The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Discourse in India (Soas Studies on South Asia)

SOAS Srudics in South Asia

The Unhappy Consciousness BANKlMCHANDRA CHATIOPADHYA Y AND THE FORMATION OF NATIONALIST DISCOURSE IN INDIA

SUDIPTA KAVIR.\]

DELHI

OXFORD BOMBhY

UNIVERSITY' Chl.CUTTh 1995

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MhDR.hS

Oxford UniVdc his way in the err.rtic light o~thc occasronallightn~ng. Soon a violent summerstonn broke out with grot voole~ce, and a duck n:rn began to fall. The honeman lost .U sense ofdirection >nd did not know wluch w>y to proceiny night into an encounter \VIth hJS dcsttny. That rs how ,human destiny is met. The wa~ he meets his destiny--the face ofTilot~mi-is symbolic. He meets ~er m an. aba~doned temple, in a place of ambiguous-holiness, in secret, m the ?tckenng uncertain light of a bmp which soon went out m a gust of wmd. What a way to meet one's destiny, to have the first glunpse of the face which would change one's life! Or is that the way it os met, always? Anyway, it wos a faul bndscape. Its gloom and foreboding coul~ have come from one of the romantic paintings of the unequ~l meen?g of man and the forces of nature. Like them, it seems to bear a dual s1gn1ficance. was not merely an event occurring in an individual m>ry, not the des~ny of this individual man, nor the darkness of this rainy mght. There was _another' night which stood beyond tlris night, anotherdarkness beyond Its darkness. M in the paintings of the Romantics the connngent, th~ event depicted, w•s significant precisely because i; expressed somethmg larger than itself. it revealed the nature of the world It was a m~taphysical inscription; and the storm of that night was th~ storm of eJUStence. It ~s also a landscape of the creator's mind. This is ~ow he thou~t the umverse wa.-tense, disorderly, nocturnal, swept by mcomprehensoble diSOrders. It was not accidental that faci"l; :h~t disorder w~ a man, ~ r~pres~ntative in Hindu theory, of the principle of order. This was an mnmanon of the condition of humaniry. The general question of liminality seems to have fascinated Bankim as a noveliSt, though th~ form of thi$ lirninaliry, its social context. varied • great t the limit between two religions raises the spectre of a great transgressive act, much greater, if it had been crossed, than liaisons with widows or otherwise desirable but unattainable women within the confines of Hindu socicry. In that sense, Banlcim retreau from this k.ind of a radical theme. In a different, more formal sense however, he radic'aliz.es his problem, because what appears as a mere possibility, a mere hint of a stonn, only the idta of a rransgression. becomes in bter novels a series of rtol transgressive acu. Ayda does not enter into an aCiual transgression; Bankim's subsequent heroines aU do: Kunda, R.ohini, Sri, lndiri all enter into real transgressive acts. What causes this play around lirninaliry is the conflict between desire and denial, desire seen as man's (or mosdy woman's) elemental inclinations, and denial as the system of prohibitions constructed by society tQ bind and channel them, and render them safe. In the world of his creation, which he slowly constructs with thineen other novels after D11rgdnandini, this struggle between the brittle creations of sociery and the waves of human desire has the central place. However, its form changes. C haracters who enact this drama vary. The play is constructed differently in each case; but there is an underlying uniry of philosophic concern about this question, this dark possibility of transgressiori.

