Kinaara

Anway Mukhopadhyay is an UG3 student of English at Jadavpur University. He is willing to join the academia later on in his life, and is interested in areas like Postcolonial studies, gender studies and cultural studies. This article is the edited version of a lengthier paper, which can be accessed by contacting Anway through the Kinaara email address.

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Ranajit Guha in his book History at the Limit of World History conceptualizes the historicality of what Tagore calls “pratyahik sukhdukkha” (the everyday joys and sorrow):

‘Its (“pratyahik”) temporality cannot be identified with any particular day that is today or tomorrow, although the characteristic monotony speaks of the recurrence of something that has been there in all our yesterdays. Everydayness is thus necessarily informed, like historicality itself, by a sense of the past.’[i]

‘Everydayness’ actually places a gap between ‘history’ and ‘past’. It makes ‘past’ into an ever pregnant mother, as whose midwife ‘history’ is absolutely inadequate. And so, this very everydayness also ensures the perpetual silence of the past beneath the limited voice of history.

We, the postcolonial people of South Asia, are today excruciatingly aware of the gap between ‘history’ and ‘past’[ii]. We know our colonial history is just a frail lily pad on the fathomless waters of the experience of our colonial past. But our consternation arises not only from this sense of an insurmountable gap between the ‘past’ and the ‘history’, but also from our surreptitious recognition of the conflict between the nationality and experientiality of our present. The postcolonial Everyman or Everywoman knows well that when she/he is living a ‘present’ moment, she/he is outside the domain of the ‘historical present’. Yes, we feel left out of the terrain of history.

The notion of historicality always embodies an implicit idea of ‘significance’. Our present is not historical if it is insignificant. And it is the power structure of the society wherein we are situated that attaches ‘significance’ to our experience. The postcolonial South Asian state, whether overtly authoritarianistic or not, almost always shows the deep lack of what Ayesha Jalal identifies as “substantive democracy”[iii]. Even in India (which, unlike Pakistan or Bangladesh, is thought to have the right to boast of its postcolonial democratic political continuum), we are not “concrete and active agents capable of pursuing their interests with a measure of autonomy from entrenched structures of dominance and privilege”[iv]. Being “abstract legal citizens”, we dwindle into an imperceptible state of anomie[v]. We are a “massified” (in Umberto Eco’s sense of the word) mass, futilely striving to overcome our horror of our collective anomie. That is perhaps the reason why we cannot but hanker after public celebrities.

When the warmth of our everyday experience is lost in the cold nationality of our existence as a “mass”, can one help being conscious of the distance between our legal existence and our real experience? Can existence be possible without the palpability of experience? The politico-cultural framework within which we operate seeks to posit an absurd split between the two. This absurdity imposes upon us an existential angst. The Everyman legally exists in a South Asian democratic state, but what he experiences is historically insignificant. In short, his experience is not ‘historical’. And yet he cannot escape the folds of history. History gives him no space for his creative individuality, but functions as a closure of the same.

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Everydayness is monotonous, but it is the very locus of the expression of our individuality. Through our experiences we not only put our existence into action, we actually construct a dynamic existence through our everyday experience. Our human individuality always struggles towards life from the mechanical process of survival. It is our narrow notion of historicity that resists our calling this struggle heroic. The Everyman in the South Asian metropolis internalizes this notion of non-historicity and non-heroicality of his everyday struggle and his ascent to life from survival gets thwarted. He begins to believe that his struggle is not a struggle for life but one for mere survival. Thus the human being becomes an automaton.

The American metropolitan citizen has to face the same situation, but he need not dream of a better world that lies overseas. We keep dream of a First World, imagining that it would lend significance to our everydayness. We are appalled by the vapid nature of our survival and dream of a life ‘over there’. The citizen of the Third World feels that he cannot but be less than a First World Citizen.

But I do not mean to explain this difference in terms of ‘inferiority complex’. Rather, I would like to explore the mechanism that cannily manufactures this ‘inferiority complex’. This is something that is the direct product of the “psychotechnology” (a la Adorno and Horkheimer) a South Asian state applies to its citizens’ psychic make-ups. “Massification” accompanies “lessification”. A lessified mass serves as a very good tabula rasa to let the state imprint its own politico-cultural idioms onto the people it rules. The Third World state de hos jour is “panopalistic”, in the sense that it knows how to make every individual within its political territory feel that what he experiences, what he does in his everyday life, has no value. The state imposes its own value-judgmental paradigms onto our experience.

Without lessening the individual, a democratic state in postcolonial South Asia will not be able to comfortably withhold “substantive democracy” from its citizens. The macropolitical state structure often encroaches upon the micropolitics of our everyday experience. Macropolitics appropriates micropolitics, thereby rendering the latter sterile. Thus the implicit authoritarian tendencies with the democratic state structure surreptitiously manifest themselves. The micropolitical domain of our everydayness cannot escape the all-pervasive web of macropolitical power.

