ness of the everyday to the most non material- i.e. the abstractable notion of suffering and its linguistic representation (Wankhade 316: 1992).
There are also the allied notions of the witnessing of this suffering, of this everydayness res.
Dalit writers who write autobiographies so that not only our history will stay alive but also our true portrayal of wrongdoers… personal experience brings out reality in a striking way… Ambedkar and Periyar spoke and wrote on the day-to-day experiences of the Dalitbahujan cases. (Valmiki xii: 2001).
ANALYSIS OF GENERAL THEMES IN JOOTHAN
The subtitle of Joothan- A Dalit’s Life- itself complicates simple readings. How is the accent distributed between “Dalit” and “Life”, especially as the indefinite article of “A” persists- are specific reading practices being invited or invoked? This is in some contrast to the European Bildungsroman, with its proper name (David Copperfield, Madame Bovary, Wilhelm Meister). It is perhaps even in some contrast to the variations available in “high” Hindi- the subtitle of Sachidanand Vatsyayan’s (“Agyeya”) important Hindi novel is Sekhar: A Life. Here, perhaps the English translation, “life” does constitute a fair semantic horizon, or perhaps it may signal a specific set of genetic protocols, or invite specific reading practices.
In Joothan, however, it seems that it is the mechanisms of a related series of affects (clustered, one might say around categories like insult and anger) that constitute the motor of the narrative, even if this narrative seems also to parallel a pseudo self making of the protagonist. As we shall see, this self making never quite gets off the ground, and is often violently arrested, or made to regress, precisely by the potency of the insult, which assumes a magical power akin to a curse.
In other words, dalit novels often have no immunity against being unnamed. Joothan by Valmiki is actually a case in a double unnaming- joothan refers to the generic leftovers of the brahminical sacrifice which food alone the dalit is supposed to eat- and this act of eating, never innocent in Hinduism, is what defines and names the dalit. The low caste is he who eats the leftovers of the higher castes, and, in the circular movement of such understandings, he is low caste (or technically, outside the caste system except insofar as he is the receiver of the leftover)- because he eats the food of the higher, twice-born castes. A conventional reading, purblind to the poignancy of what may be at stake here, may read this universalized self naming as a simple gesture to collectivity- this at least would be interpreted as a possible motivation of such a universalizing gesture. But the generic self- naming points further to the impossibility of the subject to rise to a personal name. Valmiki writes:
They did not call us by our names. If a person was older than we were, then he would call us “Oe, Chuhre [Chuhra being the name of the caste- unlike conservative Hindu rationalizations of caste names being simply an instrumental naming of occupation, Valmiki nowhere betrays this occupational sense, and it is clear from the novel that his family has to perform diverse, often unpaid occupational roles].” If the person was younger than we were or of the same age, then he would call us “Abey Chuhre”(Valmiki 2003 2).
One can see thus how naming the caste serves both to de individuate the individual into the collectivity of caste, but also equally and simultaneously serves to individualize the caste against normative collectivities like the abstract citizen of liberal humanism or nationalism. Furthermore, this naming is always a voiced naming. The experiential weight of being called a chuhre is different from just reading of histories which might speak of chuhres being oppressed. It is voice, “calling”, that gives this immediacy- the calling of the insult chuhre, and the not-calling of the individual name. This may not be necessarily due to a generalized immediacy of voice over text per se- however one might choose to speculate on the power of the voice, it is worth pointing out the enormous number and variety of times that this existential morpheme of insult gets repeatedly staged. Throughout the novel- indeed the novel often seems a repetition and elaboration of a single trauma in a single form- the protagonist gets close to someone (a mentor, friend, colleague, lover, employer) hiding (sometimes deliberately, sometimes inexplicitly) his caste till at some point the narrative interlocutor-figure reveals it (the insult, the non name name, for example chuhre or chamar or even the “real” caste name) through, and as, insult. Then the single caste-word-name, uttered sometimes without comment, and often even without enunciatory emphasis (for example, contempt, or wonder, or a feeling of betrayal) collapses the protagonist’s ego- he is literally reduced by that “hailing” into a mere name, one thus exposed retrospectively of a past that now seems fabricated or unreal. Because this event happens face to face, the protagonist cannot hide fast enough, or deny or protest adequately enough. He is reduced to wordlessness, and it is this moment that also collapses time, and strings the various lit events of this uttered naming as an indexical chain that undermines the scaffolding (and it is this moment in which the protagonist realizes that almost everything is now reduced to or recognized as mere scaffolding) and returns him to the moments of his childhood and early youth when this incident used to repeatedly occur. In a certain sense then, the journey to the city had been to get away to where the name could not so easily be discovered- and the learnings of city life and formal education lull the author into thinking he has escaped his past and origins. But at every crucial turn this “lie” is exposed - and thus the past is relinked, relived, and made material for an auto-narrative, perhaps thus making it the anti bildungsroman, where the past can no longer just be shaped into a pattern, either in his individual life(time), or in the gulf of generations stretching back into prehistoric time, in the unfathomable ritual beginnings of the dalit-status. The narrative requires both the remembered voice of naming but also requires as its motor the forgetting of the name- and this chain of event and forgetting and recovery and exposure is what constitutes the movement of the novel.