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17tt Unhappy Comtiomncss I have earlier caUM this a philosophic problem stemming from morality. It is important to see exactly what this means. It is not a moral problem in the narrow sense. A moral judgement often judges an act or a life against rules set down by a particular moral system. and evaluates them ethically as right or wrong. But the k.ind of judgement this rype of story-telling invites is very di((erent. What we come to reflect upon and judge is less the m oral quality of an act than the nature of morality itself. and the rightness and wrongness of having this kind of a system of right or wrong. The feeling left in '!.1 at the end of the story is not one of m oral horror at the presumption of Aydi's transgressive love for Jagatsinha, but a stealthy fundamental sympathy. To use another philosophic tenn, we get a tragic taste of finitude. II is not an empirical question ofjudging an act against a set of moral rules; but reflecting upon the necessity of having to judge, of having moral codes which prohibit inclinations, impose an impoverishing format on human liv!;S. destroying happiness by interdicts. 12 We come not to say how wrong AyeSa's emotions are, but how wrong is a world in which such feelingr have to be seen as wrong. It creatcs-«o use Rene Girard's argument-not a sense of wrongness of the act, but of wrongness of the world-the basic emotion of the tragic. In one sense, it explores the behaviour of a 'problematic individual', but by the skill of an it accomplishes a subtle transformation of this enquiry, and turns it into a sense of the problematiciry of the world iuelf.ll Liminaliry of a related but somewhat different son arises for the first time in Bank.im's third novel, Mrnalinl, 14 a story without much narrative complexity. Two stories are wo~en together simply by the accident of time and space. The protagonists of both stories happen to live in Nabadwip when the evenu of tloe narrative unfold. An outer. structure is formed by the tide story of M !'lilini and Hemcandra, the deposed crown prince of Magadh, seelcing revenge against the Muslim despoi.l ers of hi.s &ther's kingdom. His characru does not display any remarluble qualiry except a muscular unintelligence which causes MrniJiru much avoidable suffering.•s Within the story ofM!'Iiliru and Hemcandra, there is an inset of a rernad::able second narrative which reveals all the basic elements of Banlcim's metaphysical search for the nature of the liminal. Gaud, an independent lcingdom of Bengal, is ruiM fonnally by iu feeble old king, La~ansen. Actually, the man who rules in name of the old k.ing is P.Supati, an extraordinarily able Brahmin, a schemer, above ordinary moral scruples, constantly plotting violent d eeds for the sake of power. At the centre of his personality is an intense and interesting frustration. H e loves tloe daughter of a local priest, of vague antecedents, Manoramawoman of surpassing beauty. (A constant feature of Bank.im's fiction: I think it is not just a matter of literary conventions which did not allow unspectacular women to be o bjects of art: they had to be naturnl masterpieces to find a place in artistic ones. Bur there. may

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be • deeper philosophic point: they have to symbolize the power of d1eir sex, their &tal annc:tion; for they 2fways represent the invibtion of the liminal; their beauty is 2 marie of their being expressions of 2 principle, somet!Ung larger and more irucrubble th2n themselves.) Not!Ung is known of Manor21lli's life except that she h2d lost her husband wd was 2 young widow, the symbol in Hindu society of both artnction and interdiction. Bankim invests her 6gure with 21! the mysteriousness that the Hindu religious and cultural traditions ch2raeterize a woman with-2 contradictoty personality fluctuating between the serious and the pbyful, 2 cleor imeUect and childish innocence and, above all, • masterful capacity to use precisely dtis duality of her personality to keep Pasupati at bay.•• In the end, Paiupati dies, unable to control his destiny though he was perh2ps the most competent of rational players of his time, showing to us one face of fate. 17 Paiupati experiences 2 consuming passion for Manonmi, which docs not bring her to him. Wlu:n he dies, 2 victim of his own diplomacy, she is still disbnt, unatbined. At the end of the novel, it is reveoled that Manor21lli was not a widow; she was in f2c1, P.Supati's wedded wife; but be \Y2S kept in the dark about this by 2 &Jse interpretation of 2n ascrologcr's forecast_,, Here we 6nd a man and a woman bound together by two distinct rebrions simultaneously, and the relation between the two rel.2tions is contradictory. The first is the relation of marriage, the socially sanctified form of desire. The second is a socially unsancti6ed form of passion, something dark and noctum~. something that threatens the mapping and the whole orchitecture of the social world. Obviously, these two relations symbolizing two forms of desire, are contradiCtory in the social world that Ban kim too!< 2s given, the map ofmorol order provided by the Hindu tndition. Every structure of its kind is defined by its basic antinomies, the central de6rtitions which must be held in pbce if the entire strucrure of secondary de6rtitions is not to coll2pse in confusion. Certainly, within Hinduism the exclusion between wife and mistress is on antinomy of this kind. Within t!Us structure, they 2re exclusive of eoch other, in the sense th2t if one exists, the other connot. The same womon connot be both 2t the some time to the same m2n. •• Seen from this ongle, P.Supati is actually Manoro.III3's husband, but he is ~o. at least potentially, the dangerous mougressor. He should have h•d Manonmi 2s his wife, but is reduced by circumstances to desire her as a mistress. In a sense, the refore. in this curious story we find an overby, a

confusion of the two antithetic de6nitions-ir that he did not see in this ndical sense what he was doing. An acciden; that h2ppens in seven novels is an extraordinary accident indeed! What is sometimes said of painters and artistS is also true of novelists, ~nd of Dan kim. Anists often seck a perfect re~ization of a problem or an •mage. Leonardo, Freud said, sought the perfect rendering of that mysterious beginrting ofa smile--through the remarkable consistency ofhis painted women.20 Bankim seems to have had a similar obsessiveness with the PO:O~lem of duality of relationships, i.e., the same e~ppiri~ relation being clrgoble for two contradictoty descriptions, until he reached the cleorest and the most extreme form in the otherwise unspeetacubr novel, JndGii. By coaunoo consent, lndiTii is not one ofBankim's best .;ovels whether judged in purely aesthetic terms or by the normal criteria of e~ceUence ofth~ novel fo~ The st~ry which holds these inciden!S together is highly contnved, a senous flaw m construCtion given the ideals of reolist art that Banlcim ~on_siStendy pursued. But his is a pren2ui~istic realism. Linearity of ~•rn_to~e os the norm here; he indulges in 2n old-12shioned story-telling, quote drsnnct from the perspectiv~ experimenwism of some of his own later novels like Rajani. 21 The basic trouble with the story is its unreality. O ne con uke it seriously only through a wiiJjng suspension of disbelief on crucial points. Even if the robbery is credible, though the daughter of a wealthy family would perhaps go out somewhat better protected in d1ose unsetded times, India's subsequent run of uninterrupted good

