The Rumor of Globalization

THE RUMOR OF GLOBALIZATION BHASKAR MUKHOPADHYAY The Rumor of Globalization Desecrating the Global from Vernacular Mar...

Author: Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay

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THE RUMOR OF GLOBALIZATION

BHASKAR MUKHOPADHYAY

The Rumor of Globalization Desecrating the Global from Vernacular Margins

HURST & COMPANY, LONDON

First published in the United Kingdom in 2012 by C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 41 Great Russell Street, London, WC1B 3PL © Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay, 2012 All rights reserved. Printed in India The right of Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay to be identified as the author of this publication is asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. A Cataloguing-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-1-84904-141-6 This book is printed using paper from registered sustainable and managed sources. www.hurstpublishers.com

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ix Introduction: Desecrating the Global from Vernacular Margins

1

1. The Rumor of Globalization: Globality-Counterworks and the Location of Commodity

35

2. Writing Home, Writing Travel: Translation, Travel, and Dwelling in Bengali Modernity

59

3. Between Elite Hysteria and Subaltern Carnivalesque: Street-Food and Globalization in Calcutta

87

4. “Dream Kitsch”? Folk Art, Indigenous Media and “9/11”: The work of Pat in the Era of Electronic Transmission

105

5. Crossing the Howrah Bridge: Calcutta, Filth and Dwelling—Forms, Fragments, Phantasms

127

6. Virtual Flesh: Desi Netporn, “Fat Aunty” and the TechnoFolk—Vernacular Desire in the Age of the World Wide Web

141

Appendix 175 Notes 179 Index 211

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To my teachers from Calcutta University Ajit Chowdhury Arup Mallick Asok Sen Gautam Bhadra Kalyan Sanyal Partha Chatterjee With humility and gratitude

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book was in the making for a long time and I wish to acknowledge those who supported me during this period. I have a longstanding intellectual debt to Partha Chatterjee and my enthusiasm for popular politics in “most of the world” is imbibed mainly from him. Gyatri Chakravorty Spivak was kind enough to go through an earlier draft of this book at a time when her own schedule was quite hectic. I am deeply grateful to her for her criticism and hospitality and I humbly acknowledge my inability to redress all the inadequacies she pointed out in my vulnerable work. I was privileged to have Christopher Pinney as one of my readers and his friendship and support have been a source of my intellectual sustenance. Gautam Bhadra’s and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s imprints on my intellectual physiognomy would be evident to the readers of this book. My engagement with ethnography and fieldwork owes a lot to John Hutnyk, friend and philosopher, and to Kaushik Ghosh. I need to acknowledge my deep intellectual debt to John Frow and Marilyn Strathern. I think of myself as one of their (unworthy) disciples. Rustom Bharucha’s friendship and conversations are a source of stimulation and enlightenment. Here’s a chance to acknowledge my other friends, teachers and well-wishers from whom I have learnt in course of conversation and exchange: Imran Butt, Abhijit Roy, Sudipta Kaviraj, Ashis Nandy, Natasha Eaton, Michael Taussig, Bina Gogineni, Amitranjan Basu, Subha Chakrabarty-Dasgupta, Laurence Hughes, Joan Marie Kelly, Raghab Banerjee, Sunil Khilnani, (late) Paul Hirst, Sami Zubaida, Stephen Muecke, Mihir and Malini Bhattacharya, Sarbajit Sengupta, Anirban Das, Arnab Chatterjee, Achinto, Daud Ali, Sita Schutt, Manas Ray, Pradip Bose, Abhijit Paul, Badri Narayan, (late) IG Khan (Aligarh), Rangan Chakravorty, and James Elkins. I also wish to thank my friend, Amitabha Ganguly, scholar and bon viveur, for sharing with me his vast knowledge of political theory,

ix

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

new world wines, Cuban cigar and chamber music. My colleagues at the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths were supportive and helpful. I have learned a lot from my students. In particular, I wish to thank Jaideep Shah (Oxford), who commented on an earlier draft of the book, and Matt Mahon, for his assistance in preparing the index. I owe a special word of thank to Michael and Rachel Dawyer for their friendship, humour and hospitality. I acknowledge the assistance of the institutions and trusts—The Charles Wallace Trust, The Leverhulme Trust, SEPHIS, CODESRIA, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Indian National Science Academy, Association for Cultural Studies, Tweedie Fund (Edinburgh University, Anthropology)—who supported my research and travel by offering grants and fellowships. My family—Tutu, Meshomoni and my cousins—have sustained me during times of stress and privation. Materials from my articles published in the following journals have been used in various chapters of this book and I wish to thank the publishers for their permission to use these texts: “Home and the World”: Voyage, Traduction et Domicile dans la Modernite Bengalie, Geneses: Sciences sociales et histoire, 35, 1999, p. 5–30 (Edition Belin, CNRS, Paris). Writing Home, Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of Dwelling in Bengali Modernity, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 44, No. 2, 2002, p. 293–318 (Cambridge University Press). Between Elite Hysteria and Subaltern Carnivalesque: The Politics of Streetfood in the City of Calcutta, South Asia Research, Vol. 24, No.1, May 2004, p. 37–50, (Sage Publishers). The Rumour of Globalization: Globality Counterworks and the Location of Commodity, Dialectical Anthropology, Vol. 29, No. 1, p. 35–60, Spring 2005 (Springer). Crossing the Howrah Bridge: Calcutta, Filth and Dwelling—Forms, Fragments, Phantasms Theory, Culture, and Society, Vol. 23, No. 7–8, 2006, p. 221–241 (Sage Publishers). Dream Kitsch—Folk art, Indigenous Media and “9/11”: The work of pat in the era of electronic transmission, Journal of Material Culture, Vol. 13 No. 1, March 2008 (Sage Publishers). Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay London, July 8, 2012 x

INTRODUCTION DESECRATING THE GLOBAL FROM VERNACULAR MARGINS

“If you believe in the world, you precipitate events, however inconspicuous, that elude control, you engender new space-times, however small their surface or volume.” Gilles Deleuze Negotiations “Make Rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don’t sow, grow offshoots! … Be quick, even when standing still! … Have short-term ideas.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus “The ‘big picture’… is always simpler and more localised than the myriad of monads it expresses only in part: it could not be without them, but without it, they would still be something. Far from being the milieu in which humans grow and live, the… [global] is only a tiny set of narrow standardised connections which occupies only some of the monads some of the times, … before being inevitably broken up by the inner resistance of… infinitesimal actants. As soon as you leave those tiny networks, you are no longer in the… [global], but down in a confusing ‘plasma’ composed of myriad of monads, a chaos, a brew, that social scientists will do everything to avoid staring at the eyes.” Bruno Latour Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social [I have replaced the word “social’ in Latour’s original with the word “global.”]

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A Thousand Tiny, Subaltern Globalizations? This is a book about “globalization”—as imagined, experienced and consumed, contested, produced and invented by the poor, the dispossessed and the disenfranchised people in India. This work is attuned more to its cheap thrills than its recondite evaluation. The idea that animates this work is that, more than a program for economic and financial integration, intensifying exploitation and systematizing violence on a planetary scale, “globalization” is also an imaginary that ferments people’s imagination.1 I try to argue that it is precisely the contest around the meaning and import of globalization which makes it a project akin to deep, grassroots democracy, rather than a resource to draw from. I have not come across much in the scholarly literature on globalization that self-consciously interrogates its vernacularization—how vernacular supra-local imaginaries cross-fertilize or clash with the metropolitan ones in the global South, the nature of the phantasms, the ambivalences and the intensities unleashed thereof—and how these discordant, hybrid imaginaries exhort and incite us to rethink “globalization.” About a decade ago, I drew up a project of writing an ethnographic study of globalization after reading Arjun Appadurai’s timely essay, “The Production of Locality,” which seemed to destabilize the ground of much of the grassroots theorization and anti-globalization activism going on in India at that time.2 Of these, the ones that readily come to mind are: the Narmada Bachao Andolan, led by Medha Patkar; various ecological, farmers’ and people’s movements whose spokespersons are theorists-activists like Vandana Shiva, Arundhuti Roy and others; Indian indigenous people’s movements;3 popular movements against nuclear weapons and reactors;4 and various cultural movements opposed to capitalist globalization whose voices have found eloquent expression in the works of my compatriot, the activisttheorist Rustom Bharucha.5 Apart from these non-statist mass-movements drawing from a sort of Gandhian anarchism, I should also mention in this context the countrywide campaigns undertaken by the leftist and the Communist political parties of India. Wanting to critique Appadurai, whose deontologization of “locality” seemed to imply that in this era of mediatization of social imagination, it is no longer possible to ground resistance in localized practices and bounded “forms of life,” since the very sense of belonging to these has been undermined by the deterritorializing forces of media and communication technologies, consumption and migration, I wanted to write about vernacular struggles to participate in what he called 2

INTRODUCTION

“the work of imagination.” Capitalist globalization must not be equated with globalization tout court. The struggles to imagine otherwise, and not just to participate in the “global mediatic imagination [Inc.],” cannot even be registered from the “molar” perspectives of normalizing social sciences. Hence, my maxim: “Better to be a tiny quantum flow than a molar converter, oscillator or distributor!”6 To sidetrack the unproductive, sterile debate between the nationalists and the globalists, I opted for the neutral term “vernacular” because it seemed to me that the national-global matrix leaves out vast spaces of solidarities, crucial contests around imaginaries and intensities. In a country like India and in the global South in general, there are “other [non-state] authorities,” to use Partha Chatterjee’s felicitous phrase, other belongings not wholly commensurate with citizenship in a nation state. These are difficult to capture since our training in social sciences and cultural theory has not prepared us to track these solidarities. The textbook categories can be no more than entry points into the real lives of people living in the subcontinent today. Anthropological theorizing in India, at least in its initial phase, did not take into account the state. The historians have tried to redress the balance somewhat. It is mainly historical works which enable us to see that the lived socialities and solidarities today are resultants of long processes of mutations in which we must factor in the formative influence of the state—its apparatus, categories, administration, governance etc.—as well as those of media, of consumption, of migration, of electoral politics, of the economy, of social movements and so on. The influence of “other authorities” works alongside as well as through these institutions and processes. We must aim at interrogating what Fanon called “that zone of occult instability where the people dwell.” More specifically, the locution, vernacular, names those rhizomic formations which are: acentred, non-hierarchical… systems(s) without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states. Unlike a structure, which is defined by a set of points and positions, with binary relations between the points and biunivocal relationships between the positions, the rhizome is made only of lines: lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimension, and the line of flight or deterritorialization as the maximum dimensions after which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature.7

Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestive language goes on to capture, in very general terms, the nature of the solidarities I have in mind. 3


If one leaves out a miniscule number of transnational institutions—the IMF, the WTO and their likes, the global financial and corporate economy and the global NGOs—who declare the capitalist globalization to be a fait accompli and yet work ceaselessly towards its production, when it comes to cultural boundaries, scale and location, today’s globalization needs to be viewed, according to Saskia Sassen, the official sociologist of globalization, “as partly inhabiting and even getting constituted inside the national.”8 These forms are “localization of the global.” Her entire optic being grounded in the molar, univocal over-coding characteristic of state-thinking, she cannot think of space as anything but a surface as represented in a map: geometry. And there is a secret bond between the State and geometry unperceived by Husserl or Derrida: they take on the power of the scalpel. The farthest one can go from there is: “Localized in national and subnational settings, these processes [denationalizing practices within the national] are part of globalization in that they insert localities in the global production…”9 But recognizing the “multiscalar character” of global formations or even “the fact of multiple globalizations” would not take us very far. The same is true for Appadurai’s “locality” or place, which is described as “a complex phenomenological quality, constituted by a series of links between the sense of social immediacy, the technologies of interconnectivity, and the relativity of contexts.”10 Though these qualifications are meant to remove a residual sense of fixity and immediacy, his thinking is still claustrophobically holistic to account for the intricate web of solidarities people dwell, mobilize and act upon in complex, historical and highly stratified societies like India. But Gilles Deleuze’s “molecular” and the “micropolitical” may name the kind of unstable, context-specific, fragile locations of resistance and reconstructions I have in mind. He writes: The issue is that the molar and the molecular are distinguished not by size, scale, or dimension but by the nature of the system of reference envisioned. Perhaps, then, the words “line” and “segment” should be reserved for molar organization, and other, more suitable, words should be sought in molecular composition. And in fact, whenever we identify a well-defined segmented line, we notice that it continues in another form, as a quantum flow. And in every instance, we can locate a “power centre” at the border between the two, defined not by an absolute exercise of power within its domain but by the relative adaptations and conversions it effects between the line and the flow. … [P]ower centres are defined much more by what escapes them or by their impotence than by their zones of power. In short, the molecular, or… micropolitics is defined not by the smallness of its elements but by the nature of its “mass”—the quantum flow as opposed to the molar segmented line. The task

4

INTRODUCTION of making the segments correspond to the quanta, of adjusting the segments to the quanta, implies hit-and-miss charges in rhythm and mode rather than any omnipotence; and something always escapes.11

In this book, in the course of my ethnographic and historical reconstructions of our “micropolitics” underpinned by specific institutions, historical practices and instituted imaginaries, the “molecular” will be historicized and vernacularized (see the chapters entitled The Rumor of Globalization and Writing Home, Writing Travel). Readers acquainted with the works of Subaltern Studies scholarship from South Asia are familiar with the term “community.” It resonates strongly with German historical sociology’s discredited analytical construct—the autochthonous, immediate, and sheltering Gemeinschaft, which opposes itself to the self-interest fuelled contractual “association.” In view of my exploration of subaltern, vernacular socialities in this book in connection with globalization, I propose that they recall and disown the term. Just as ethnos and polis, or multitude and people, are not ideal-types with universal applicability but are rather results of very specific historical mutations (e.g., there would be no “multitude” without the centralizing forces unleashed by the Renaissance state; it would be meaningless to talk of polis without the backdrop of what Aristotle called politike koinonia), so Gemeinschaft, despite Tönnies’ own idealization, cannot be taken as a generic category encompassing of all solidarities everywhere prior to the institution of Abstract Right. The panacea of community, sadly, has foreclosed the empirical investigation of subaltern socialities. I want to demonstrate that the local and the vernacular are not down here and the global is not up there, always somewhere else, as Appadurai and most theorists of globalization would have us believe.12 Sassen writes that the “nested scalar hierarchy” must be replaced by “topological patterns” and proposes that “today’s local is multiscaler.”13 But even the deep space of topology reduces spatiality to mere surface and extension. It is as if space pre-exists events unfolding in it, as if it is a mere container. I want to think space and place politically, eventally, as always displaced, dislocated, always under construction and, therefore, beyond geometry, topology and map— exceeding representation. Time and space must be thought together. The deprioritization of space, arising out of its supposed concurrence with extension, goes back to conceptual mutations articulated theoretically by Bergson and Poincaré (Bourdieu’s habitus is deeply complicit with Poincaré’s Euclidian spatial ontology) in the early-twentieth century, who distinguished it radically from time, intensity and duration. For them, space is a 5


discrete multiplicity without duration, not only instantaneous but also static: “We cannot make movement out of immobilities, nor time out of space.”14 But can external objects be thought without duration? Representation, indeed, fixes and stabilizes. But that would be true for time and history as well. Visionary thinkers like Benjamin have shown that history, at least from the point of view of those who want to “blast open its continuum,” is unrepresentable. Doreen Massey, the cultural geographer, has rightly asserted that “there is no case at all for the… proposition… that there is an equivalence between space and representation.”15 The map is not the territory and the space of the world always exceeds its mimetic representation and, in that sense, it must be thought as unrepresentable. The argument here is that space is an open, ongoing production, result of interaction, that space itself is an event. Place takes place.16 In the Indic civilization, in contradistinction to the Judeo-Christian tradition,17 even the holy places were understood relationally, performatively.18 Neither time nor space is reducible to the other but they are, in Massey’s words, “co-implicated.”19 Latour’s well-known dictum “The connection among things alone make time,”20 would not sound so outrageous if we balance the equation by stressing the other side: that it is because of time that things can be conceptualized as co-produced and lying side-by-side. My basic objection to Appadurai’s “locality” is that despite recognizing that it is a kind of performance, “a fragile achievement,” his locality almost coincides with the ethnological notion of place as locations of coherence. While “disjuncture and difference” are attributed to the global,21 locality seems to be closed off from other similar but equally insular localities prior to the onset of the process of capitalist globalization when, suddenly and dramatically, the world becomes “radically delocalized,” inhabiting a depthless instantaneity in which everything is connected to everything else and, in that process, space has been annihilated by time. In this book, in the chapter on vernacular travel and its relation to home (Writing Home, Writing Travel), I have tried to demonstrate the impossibility of any position which is not already a relation. And there is no point of departure—localities never had any timeless “authenticity” secreting “ontological moorings” for their members. To talk of “global flows” resulting from capitalist globalization (Appadurai) or the “multiscalar” nature of today’s local (Sassen), is to assume that once these boundaries were impermeable, that there was no transgression. That is not the case. I have demonstrated with textual evidence that long before European colonialism put in place a frame for capi6