The Foucaultian notion of “panopticism” must be reconsidered in the South Asian context. A Third World state makes its citizens into “docile bodies” in a way totally different from that in which a First World state accomplishes the same task. Our docility is predicated upon our acceptance of the fact that our experience of everydayness is worth nothing. Our ‘everyday’ is detached from the historical present. The reason why I say this is different from the First World citizens’ experience is that we, the South Asian postcolonials, keep feeling that the First World, our ‘everyday’ would not have been quite so insignificant.

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While reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, a non-NRI Indian reader keeps thinking that she/he is reading something about the “diasporic” experience of the NRIs. The kind of migration-craze Kiran Desai depicts in The Inheritance of Loss is not a caricature at all: it is the very psychic reality of the postcolonial South Asian. We think there is a “land of opportunities” beyond the sea. The South Asian Everyman feels proud if he has relatives residing abroad.

All this hankering springs from a deep sense of alienation between the “present” and the “pratyahik”. We think we live in the shabby domain of the “pratyahik”, whereas they abroad live in the historic present. Their everyday is historically significant, while ours is not. In the unipolar universe of today, we feel all history stems from the American soil. So, the “unaccustomed earth” of the NRI experience can proffer it a significance which our ostensibly accustomed earth cannot provide us with.

But if you are not a jejune one, you will begin to ask yourself a few very disturbing questions. Are you, the Indian in India, any more accustomed to your earth that the Indian in the U.S is to his? Does your experience grow out of an accustomed earth? Aren’t you both temporally and spatially detached from your “historical” present? In fact, are you not also spatially detached from your experience, when you keep pondering on the possible alternatives overseas without living fully in your present?

It is wrong to think that authors like Tagore or Bibhutibhusan tried to valorise the “pratyahik” in the face of “history”. They acutely observed the monotony of everydayness. In their works one can more often than not find a covert consternation at the recognition of the huge gap between the “history” and the “pratyahik”. The colonists’ history conflicts with the colonized’s everydayness. Bankimchandra  had set out to explore the “history” of the colonized; Tagore or Bibhutibhusan tried to capture the polychromatic nuances of the “pratyahik” of the colonized. They did not romanticise everydayness, they accepted its monotonous nature. But they tried to lend it a significance of its own[vi]. Thus, in their works we find a beautiful aesthetic attempt to resist the alienation I have so far focused on. They also accomplish another very significant task — they create a unique space for the “pratyahik” where it can remain functional without begging “significance” from the historical present. That is not to say that in this process there is no possibility of interpenetration between the historic present and everydayness. Today we have not only inherited but also actively effected a “loss” — we have lost the space of everydayness that Tagore or Bibhutibhusan sought to carve out for us.

Despite all the hullabaloo over the South Asian immigrant experience in the U.S., what Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories essentially show is that there is no additional significance in the everyday experience of the NRI. Is Lahiri’s ‘Only Goodness’ a story about immigrant experience? Can you not find a Sudha-like figure amongst your sisters and sisters-in-law in your apparently insignificant family life in India? Aren’t there many non-NRI women here as well who want to be “only goodness” to their relatives and friends and at last excruciatingly realise that they cannot? Then why should we attach significance and human dignity to a Sudha only when she is an NRI?

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Leo Tolstoy writes in the second epilogue to War and Peace, ‘The problem is, that regarding man as a subject of observation from whatever point of view — theological, historical, ethical, or philosophic — we find a general law of necessity to which he (like all that exists) is subject. But regarding him from within ourselves, as what we are conscious of, we feel ourselves to be free.’[vii]

For the Christian Tolstoy, “free will” is a basic conceptual point round which all historiographical debates centre. He is absolutely right in realizing that as an objectified entity, a human being is a subject to some general laws, while as a non-objectified entity a human subject feels himself to be free. (The first is the domain of “history”, whereas the latter is that of the “pratyahik”.) But must we, the South Asian postcolonials, keep sacrificing our “pratyahik” to a history which is Eurocentrically conceptualized as a domain of general laws?

Everydayness is not a domain where you can exert an absolute free will, nor is it a space for an exclusive subjectivity. It lives through its dynamic experientiality, without negating the “Other”.

The Everyman has always remained alienated from history in every nook of the world in every “historic” era. In this feeling of alienation, the American Everyman is fraternally bonded to the South Asian Everyman. We needn’t feel that the American Everyman is within history, while we are outside it. We needn’t feel that their everydayness is historical, whereas ours is not. Shall we only dwell on the sordid aspects of everydayness, like T.S. Eliot or Baudelaire? Cannot we, the South Asian postcolonials, attribute a certain amount of grace to our everydayness?