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fortune is hordly so. lndirii is lucky in meeting • Brahmin who apparcnt!Y ~xim for the explicit purpose of helping girls in distress. She J.S lucky tn getting an employer like Suhisini. She is incredrbly lucky m the ~hance of her husband's susceptibility to physical be>ury and her ~ron ~f the exact kind that Batters him, and particularly the fact that thas potcntJ>I was not olready exploited by ony pr~ccding cook in his life. Ycot it is difficult $omehow to say that Indira is entirely unrealistic. One finds pleasure in Bankim's characteristic observation of the snull thin~ of domestic life. The realism of a story is, after all, a rather complex alfaar. It is not just a matter of the plot, the sequence of even~ which constitute the movement of the story from one point of equahbnum to the next. If we use Todorov's distinction, the story is unrealistic. in its 'verb' asp~ct, but ~ntirely credible in its '•djectives'. All thOSVels of action this is a novel which explores relationships, m which acnons are neglig\bJe 2nd exter=l. Wlut luppens goes on in the kitchen o r its ~ viciniry. At any rate, it rarely moves out of the andatmaha~ the women s sanctuuy within the Bengali household, except for some forays to moc.k at that lugubrious symbol of the ·formal, w~emized outside world, the perennial object ofBank:im's ridicule-coloma! cou~. . Some interesting allegories could ~ fou~d o.n .this. level. There •s at play a caricatured version of the phil~sop~1c dis~ncno~ berwe.en male and female principles, a serious enough 1dea m ongmal ~mdu ph•losophy but adapted by the imitative Victorianism o.f the babu mto one between an all-!mportant outside world and an uru~porta~t home. The bab~ version, the rationaliry of the male and ~~nnm~ntalJSm of the fc~e, JS of course a caricature of the original rradJOona!Jdea; and there IS eVIdent justice in its being caricatured in rum. It shows up the world-consurrung pretensions and delusions ofthe babu, the ineffectualiry of the subordination he wishes to impose on Others who live around ~· Men repr~ent, in this very masculine of myths, the outside_ world ~f we1ghry and mrncate decisions, women the uncomplicated sentunental•ty of th~ ho~seh~ld. It is men who bold the world in order, and stop it fro":' dissolVIng mto a confusion of indulgence and tears, a stereotype tlut nu~SJons, that even somethmg which is not ordinarily justifiable is right for the sake ofsdf-preservationn She is driven to do this to win her way back into h, she ~ns by bdng Siurim's t.wfully wedd~d wife, the relationship of normalcy, of unevenrfulness; but at a nme ofhfe when it could not be seen as a nornul relation of sexuality. Afterwards, as in so nuny of Bankim's stories, there is obligatory interference by a fnudulent version of fate. Sitirim's &mily finds, on having her horoscope read (and the reader m•kes a true statement of truly o racular o~aci.ty) that she is fated to cause death to her dearest. It is a sutemeot wh1ch u to bc. intetpreted twice," and the nearer intetpretation is characteristically wrong. She is estranged from Sitiram as a conseq~ence. They l~:_v: a~• accidental second meeting which revives their reJanon. In fact, Sw>ram s conduct on th1s second meeting is nor above reproach; for he wishes to take Sri back not out of a moral conviction of injustice done against her, or of her rights as his wife, but for the very differ~nt claims of her bca~ty. Siuram gets attracted nor to his wifc--2 social relanon--but to the beaunful woman a relation of natural instinct. For a speU, in a foreshortened sort of way,' Sri is 1ndira to Siurim, but this is not dra~~ out, for dut is ~ot the point of this particular story. It has greater arnb1nons of consrrucung relational complexiry. Sri takes a further step by renounang her conta.ct with her husband, becoming a sannyiisr~ a renouncer of the world and IU ordinary desires. When she returns to Siurim it is ~th a new 1de?uty. she agrees to live near him without public rites of.mamage; for the ~tgher and the lower liminality are identical on one pomt: to both the rrustrcss and the renouncer the path of marriage is barred. Sitirim's behaviour towards Sri is JWf what one would expect towards a mistress, one ~un~ by this strongest of all relations. He is shown to be besotted. Sn tS h1s addict.i on as no wife, no woman of nornulcy can bc.. This can happen only with a wom•n who has the darkness ofliminality about her~ a woman transfigured by transgreuion. At the midpoint of the story, ~n has three different fem2le identities superimposed on one another, whtch relate to Siurim in three distinct ways, yet all subsisting within herself. She covers the realm of nornulcy and the rwo liminal realms at the same time. She is a sannyiisl, one who has given up the rights of desire; s~e is a ':"ife, a woman in the nornul space; she is also perilously close to bc.10g a t~tress, a wonun who represcnu this dark sexuality of tnnsl!"esston. ObVJo~ty the question of transgression, of a faU, is exacerba~ed by the fact that tt IS not d1e faU of a housewife, but of a renouncer. It t.S seen exactly this w_ay by the rwo rather prudish subjects ofSiurim's ltingdom who ~ct as a ltind of chorus to their &te.lS Sri is seen as going out of the sOCial space of nonnalcy in cwo different directions. If relations define id~ntity, who is she? What is she to Siurim? What could bc. a good moral JUdgement on what she has done with her life? There can hordly be any greater indefinab1hty than in this ease. In a sense: her~ ~an~ had achiev.ed c : something like a hminal case of constructing linunality; the pby With limiu has reached a limit of its own.