INTRODUCTION

talist globalization whose center was Europe and in that process, destroyed other, erstwhile worlds (in this case, the Indo-Islamic “cosmopolis”), people in “India,” “Africa”22 or “China”23 were not insular homebodies. If you read the travelogue of Abu Taleb, a nawabi aristocrat from late-eighteenth century Lucknow with Indo-Islamic affiliation who wrote a travelogue of England, you will see how he jumps from one scale to another in his introspections about location. “The presumption that spaces are autonomous [and, therefore, naturally disconnected] has enabled the power of topography to conceal successfully the topography of power.”24 Lived space is not just extension, it is much more. To think of space as intensive means to acknowledge its multiplicities, its fractures, its inherent instabilities and creativities. And that can only be done if we acknowledge that distinctive cultural spaces were and are still being maintained (for example, in the vernacular pornographic cybercultural imagination in desi porn sites I document in Virtual Flesh) through connections rather than disjunctions and “locality” is a contingent component of that space of flows and fluidity rather than its antithesis. The vernacular, as opposed to the local or the national, names that location, that place—topos—whence a relational politics for a relational space becomes thinkable. As an overture to the wide-ranging theoretical project of rethinking space as such, as proposed by Doreen Massey and partially, empirically, undertaken by a number of theorists, including Escobar,25 Gibson-Graham26 and following them, myself, we need to pose a basic question to mainstream theorists like Appadurai and Sassen whose works are specifically concerned with the politics of scale: where is the global? Their response would be: everywhere. But this is bad theory. One cannot, simultaneously, be a constructivist while talking about locality, claimed to be a kind of performance, “a fragile achievement,” and a realist when theorizing globality, assuming that it is a kind of ground, a substratum undergirding the “flows” crisscrossing the globe. If the local is “constructed,” “produced” and “performed,” so is the global. Theorizing the global as some kind of emancipation from parochialism is part of that process of performance. Theorists need to be reflexive and take into account their own locations, scales (who says that holism is the best way to approach global complexity?), apparatus and tools in their theorizing.27 Latour is right: “There exists no place that can be said to be ‘non-local.’”28 The Global (a certain vision of capitalist globalization) is not only a location but is also located, physically, in certain places in the North. By common consent, the nerve center of “global” capitalism today 7


is Wall Street. More than ever, it is in our era that physical places and even specific sites (the Twin Towers, Wall Street, the Pentagon, the White House etc.) in one small corner of the globe have become synonymous with capitalism (though, factually, this is no longer true. China has established vast networks all over the world. But that would be called Sinification, not globalization. The Chinese development would be rationalized as some kind of an effect of globalization). There is little recognition of this—the fact that what they call the global is simply an inflated local—in the triumphant assertions about the epochal and ubiquitous character of globalization by our theorists. There is a sense in Appadurai and Sassen’s works that the ominous side of capitalist globalization (hyper-centralization, concentration and control) is somewhat compensated by its emancipatory universalism. Writes Appadurai, with an air of finality: “local knowledge is not only local in itself but, even more important, for itself.”29 This pre-empts the possibility of imagining otherwise by tying up spatial and political imagination to reified eighteenth century European models (see below). Today, I think there is a case to be made for trans-local—a new kind of global—imagination, which is floating free of its Euro-American entanglements and turning into a runaway subversive counter-imaginary. Tahrir Square, indigenous activism deep inside the Amazon rainforest against unlimited oil extraction and environmental destruction,30 in the remote hills of tribal Orissa, India,31 and numerous other sites of interventions in the global South, show that in these instances of resistance, to borrow a phrase from Escobar, “place and the local do not derive their meaning only from their juxtaposition to the [Wall Street] global.”32 In fact, in some cases, bounded local knowledge, cosmology, can even act as a tool for mobilization.33 In these sites of hope, democratic mobilization has been reinvented and given new meanings altogether.34 These would not fit the talk-show model of “Public Sphere” bequeathed to us by Europe. It is time we speak of these subaltern globalities. It is not a sentimental longing for “place,” nor a normative commitment to the “small” (“Small is beautiful,” “A small [but comfortable and complicit] history” of my little corner versus the rest of the big, bad world, etc.) that call for a radical reversal of the optic. I am making a plea for looking down (rather than “looking up” studying “global flows”) not because I believe that the “local” is inherently resistant or “different.” It is not moral outrage, nostalgia or just some vague empathy for the underdog which induces me to examine the molecular rather than the molar. I reserve those 8

INTRODUCTION

praiseworthy but ultimately impotent philanthropic sentiments for Oxfam and its likes. Nor is it my project to “provincialize” Europe. I have a much more perverse proposition to argue. The reason for deep-focusing on the non-West is purely “conjunctural”—something that has to do with geopolitics and history. I am convinced, after Deleuze and Guattari, that “the most profound transformations and translations of our time are not occurring in Europe.” Postcolonialism has floundered by conceptualizing difference through categories derived from representationalist metaphysics. Difference has been understood as empirical difference. There are two problems with this. First, as Naoki Sakai has argued convincingly, a particular cannot contest the universal: its particularity is already subsumed within the universal.35 Second, postcolonial arguments about difference, underpinned by an anxiety about authenticity, run the risk of subordinating difference to identity, being eclipsed by identity. This is because, as Aristotle pointed out, “that which is different is different from some particular thing in some particular respect, so that there must be something identical whereby they are different.”36 Unable to go beyond empirical difference, postcolonial writers had no choice but to decide upon the right mix of difference and identity every time they espoused difference, as if only a fixed quantity of each is available for use. Faced with a range of new democratic movements and insurgent imaginaries in different sites of the global South which thrive on dissent and defiance, it is urgent to rethink difference today. And here we can learn from Deleuze, the “difference engineer” par excellence. In his reckoning, differences themselves are, they have being, they are not mere predicates of other concepts: Difference is the state in which one can speak of determination as such. The difference “between” two things is only empirical, and the corresponding determinations are only extrinsic. However, instead of something distinguished from something else, imagine something which distinguishes itself—and yet that from which it distinguishes itself does not distinguish itself from it. Lightening, for example, distinguishes itself from the black sky but must also trail it behind, as though it were distinguishing itself from that which does not distinguish itself from it. It is as if the ground rose to the surface, without ceasing to be ground. There is cruelty, even monstrosity, on both sides of this struggle against an elusive adversary, in which the distinguished opposes something which cannot distinguish itself from it but continues to espouse that which divorces it. Difference is this state in which determination takes the form of unilateral distinction. We must therefore say that difference is made, or makes itself, as in the expression “make the difference.”’37

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Deleuze’s thought is dynamic, “nomadic.” His difference is not a concept, it names a process—actually it names the twin processes of the real: the virtual and the actual. “The virtual is a differentiated and differentiating process whose differentiating dynamism coincides with its differentiated actualization.”38 In traditional thought, an already constituted, familiar world is recognized by an already constituted subject. In this static world, where thought means recognition through representation, difference as such is unthinkable and is subsumed under similitude, opposition, analogy and identity. The moment we start to think of the world around us as a process pregnant with tendencies (the virtual), it becomes possible to de-actualize the present and tap the resources of the past and the future. The Bergsonian idea of durée—as invoked by Deleuze—makes it possible to go beyond all archival and trace-based theories of memory: in all presents, the entire past is mobilized in itself. And there are pasts that have never been present as well as futures that will never be present. Deleuze’s ontology is meant to sensitize us to the intensive genesis of the extended. If, behind the commonsense everyday world consisting of entities—extended things and actual state of affairs—he sees forcefields traversed by intensities responsible for the genesis of entities, it is not because there is any ontological gap between the virtual and the actual. That would be Plato, not Deleuze. The intensive exists nowhere else but in the extended they constitute. The actual and the virtual are two mutually exclusive, yet jointly sufficient characterizations of the real. The virtual is something which, without being or resembling the actual has, nevertheless, the capacity to bring it about and yet does not get depleted by it. Becoming, instead of being a linear process from one actual to another, should rather be thought as the movement from an actual state of affairs, through a dynamic field of virtual/real tendencies, to the actualization of this field in a new state of affairs. The reversibility between the virtual and actual safeguards any lapse into idealism. I spent some time explicating Deleuze’s complex ideas about difference because this is the only way to think of difference in practice, to foster spaces of difference, to engage in production of difference in oppositional sites. Foundationalist difference (the claim that “we” are constitutively, historically, different) is susceptible to easy capture because it is grounded on a substratum of identity. It will not enable us to make any real difference because of the categorical orientation of philosophy since Aristotle, whose demand for coherence and hierarchy in the organic representation inscribes all difference in a general concept. Bhabha’s Lacanian “mimicry” which 10

INTRODUCTION

merely “repeats rather than represents”39 is a good example of the debilitating effect of taking empirical, observable difference as quintessence of difference. Though no constitutive difference is involved (“Mimicry conceals no presence or identity behind its masks”), the difference between mimicry and mimesis is an empirically observable difference between two states of affairs. And it is deeply debilitating: it reduces dissent, opposition and criticism to the effect of an effect. In Deleuzian difference, despite the chaotic images of the bottom rising, form dissolving, a determination is made: this “determination is made by dint of supporting a precise and unilateral relationship with the indeterminate.”40 Today’s insurgent subaltern imaginaries from the global South are deeply rooted in places. They are necessarily reflexive but do not derive their meaning only from their juxtaposition with the global. They behove us to think in terms of what Deleuze characterized as a “unilateral relationship with the indeterminate.” I want to end this section by straying into a promising but relatively unexplored direction. Led by the Actor-Network theorists Latour and Law and drawing from the theoretical resources of a dissenting tradition of European thought (Leibniz, Gabriel Tarde, Whitehead etc.), I want to connive with their challenging of the basic tenets of post-Kantian thought. Let us start with a simple observation: the global village, as Gayatri Spivak wrote, is counter-intuitive: nobody lives there. This means that the sensuous immediacy of our everyday life, its existential density and phenomenological richness and realness, can never be matched by the abstract time-space of capital and the pseudo-intensities concocted by the global culture industry. “Culture sits in places,” wrote Escobar. Although neither of them selfconsciously espoused a Leibnizian theoretical agenda, notice how their arguments can be inflected in that direction. Writes Latour, endorsing Gabrial Tarde’s agenda of “looking down” in sociology: “The big, the whole, the great, is not superior to the monads, it is only a simpler, more standardized, version of one of the monad’s goal which has succeeded in making part of its view shared by others.”41 We would be hard pressed to find a better articulation of our central argument about globalization. The point of departure of Latour and Law is in the observation that holism is a theory made by humans. Although those who believe in holism say that “The whole as a real character is writ large on the face of Nature”42 or, “Society is a reality sui generis” (Durkheim), obviously they are asserting these themselves—society or nature cannot speak or write. Kant, as is wellknown, did insist that the creation of unity is an activity of the mind. The 11


philosopher of science, Kwa, calls this notion—nature [or society] as a complex unity of systems—“Romantic Holism,” which he opposes to “Baroque Complexity.”43 Romantic holism looks up, integrates individuals who appear to be a heterogeneous lot at the phenomenological level to a single entity at a higher level of organization. Baroque complexity looks down because, for them, the ideal of integrating all the workings of nature into a whole takes abstraction to a point where it ceases to have anything to do with the actual monads who gave rise to it. Leibniz observed: “Every bit of matter can be conceived as a garden full of plants or a pond full of fish. But each branch of the plant, each drop of its bodily fluids, is also such a garden or such a pond.”44 For Leibniz, individuals—monads—are not linked at all, they are windowless, though they affect each other. If one individual had not existed, the whole universe would have been different. In The Fold, Deleuze sketches a Baroque building, an allegory of the monad.45 The building’s lower part has windows but the upper part is wholly closed. Each monad has its context represented inside itself, like an inner screen. Lesser monads have only their own local contexts represented and the more important the monad, the richer its world. But none can read its own screen in its entirety; its folds go on to infinity. The link between monads is not connection but reciprocal reference. If we pursue the idea of Baroque complexity (looking down) with monads populating the universe, it would not be difficult to demonstrate the possibility of a chaotic side-byside existence of mutually exclusive realities. In his article on Gabriel Tarde, Latour makes the point that the small is necessarily more complex and interesting that the large aggregates. The large or the whole, because it is made out of the common and standardized features of the small, is necessarily impoverished. There are two sides to “globalization”: size and complexity. Theorists like Appadurai would have us believe that the global is not simply large, it is also more complex because of its high degree of interconnectedness. But size and complexity may not, necessarily, go together. Think of “global culture.” Transnational institutions like UNESCO actually operates on something called “World Culture” in their activities, which is simply a pastiche. It is large but much less complex than any actually existing form of life in any part of the world, however small. It cannot approximate the phenomenological realness, the sensuous materiality of an actually existing form of life. Also, it presupposes that forms of life or “cultures” are commensurate—an unwarranted assumption (what if they were heterogeneous?). But Tarde’s claim is not just that the 12

INTRODUCTION

small is more complex than the large; it is much more: “[the atom] is a milieu that is universal or that aspires to become such, a universe in itself, not only a microcosm, as Leibniz intended, but the cosmos conquered in its entirety and absorbed by a single being.” Or even more tellingly: “In the bosom of each thing, there reside every other thing real and possible.”46 Let us try to unpack this Baroque claim and understand it vis-à-vis globalization, taking our cue from John Law’s fascinating essay, “And if the global were small and noncoherent? Method, Complexity and the Baroque.”47 The Baroque claim is that everything is already present within the individual. But unlike Romantic complexity which operates with a reified notion of the individual, each frozen in its insular eachness, the Baroque does not posit any natural, pre-given boundary. Individuation, as Simondon has shown, is itself a process and part of the problem.48 We do not start with already individuated beings, as I have hinted above while discussing Deleuze’s theorization of the relationship between the virtual and the actual. Instead we try to account for the genesis of the individual and leave open the space for further individuation. In Baroque imagination, everything is not just connected but also contained within everything else. There is no clear distinction between the individual and environment. Instead, there is blurring. Leibniz: “In a confused way [monads] all go towards the infinite… but they are limited and distinguished from one another by the degrees of their distinct perceptions.”49 So, some individuals make some things explicit, and others make other things explicit. Complexity being endless, there is no hope that the kind of clarity Hume demanded when he said, “Clarity is virtue,” would ever emerge. The Baroque does not equate knowledge with explicitness. In fact, their concept of “concept” is different. Concept normally refers to a cosmological order grasped by thinking humans. The Baroque idea of concept is never severed from the individual. A Baroque concept is an allegory and not a symbol of the cosmos— knowing something is to reflect, refract, enact or embody it. It is a narrative. In any case, everything is reflected, refracted or embodied in everything present. So there is no possibility of grasping the whole, the global, but it is possible to imagine knowing this well by implicit means. Finally, unlike Leibniz, we cannot simply assume that there is a beneficent creator, God, who ensures a certain pre-established harmony between different individuals and their worlds. If we believe Deleuze, who commented that A. N. Whitehead managed to do away with the Leibnizian hypothesis of “convergence” (as in the mathematical term “convergent 13


series”), and assume (this is an assumption, and there can be no verification of this because we have no way of knowing) “divergence,” then the imagination of complexity is not simply vague and in parts “confused” but also, and now we are going beyond Leibniz, patchy and, at best, only partially coherent. Therefore, there is no possibility whatsoever of an emergent overview. As it is, Baroque imagination’s image of knowledge is somewhat different—uncertainty here is ontological rather than epistemological. But in this case, there cannot be even an implicit kind of knowing for the simple reason that “reality” is heterogeneous and non-coherent. Law writes: “There is no system, global order, or network. These are, at best, partially enacted romantic aspirations. Instead there are local complexities and local globalities, and the relations between them are uncertain.”50 We might want to add here that Appadurai, working within a rather straitlaced tradition of thinking and writing, did not offer a well-rounded, blissful, upbeat imaginary of globalization in the end. Though his methodological imperative was traditional macrosocial holism, his vision of globalization is quite disturbing and entropic. Not only does he speak of “disjuncture and difference” between the various “flows” he delineates, he also makes a case for taking recourse to “chaos theory” and “fractals” in order to model global complexity. These are more in the nature of (Romantic) aspiration rather than actual accomplishment. Replacing his “flow” with a more dynamic “flux,” as a sociologist has proposed recently,51 would not radically undermine the systemic aspiration of social theory. This book makes a self-conscious effort to “look down” ethnographically. In my understanding, to know something in its phenomenological richness is to embody it, to construct narratives (“fabulation”—see below) reflecting or refracting it. Rather than inserting the local into the global somewhere down the hierarchy of emergence, as Appadurai’s or Sassen’s research program dictates, I have tried to show how the global is situated, specific, and materially constructed in the practices which make each specificity. Chapter 1 (The Rumor of Globalization) and Chapter 4 (Dream Kitsch) of this book are concerned with the question of material construction of the global in specific sites. Clearly, the global (as opposed to the global) is specific to each location, and its bigness or smallness does not depend on some originary intention or project but on contingent local conditions. It can be made bigger or smaller at this site or that. Therefore, size is an accomplishment— a specific accomplishment to boot, rather than something pre-given. What about the relationship between the sites? A Baroque optic coupled with the 14