We, the South Asians who are not abroad, can regain our accustomed earth only by reclaiming the dynamic autonomy of our “pratyahik”. And of course, it will be a ‘Good Earth’. The experience which will sprout from it will restore humanity to the postcolonials. Each of us, in postcolonial South Asia, does have a right to reclaim our accustomed earth from the power-structure that dares to deny it to us. We will have to re-link ourselves to our “pratyahik”, rediscover its dignity; we will have to exercise everydayness as a therapeutic measure against the anxiety and violence of our postcolonial alienation.

We have to overcome the monotony of everydayness. Explosive historic breaks can never redeem the Everyman or Everywoman from the vapid monotony of the “pratyahik” once and for all. We need not strive to get historically significant. Our angst is existential, and it springs from our alienation from the “pratyahik” as well as from “history”, though we faultily attribute our angst wholly to our alienation from history. Our dignified exercise of everydayness itself will enable the pageant of our “pratyahik sukhdukhha” to pierce and dismantle the monolith of history in the long run.

I write this piece not as an academic article, but much in the same manner as Sissy in Ama Ata Aidoo’s novel Our Sister Killjoy writes that ambiguous “love letter”. Sissie doesn’t post her letter. Ama Ata Aidoo writes, ‘Once written, it was written. She had taken some of the pain away and she was glad. There was no need to mail it. There was no need to mail it. It was not necessary.’[viii]. Sissie does not post it, but Ama Ata Aidoo publishes it in her novel. And likewise, though I’m “glad” after taking “some of the pain away”, I send my letter out, inviting rewritings by my South Asian brothers and sisters.

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POSTSCRIPT:

Gunnar Myrdol’s seminal work on South Asian “realities” is called Asian Drama. We all are apparently actors in what the Nobel Laureate economist identifies as the “Asian drama”. But what role does the South Asian Everyman play in this drama – only that of a clown, or that of an anonymous one amid a thespian mob? Nirad C. Chaudhuri, the arcane healer, proffers the Indians a peculiar prescription to “rescue” their “European soul(s) from Circe”:

‘Say that we are Europeans in our own right, and we want no patronage. We shall take our destiny in our hands… And in a moment the pelt, the skin, and the fur will fall of your backs, and you will be free again.’[ix]

Chaudhuri’s idiosyncratic proposal emanates from a deep angst which all of us (in his words his “fellow-beasts”), share with him. We think we Asians are not the masters but the slaves of the historic present, while they “over there” (the Europeans in Chaudhuri’s imagination, or the Americans in our imagination today) have the reins of the historic present in their own hands. However, we have to realise that the Circe is not India (or South Asia, for that matter), but the “history” imposed on us. To become “free again”, we need not reclaim our European-ness (which is absurd), we just need to reclaim the human dignity of the accustomed earth of our everydayness. There is no one god of small things —only gods of small things. We will have to make the religion of History polytheistic.

Some of us, certainly, move heaven and earth to reclaim our dignity. And that is why, besides the euphoria of “diasporic” literature, we have also such powerful works as Bluemonkish by Zai Kuning, where our self-dignity is asserted without the positing of an imaginary American-ness or European-ness of the South Asians.

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[i] Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World History (NY: Columbia University Press, 2002) pp 98-99. Also see Saranindranath Tagore, ‘Rabindranath Tagore, History, and the Problem of Modernity’ in Krishna Sen and Tapati Gupta eds. Tagore and Modernity (Kolkata: Dasgupta & Co. , 2006), pp. 15-16

[ii] Ashis Nandy has presented a brilliant discussion of the ‘nonhistoricised pasts’ and their significance in the South Asian cultural life today, in his book, Time Warps. See Ashis Nandy, ‘Introduction’ to Time Warps, The Insistent Politics of Silent and Evasive Pasts (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007), pp 1-12

[iii] Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: A Comparative and Historical Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 1996). See the ‘Introduction’, p. 3.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] A brilliant image of this kind of anomie is presented by Amitav Ghosh at the end of his novel, In an Antique Land, where he writes, ‘There was nothing to be seen except crowds: Nabeel had vanished into the anonymity of History.’ We the South Asians, too, just like Nabeel, are everyday forcibly drowned by History into an ostensibly irredeemable anonymity. Perhaps everydayness can alone redeem us, restoring a name to each of us outside the exclusionary regime of mainstream history. Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 2004), p. 353 [See the Epilogue]

[vi] For a detailed discussion of Tagore’s novel historiographical idea centred round the ‘pratyahik’ see the essay by Sradindranath Tagore mentioned in the first endnote.

[vii] Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude, ed. Henry Clifford (New York: GUP, 2008), p. 1291.

[viii] Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy, or Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint, (Burnt Mill, Harlow: Longman, 1981), pp. 133.

[ix] Nirad C. Chaudhuri, ‘The Continent of Circe, an Essay on the Peoples of India’ (Mumbai: Jaico, 2001), p. 350.