In the novel, Valmiki does not name his father (simply calling him Pitaji), and his mother and brothers and sisters are also just called that. Much of the poignancy of dalit literature lies in the act of learning to write, for this knowledge now creates an indefinable gulf between the protagonist and his family. His family, and most of his fellow dalits will never be able to read the book he has written. This is a point to which the author repeatedly returns realizing that it is in the naming of the several characters and his experiences with them over time that constitutes his narrative- but his family would be frozen in a land he has left forever, and some of this is indexed by the fact that only the people who participate in his growth are given individual names in the novel. The family itself is only called by kinship terms, and most of them do not return to the book after the early childhood village sections.
The author’s name Valmiki is itself fraught with much semantic accumulation. Here again, the entire caste had taken on this name of Valmiki in the nineteen thirties to escape from the extreme stigmatization of the word chamar- this latter being their specific caste name. But to their keen shame, the word chamar was the most common, and universally understood generic name for untouchables in all India. The protagonist is continually reminded of this throughout the novel- in spite of the renaming, all the upper castes keep the memory of the original name. In choosing the name Valmiki, they were of course caught in the understandable but nevertheless inescapable bind of both claiming Sanskrit’s greatest and first poet as theirs (Valmiki was of course also revered in Sanskrit tradition as Adi Kavi)- this is even as the entire thrust of dalit politics was against the ruinous effects of Sanskrit political and ritual theory. Furthermore, Valmiki has always been represented even within the Sanskrit tradition as being a “primitive”, a former thief, who was only “saved” by Brahmins- so when Omprakash Valmiki expropriates this symbol, he is choosing a particularly potent symbol.
There are further layers of meaning and reading- the novel was published in 1993, at the very height of the Ayodhya movement and the rise of a conservative Hindu party to federal power- this is even as Dalit parties were beginning to enter the political mainstream in the face of the Congress consensus breaking down. The eighties and nineties also witnessed new historical developments like the recruitment of Dalits as a new “lumpen proletariat” for events like the 1984 anti Sikh riots- this is simultaneous with their new demonization as the unfair beneficiaries of the Mandal Commission which increased the percentage reserved for depressed castes in federal employment. If one goes further back in the twentieth century, one would also remember that this historical renaming was squarely in the center of one of the most vexed political projects of South Asian nationalism. One may recall Gandhi’s insistence on renaming Sudras as Harijans, or children of God. This renaming was immediately unpopular and considered patronizing by the numerous dalit intellectuals including the great dalit champion Bhimrao Ambedkar (who, famously, had himself changed his name to a Brahmin one- we have seen figures like Ambedkar and Periyar repeatedly referenced in this book). It may also be noted that even today “hurling” a caste name as an insult is a non cognizable, non- bailable offence under the Indian Penal Code in many states of India.