INTRODUCTION

assumption of a lack of “convergence” or “harmony” would tend to suggest that there is nothing certain as to how this global will relate to that global. They may be coherent and move easily from one site to the next. Perhaps, then, size relations are transitive, but perhaps they are not. The most we can say is that there are many globalities and the links between them are contingent, dependent on local power struggles and not given in a general logic of emergence. When we look for the global in specific sites, as I have tried to do in this book by “looking down,” the global emerges as something very poorly formed, brittle and broken; it comes in patches and appears to be quite small and pretty elusive. But what also emerged is that globalization has gone viral in some sites, giving rise to subaltern, rhizomic globalities, whose emergence is still on the cusp (examples can be found in this book). There are even feral globalities. Tame Enlightenment ideas52 (“Public use of reason,” “Public Sphere,” “Associative Democracy,” etc.) have escaped from their comfortable domestic environs, became feral and threatening to turn from paper tigers into ferocious menacing animals. The West tells us that Islam’s universalism means Jihad, whereas true universalism is preserved in some sacred core of Christianity.53 What then is this strange animal called Islamic radical democracy? These site-specific views of globalization are the most that an ethnographer-fabulist can offer. But I am not trying to make a virtue out of necessity. I am not trying to say that the limitations of my tools and optic have forced me to take a mole-like perspective. Like the ANT theorists (the acronym is telling because these theorists behave like ants, refusing to look up), I have opted for this flat ontology because I think that this is the only legitimate perspective. Globality is very much a matter of enactment, each “actor” enacts one’s version of the global. This view is diametrically opposed to that of Sassen, whom we can take as a representative of mainstream globalization studies. She writes: “globalization is more than the formation of global institutions and growing interdependence of… nation-states. … [G]lobalization signals a possibly deeper unsettlement.”54 This amounts to endowing globalization with agency, as if it is some kind of a mysterious force emanating from nowhere and gradually affecting everything, somewhat like the “substance” of seventeenth century philosophy. The global is not some kind of substance, it doesn’t explain anything. Rather, the global has to be explained. It is not a big, emergent reality and the question must not be posed in a way so that it appears as if the work of the theorist is to make explicit that which is implicit or emergent: the big picture, the sys 15


tem, the whole, etc. The whole is false. Under the illusion that they are merely describing, theorists simply connive with this or that big project. Bruno Latour has argued in his little treatise entitled “Irreduction,” which can be found in the second part of his book, The Pasteurisation of France, that all objects and humans are at the same ontological level. Nothing can be reduced to anything else, nor that anything is irreducible to anything else. Our universe becomes populated by trials of strength where actors vie with one another, striving to enlist allies to advance their own aims. Their networks enter into trials of strengths. The outcome depends on how much some actors can pull their own weight in terms of their traceable association with other actors whom they affect and are, in turn, affected by them. To summarize, macrosocial holism leads to debilitating meta-narratives. In this section, I have tried to open up spaces for intervention by making a case for imagining otherwise. Taking recourse to other imaginaries, I have tried to construct an argument as to how we can configure subaltern agency and difference. Traditional social and political thought is attuned to the tree imaginary. So long as we are stuck to the tree, we would not be able to register what difference the emergent rhizomic formations (I have given some indications as to who and where they are) make. As opposed to the tree: A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb “to be,” but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, “and… and… and…” This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb “to be.” Where are you going? Where are you coming from? What are you heading for? These are totally useless questions. Making a clean slate… seeking a beginning or a foundation—all imply a false conception of… movement… [K]now how to move between things, establish a logic of the AND, overthrow ontology, do away with foundations, nullify endings and beginnings… Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away…55

This citation from Deleuze and Guattari is meant to sensitize us to other ways of relating: pitting one grand theory against another, juxtaposing one tree against another will not open up new spaces. The idea instead is to move between things: rhizomes and alliances. Apart from sociologists writing on globalization and space whose works we encountered in the last section, globalization has also been theorized as part of a grand narrative, as part of an epochal, transhistorical design. In what follows, in the next section that is, I signpost the major strands of arguments advanced in these 16

INTRODUCTION

grand theories of globalization and try to situate my own naxas vis-à-vis these. These are site-specific “ethnographies” and “histories” of globaliza tion(s) from the global South—about events, objects, images and episodes—rhizomic, shooting up in “a perpendicular direction” like “a transversal movement that sweeps up the one and the other away.” I want to make it quite clear at the outset that there is no totalizing “vision” immanent in these which would be amenable to a neat summary to give the reader a feel in advance as to what is for offer here. Instead, I am bent on showing how the totalizing “visions” have failed us.

Desecrating the “Global” A blanket denunciation of “globalization” understood as a simple intensification or exacerbation of capitalist modernity has been the staple of anti-globalization rhetoric since the 1980s. It connects effortlessly with the Romantic tradition of historical sociology where the model of the autochthonous Gemeinschaft is idealized as the model of dwelling as opposed to the urban, mediated and global Gesellschaft of the modern world.56 Thus, writes George Ritzer, the author of The McDonaldization of Society, in his recent The Globalization of Nothing: “[N]othing… will be employed here to mean generally centrally conceived and controlled social forms… devoid of distinctive substantive content.”57 He distinguishes between four types of nothing: non-places, non-things, non-people, and non-services. “Thus, people around the world are spending more time in non-places (the shopping mall, the Las Vegas casino) and with non-things (Old Navy T-shirts, Dolce and Gabbana dresses), non-people (the counter-people at Burger King, telemarketers), and non-services (those provided by ATMs, Amazon.com).”58 The implication of the globalization of “centrally conceived and controlled” “empty forms” or “nothing” is ominous. His analysis “foresees the death of the local” and it seems evident to him that “the purely local is fast disappearing.” However, the eclipse of the local by the global, of “something” by “nothing,” is not just a description of an empirical phenomenon. It is a historic vision, its constitutive categories are “ideal types” and simply not amenable to empirical interrogation or verification. As he himself puts it, the eclipse of the local by the global follows from “a modern grand narrative—a long-term trend in the direction of the increasing proliferation of nothing especially through the process of globalization.”59 Thus, real, observable phenomena are made sense of through the 17


prism of the “grand narrative” and, therefore, in a certain sense, it is his theory that generates and performs these divisions—local/global, something/nothing, tradition/modernity, etc. To criticize Ritzer’s genre of argument is not to say that modernity or globalization is illusion. These are projects resulting from theoretical operations. These perform certain works and make certain things possible (e.g., World Social Forum, the UN Commission on Human Rights or India’s Dalits mobilizing in global fora to indict untouchability as a form of racism). To think of modernism or globalization as performance does not mean ignoring the ordering strains towards dualism (e.g., something/nothing, tradition/modernity, local/global etc.) posited and at least partially performed by these theories. Argues John Law: [W]e should… treat dualism as a social project, a sociological topic, rather than treating it as a resource. Accordingly, the argument is that modernism more or less successfully (though partially and precariously) generates and performs a series of such divisions.60

An important consequence of (re)thinking modernity as a project, as a sociological topic, rather than as a marker of the triumph of Reason, is that it takes away from “modernity” and “globalization” their claim to epochality and the aura of inevitability (and fatalism, especially in thinking about “globalization”) that comes with it. As “projects,” these are vulnerable to the vagaries of history and geo-politics. History would look less coherent and radically messy if we refuse this logic of epochality. The meaning and consequence of modernity or globalization are to be found in this mess, not in the canonical texts of Kant, Hegel, Marx or Heidegger. The precariousness of the modern project is so obvious in the global South and so much has been written on the so-called “incompleteness” of colonial or postcolonial modernity that it is pointless to reproduce these here. For example, Ranajit Guha famously said that Reason was born “spastic” in the colonies. However, we need to pay attention to people’s desire in our part of the world for things “modern.” If we refuse the logic of epochality, it is incumbent upon us to demonstrate the ways in which this desire is transmitted and produced. Latour has written that, “One is not born traditional; one chooses to become traditional by constant innovation.”61 One of the objectives of his empirical works on the dissemination of scientific theories is to show the irrelevance of epochal ideas like “disenchantment,” “secularization” etc. and to demonstrate instead how ideas and propositions are tied up with specific networks of things, instruments, procedures and people. In the eponymous 18

INTRODUCTION

chapter of this book, I have critiqued Partha Chatterjee’s modernist idea of the “desire for democratization” of the subaltern masses—their timeless longing for “autonomy.” I have tried to account for this desire in terms of actor-networks of transmission comprising objects, images and people. These enabled me to point to the “artifactuality of desire.” This is how, in Latour’s words, one can “rethink anew the role of objects in the construction of collectives, thus challenging philosophy.”62 Now what does it mean to say that modernity is a project? It means, first of all, to depart radically from Enlightenment derived rationalizations of the modernist project. In these, what guarantees the triumph of Reason is nature. The first theorist of modernity/globalization was Kant. In his rather terse summary of “Perpetual Peace,” Foucault writes: How does Kant conceive of perpetual peace? He says: What… is it in history that guarantees this perpetual peace…? Is it men’s will…? Not at all. It is nature… The guarantee of perpetual peace is… actually commercial globalisation.63

Foucault’s account of Kant’s political and ethical works as a kind of resolution of the mid- or late-eighteenth century “dissymmetrical bipolarity of politics [the ancient juridical tradition] and the economy”64 need not detain us here. For, in the tradition of German idealism, in Hegel, and later in Marx, the so-called “nature” is taken over by History and its inexorable laws. The resultant epochal accounts of cultural modernity culminating in a certain “globalization” are, as John Frow put it, “the effect of a process of backprojection in which the present constructs itself as a unity of all present time by distinguishing itself from a stable and archaic past which has a singular form.”65 Thus, the primary work of the concept of modernity or globalization is “to cut across the knot of heterogeneous strands of time in such a way as to produce the stabilities and unities of a now and a then.” This is not to deny the intensity and scale of transformation taking place in the world during the past two centuries and the role of the transforming power of modernism in it, but to assert that these changes do not consolidate into the vast, metaphysical and spurious binary opposition between “modernity” and “tradition.” “We have never been modern,” writes Bruno Latour, meaning that the real world does not conform to this model of a universal rupture. “It is the sorting that makes the times, not the times that make the sorting.”66 There are only histories (“lock-in” and “path dependence”), no epochs. If we refuse the optic of “modernity,” its epochal coherence and the kind of closure it implies, what other analytical tools can we mobilize to make sense of the present? It is in the register of social temporality that arguments 19


about modernity or globalization find their greatest purchase. The argument is that through various disciplining mechanisms, of which the capitalist system of states, governance, economy and international trade are preeminent, disparate, heterogeneous temporalities are subjugated to a global, universal time: what Eric Alliez calls “Capital Times.”67 Through a process of coercive “translations” (colonization and commodification), a particular regime of intersubjective time is enforced over a range of culturally specific, localized experiences of time. Guy Debord has written about the irreversible time of commodity and mass-production which opposes itself to earlier, cyclical times and to “historical” time instituted by the Enlightenment (project) and theorized by Hegel and others.68 While Debord’s argument derives from a denunciation of the commodity form in so far as it works as a historico-philosophical principle, the anthropologist Johannes Fabian explores the point with a different inflection. He contests the very idea of temporal heterogeneity and denies the possibility of other co-existing temporalities, in order to extract a certain critical mileage out of the idea of an enabling “coevalness.” He writes: “The radical contemporaneity of the mankind is a project.”69 Fabian’s immediate target is the kind of tame pluralism and cultural relativism practiced by working anthropologists (“more ethnography of Time will not change the situation”).70 Hans Blumenberg argued quite rightly that the anthropological idea of plurality of life-worlds was born in the West in the late-eighteenth century with Kant. It would make no sense in the antique philosophical idea of the reality of instantaneous evidence or in the medieval theological doctrine of reality as guaranteed by god. In the latter, there may be diabolical deceptions of all kinds, but these are not plural realities but the plurality of falsehoods. Kant reserved a certain kind of certainty for (western) science and the other “worlds” (strange customs and people) were explained by a resort to the idea of Weltanschauung (worldview)—the specificity with which each culture or era experiences the world. This primitivizing pluralism is, of course, deeply debilitating and its plurality is sham because it says that the Red Indians or the Pygmies are not really different from Europeans, but simply behind them.71 I find the temporal imagination of modernity (“Idea of a Universal History”) or the project of the radical contemporaneity of mankind (to be achieved through some sort of globalization) deeply flawed and troubling. The future is already foretold—inscribed into the modernist ontostory. Pace Jameson, it is not necessary to posit a “singular modernity”—a common globally shared experience of time—in order to track socio-economic injus20

INTRODUCTION

tice and class apartheid.72 Ernst Bloch’s well-known assertion, “Not everyone inhabits the same now,”73 means lack of contemporaneity: people live in different typological or epochal times even when occupying the same instant in chronological time. The recent work of Dipesh Chakrabarty on lived times in Calcutta goes on to demonstrate that whole cultures, populations or people can inhabit and straddle radically heterogeneous or even contradictory temporal worlds without any hint of hiatus or social disequilibrium. And this in no way affects the struggle for social justice or “classstruggle” stripped of its historicist garb. According to Chakrabarty, “notbeing-a-totality” is “a constitutional characteristic of the ‘now.’” It is in this radical sense of never being a totality that the “now” is “constantly fragmentary and not-one.”74 John Frow has critiqued the Jamesonian idea of one global capitalist modernity or its successor, postmodernity as “a radial design conferring its meaning upon all the pieces”—because it posits the present as “pure presence.” His idea of non-synchronicity—“a mosaic of pieces in different developmental states, and of different stages”75—derived from Kubler, aiming to capture the unequal relations that hold within a synchronic framework characterized by uneven development, is a cogent way of understanding the entangled world(s) we inhabit.76 The end of one modernity and its presumed successor, globalization, is, necessarily the beginning of many histories, many modernities and many globalizations. The implication for empirical research, however, is not a celebration of cultural relativism or mindless “pluralism.” It is instead to unravel connections and mechanisms of transmission between unequal times to show how these are organized together. This organization is also a project, never really accomplished in reality. Global capitalism is constructed as a system but its systemic character does not imply that it would lead or is leading to a predetermined end. Like modernization studies (“area studies”) of the 1950s and 1960s, in recent times, the figure of globalization has redirected attention to the far-flung corners of the world. The tacit understanding is that globalization has initiated homologous processes in all places more or less in the same way colonialism and postcolonial modernization were supposed to have incubated similar or comparable life forms all over the world. Thus, the theorists of globalization have tried to stabilize and simplify the heterogeneous but interconnected present(s) by imposing a false holism and a misleading “model” on disparate and inchoate processes. This is intellectual laziness. As an example, let us examine Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophical account of globalization which, incidentally, relies on the something-nothing polarity 21


we encountered earlier and the epochal thinking it endorses. Nancy’s Heidegger-derived account works by setting into motion a series of oppositions—globalization as opposed to mondialization, world as opposed to un-world, world-forming as opposed to world-destroying and, finally, the global as opposed to the worldly. Globalization, according to Nancy, is “an unprecedented… catastrophe.”77 Noting briefly the features of this “catastrophe,” he highlights the shifts in meaning of the papal formulation “urbi et orbi” (“everywhere and anywhere”). It is no longer possible to form an orb of the world because the world has dissolved in the non-place of global multiplicity. Calling this hyperbolic “accumulation” or “agglomeration” of “bad infinite” (p. 47), “enclosure in the undifferentiated sphere of a unitotality” (p. 28), he moves on to a consideration of the so-called “world,” the “worldly” and the “world-forming.” As opposed to globality understood as a “totality grasped as a whole,” an “indistinct totality,” world-forming maintains a crucial reference to the world’s horizon, as a space of meaning held in common, a space of signification. Thus, while globalization, far from being a becoming-world, leads to a proliferation of the un-world, mondialization would be a renewal of the humankind’s capacity to form a world. What would that authentic “world” be like? How would we get there? By coming out of the shackles of Cartesian-Kantian representational thinking. The world would emerge as world when it comes out of representation, when it frees itself from the so-called world view or Weltanschauung. Representational thinking, positioning itself outside the world (objectivity), regards itself as “objective” and reduces the world to the status of an object. By positioning itself outside the world, the subject acquires a certain mastery of the world and gains a theological status. The sensuous world is thus missed, passed over, by this onto-theology of representational thinking. It is a theology because it is transcendent and Nancy opposes this transcendentalist account of “rationalism” with an asubjective account where the world is configured as an absolute immanence. One wonders what kind of place Nancy himself is speaking from. He does not participate in the present, he misses the sensuous world, it is passed over in a gesture of resignation, signifying a passive withdrawal. This is proto-Stoic amor fati in the banal, non-Nietzscheian sense of the phrase78—rather than a concernful “care.” He lacks what Hannah Arendt called “love of the world” (amor mundi), and care for the things and people of this world, the only world we have. And in that sense, his thinking is worldless. In particular, he has little or no interest in the petit recits: in small 22