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In this world that we ~e building up gndually through >ucceeding novels of dc:sire there are some underlying regularities of structure and form. The point of underlyingness. or implicitness is important. An artist as successful, prolific and creative as Bankim obviously followed deliberate plans and strategies of narntive construction. His fiction .!so shows a remarlc.able variety of situations, of personalities, of plot construction, a deliberate and very well-judged variety of language. Still, there are some underlying themes and f9rrns conunon to practically aU his novels. If this had been a real world, these would have constituted iu structure and its laws of motion. There is of course nothing contradictory in this. What the artist depiccs is the variety of a world, and to be a world it must have form and order. What is revealed by these is the author's sense of the world; what he thinks the world is. One of the most significant features of this world, the way the world is. is what women do in its general scheme." though perhaps the proper verb for what I wish to convey is nOt do, but ~. Bankim must have been conscious of this ambiguous centrality of the woman in the transactions of the world of his making. At the most obvious level, this is announced in the names of novels after thdr central figures: Durgdnanclini M('tiilini, Indira, RaclhDrani, Rajani, Devi Cauc/hurani, Kapalkuntlafii. This consists in a declaration by the author that these narnrives arc centred around tl)ese characters. Only Candrasekhar, RDjsinha and Sitaram bear the names of their heroes. But the logic of history and the logic of narrative are different. There is a sense in .which even these stories which do not fomtally revolve round the fates of women, do depend on them for the movement of the ,I narnrive. Women are the,prime movers of the verbs. Clearly, the story in Candrasekl1aris as much Saibaliru~s story as C•ndrasekhar's, in fuct, more so. For •!though Candrasekhu and S•ibalini constitute one of the few p•irs in which the relation between possive •nd weak men and dominant and active women hos been forrnolly reversed-becouse Saibaluu Jus no remorkoble trait excepr her beouty, the 1001 of all rrouble--stiU, it is she who is critically significanr for the mOtion of the narrative. It is h.or life •nd pbyfulness which bring th~ disparate elements of the story together. It is the rebtion of three men with her-Candr2sekhor bound by the tie of marriage, Foster by the tie of violence, and Prolip by the wistful relationship ofrenunciation-which keeps the srory going. She is the cause in the story of all the ocence ·and simplicity, entirely devoid of ill will towards •nyone. But the consequences for the two families which come in couch with them are identical. Even if tllis is not a deliberate construction, it makes a point with particular cbriry. Differences in character arc not J significant for the detenninarion of fate. It is not their in tendon or their personality which c•use destruCtion. but their very being. TypicaUy, in ne2rly aU of .Bankim's noveb of crime and punishment, there are indications pointing towards either a philosophical or cin:umst>ntif-1 extenuation. Often, the character who tmugresscs, usually a wom•n. at a time of crisis gives • powerful and entirely credible justification of what she

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has done. Often, the narrator shows how she could not have 2cted othe~s:--o' .questioning of the concepts of guilt, responsibility and detenrurusm·lies at the heart of Bank.im's art. It is in this sense that his art, when he"::ims at it, attains the truly tragic. like all great tragedies we seem to encounter in them something that cannot be reckoned in terms of human agency and responsibility alone. It is what happens incvitobly and ~efies accounting for _in ordinary temu of cause and responsibility that IS called fate. .