The question of thus being insulted is also intimately tied to the question of labor- not, as said, merely as a rationalization of a non- hierarchical question of the economic division of labor, but actively, as a particularly powerful tool of power. Some of the loss in translation into English is not merely the mimetic sociological representation of different dialects spoken by different castes- such a loss is inevitable in any translation and may not merit more than a passing comment on linguistic diversity for its own sake. But the greater loss in the flattening of language in English prose is the entire honorific system which is crucial to the language of communication between lower and upper castes in South Asia. The physical postures of address (if address was possible at all, for sometimes even the shadow of the lower caste was considered polluting) often involved not looking directly at the upper castes, looking at the floor, not turning one’s back, placing the palm of one’s hand before one’s mouth, speaking in a low voice etc. This richness of physical self abasement was minutely paralleled by a linguistic system of honorifics whereby the whole syntax and sociolinguistics involved in such “non standard” Hindi changed to a very considerable degree. Much of this honorific system is flattened when converted to standard or even written Hindi (Bhatia 1987). Thus the loss of “voice” constitutes a fundamental site of the loss of not just a neutral socio-linguistic register, but equally a political one- for voice served as a template of power both in its simple physicality (i.e. the low, soft voiced, modest, tentative phoneme) as well as its in its semantic and syntactical modes of address to social and ritual superiors. In most north Indian languages, downstream from Sanskrit, the question of voice is associated with linguistic voice- active or passive forms of speech. Thus one can address social superiors only in the passive voice and only in the third, and not second person. This shift leads to a whole series of syntactic maneuvers- the entire declensional and conjugational system change (Gonda 1966 Kellogg 1995). This encoding of the ritual-social by the linguistic is not sufficiently noted by the translator- the brief comment the translator of Joothan, Arun Prabha Mukherjee makes is with regard to the simple diversity of local dialect-“ The speech and conversations of his family and villagers are in local dialect.” (Arun Prabha Mukherjee xlvii 2003).
However, he aptly notes the significance of how the adult varies from the child- for the educated adult speaks in (perhaps ironically or understandingly, or then again, perhaps not) in a literary sanskritised Hindi even as the child speaks “dialect”. These abrupt shifts are what give sharpness to the sudden switches of memory and time-lapses- it is in the unexpected abutment of the high hindi with the dialect that the “child within” is accessed, a fossil that can nevertheless scream in disarticulate dialect pain. Thus unlike the Joycean maneuver in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man of linguistic registers progressing as a child goes through developmental stages, in Joothan, the point is rather the resilience of childhood, especially in its mode of hailing – the voice of Oe chuhre (or in wider equivalence in contemporary Hindi speaking North India, calling lower class men like waiters in dhabas as chokre (boy), or even the American practice of the early century of calling the adult African American not just nigger, but also “boy”), which always reduces the protagonist in age to a child/young adult. As noted before, this simple naming-hailing- the caste name itself being neither sanskritized Hindi nor village dialect- nevertheless reduces the adult to child, indeed to speechless silence.
This mode of address is especially pernicious when an authority figure uses it disparagingly. If one of the aims of the European bildungsroman was pedagogy- the child using his limited resources and resilience to learn from the world and to finally find success in it up to the point where he has “made” his name (David Copperfield but also Sekhar : A Life), the dalit child’s learning experience is compromised from the beginning by the fact that it is the very figures of pedagogy and trust who abuse by name- the teacher in the government school ostensibly set up to allow Dalits a chance in the new Indian democracy; the literary editor introducing him to new ways of looking at language; the employer in a public sector socialist undertaking where he finds employment through affirmative action or positive discrimination. Thus almost every classic site of the landscape of post-colonial India ends up subserving the opposite of pedagogical transformation. It is not a merely a rhetorical point when Dalit writers speak of the pampered “life” of the upper caste literary establishment- the dalit writers seems to have to need much more resilience and with much fewer materials to be able to carve out a “life”- for much of the time he has to be content and discontent with writing on “ A Dalit’s Life”- where dalit does not represent or index merely a genotype, but also the entirety of a behavioral and psychological mode of interactivity with a hostile politico-literary establishment.
ANALYSIS OF SPECIFIC SCENES FROM THE NOVEL
In a very early scene of the novel, Valmiki’s identity as a new student (among the very first in his caste) in the school becomes continually undermined as he is made to sweep the classroom floor every morning. This sweeping tires him, and often causes him to miss the class itself. Thus he notes that one day:
I went to the class and sat down quietly. After a few minutes the headmaster’s loud thundering was heard: “ Abhey, Chuhre ke, motherfucker, where are you hiding your mother?”
I began to shake uncontrollably. A Tyagi boy shouted, “Master Sahib, there he is, sitting in the corner.”
The headmaster pounced on my neck. “ (Valmiki 6 2003).