INTRODUCTION

victories of the poor or the disenfranchised, like establishment of popular democracy in countries like Nepal, Bolivia or Egypt, victories for the struggles of indigenous people in Latin America, in the emergence of a social sector in places like India or Venezuela etc. And in big, global solidarities around causes like freedom for Tibet, sovereignty for Palestine, democracy for Burma, women’s rights in Pakistan, or protests against the G20 summit in Toronto and so on and so forth. The point to note is that these small but significant events are happening not because of capitalist globalization but in spite of it. Numbers—the kind of numbers people like Amartya Sen talk about and which are reported in publications like World Development Report, for example, are of no importance to Nancy. In his understanding of politics, which is also shared by Heidegger, these numbers have no place.79 Numbers are not just apolitical but also deeply depoliticizing. The model of politics based on “world disclosure” through modulated public speech he works with is at odds with the politics aiming at the controlled fabrication of subjects. Yet, numbers cannot be written off if one is to understand our present. I will demonstrate this in a somewhat roundabout way. If modernity (globalization) is to be understood as a project, some empirical demonstration of its precariousness would come in handy. Modernism’s “emancipatory” ideal of “autonomy” deriving from a philosophical anthropology Nancy condemns as “onto-theology” is actually a program (project) for the institution of, and providing universal access to a domain of life-activity called “politics” as Balibar has clarified.80 Benedict Anderson, a die-hard modernist, has written about “the… planetary spread… of a profoundly standardized conception of politics… that have displaced the cosmos to make way for the world.”81 “Such a conception of politics,” explicates Chatterjee, “requires an understanding of the world as one, so that a common activity called politics can be seen to be going on everywhere. … [T]ime in this conception easily translates into space, so that we should speak here of the time-space of modernity. Thus, politics in this sense, inhabits the empty homogeneous time-space of modernity.” A “radical contemporaneity of the mankind” can only be achieved through a universalization of this modular “politics.” But the empty homogeneous time of modernity is the utopian time of capital. “People can only imagine themselves in empty homogeneous time; they do not live in it. Empty homogeneous time… linearly connects past, present and future, creating the possibility for all of those historicist imagin 23


ings of identity, nationhood and progress, and so on… But… [it] is not located anywhere in real space… [In] the real space of modern life… [t] ime… is heterogeneous, unevenly dense… Politics here does not mean the same thing to all people. To ignore this is… to discard the real for the utopian…” (pp. 6–7). As opposed to modular, “abstract right” (Hegel) based politics whose ubiquity is supposed to testify our modernity, Chatterjee shows that the real politics in “most of the world” has little to do with the model of politics grounded in “civil society”—that precious flower of associative endeavors of enlightened citizens idealized in normative political theory. The enabling power of numbers rather than right or autonomy is what engenders “the politics of the governed.” Anderson is deeply skeptical of this politics of “bound seriality” which came to the fore as a result of the operation of postcolonial governmentality (census, welfare programs, developmental work, electoral politics based on ethnic identity, affirmative action programs etc.). Bound serialities are apparently depoliticizing as these give rise to fragmentation, bureaucratization and ethnicization of politics. Drawing from Foucault’s idea that politics is conditioned and even formed by governmentality aiming at the instrumental construct called the “population” rather than the normative “citizen,” Chatterjee argues that in the postcolonial world, long before anti-colonial political nationalism came to the fore, the colonial state deployed the technologies of governmentality (ethnographic, classificatory, pedagogic, civic, medical, penal etc.) which shaped the colonial and postcolonial polity.82 The postcolonial states inherited and actually reinforced the colonial governmental technologies and redeployed these with renewed vigor. In the postcolony, we have therefore two sets of conceptual connections. The first connects the civil society (in Hegel’s and Marx’s sense) to the nation state founded on universality and autonomy and the other connects the populations to the governmental agencies pursuing “security” and pastoral welfare. Chatterjee’s contribution to political philosophy has been in theorizing the agonistic struggles going on in the latter domain as political. But to understand his reasons for doing so, we need some idea of the ground realities. Civil society in such polities is demographically limited and the vast majority of the population, the disenfranchised poor, is not a part of the law-governed, interest-oriented, propertied, right-bearing citizenry. They figure in terms of a “law and order” problem. Their very survival depends on their ability to organize themselves into associations which 24

INTRODUCTION

transgress the strict lines of legality in order to live and work. They make instrumental use of their voting rights (numbers), and, through their electoral power, extract semi-legal concessions from the state (e.g., occupying land which does not belong to them or using resources without adequate payment etc.). The moral justification for such politically negotiated “concessions” comes from archaic ideologies about the entitlement of the poor to livelihood. In concrete terms, “governmental agencies must descend from that high ground [of strict, processual constitutionalism] to the terrain of political society in order to renew their legitimacy as providers of well-being and there to confront whatever is the current configuration of politically mobilized demand” (p. 41). We thus have here a founding gap between “modernity” and democracy in “most of the world.” My point here is not just about the precariousness and partialness of the modern project, or how the epochal logic breaks down or mutates into something unanticipated and unforeseen. It is also about newness entering history through unforeseen crevices—through numbers, for example. The name of this newness now is globalization. The temptation to derive the logic of the cultural from the epochal, (“modernity,” “globalization,” etc.), necessitating a certain concordance between event and idea, is glaringly visible in the practice of Cultural Studies. In their collaborative work, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, even Deleuze and Guattari endorse epochal thinking by affirming the notion of a great divide: whereas the previous social machines operated by means of the codification of social processes, capitalism is unique and unprecedented because it functions by means of a formal connection of decoded flows which they call “axiomatization.” This simply means that pre-capitalist societies operated through extra-economic means (“code”) to regulate the flow of social wealth while capitalism works by means of an axiomatic intrinsic to the social process. The logic of capital understood as “a general axiomatics of decoded social flows”83 would push social life toward absolute deterritorialization which haunts capitalism in the form of a limit that is continually approached but never attained. If the limit was ever reached, it would amount to a social schizophrenia when the flows of desire would “travel in a free state on a desocialized body without organs.”84 Deleuze and Guattari’s emphasis on “desire” as opposed to, say, structure, by no means diminishes the importance of commodification understood as a historico-philosophical principle in their account of capitalism and history. What distinguishes them is their de-emphasis of the molar which opposes itself to the molecu 25


lar and their truly original and innovative thinking concerning struggles and strategies of resistance. The empirical, ethnographic works contained in this book are directed against the cultural vision of globalization conceived as a simple exacerbation of modernity or a simple intensification of the process of commodification (as in Ritzer’s account of globalization as proliferation of “nothing” or in Nancy’s analysis of globalization as the dissolving of the world in the non-place of global multiplicity through hyperbolic accumulation or “agglomeration” of “bad infinite”—a thinly veiled metaphor for commodification). The modern project—aptly summarized by Anderson as a historic undertaking of making a universal rupture in time through a move away from cosmos to the world when words would describe the world rather than performing it—has two distinct but interrelated components. These are: the institution of a modular rights-based politics everywhere and, what Foucault called (the Kantian project of ) “commercial globalization” on a planetary scale. Through a recourse to Partha Chatterjee’s work, I have demonstrated that real politics in “most of the world” is not the simple actualization of a virtual “abstract right.” Correlatively, I have tried to demonstrate, through my ethnographic work interrogating vernacular socioeconomic practices and imaginaries of cultural thingness, that in order to account for these, it is simply not possible to hold on to the categorical purity of gift (metonymy for cosmos) and commodity (“world” as market). I do not mean to ignore the ordering strains towards dualism built into the modern project. Gift vs. commodity is one of these typical dualisms through which modernity organizes the world. While these are useful for setting up explanatory metaphors, the (interconnected) imagination of cultural thingness and personhood that animates and enables the social circulation of things, including political, governmental, public as well as everyday “things” in our part of the world, cannot be accounted for without admitting a certain breach (transgression?) where the so-called moral economy of the gift and the contractual rationality of the commodity bleed into each other. Deep-focusing on a small but highly significant incident in contemporary Calcutta, in the backdrop of a popular rumor about globalization sweeping across India, fermenting desire and dread, I go on to show, in The Rumor of Globalization (Chapter 1), that access to the global marketplace offering sleek and durable consumer goods at fair price, is itself considered as a “gift (daan) of globalization” by the ordinary Indian rural masses (India 26

INTRODUCTION

is still a highly protected market). Delving into their quotidian lifeworlds, I found out that though they live in a democracy and their everyday life is deeply affected by electoral party politics as well as state policies, all government policies, legislations and welfare measures benefiting the “population” is immediately rationalized as “gift.” Thanks to electoral propaganda and mobilizations by the political parties, they are acquainted, at least nominally, with the notion of “right” (adhikar). But this “right” is not an entitlement: the right to have rights. Gleaning from the working of electoral democracy at the grassroots, it turns out that the right to have rights is considered a gift. In this specific case (these villagers are typical of the rural population of West Bengal who voted a Communist Party to power for the last three decades), this “gift,” the right to have rights, was bestowed on them, according to their own rationalization, by the “generous” leftist regime which initiated many pro-poor reforms empowering the disenfranchised and proclaimed and popularized the notion of right as an entitlement of the poor. The sleek but relatively cheap “value for money” Chinese goods to be made available to them in the wake of “globalization”—meaning what they have learnt about globalization from negative leftist political propaganda—are rationalized as a kind of “gift of globalization.” There is a strict analogy here between their entitlement to rights seemingly dependent on the discretion of the regime in power and their entitlement to access the global marketplace. Both are considered as gift. The structural understanding of modern societies cannot account for these imaginaries of cultural thingness in “most of the world.” The concept of gift is irrelevant, we are told, for understanding the modern day market economy which is the domain of contract and exchange. Concurrently, political theorists would tell us that there can be no gift in the state sphere or in civil society. The whole edifice of the modern state and the economy is built to exclude the “archaic” patterns of obligation termed “gift”—those dangerous, fluid, subtle generosities that bind persons into an order of relations which is diametrically opposed to the contractual rationality of commodity. To complicate matters further, the gift I am talking about is a gift of commodities. The works we have on gift in contemporary Euro-American societies relate mostly to the everyday sphere of private interaction between persons. Works on money use which contest its abstractness and fungibility, also relate to the private sphere and the everyday.85 Since the public and the private are mutually over-determined, in these cases one can think of a 27


relationship of mutual over-determination between gift and commodity. But when the access to ordinary commodities from the global marketplace at fair price appears as a “gift of globalization” to the disenfranchised poor of the global South and it turns out that apart from the formal, official meaning of politics, state and civil society, there are other, contending vernacular ascriptions to these embedded in subaltern political practices partly recognized and endorsed by the state, the boundary between the two different social lives of things—those of gift and commodity—becomes porous and negotiable. When ordinary commodities are inscribed with other, vernacular diacritics, as in the villagers’ expression “gift of globalization,” they become gift. It is not a case of the indeterminacy of the social trajectory of things but of multiple determinations, of over-determination. Clearly, it is also not a case of Granovetterian “embeddedness” of the economic in the social.86 Thus, commodity here has another history, another life, another kind of potency not annulled by its life qua commodity in the global marketplace. More than cultural rationalization, it is a case of reinscription. It is this untold story of the vernacular in the global (gift in commodity) that I have endeavored to narrate. Thus commodity, whose generalized denunciation acts as a historico-philosophical principle for the Marxist and the Postmodernist writers, does not bestow an unequivocal meaning on cultural life and commodification, does not necessarily lead to a reconfiguration of ontologies. Instead, the meaning of commodity is culturally negotiated—commodity does not mean the same thing in all places and to all people. Hence, “the concept of commodity is not itself ‘real’” because it possess different valences in different contexts.87 Commodity can be “intensive” and not in its private enjoyment and use but in its public face, and this intensiveness can exist side by side with its extensiveness. Central to the dystopic vision of cultural globalization commonly referred to as McDonaldization, is an understanding of the globalized world as “an interactive system,” as cohesion. This cohesion is imposed from above and is a result of mediatization of life. As Guy Debord put it: “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.”88 Appadurai’s powerful idea of the “landscapes of images” or “mediascape”89 refers to the images of the world created by the global media machine through which people make sense of their lives and the world at large. These “simulated” images of “strips of reality” are “chimerical,” “even fantastic objects,” bereft of ground, traversing a depthless field saturated with similar images. In my ethnogra28

INTRODUCTION

phy of the transmigration of the televised image of the crumbling Twin Towers as metonymic of the 9/11 episode to Bengali folk scroll painting (Dream Kitsch, Chapter 4), I have tried to trace the displacements of meanings through various layers of mediation between the global and the vernacular. In this long chain connecting the Bengali scroll-painter artisan (patua), his folk painting (pat) and the image of the crumbling Twin Towers transmitted by global image machines (CNN etc.), the original meaning loses its originary bearing and morphs into something completely different. The narrative of 9/11 loses its historic meaning and becomes a Bengali folk tale of epic rivalry between good and evil. The semi-literate, poor patua does not register the significance of 9/11 when he hears the news in radio or people reading aloud the news in newspapers in his presence. The image of the Twin Towers captivates him when he watches it as a spectacle in a travelling folk theatre (jatra). Even then, the meaning of 9/11 eludes him, he is unable to comprehend the significance of the rise of global terrorism, although as a subaltern half-Muslim he himself is a target of Islamic extremist propaganda emanating from Bangladesh and elsewhere in the subcontinent. We must not think of this chain connecting the patua and CNN as a descending order of gradual erosion of an originary ur-meaning—as a process of incremental loss. The reason I delve deep into the ontology of the image in traditional Bengali scroll painting is to demonstrate that its status as non-mimetic image remains unaffected despite its supposed “contamination” by mass-media and the invasion of a mediatized global icon (the image of crumbling Twin Towers disseminated by television) into the visual field of traditional art. My hope in writing these chapters and delineating carefully the vernacular practices of worlding has been in demonstrating that our pluriverse is constructed and traversed by heterogenities which are continually activating things, people and practices. At the heart of the current anxiety about the system’s unchecked drive towards interconnection acting as a closure for affirmative, world-forming praxis lies a concern, not wholly unfounded, as to how an ethic of belonging together, of a multitude of codependent “worlds” can be created/fostered. I try to argue, exploring a range of practices in the global, vernacular South, that a politics of synchronization, a cosmopolitics so to speak, envisaged by theorists like Appadurai, Sassen or philosophers like Peter Sloterdijk,90 bearing the mark of the dualist modernist project, cannot animate our lives and worlds. The finitude implicated in this vision, the finitude of the “one, true earth” as bearer of the human, 29


creates constraints and claustrophobia. A truly pluralist ethic must think in terms of what Latour calls the problem of “composition” and “cohabitation” rather than synchronization because our worlds are many, not double.91

Between Here and Elsewhere: The Vernacular as Objec-trouvé A few words here about the process of conceiving the themes of the chapters which comprise the book and the reasons for resorting to a rather unorthodox method of ethnography. What defines ethnography is the notion of the field. The ethnographer must situate him/herself at a certain remove from the field. I tried to do this as best I could by reading ethnographic masterpieces and by trying to emulate the styles of the gifted ethnographers I know (Chris Pinney, Kaushik Ghosh, Mick Taussig, John Hutnyk, late Tarapada Santra and others I met and befriended in Calcutta). I must confess that I have not been able to observe scrupulously that subtle, permeable but unbreachable line between observation and participation. This is partly because of the fact that the “locality” I explored as my “field” also happens to be the place where I grew up and lived the larger part of my life. I have an existential stake in the fate of this place and its people. (Is this what Heidegger meant by “care”?) This is my moral location, the place from where I speak. Paul Celan spoke of his poetry as a kind of handshake, as a way of connecting with people, as a way of engaging them. More than a scholarly accomplishment, this book was conceived as an act of participation in the ongoing production of that place in the space of the world. Initially, I had very rigid and set ideas as to how to do ethnography— acquired largely from books. Yet, as soon as I started the spadework, like the fictional director of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author92 about to start preparing his company to rehearse a play being disrupted by the emergence of the unwelcome unfinished characters, my project was unexpectedly interrupted by the arrival of some strange and unanticipated people, episodes, rumors, objects, pictures, texts etc., and like Pirandello’s unfinished characters, demanded that I tell their tales by following the trails they put me into. I became a kind of mouthpiece for these tales. I want to call this process fabulation, borrowing from Deleuze who appropriated the term from Bergson, though it is not fictionality that I want to highlight. In these fabulations or “stories,” if you will, I am spoken of as the visiting ethnographer (The Rumor of Globalization) or the activist chatting with Ramsharan about his “artworks,” sitting in his tea-shack near Nimtolla 30

INTRODUCTION

“burning-ghat” (Crossing the Howrah Bridge). Fabulation comes from the Latin fabula which means “conversation” or “small talk” but also “lore.” Fabula’s Greek counterpart is mythos which opposes itself to logos, reasoned, grandiloquent (hubristic?), persuasive speech of respectable propertied citizens through which the Heideggerian “world disclosure” supposedly took place. Deleuze’s most interesting exploration of fabulation where he “take[s] up… the Bergsonian notion of fabulation… and give[s] it a political sense”93 is to be found in Cinema 2: The Time-image where he examines the “powers of the false” (puissances du faux) displayed in Pierre Perrault’s cinema du vécu and Jean Rouch’s cinema verité. Both produced “documentary” films, not by providing a factual account of “reality” but by entering into a collaborative process of invention with their subjects. Both worked with once-colonized “tribes” whose distant memories and ancestral lore have almost fallen into disuse, attesting to their present marginality and degeneration. Incited by the directors, as they act out their reconstructed rituals or customs, they are caught by camera in a state of “legending,” in the process of fashioning a new communal lore leading to a collective selfinvention. Deleuze comments on the “fabulative function of the poor,” about “fabulating without being fictive.” Fabulation challenges the hegemonic “truths” of the dominant oppressor classes and in this sense it manifests the creative “power of the false.” And if there is a relationship between Deleuzian fabulation and narrative, it is that of the disruption of the conventional narrative and the disclosure of the time of the event. Not many commentators have noticed the role and currency of fabulation in postcolonial writings from the South. Fabulation plays a strategic and key role in the writings of Indian postcolonial theorists like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Can the Subaltern Speak?), Partha Chatterjee (The Politics of the Governed), Dipesh Chakrabarty (Provincializing Europe) and others. Stories and anecdotes which cannot be found in official archives play a central role in their theorizing. But what distinguishes them from academic historians doing conventional “oral history” is the way they creatively appropriate these stories by entering into a dialogue with their characters so that these become generative of new meanings. In a sense, this is also fabulation. For example, Chakrabarty’s stories about Tagore, about adda, about the Calcutta physicist CV Raman, are fabulations. He comments: “these possibly apocryphal stories… suggest… a fore-conception of… different life-practices within which they [the protagonists] found themselves… These stories… speak of possible thought practices in which the future that “will be” never completely 31


swamps the futures that already ‘are.’”94 Their veracity is unascertainable but they activate a politics in which the desiring subject hallucinates a history and this history contributes to the conjuration of an open, fluid collectivityto-come. Spivak’s strategic use of the anecdote of Bhuvaneswary Bhaduri’s poignant suicide from her own family history and reading that episode as an agentive act of “the subaltern rewriting of the social text of sati-suicide as much as the hegemonic account of the blazing, fighting, familiar Durga,”95 deeply destabilizes not just the narrative of the nationalist citizen-subject, the phallocentric discourse of Indian official nationalism, but also the claims to appropriate subaltern agency through pre-fabricated subject positions and enunciative modalities. The point I want to stress is that through Spivak’s “reading” and writing, a virtual community-to-come is invoked, a new solidarity is formed. Her fabulation engages the powers of the false, falsifying received truths and fashioning new truths by “legending.” Chatterjee is the prince among the fabulists. His illuminating theorization of populist politics and grassroots democracy in “most of the world” draws heavily from lurid reports of bazaar tabloids, carnivalesque narratives of street-brawls and rumors of imminent revolutions spread by obscure millennial cults. He catches the people to come in a state of legending in flagrante delicto and the resulting texts are about solidarities (“political society”) unendorsed in received, canonical texts of politics. Thus, the fabulations which go into the making of this book, inciting my musings on Chinese bicycles in The Rumor of Globalization, on vernacular practices of habitation in Writing Home, Writing Travel, on street-food in Between Elite Hysteria and Subaltern Carnivalesque, for example, belong to a well-developed genre practiced by some of the most respected practitioners of Subaltern Studies. However, “fabulation” also has another, more plebeian and vernacular association. There are genres like kissa, naxa, galpa in our story-telling traditions ascribed to fictitious authors like Mollah Nasiruddin, Gopal Bhand, etc. These are collective fabrications or fabulations of a people. All major Indian vernacular cultures, including Hindi, Urdu and Bengali, have a long and vigorous tradition of pamphleteering, of vicious feuilleton journalism, of publishing seditious, salacious, malicious, often provocative and sometimes outright obscene tracts, texts and pamphlets. We should not forget, in this context, the gujabs (rumors) that circulate through word of mouth or printed leaflets. I owe my initiation to these disreputable, “chotoloki” Battala genres to the “people’s historian,” Gautam Bhadra. While researching vernacular sexual subcultures for Virtual Flesh, transmission of 32

INTRODUCTION

rumor for The Rumor of Globalization, vernacular perceptions of 9/11, “terrorism” and Bin Laden for Dream Kitsch and also elsewhere, I have drawn freely from these sources, often without acknowledging explicitly. It is my modest hope that my fabulations around what Calcutta’s beloved Latin American novelist Marquez called our “outsized reality,” will be of some interest and use to activists and theorists “here” and “elsewhere.”96

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1

THE RUMOR OF GLOBALIZATION GLOBALITY-COUNTERWORKS AND THE LOCATION OF COMMODITY In memoriam: Gourkishore Ghosh (1923–2001) Vernacular intellectual, publicist and crusader for free speech and democracy

Who is afraid of Cyber-Communism? Bombard the headquarters! A major leitmotif of disquietude about globalization in India has been its supposed inculcation of “western” consumerism to the gullible Indian masses. This enjoys a broad-based consensus: the RSS thugs (Hindu-Fascist storm-troopers) who routinely smash shops selling totemic “western” goods like Valentine’s Day cards are not ideologically far removed from the Stalinist crusaders fighting apasanskriti (degenerate culture) in their left bastion, Calcutta. Denunciation of western “decadence” and “hedonism” (bhogbad) is a constant refrain of their cultural propaganda, too. In this regard, the Chinese comrades (to whom the Indian Stalinists are closely allied), once again, have proved their nettle. Justifying their longstanding censorship of the internet and the crack-down on cyber-cafés, Beijing’s then vice-mayor, Liu Zhihua, came up with a handy aphorism: it is no longer religion but cyber-café which is the “opium of the masses.”1

35


Given this rainbow coalition against “the evil demon of images,” I want to celebrate here the imaginaries of consumption in our part of the world haunted by the specter of cyber-communism. I do this by exploring the emergent solidarities engendered by these images, binding ordinary people in their quotidian struggles against the state, the Party, the World Bank, the IMF and other such self-appointed custodians of their destiny. I locate agency in the pleasure experienced by the poor in their enchantment by images of commodities (rather than in “consumption” as such, understood as a historic phenomenon).2 From Mandeville through Marx to postmodern counter-culture gurus, desire and consumption have consistently been vilified; the experience of consumption is held to be passive and banal, leading to a certain “bimbofication” of the masses.3 I argue that the critique of the so-called passivity of consumption ensues from a messianic desire to purge society by punishing the people for their reversion to idolatry and paganism (more on this later). I show that this didacticism is a throw back from a hoary western fear of representation as such whose poisoned fruits are, paradoxically, the authoritarian regimes of Asia. I seek to unravel here the diabolical complicity of authoritarianism with the chilling illogic of a utopian “beyond” of representation. The Production of Globality An arresting event took place in Calcutta in May 2001.4 Truckloads of villagers from the countryside invaded the city with the objective of buying Chinese consumer goods. Rumor was rife that due to the lifting of restrictions on imports, unbelievably cheap Chinese goods would be made available and sold to the public at the Netaji Indoor Stadium. In early 2001, a systematic disinformation campaign was launched by Indian big business to create panic about the invasion of Chinese goods in order to generate pressure on the government about tariffs. The pro-business print-media carried lead stories on what they apprehended as “dumping” of cheap goods by China.5 The mass hysteria ensuing this campaign reached such heights that the commerce minister at the time, Murasoli Maran, had to reassure the members of the parliament on 24 February, 2001 that there was no immediate threat of Chinese dumping. What is peculiar about this rumor is that it was transmitted through the electronic media: traders and wholesalers all over the country received faxed messages and emails containing lists of prices of Chinese goods.6 36


This rumor had generic similarity to an earlier one: the Hindu god Ganesh would drink milk offered by devotees on a certain day in September 1995.7 This rumor, which originated abroad among the Indian diaspora, spread all over India like wildfire through fax messages and telephone calls. It is widely believed that this “miracle” actually happened. This new genre of cyber-rumor is a simulated hybrid: its potency derives not from the relative indeterminacy of word of mouth, but from the cold precision of bytes of data transmitted through silicon chips. Like the Toyota-ridden hybrid ratha (chariot) of LK Advani’s sinister Rathayatra in 1991,8 or the televised ancient epics of the early 1990s, the proliferation of these hybrid signifiers is a defining feature of India’s public culture today. These dissolve, in a manner held to be quintessentially “postmodern,” the sacred into the profane, depth into surface and, more ominously, for the leftist Kulturkritik, the epochal division of the world into a now and a then.9 These cyber rumors are compelling instances of simulacra—a mere “copy” not backed by an “original,” the “truth” or the “real.” My quarrel with the leftist critiques of Indian public culture erupts at the point when they seek to denude simulation of agency. Rumor is a process of communication through which meanings are produced, transmitted and consumed. Yet, the coding of a message may not, necessarily, control its reception: encoding and decoding are separate and autonomous processes. Even with simulated cyber rumors, there remains the agentive moment of decoding. It is from the debilitating shadow of passivity—of consuming passively without having a share in the production of meaning—that I want to rescue the silent majorities and the damning metaphor of simulacra. More broadly, “The Rumor of Globalization” seeks to capture the wider historic unease surrounding “globalization.” Critical studies of globalization phrase it as a totalizing process involving a kind of “economic” rationality which is devoid of agency—the inhuman, “fantastic” logic of “things” comes to impose itself on what is directly lived—human “belonging” which is necessarily local, autochthonous, resistant and unmediated by representation. It is my contention that globalization is also an imaginary; it is imagined through metaphors, narratives, and rumors. Even its moments of violence are mediated by structures of meaning. These meanings are constitutive of “globalization” and not simply its flip-sides or ideological chimeras that mask forms of oppression that are external to them. Finance, interest rates, markets, tariffs and regulations emerge from a discursive process because the “economy” itself is a re-presentation, and not the “real” world itself. 37


Surely, “globalization” is not one: it is many visions and projects. It is, precisely, a war of contesting visions. To illustrate this contest with our rumor of globalization: what was meant to create the semiotic condition of dread, panic and foreboding, as evident from the articles in cold print, turns into a jubilant state of expectancy for arrival of cheap consumer goods which have been denied to the Indian masses. I want to read the figure of globalization against the grain, against one of the most influential strands of contemporary thought concerned with the politics of location—namely, the work of Appadurai on “locality” and location.10 His contribution has been in de-ontologizing the “local”—in initiating the analysis of how the local is constructed by the global forces in a radically “delocalized” world. In his reckoning, the “local,” far from being the site of a plenitude of meaning, turns out to be a mere effect—caught, as it were, in the interstices of an omnipresent Global. I want to critique the localism of this globalization speak and its metropolitan myopia. Appadurai rightly asserts that locality is the figural effect of cultural– social production. It is performed and produced, rather than being something simply given. Yet, this thinking about locality in the performative is not extended to the global. At the very least, one cannot take the global as some kind of an ontological ground. Besides, isn’t the Global—a certain global—strictly localized in the North? Wanting to bring in a dash of dialogism into what is no more than a tame metropolitan project—the so-called “global civil society”—in a recent essay on “grassroots globalization,” Appadurai makes a case for the funded NGOs as those who, proverbially, think global but act local.11 He identifies these as the agency which would ensure, not just our deliverance from the clutches of the “predatory” nation state, but also the promotion of a more holistic, “from below,” counter-vision of globalization, acting as a buffer against the corrosive effects of hyper-mobile finance capital. By evacuating the local political processes altogether as transforming sites, he misses the point that what metropolitan funding begets are oligarchies run by operators with no grass-roots accountability. It is thus perfectly legitimate to think of this “global” as no more than a localized, minority vision whose production requires work of all sorts, including the ideological work of propagating a certain Eurocentric “cosmopolitanism” and “globalism.”12 One cannot be a constructivist while talking about locality and, simultaneously, a realist when thinking about globality. This is not to invoke the lurid alterity of a “resistant” local as some kind of a primeval community, as a “preexisting ontological entity,”13 but 38


simply to point out that we need to strive for a truly global view of globalization as opposed to the parochialism implicated in the project of “global civil society.” Besides, it is not always autochthony which scripts the local. To get on with the incident of the rumor of globalization in Calcutta. Arriving at the stadium early in the morning, the villagers queued up like disciplined soldiers. By ten o’ clock, the unnerved administration deputed cops in riot gears to disperse the crowd. They declared over loudspeakers that no such “sale” is scheduled to take place, but in vain. At about midday, the impatient crowd threatened to smash the gates of the stadium. In order to avoid trouble, the gates were opened. Representatives went inside the stadium and reported back to their folks. Convinced that the venue has been shifted to prevent them from buying the cheap “foren” (foreign) goods in limited supply and that the administration had connived with the rich to corner the goodies for themselves, the disappointed crowd left in bitterness. Before I come to my untimely meditations on these subaltern imaginaries of consumption, allow me to elaborate on the barest minimum of an analytical framework. My initial entry point is Appadurai’s essay on “the politics of value” where commodity is defined in terms of a situation—things can walk in and out of their commodity state.14 This work is heavy with the recognition that value is not an “inherent property of objects,” it is intersubjective, and thus it opens up the possibility of thinking of commodity’s ascription with other meanings. However, I am not entirely in agreement with Appadurai because his account derives from Simmel’s definition of value reliant on the neo-classical paradigm of subjective value. This account, unlike Marx’s, is unable to account for value’s complex and systematic nature. A theory of value that dispenses with the anthropology of need and the notion of intrinsic worth of things and builds instead on its sumptuary nature, can be found in Frow.15 I will not pursue the matter any further. Instead, I will explore, theoretically, the historic emergence of the notion of use-value understood as “properties” of things, which founds the anthropology of the “system of needs.” Before Appadurai’s intervention, cultural thingness was explored by a brand of semiotics practiced by Barthes, early Baudrillard etc. who worked hard to peel off the “ideological” layers of meaning surrounding things, hoping to reach its kernel—a degree zero—where the thing would be equal to itself. Released from the burden of representation, it was hoped, the thing will reappear in its pristine clarity whose locus classicus was laid out by the Cartesian res as modified by the Kantian bipolarity of the transcendental 39


subject and the mute thing-in-itself. This bipolarity is constitutive of what Latour calls the “modern” reality; the “reality” of the thing as mere object emerges out of this framing.16 The aim of this essay is to rid progressive politics of this imaginary of the worldless res through which “a beyond of representation is posited in such a way that representation could be measured against it.”17 Matter that matters is always-already inscribed with discourse.18 The materiality implicated in the Marxist critique of “commodity fetishism” understood as an “objective illusion” is the materiality of the res. It demands that things be restored to their primal innocence (use-value) by being related directly and transparently to their master, man, without the mediation of market.19 This nostalgia for a world of simple objects is grounded in a myth of presence which informs much of contemporary “materialist” idealism.20 It is my contention that materiality must be understood as materialityeffect—the res is a worldless no-thing. The existential density of worldly things is wholly due to their inscription with text. It follows that the res is a historical effect, rather than the ground of all history. Marx treats use-value as a mere foil to bring out the distinctive nature of exchange-value. He wrote: “Use-value expresses a natural relationship between a thing and a man, the existence of things for man. But exchange value represents the social existence of things”: use-value is nature, exchange-value is culture.21 Therefore, the work of de-naturalizing use-value and reclaiming its socialness and historicity has to begin, by necessity, with Marx, who tried to wriggle use-value out of history. He wrote in Capital I that the history of use-value coincides with the history of discovery of the “properties of things.” This “history” is sham because the notion that the thing is the sum total of its physical properties is itself a product of recent history. Marx takes what he calls the “sensuously varied objectivity [of things] as articles of utility” as a timeless fact.22 But “facts” are something “constructed… and yet, once constructed… [they have] sufficient existence that none can deny them.”23 We come upon a scene when things are viewed solely in terms of their “objective” properties satisfying human “want”— use-value and later, in neo-classical economic jargon, “utility.” I propose to treat this “fact” as a social construction which has acquired a certain “durability.” Marx’s reservation about market stems from the fact that it homogenizes the “natural,” sensuous singularities of things into the regimented equivalence of atom-like exchange-values.24 But Marx’s account of exchange-value leaves out something crucial: the emergence, existence and uniqueness of a system of “goods” subject to a common definition. Political 40