Here we see how the concept of gratuitous humiliation underwrites the exploitation of labor. It is as if the entire power of caste can be emblematized in this simple act of hailing the caste. This leaves the protagonist in a perpetual vulnerability to insult, leaving him no available counter response that would give him any sense of self worth. Later in the novel, being teased by boys in his hostel for his used clothes, he works hard to save money to buy a new uniform. He washes this uniform with great care, but having no iron, had to go to a dhobi (a washerman). A dhobi in Hindu society is often looked down upon as belonging to a fairly menial caste- as one who performs labor of low worth, both monetarily and ritually- nevertheless even this dhobi – perhaps in fear of economic censure by higher castes- insults Valmiki, revealing the interanimated nexus of labor and status.
I asked him for help. He told me to come to his house in the evening. I took the uniform to his house that evening. As soon as his father saw me, he screamed, “Abey Chuhre, where do you think you are going”. His son was standing next to him. I said, “ I need to have the uniform ironed.”
We don’t wash the clothes of Chuhra-Chamars. Nor do we iron them. If we iron your clothes, the Tyagis won’t get their clothes washed by us. We’ll lose our roti.” He had answered me bluntly. His reply crushed me. I left without saying a word. My heart was heavy. I lost faith in God. One can somehow get past poverty and deprivation, but it is impossible to get past caste. (Valmiki 21 2003)
What is spectacularly pernicious about caste is the ability of the entirety of its affective history to be invoked by the calling of a single name. As Valmiki tells us, for all the ameliorative rhetoric and institutions of the school, college, literary journals, respectable employment etc, the internal history of the stabilized subject can never be written for all it takes for it to be entirely sabotaged is one’s surname. What one is up against is not merely the regressive political formations of the twentieth century, but an immeasurable history, distended unto an infinity- it is against this that self formation and self naming seems to flounder. When Valmiki falls in love with a Brahmin woman, and courts her over a long time, he has to initially hide his full name. When he finally admits it, she cannot believe it, and accuses him of cheating and being false to her. He had to “convince” her that he was not lying.
Savi appeared grave. Her eyes were filled with tears and she said tearfully, “ You are lying, right?”
“No, Savi, it is the truth. You ought to know this.” I had managed to convince her.
She started to cry, as though my being an SC was a crime. She sobbed for a long time. Suddenly, the distance between us had increased. The hatred of thousands of years had entered our hearts. What a lie culture and civilization are.” (Valmiki 113 2003).
It is also this question of naming and insult that mediate the temporality of the retrospective writing of one’s history. Indeed, the point can be made that insults may well grow in power over time- that every new horizon that the successful Chuhra subjugates (for example by becoming a famous writer highly regarded by numerous audiences and critics alike), only adds to the sharpness of the inevitable insult that is peering over every corner. To be more widely known is also to be more widely known as a Chuhra writer- and while to a certain audience this information is part of a goodwill that only increases one’s regard and respect for the writer, to many other audiences there is an extra edge of harshness that only a combination of insult and perhaps envy and resentment brings. Time and time again- indeed the very flesh of much of the narrative emplotment- is Valmiki attempting to progress in life according to all the conventional and required bourgeois norms (becoming an engineer etc) only to be humiliated in every dinner party by at least one of his new peers or their wives. This is a familiar dalit narrative- as Omprakash Valmiki reminds us with his several invocations of Ambedkar in the text- from at least the days when Ambedkar with his two doctorates in two different disciplines (in sociology from Columbia University, New York and in economics from the London School of Economics, as well as post doctoral work in Germany) came home to India only to be made to sit in corner rooms separate from all the higher castes.
It is however worth dwelling further on how precisely this immediacy of insult collapses narrative time from the past moment of insult to the present moment of writing. The act of writing brings back this insult which remains undiluted by time- indeed it is the very essence of the novelistic experience, constituting its primary mode of interiority and subjectification. It is through insult that the very language shifts from the sanskritized Hindi of the adult self to the village dialect of his childhood, whose pain and now incompleteness he relives again. In contrast, the beatings which the child is continually subjected to, cannot quite retain their pain after all these years- or rather, it is the referential significance of pain (as too, labor) as humiliation that constitutes subjectivity. The dalit subject, without name, nameless even in the tale of himself, even in the autobiographical mode, is constituted by the repeated iterations of an insult- the insult is at the center of his inability to self constitute. It is what abolishes childhood, or at least childhood as separate from adulthood (and likewise other dyads like the urban as different from the rural, the sanskritised hindi from village hindi), for the insult short circuits these binaries and always scathes in the present tense. Childhood can never be evaluated as a whole, or even as truly retrospective, or as a site for nostalgia, recompense, or even a trauma that one can dissociate from. This is why even when the narrator keeps interrupting the childhood narration with his present reading of events, it does not seem jarring in the least- rather we can see quite clearly the co-evolution of the child and adult selves in the moment of narration.