Economy emerged when the existence of this system was already a datum, a “social fact,” and it took this equivalence for granted. Before “Political Economy,” so to speak, things were organized in a moral hierarchy and not yet normalized into a homogeneous system of “goods” capable of satisfying “human want.” The question of equivalence was posed in cases when conflict arose and judges had to decide if an item was of satisfactory “quality.” The tradition dealing with this taxonomic problem goes back to law and jurisprudence: to judge and to code both come down to classifying a case in a legal category or, in legal terms, to “qualifying” it. Law here refers at once to the king—the judge of judges, and to knowledge. So there is a clear link between equity and equivalence: what was once prescriptive, pertaining to morality and law, gradually, through repeated usage, became descriptive.25 Thus, “use-value”—the so-called qualitative character of things as things—a repository of an original and authentic substantiality—is simply the “anthropological alibi” of exchange-value. Since both use- and exchange-values are historically contingent constructs, coming out of a historical process of commensuration,26 it follows that the concept of commodity itself is not “real.” It is a powerful theoretical fiction yoked with a certain vision about the nature of the present we inhabit. Stated categorically, the script I wish to contest is: through the universalization of the commodity form, the erstwhile “unity” of life is torn asunder and images bereft of their referents are made autonomous. Though “globalization” is the latest phase in the career of the commodity form, so runs the argument, the germ of this development was present essentially in the very imaginary of commodity—in its privileging of representation and mediation over immediacy. Given that, that “capital [would get] accumulated to the point where it becomes image” or “spectacle” is simply a matter of time.27 In its post-Marxist formulation, globalization is the culminating moment of this logic when commodity, freed from its erstwhile territorial underpinning, becomes autonomous and self-referential. Commodity deterritorialized is the “spectacle” universalized. Using the critique of the commodity form I just developed, I want to work out a non-utopian vision of valorizing the present in interpreting the incident I just reported that took place in Calcutta in the wake of “globalization.” My purpose is to interrogate the people’s “take” on commoditization and globalization. Exploring the commodity form through a reading of its meaning(s) as it circulates through the moral economy of the everyday, will alert us to the possibility that commodity, “rather than being read 41


able as a constant function,” should be thought more as a “relational structure,” “possessing different valences in different contexts.”28

Globalization Gone Native The ontology of everyday transactions in a Bengali village: daan, bakhsish, dakshina and Chinese bicycles Though I was present at the scene as a curious onlooker on the day when the big China sale was supposed to take place at the Netaji Indoor Stadium, I did not get the opportunity to talk to the villagers. Later, I arranged to meet some of them in a distant village in the Midnapore district of West Bengal. They came to Calcutta to buy Chinese bicycles, a metonymy for mobility in rural Bengal (at that time, a standard Indian bicycle used to cost around Rs. 1200 while a Chinese one with gears was supposed to cost only Rs. 500 at the Chinese sale). What emerged as crucial about their understanding of the Chinese goods is the category of “gift” in the very special sense they used it. They called these goods “viśvāyaner daan” (gift of globalization) when I was chiding them for their credulity. Daan in Bengali (derived from Sanskrit dana) means gift. The Bengali word “viśvāyan,” a literal translation of the English word globalization, is a recent coinage by the vernacular press. I do not wish to revisit here the vast ethnographic literature generated in the wake of Mauss’s The Gift.29 Leaving traditional Melanesia apart, which bears little resemblance to our rural Bengal which has voted a Communist party to power for the last thirty years, I find it difficult to locate an analog in the “hard” ethnographic literature on “gift” (the most interesting works being on ceremonial exchange)30 to make sense of “viśvāyaner daan.” Some kind of a parallel can be found in the early work of Taussig about devil worship in Latin America.31 However, his model of fetishism in which western consumer goods play the role of fetish in the literal sense of the term (animated objects), is inappropriate here since there is nothing “magical” about our Chinese goods. Why “gift” then, since one must pay money to purchase the bicycles? I hope a tentative answer emerges from my diminutive ethnography. At the heart of the Marxist theorization of commodity, there is a generalized denunciation of the present as the abstract time of capital as opposed to an “earlier,” “cyclical” time lived by “communities.” The series of binary oppo42


sitions—capital/community, use-/exchange-value, self-interest/altruism— inheres in the commodity/gift opposition. These two different forms of social life of things correspond to a more general logic that opposes tradition to modernity. As I have hinted earlier, in the Introduction, the binary opposition between these ideal types are ordering strains built into the modern project. These do not correspond to clear-cut temporal rupture in the real. After the expression “viśvāyaner daan” was thrown up in course of conversation, I was waiting in suspended animation for some supplementary statements. To my utter dismay, the villagers went on and on talking about local politics, narrating breathtaking stories of corruption by the cliques formed around the various panchayat bodies dominated by the ruling Communist Party of India (Marxist). These local stories were complemented by more fantastic stories of grafting, bribery and nepotism of the leaders of the ruling party quoted from the vernacular newspaper Bartaman, which specializes in sensational journalism and was backing Mamata Banerjee, the leader of the opposition party, Trinamul Congress (TMC), on the eve of the 2002 assembly elections. Before the election, the TMC was riding a sudden “wave” of popularity induced by media-hype but was routed subsequently through electoral debacle. Since the ethnographer’s job is to listen, I sit in a kind of bored trance, growing increasingly restive with their discordant stories. To break out of the stalemate, I decide to argue with the villagers. I tell them that I am not a gullible outsider. I vote for the Communists because they are the only force committed to grassroots democracy and empowerment of the poor. Corruption notwithstanding, one must not forget about the wider society which has benefited from leftist rule. Before the left came to power, the question of corruption at the grassroots could not arise: money started percolating down to the village level only after the elected panchayat (elected and autonomous village civic bodies) system got off the ground in 1978. This historic step towards decentralization was further exacerbated by grassroots land reforms (Operation Barga). So, their keenness in discussing corruption and local politics is welcome and through such grassroots critiques, someday, corruption will give way to transparency and efficiency. But we must not throw away the baby with the bath water. My little speech failed to produce the desired effect—I found incomprehension writ large on the faces of my audience. The problem seemed to be rooted in the semantic ambiguity of the term “wider society” (brihattaro samaj). What “society” am I talking about? Am I talking about the sikshito 43


samaj (a common expression in subaltern Bengali speech, meaning “the posh, educated lot”)? It is true that salaried middle classes have ﬂourished under the left rule, but what about their samaj? My plea that there is a “wider society,” transcending this or that samaj, fell on deaf ears. The villagers failed to comprehend what I called an overarching, wider society, and we plunged into a dense discussion about samaj, person (lok) and self-other (apan-par, nijer-parer). I meant to tell them that they are parochial; a person must relate directly to society and not just with one’s own kin or neighbors. They point out that this is impossible. How can a person be like a solitary, stand-alone “light-post” [lamp-post]? Are they humans or insects (“lok na pok ?”)? How can immediate relationships be so cut and dry (“lepa-poncha”) as to be mediated through the abstract protocol of some “wider society”? I think of relations as something “I” enter into, as after the fact of my personhood, while they think of relations (not in the abstract but very concretely as atmiya-swajan (relatives) and para-porshi (neighbors) as constitutive of their personhood (“I”). No wonder they thought of what I called “wider society” as a bookish jargon. It turns out that these villagers’ practices of life neither presuppose nor evince, after the fact, anything like “society” and its corollary, “individual.” Hence, the search for “the relationship” between the two is misleading. What has been called “clientelism” is precisely a gloss on this phenomenon—the fact that voting and mobilization patterns in Indian politics do not evince the individual as the basic unit of decision making.32 Pundits of Indian politics talk of “ascriptive” rather than “associative” community in explaining the phenomenon of “bloc voting” where people vote on the basis of caste, community or other so-called “primordial” loyalties. The recent NGO interventions in devising novel forms of credit customized to serve the very poor also demonstrates this. The spectacular success of “microfinance,” where a group as a whole stands as collateral for debts incurred by its members, reveals a pattern of behavior grossly at odds with the received notions of personhood, property and agency.33 The word samaj resists translation. It is an ancient Sanskrit compoundword which inhered to the Sanskrit-derived languages. Sam, the prefix, means “with,” as in “together with,” “along with,” etc. The root verb aj means to drive forward, to propel forward etc. Together they mean to go together, to be driven forward together etc. The entire discourse of sociality in India, understood as the memory (smriti) of customs, manners, laws and usages (byabahara) of the ancients, is organized around the sociality of 44


samaj. All the authoritative dictionaries of Bengali language I have consulted assert unambiguously that samaj is primarily a congregation of a particular jati or a sub-jati of a particular locality.34 It also means a particular and localized group of people (a certain jati of a particular locality), an assembly (a “caste council”) or a face-to-face milieu. Thus, Bengali samaj is not a synonym of “society.” More generally, the primary meaning of samaj is a contingent congregation—a coming together of people for a particular occasion or purpose. A samaj can also mean a party, a league etc., as in Arya Samaj or Brahmo Samaj. It is an event, even a performance, but never a “thing,” as in the Durkheimian “society”—a putative anthropological constant. Thus, the discourse of samaj never presupposes something like an overarching environment-like “society” and its bond—sociability—as a connector between individuals. There is (was) no big Society in traditional India, only little samajs. In recent times, sociologists and anthropologists have attempted to interrogate the category of “society”: it is no longer thought of as a condition humana. Strathern set the agenda when she asked rhetorically: “In what kind of cultural contexts do people’s self-description include a representation of themselves as society?”35 In social theory, Mary Poovey (among others) has attempted a deconstruction of the “social”; the kind of durability it has acquired in the West is shown to be a part of the long process of reification that we call “modernity.”36 The Bengali debate on samaj goes back to the end of the nineteenth century and is still smouldering. The debate was shaped by concerns arising out of the vicissitudes of colonial modernity. With the deepening of the western influence, the development of the modern institution of “society” (understood in the Arendtian sense of a middle-ground between family/kinship institutions and the state) implicated in the growth of various civic institutions in late-nineteenth century Calcutta, did not go unnoticed by indigenous thinkers like Rabindranath Tagore. This was also the period when what we now call, after Foucault, a certain “governmentalization” of the colonial state was under way. To the swadeshi thinker, this appeared as an encroachment on the domain of the samaj and a radical departure from the erstwhile ideal of a polity governed largely by self-regulated institutions centered on kinship and caste. In his famous essay, Swadeshi Samaj (Indigenous Society) (1904), Tagore upheld the ideal of a self-subsistent, resistant samaj autonomous from the state and the government as the differencia specificia of “our” polity as opposed to the centrality of the state in European polities.37 But tradi 45


tional Indian society (I use the word now in a purely descriptive sense), by its very constitution, consisting of numerous samajs at different levels, is not something that can ever act together as one body. The very nature of samaj sociality that operates by differentiation would prevent this. What holds it together is not solidarity or sociability in the western sense but the symbolic efficacy of a very lose ethic called dharma. So, while Tagore was right in stressing the autonomy of the traditional samajs from the state, he was wrong in thinking that this autonomy can be used to forge an effective unity—swadeshi samaj—to promote the cause of indigenous unity against the colonial state. To be more precise, if the erstwhile samajs had to combine into a bloc, nothing less than the transformation of the very nature of its sociality would be called for. Let us note in passing that Tagore’s project of activating the swadeshi samaj or the nationalist project of constructing a resistant “inside,” was a historic attempt to forge a social body—“society”— ex nihilo. However tentative and tenuous this “society” was, it was an entity—a “thing”—that was acted upon in nationalist mobilizations against the colonial state. To the extent the project of pedagogic nationalism can be considered as successful, this imaginary institution of “society” was not a mere figment of elite imagination: repeated enactments performed it. Some of Tagore’s contemporaries did recognize that the model of swadeshi samaj whose professed aim was to consolidate the samajs vis-à-vis the colonial state, goes against the grain of the sociality of the samaj. Strong objections about Tagore’s project came from the “traditionalist” lobby (as articulated in their mouthpiece, Bangabasi, the conservative Bengali journal)—the last bastion of what was still left of the samajs and their garrulous, reactionary samajpatis.38 They accused Tagore of subverting the traditional samaj order by his tendentious depiction of samaj as some kind of a mélange. If samaj becomes a homogenous collectivity, defining itself as a unified bloc vis-à-vis the state, the principle of samaj, that which holds it together—dharma (read caste and hierarchy)—will be undermined and European-style “society” will triumph. We might add here that the traditional discourse on samaj immanent in our regulative smriti texts never posited an environment-like society and its bond, sociability. I cannot afford to narrate here the history of transformation of Bengali sociality. But the very real existence of the unequal “languages” in contemporary Bengal—the villagers’ incomprehension of my “wider society”— indicates the tenacious underground persistence of samaj and the still tenuous nature of the institution of “society.” To be fair to Tagore, it should 46


be mentioned that elsewhere, in a different context, he did admit that until recently (we are in 1894), we were a “samaj of householders.” Which is to say, there was no middle-ground between the household and the state: there was no “society.” What I have said so far should make it clear that samaj cannot be posited even as a weak substitute of society. Samaj is not only not society, it is something else altogether. Largely because of the forces of colonialism, Tagore wrote, “a new flood has swept into its [samaj’s] domain. Its name is ‘the public’ [original in English]… It is impossible to translate it into Bengali… Now our samaj consists not only of households but also an emergent public.”39 To bring out the nature of the sociality of samaj, it would be instructive to contrast it with the notion of “community” preached by the influential “Subaltern Studies” group of historians. “Community” was salvaged from the dusty alcove of nineteenth century historical sociology and it is simply the binary opposite of contractual “association.” I find the notion of “community” unhelpful for dethroning the concept of person qua individual idealized in western political theory. In Partha Chatterjee’s acclaimed The Nation and Its Fragments, “community” is presented as a critique of methodological individualism. Using the origin-myth of a subaltern Bengali sect as a “cultural critique” of liberalism, Chatterjee idealizes the image of society as an organic body (Gemeinschaft) of which the various jatis are the interdependent parts. This organicism of Gemeinschaft is contrasted with the unsocial sociability of civil society. And yet, his very posing of the problem of sociality in terms of a putatively “universal” problem of “the unity of mutual separateness and mutual dependence” (his words) of persons,40 suggests as if there is an axiomatic context of action everywhere and has the effect of making “society” a universal, removing the very possibility of eliciting other socialities. So long as individuals are imagined as conceptually distinct from the relations that bring them together, we would not be able even to raise the problem of the sociality of samaj. Chatterjee’s “community” takes its final shape through a reworking of the section on “Ethical Life” in Hegel’s The Philosophy of Right as a “suppressed” narrative of the “community.”41 He argues for an ethical priority of the organicism of kinship (caste) over the principle of bourgeois equality. The underlying argument is familiar: before that historic separation of man from what Marx called “the original conditions of production,” society was an organic whole immersed in a time before representation.42 Enveloped in “custom,” people experienced “nature” and themselves in an unmediated 47


immediacy (“irreducible immediacy,” Chatterjee, p. 48), till market and commodity, the forces of bürgerliche Gesellschaft (civil/bourgeois society) that is, raised their ugly heads, alienating people from nature and from themselves. This is, famously, the Left-Hegelianism of the Marx of 1844: Schiller’s Romantic theory of alienation amplified and then projected on a world-historical scale.43 It is also a historic regression from Hegel; for, the Feurebachian “species love” implicated in this mythic humanist narrative derives heavily from the notion of aesthetic interiority developed by the German Romantics and their reactionary politics of nostalgia. Capitalism means progressive commoditization. But, and this is crucial, the ineluctable logic of commodity also engenders the emphatically decommodified domain of family, love and friendship as a kind of paradoxical counter-movement.44 “Love” in Hegel’s sense does not predate commodity but is contemporaneous with it. Thus, the question of an ethical priority of “organic” relations over impersonal contractual relationships is simply misconceived. What Chatterjee chooses to valorize belongs to the very same metaphysics of bourgeois personhood he denounces. The idea of the bourgeois personhood derives from the interconnected notions of primordial self-ownership, the idea of property as a right of exclusion of others and the Romantic notion of “authorship”—coalescing in the notion of an originary proprietary right in one’s own self and its activities.45 Precisely what seems to resist the alienating logic of commodity the most—viz., the idea of a selfdetermining, unique, moral person who owns his/her “own” works—is, paradoxically, a singular creation of bourgeois law.46 And, to make a political agenda out of the unmediated “immediacy” of “community” is what Carl Schmitt called, in a somewhat different context, “Political Romanticism.”47

Outside-Inside the Commodity Machine Personhood (to be a lok) for my villagers is a result of “transactions,” the two axes of which are apan (kin) and par (non-kin). The communitarian ideas I imbibed made me think that the bond of community is the connector between persons and society and further, society is a matter of collectivity. This has the distinct disadvantage of prioritizing “society” as an a priori, as a reality sui generis (as Durkheim would say), which is never accounted for. In the life-world of my villagers, “single actors are not thought… [as] indivisible, bounded units; … Instead… persons are… thought… to be “dividuals” or divisible.”48 Viewed thus, the villagers “exhibit an elaborate 48


transactional culture, characterized by explicit, institutionalized concern for giving and receiving of many kinds in kinship, work, … worship” and, I hope to show, even in politics.49 The upshot of this is that both persons and things are produced by exchange or transactions (whereas commodity is produced for exchange). People’s work in such cultures is not to sustain “social” relationships through “reciprocation.” What people do is to place constraints on the webs of relationships. For the villagers, non-kin (par) relationships are based on solidarities which can be quite contingent and fluid as well as long-lasting and durable. Here are some examples: relationships arising out of interactions among those who participate in some adda in a tea-shop, those who organize together to celebrate a barwari puja, those who are disciples of a particular religious guru like Baba Loknath, those who follow a particular neta, village fractions formed around various interests, customs, events and agendas. All these are little samajs. Even the group of daily passengers commuting to Calcutta by train in “Midnapore Local” who chant auspicious Harinam to elevate the monotony of a long journey, is called a samaj. The singular person is a derivative of multiple identities—a social microcosm. In Bengali, there is a name for this mode of social action activating intricate networks of cross-cutting solidarities in which people find themselves enmeshed: daladali (translated usually as factionalism). It may not be a bad descriptor of subaltern Bengali sociality as such, which is emphatically not a collective sociability. In so far as “social action” is concerned, collective life is a unity while singular persons are composite. I have asserted that exchange produces people as persons and things as “gifts.” This “gift-economy” must not be conflated with reciprocity or some generalized altruism. I want to argue that in India, an underground gift culture still governs the informal economy involving the disenfranchised poor and that, too, in complicity with the market and the state. The Bengali expression paiyee dewar rajniti, meaning a perverse, paternalistic politics, has come into use during the last thirty years or so. This expression captures with great penetration the kind of negotiations that take place between the villagers and the various civic-governmental institutions. Public goods and facilities (roads, wells, public buildings, electricity, tap-water, hospitals, etc.) are inevitably seen as “gifts.” Such gifts of unnayan (development) are given to chosen peoples and localities (excluding others) through the mediation of the big men (neta, dada etc.) with “influence” (their word)—powerbrokers at various rungs. There is a category of goods for which the official nomenclature in Bengali is khayrati (alms-giving)—e.g., “relief ” after natu 49


ral calamities, ad hoc schemes to provide residential houses and pukka privy, “food-for-work” schemes etc. These often come directly stamped with the name of the “donor” (e.g., Indira Abas Yojona, Jawahar Rojgar Yojona, Prime Minister’s Scheme for this or that etc.) and these schemes are announced from the ramparts of the Red Fort by the prime minister in his Independence Day speech. Access to these as beneficiaries, getting a “ration” or a BPL card (for access to state-subsidized goods and various other concessions earmarked for the very poor), inclusion in various governmental schemes as beneficiaries, admission of patients to state-run hospitals and even formal registration of a complaint in the police station—all these require mediation of biggies who demand loyalty and who have access to elected representatives, to government officers, to police, to press etc. This loyalty is political capital: if you have taken favor, you will have to pay it back: by voting for the candidate your big man favors, by joining political rallies, by campaigning for particular candidates etc. The big man will capitalize on the number of men he can mobilize. This is how “vote banks” work, leading to “bloc” voting. This intricate mesh of loyalty, favor and patronage extends from the grassroots to the top. And so does the flow of favors, gifts, obligations and counter-gifts. The unofficial state, the real state that touches the lives of millions in India, is made sense of, and reciprocally, the state has to operate, of necessity, in terms of this “moral economy”—what Mauss called the “antiquated and dangerous gift economy.”50 Yet, there can be no “gift” in the sphere of the modern, governmentalized state. If gift of commodities does emerge as a strategy of governance it is because the modern, modular, nation state still does not rule over all the sectors of our lives: there are other authorities. Thus, there is space for other socialities not pre-empted by the “social”; there are other, dissonant temporalities different from “the time of the states.”51 And, there are other thingings, imaginaries of cultural thingness not exhausted by the subject-object idiom of property and possession. It is in this allochronic time and allotopic place, that the threshold between two different social lives of things—that of gift and commodity—becomes porous and negotiable. When commodities are inscribed with other, vernacular diacritics, as in the villagers’ expression “viśvāyaner daan,” they become gift. It is not a case of an indeterminacy of social trajectory of things but of multiple determinations, of over-determination. Thus, commodity here has another history not annulled by its life qua commodity. It is to this history that we must now turn. Let us ponder on the meaning of the villagers’ understanding of foreign commodity qua “daan.” It is not just a straightforward desire for imported 50


commodities. On closer examination, it turns out that they were not only wanting things but also wanting people to behave in certain ways. They came up with two key indigenous categories: subidha (privilege) and adhikar (literal meaning: right). The latter has crept into their vocabulary from leftist grassroots propaganda. By adhikar, a rather formal word, usually found in sadhu bhasa, they mean something like “officially sanctioned,” “formal,” and not “right” in the juridical sense of the term. With the experience of just-held elections in mind when massive rigging took place in various parts of Midnapore district, they said that casting a vote is an adhikar but, as things stand, this adhikar, like the adhikar of buying a commodity at “fair” price, is rarely allowed to be exercised. Hence, these are adhikar only in name; for ordinary villagers like them who are outside the transactional network of the ruling party, these are subidha. Illustrative examples were subsidized kerosene, sugar, grain, “relief ” materials distributed through the panchayats and public goods like tube-wells, roads etc. These villagers inevitably end up paying much more than the official subsidized price for things like kerosene and the beneficiaries of the development and welfare programs invariably turn out to be those who are part of the coterie formed around the big-men of the panchayat. The same is true for fertilizer, seed, pesticide and even allopathic medicines. To get unadulterated, “orginal” (original) stuff, as they call it in their pidgin English, one has to pay a little extra, which they call, euphemistically, dakshina (literally, remuneration paid to the Brahmin priest for performing puja). Even the police station will not accept a complaint for a common theft without some bakhsish (tip). A quality bicycle at an easy price, with no palms to grease, is therefore a daan from globalization. But the ruling party in the state, for their own narrow vested interests, is trying to malign globalization, as is evident from their extensive campaigns against the Dunkel proposal, “globalization” and the GATT in the recent past. Thus, these villagers inhabit an everyday permeated by the archaic patterns of obligation—those dangerous, fluid, subtle generosities that bind persons into an order of relations different from the contractual rationality of commodity—and from which they cannot be easily extricated. The coercive cosmopolitanism enshrined in the neo-liberal creed is “founded on a conformist sense of what it means to be a “person” as an abstract unit of cultural exchange.”52 The mutually obligating gift makes the sense of dwelling of my villagers ontologically different from the bourgeois habitus. In the vernacular imagination, the putative benefits of globalization are conceived 51


as “daan” i.e., mediated by the ethic of mutually obligating transactions. Can globalization contain its own specter—this plague of media-mediated imagination fermenting at the hearts of the world’s dispossessed?

Leftist Propaganda and the Education of Desire Though “fetish” in Taussig’s sense is grossly inapplicable here, surely the Chinese bicycle is a place-holder for their deep and repeatedly frustrated desire to participate in the political process as dignified right-bearing citizens, as subjects of a welfare-state entitled to enjoy the entitlement to statesubsidized goods as a matter of right, to participate in the global marketplace as consumers free from the restrictions imposed by a paternalist state. These bicycles are better seen not as passive consumables at all but rather as compressed performances—as scripts for political action. The point is, these desires are not innate, but produced. These are not, what Chatterjee called, in another context, the “desire for democratization” of the subaltern masses—their timeless longing for “autonomy.”53 The Brahminical ideology of caste legitimizes the appropriation of the labor of the low-caste subalterns. The contending “subaltern” narratives, according to Chatterjee, staying within the cosmology of caste, “attempt to define a claim of proprietorship over one’s body, to negate… [its] daily submission… to the… dominant dharma and to assert a domain of bodily activity where… it can… disregard those demands.”54 This feat of absent-mindedness with which Lockean selfownership is imputed to Bengali subalterns deserves notice. The idea of self-ownership is not a fixed ontological position to ground ethnographic descriptions but is itself a construct which should be read from the materials and not into these. Chatterjee’s ontology of autonomy crucially hinges on the formation of sovereign, agentive, bourgeois subjectivity. Yet, there is no transcendental normative ground on which to glorify “autonomy” in general. So, if there is a case for “desire” here, it is his pedagogic desire to divest them of agency as desiring persons. I want to look into desire’s artifactuality and contingency. I want to investigate how desires are produced. This particular “desire for democratization” metonymically related to the Chinese bicycles was produced: first, by leftist rule which made these villagers political subjects but did not confer on them the accoutrements and entitlements of citizenship. And second, by the “rumor of globalization,” by which I mean the dissemination of a technologically mediated imaginary through media in which is included 52


not just the media hype surrounding the imminent invasion of Chinese goods, but also their prolonged exposure to what they call an iconic “foren” (meaning the Euro-American) lifestyle through cable television and video (most villages have video-parlors screening all kinds of films: Bengali, Hindi, dubbed Hollywood films like Titanic and Jurassic Park, and clips of B-grade foreign movies, usually “adult” scenes), and the (negative) leftist vernacular propaganda in the countryside against globalization, warning people that soon cheap mass-consumption goods of everyday use would flood the Indian market at the detriment of indigenous industries. Acknowledging the spectrality of consumerist desires, mediated through the images simulated by the technologies of communication, is commonplace today; but it is rarely appreciated that the very same specter also fuels formation of new solidarities centered on new desires. The villagers think of “globalization” as a process operating from some nether region of the world, involving posh, white, educated, well-meaning people who want the poor, underprivileged Indians to enjoy the same access to quality consumer goods as they do. The central government in Delhi has been agreeable to globalization after protracted negotiations—after being threatened with being thrown out of the world community. But the ruling party of this state, for their own narrow vested interests, is trying to malign globalization. The drift of their argument is that enjoying “right” (adhikar) itself is a “privilege” (subidha). The leftist regime inculcated in them the rhetoric of right through their initial mobilization around the issue of recording the names of the poor sharecroppers. That was the first “gift” of right. Then there was this “gift” of panchayat, resulting in improved village infrastructure and enhanced accessibility to “gifts” from the state. But after a few years, the same leftists started deriving special privileges and benefits out of the system, now narrowly constricted into a coterie. Thus the desire for democratization I am concerned with resulted from the leftist pedagogy of “right” (“Adhikar keu diye day na, adhikar ladai kore chinye nite hoy”— meaning, “Nobody will give you rights, you will have to fight and claim it for yourself ”—a popular leftist slogan) as modified by wily popular understanding. This right to right is domesticated as “gift” from the leftist regime which presupposes calculation from both the donor and the recipient. The gift of this right must be paid back and matched by the obligation to vote for the left and bring them to power. Exactly the same is true for the “gift of globalization”: it entails the potential recipients to enter into a sticky moral obligation with “globalization,” which means, minimally, denouncing 53


the leftist propaganda against globalization as hogwash. Thus, the Chinese bicycle is both a commodity (since it has been produced for exchange, one has to pay a price in order to acquire it) and a gift (since it is produced by exchange between the villagers and “globalization”).

On the Banality of the “Evils” of Commodity Fetishism: Enchantment, Fetishism, Location It is clear that some kind of enchantment is implicated in my villagers’ desire for imported consumer goods. Taussig would have us believe that the world’s dispossessed attaches a negative valence to the spectral: precisely because these are enchanting, these are also dangerous. There is an easy conflation here between Marx’s aesthetic-anthropological critique of commodity’s fetish character and the noble savage’s putative ambivalence towards the spectral. This denunciation of seduction by the spectral rests on a more fundamental distrust of representation as such. Wrote Baudrillard, the melancholic, fatalist prophet of postmodernism: [A]t stake has always been the murderous capacity of images, murderers of the real, murderers of their own model… To this murderous capacity is opposed the dialectical capacity of representations as a visible and intelligible mediation of the Real. All of Western faith… was engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange for meaning, and that something could guarantee this exchange—God, of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs which attest his existence? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum—not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.55

Guy Debord is more direct: “Whenever representation takes on an independent existence, the spectacle establishes its rule.”56 What underlies the Marxist critique of commodity as fetish, a category Marx picked up directly from Enlightenment anthropology of religion, is precisely a denunciation of the simulacra which links Marx to an unbroken line of tradition which runs from Plato to the Romantics through the Schoolmen and Luther. There is a persistent and morally valorized ontological opposition throughout the “western” tradition between likeness and presence, between things fabricated by man and those given by nature or god. We recall in Plato’s Sophist a clear-cut distinction between two kinds of images: copies and simulacra. The copies are good images, the icons which resemble from 54


within, while simulacra are bad and false images. Copies embody presence, simulacra is mere likeness with no reassuring presence to back it. It is a copy without an original. Deleuze wrote: “[W]ith Plato a philosophical decision of the utmost importance was taken”—that the phantasm or simulacra is the devil, the Sophist, that always disguised and displaced false pretender as opposed to god, the demiurge, the only true and authentic “maker.”57 The reason behind my cursory harangue into philosophy is strictly polemical. Recently, William Pietz has attempted to restore to “fetish” its historically specific meaning(s).58 Pietz’s philological point about the semantic broadening of “fetish” in the course of Euro-African first encounter is well taken but the import of this philological discovery is not as radical as he supposes: all sorts of worldly “illusions” about the “real” nature of things are already taken care of in Plato’s “simulacra.” Pietz is traversing the same Platonic path in thinking that the “untranscended materiality” of res understood as a transcendental signified can be taken as an ontological ground against which is to be measured its various “objective” (mis)representations like “fetishisms” of various hues.59 The distinction between materiality and its representation is, of course, a distinction between two signifieds (not between a representation and a referent), involving a characteristically rhetorical production of “materiality-effect.” Enlightenment anthropology’s derogatory term “fetish,” deriving from the Latin adjective facticius (rootmeaning: man-made or artificial), has a long history. It is not the semantic history of a word but the continuity of a certain substratum of meaning that concerns me. It began its career as simulacra in Plato to be used later by Schoolmen (“Thou shalt not make graven images”). Icons flourished under Christianity, not as presence but as mere likeness.60 The icons and idols of the heathens (often referred as “fetish”)—claiming to embody not just likeness but also presence—are said to have crumbled when Jesus entered the scene. After the Reformation, Protestant thinkers condemned all erstwhile icons and images, including those of the Catholics, as idolatry, as fetish. Koerner has demonstrated brilliantly how the Reformation image incorporated a certain reflexivity such that the icon itself became iconoclastic.61 It takes little imagination to see why fetish became a key term for condemning the practices of the heathens in early colonial encounters and, finally, institutionalized as an object of study through academic anthropology. It is at this point that Marx picked it up as a category to demystify the “idolatry” of commodity in modern societies. Thus, there is a red thread of discursive continuity from Plato to Marx and “fetish” is tainted. Its cutting edge derives from an ur-presence, an ur 55


model, and the priority of the model over the copy, whose untruth is measured precisely by its deviation from the original. Use-value, the self-same and the self-identical, original and authentic substantiality of things qua things, is the origin of value. Exchange-value is the false pretender, the Sophist. What I am trying to do is to unyoke the theorization of commodity from these metaphysical presumptions.