Finally, and briefly, this question of naming does not limit itself to the subject alone. Valmiki does not name the village he comes from- even the spatiality of the rural is remembered only as an interlocking system of caste and power. This is how the novel begins:
Our house was next to Chandrabhan Taga’s cattle shed. Families of Muslim weavers lived on the other side of it. Right in front of the cattle shed was a little pond that had created a sort of partition between chuhra’s swellings and the village. The pond was called Dabbowali….On one side of the pit were the high walls of the brick homes of the Tagas. At a right angle to these were the clay walls of the tow or three homes of the Jhinwars, another untouchable caste. (Valmiki 1 2003).
How easy it is to contrast this with the very names of the metropolii that populate the text, where the mere evocation of those proper names mine a rich semantic load, already implicating one in a whole series of plotted histories, stretching back to a long but finite and narrativizable time- Delhi and Kolkatta, but even the Chandrapur Ordnance Factory where Valmiki worked. It is against the privileged complacence of this calm voice of self naming that the dalit protagonist must stake his claim to language and literary-historical identity.
ps: One may end by remembering that even Ambedkar felt this clearly- for this logician of state representation nevertheless resorted often to a continual history/myth-writing, even a final self-conversion. His narrative enterprise thus reminds us of how ill at home the subaltern still is in the routinized and banalized norms of electoral and representative democracy and how much power and inflationary violence still has to teach us about the truer needs of sovereignty in this land of not just elite but also of a pacifist gandhian nationalism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bhatia, Tej K. A History of the Hindi Grammatical Tradition: Hindi- Hindustani Grammar, Grammarians, History and Problems. Leiden: E J Brill, 1987.
Gonda, Jan. A Concise Elementary Grammar of the Sanskrit Language. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1966.
Kellogg, S H. A Grammar of the Hindi Language. Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1995.
Limbale, Sharankumar. Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature: History, Controversy and Considerations. Translated by Alok Mukherjee. Hyderabad; Orient Longman, 2005.
Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso, 2000.
Valmiki, Omprakash. Jhootan: A Dalit’s Life. Translated by Arun Prabha Mukherjee. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
-------------------------- Dalit Sahitya ka Saundaryashastra. Delhi: Radhakrishna Publications, 2001.
Wankhede, M.N.” Friends, the Day of Irresponsible Writing is Over.” In Arjun Dangle, ed., Poisoned Bread: Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature, pp 314-323. Translated by Maxine Bernsten. Bombay: Orient Longman, 1992.
Saturday, January 3, 2009
biracial obama- black pride/anger or white guilt?- do they cancel, complement?
only gaza will tell-
an occasion to remember the first cybernetic politico, prewaves of the future-mkg. gandhi the blogger, 100 volumes of suffering-
an occasion to remember the first cybernetic politico, prewaves of the future-mkg. gandhi the blogger, 100 volumes of suffering-
Monday, December 29, 2008
blog sutras
folklores of the farthest future, unite, invade the present, take us over, somersault us over, let our stomachs regurgitate all all pasts, let there only be a dizzying flat horizon-talness infinity of the present spreading its tentacular nerval electron-i-cities wider and away and inside into the grand (to a billionth, or nano, power) child's gut and spinal song of opened outward surging meta-electronic post brainal multi galactic money
a dream i had, recently: mayawati as seshnag, fist on chin at pralaya/ floating in a sea of statues in hardbeating rain that made the ocean roil over & over gurgitating her & her statues up & up into the painted clouds, vedic moments are made of such
a dream i had, recently: mayawati as seshnag, fist on chin at pralaya/ floating in a sea of statues in hardbeating rain that made the ocean roil over & over gurgitating her & her statues up & up into the painted clouds, vedic moments are made of such
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