Conclusion Commodity has a location, it is not the same thing everywhere. The villagers’ entanglement with images of “foren” commodities does not epitomize people’s powerlessness and lack of control over their own destinies. Exactly the opposite. The bicycles function as tangible and public celebrations of the power of the dispossessed. Following Jane Bennett, the question I wish to pose is: “what are the implications for politics when consumables appear as animate, as politically and symbolically valorized?”62 Marx’s critique of fetishism hinges crucially on the Cartesian characterization of matter as res extensa, which is inert and extensive. This supports an onto-story in which agency is concentrated only in humans. In the wake of a Deleuze-inspired Bergsonism, Rancière has spoken of a historic act of “restitution,” of putting “perception inside things”: “We must give things the perceptual power that they have already, because they have lost it. They have lost it because their phosphorescence and movement have been interrupted by another image— the image of the human brain… that confiscated the interval between action and reaction… and made itself the center of the world.”63 Latour, a new kind of secular occassionalist, has spoken of the agency of things in his object-oriented philosophy, of the need to do away with human/non-human distinction from the point of view of his flat ontology, which is clearly antiBergsonian and anti-Deleuzeian. As Graham Harman has pointed out, if we wholeheartedly accept Latour’s relational ontology, then we will have to say that objects (actors) are solely defined in terms of their relations.64 Clearly, that is not the case. If objects were totally relational and had no autonomy, we would have just one big homogeneous web of relations melted into each other, rather than the singular objects we do in fact encounter. So, actors need to exist robustly prior to relations and need to partially resist their falling into relation. Therefore, “an actor is not identical with whatever it modifies, transforms… or creates, but always remains underdetermined by those effects.”65 Harman also points out that all “philosophies of access” (i.e., 56


systems in which the human-world correlate is at the center of philosophy), Kant included (unless we embark on a rediscovery of his “things-in-themselves”), would face this problem of grounding66 things and the universe as such, understood as something extra-human. To my mind, Harman poses the question badly: it is not a problem of choosing between a human centered viewpoint (“philosophies of access”) and some “object oriented philosophy.” Bergson, Whitehead and Deleuze are right: there is lot to learn from Spinoza, Leibniz and Hume. For, as Spinoza has written: “It is never we who affirm or deny something of a thing: it is the thing itself that affirms or denies something of itself in us” (Short Treatise II). However, I cannot resolve this theoretical problem here. Let philosophers do their work to earn their bread. What I can point out to them, as a humble ethnographer, is that the Chinese bicycle I am concerned with is expressive of a different kind of thinging which cannot be accounted for either in terms of the CartesianKantian res-thing or the Latourian actor-thing. It is also not a Heideggerian Ding-thing. Clearly the Chinese bicycles have nothing to do with things-inthemselves. In it, the liveliness of politicized matter itself is at once apparent, by the grace of the technology of media (hybrid, simulated rumor) and the political technology of producing citizens. These bicycles thus emerge from a subversive, underground cultural sense of porosity between things and persons, from a culture of “transaction” grounded in a different set of notions of property, possession and person. Out of the commercialized beckoning of Chinese bicycles erupts a cosmology where the self is not an interiority, something one owns, but a node in a network where the paradigmatic altruism/selfishness, human/non-human divides are unobtrusively but incontrovertibly breached. Apart from the philosophical constructs of objects I mentioned above, there is this sociological construct called “commodity” of Marx reliant on the Cartesian res extensa. What I have tried to underscore in this chapter is the lack of ready availability of this (meta)narrative called “commodity” in appropriating the kind of intransigence coded in my Chinese bicycles. This intransigence is also productive in interrogating the theories of location which think of the “global” as ground. Finally, it is this intransigence that calls into question the generalized denunciation of commodity and the spectral. It is the media simulated spectral that activates discordant imaginaries of vernacular globalization, glaringly at odds with the bloodless vision of the “global civil society.” 57

2

WRITING HOME, WRITING TRAVEL TRANSLATION, TRAVEL, AND DWELLING IN BENGALI MODERNITY

“[H]ome does not pre-exist: it is necessary to draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile centre, to organize a limited space…The forces of chaos are kept outside as much as possible, and the interior space protects the germinal forces of a task to fulfil or a deed to do… Finally one opens the circle a crack, opens it all the way, lets someone in, calls someone, or else goes out of oneself, launches forth.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

This chapter is about home. In the debate about the culture of globalization in recent decades, home and belonging turned out to be one of the most contentious issues. Appaduari’s deep anxiety about the human consequences of globalization—its putative ability to unmoor the recursive patterns of what he calls—in the jargon of textbook sociology—“human reproduction,” “enculturation,” “socialization,” “transmission of culture,” etc.—from their (erstwhile) “steady points of reference,” is clearly manifest in the last few pages of his classic essay entitled “Disjuncture and Difference” from which I have cited many times. Although his anxiety is articulated through a neutral, social science vocabulary, there is no reason to believe that the problem of what Heidegger would call “dwelling” is of recent origin or is contempo

59


raneous with the current phase of globalization. In a sense, this anxiety founds the discourse of “modernity.” From Schiller to Heidegger and beyond, a certain fixity inheres in the terms “dwelling,” “place” and “home,” postulated historically as “lost” domains of authentic experience. Modernity itself has been conceived as a state of metaphorical “homelessness.”1 Globalization has seen to a certain exacerbation of these anxieties concerning home and place2 which pit “the traumas of deterritorialization” entailed in the late-twentieth century “cultural flux” arising out of incessant and often involuntary displacements and movements of refugees, tourists, diasporic populations and migrant workers, against the fixity, stability and sheltering tranquility of the primordial cosmology of home and dwelling. In the Introduction of this book, I have argued, pace Heidegger, who, in his last public seminar held in Le Thor in 1968, characterized the final stage of his own thinking as an engagement with the “question of place, or of the locality of Being,” that place is always displaced, always in the making. Displacement and travel do not merely complement sedentary dwelling, they are supplements with an originary status (“that dangerous supplement…”). This chapter scripts a contending narrative of the cosmopolitan vernacular in order to contest what is at bottom a theological notion of place (theology: God said to Abraham, “Leave your country” and this descent into history and time awaits a Messianic redemption of place). As opposed to the “morbid hedonism of the redeemer” (Nietzsche), place and home in subaltern worldings, as my reading of vernacular narratives of home and travel in this chapter go on to demonstrate, are understood libidinally, as expenditure: one travels in order to lose, in order to find oneself at home in strange places. Far from being a marker of fixity, a kind of (back)ground, home itself turns out to be an event. Far from being the home of Being, the beginning of History (“which is always written from the sedentary point of view of a unitary State apparatus”), home in these subaltern narratives turns out to be detachable, connectable, motile, reversible, modifiable, polycentric, plastic. It is defined solely by circulation—it becomes nomadic. Let me start with an amusing anecdote. Like all great cities, Calcutta has its share of catty rumors, many of which are about Calcuttans themselves. One of these runs as follows: Nirad C. Chaudhuri (1897–1999), the noted Bengali Anglophile and man of letters, visited England for the first time sometime in the late 1950s. Out on the streets of London, Niradbabu started navigating his cab like a veteran Londoner. What the driver found incongruous was the fact that Niradbabu mentioned some landmarks which 60

WRITING HOME, WRITING TRAVEL

no longer existed. It was explained to him that these had either been demolished or bombed during the War. Now, how did he know about the city so well without ever setting foot in England? By his own admission, he was brought up to consume England as an ever-present entity, “very much like the sky above our head,” in his remote ancestral East Bengal village, largely through books, pictures, and newspapers.3

The Past of the Modern Chaudhuri was not exceptional in this sense. The colonial Bengali visitors’ first impression of England, as we will see, was tainted with a sense of déjà vu.4 For these colonial tourists, travel to England was not so much a journey into the unknown as a confirmation of what was already known about England thanks to “print capitalism” and “travel capitalism.”5 Our travelers were not on the look-out for the marvelous and the unknown—their gaze constantly scrutinized whether the real England measured up to their hyperreal image of England. If it did not, whether the force needed to close the gap could have been productive of a certain “critique” of colonialism is a question that has recently been raised by a young Bengali historian, Simonti Sen.6 Here I would like to submit the corpus of texts generated by these Bengali visitors to another, rather perverse consideration, which does not arise out of the problematic of “returning the gaze.” I will ask not how “the colony writes back,” but how it writes at all—this is the question with which I propose to confront these texts. There is a certain complicity between recent postcolonial literary criticism, on one hand, and historicism and sociologism, on the other. It is as if third-world texts do not deserve the critical attention bestowed on metropolitan texts, as if it is possible to read these texts as transparent inscriptions of authors’ intentions or expressions of agency. The main casualty of this sociologism which disavows “the prison-house of language,” is not firstworld formalism but third-world history. It is our history which is compromised if we erase from our purview the history of the reception of western genres like the novel or travelogue, and concentrate instead on their socalled “content.” Arguments about content cannot even be raised unless and until the question of “form” has been mercilessly de-ontologized by a rigorous rhetorical reading foregrounded in the historical-critical problem of colonial appropriation of metropolitan genres. 61


How does rhetoric help to de-ontologize a genre? Paul de Man put it all quite well in the course of deconstructing autobiography: We assume that life produces the autobiography as an act produces its consequences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of his medium? And since the mimesis here assumed to be operative is one mode of figuration among others, does the referent determine the figure, or is it the other way round: is the illusion of reference not a correlation of the structure of the figure, that is to say no longer clearly and simply a referent at all but something more akin to a fiction which then, however, in its own turn, acquires a degree of referential productivity ?7

It is tempting to concur with this provocative suggestion. But de Man does not feel, like most western critics, the need to foreground his observation in the specific linguistic-cultural lifeworld of modern western languages. Since I do not believe that God speaks in English or French, I will have to, of necessity, enter into the unwieldy question of how, when, and if at all, narratives of travel written in non-western languages become “travelogue,” and raise the troubling issue of how colonialism (“referent”) was implicated in it. The latter part of the nineteenth century was the period when modern genres like novel, autobiography, diary and travelogue were gradually emerging in Bengal. In order to acquire what de Man calls “referential productivity,” a certain amount of time had to elapse. We see a certain formal instability in early Bengali “travelogues,” which are not quite pilgrimage-narratives (tirthamahatya) and not quite anecdotes of sight-seeing. In Persian, apart from the well-known late-eighteenth century Indo-Persian Safar-Namas about the West, we have at least one early “travelogue” by an “Indian” written around 1835 in (bad) English. It is formally much closer to the Persian genre than to modern “travelogue!”8 This instability is symptomatic of the fact that what precisely were the technical rules of this specific genre was still somewhat under-determined. Travelogue had important precursors in Bengali literature. We have, on the one hand, the powerful pre-modern tradition of pilgrimagenarratives in Sanskrit and Bengali and, on the other, a well-developed tradition of travel-writing in Persian (Bengali men of affairs of the eighteenth century were steeped in Persian court culture). Neither of these, as it were, derived from a mimetic theory of writing. Both Sanskrit and Indo-Persian had rich, well-developed rhetorical and generic conventions. The sophistication of Sanskrit rhetoric had drawn critical attention from modern scholars long before “rhetoric” became de 62


rigueur.9 Pilgrimage-narratives in Sanskrit and Sanskrit-derived languages had a specific onto-rhetorical status in the Brahminical life-world,10 foregrounded in a different theory of the relation between language and “reality.” But what authorized the Indo-Persian travelogues, I have argued elsewhere, was a certain aesthetic of the “marvelous” (aja’ib).11 Neither of these genres claimed to be transparent inscriptions of the so-called spontaneous individual “experience.” When modern travelogue was gradually establishing its sway in Bengal, it had to negotiate with these pre-existing Sanskrit/Bengali and Persian traditions. Thus, from the point of view of genre history, the unity of Bengali “travelogue” was fractured and fissured even before it got off the ground. If de Man’s provocative observation is to serve as a productive hypothesis in our context here, we will have to go beyond his “formalism” which refuses to recognize, let alone negotiate, with extra-textual questions about historical determination. De Man showed that “autobiography” is not simply the result of crystallization of “lived experience” of the individual. Understood as a mindset, the “autobiographical project” itself gave rise to notions of “life” and “experience,” a certain kind of life and a certain kind of experience, that is. But where did the “project” itself come from? I do not wish to trivialize de Man by posing the question in a “chicken or egg?” manner. But surely it was the historically specific notion of individual life understood as something singular and unique, corresponding to the idea of modern self, which coalesced in a mindset that gave rise to the so-called “autobiographical project.” Similarly, it was the experience of a specific kind of travel—the word “experience” understood here not in its usual subjective, existential connotation but rather in the wider sense of historically conditioned, epochal “structure of feeling”—that gave rise to the genre called “travelogue.” Though people have always traveled, the Romantic preoccupation with travel as an end in itself, what Enzensberger categorized as “tourism,” was unknown until well into the eighteenth century.12 Travelogue, understood as the inscription of the touristic experience of “sightseeing,” is not to be confused with travel-writing as such.13 Hence the pertinence of the question of a politics of experience, of colonization of experience. It is my contention that a certain politics of the self is crucially implicated in the process of what I have called becoming travelogue. The colonization of experience is so glaringly obvious in the colonial Bengali images of the West, the privileged West—England—that it would be preposterous to overlook this in the name of textual determinations. A great Bengali 63


poet, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, wrote, in one of his juvenile English poems, in 1841: I sigh for Albion’s distant shore, Its valleys green, its mountains high; Tho’ friends, relations, I have none In that far clime, yet, oh! I sigh To cross the vast Atlantic wave For glory, or a nameless grave! My father, mother, sister, all, Do love me and I love them too, Yet oft the tear-drops rush and fall From my sad eyes like winter’s dew. And, oh! I sigh for Albion’s stand, As if she were my native-land.14

This longing has something almost amorous about it. Partha Chatterjee calls it the English-educated colonial elite’s “love” for Europe, for the concept of Europe.15 This longing is not for travel per se, but for a one-way street travelling west. As a counterpoise to this colonial mindset, we may use the earlier Indo-Persian travel narratives about England. Becoming travelogue has to do with the intervening politics of experience resulting in a certain colonization of the Bengali self. The word “earlier,” in that case, would signify priority not only in chronological but also in epochal time. Mirza Sheikh Itesamuddin was the first “Indian” to produce a travelogue of Europe. He was sent to England in 1765 and wrote his account in 1799.16 The tour of Mirza Abu Muhammad Tabrizi Isfahani (Abu Taleb), Lucknow-born son of a Turkish noble, lasted from 1799 to 1803.17 What is interesting in these Persian travelogues is the way their authors constructed their own locations vis-à-vis Europe. Abu Taleb, justifying the confinement of Asian women (as opposed to the “liberty” of their European counterpart) in terms of circumstances rather than innate cultural biases, wrote: “[ I]n this kingdom [ England], placed in a corner of the globe where there is no coming and going of foreigners, the intercourse of the sexes is not attended with the consequences of a corruption of manners, as in Asia, where people of various nations dwell in the same city …”18 This provincialization of Europe bespeaks a location that had no use for the spatial discourse which evolved in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. In the course of the nineteenth century, geography and anthropology pivoted around an axis whereby differences residing in geographical 64


space were rotated until they became differences residing in developmental historical time: beyond Europe was henceforth before Europe. Dutt’s poem is a testimony to the power of this new discourse of space and the grip of colonial pedagogy on the Bengali mind. Itesamuddin had the option of continuing to live in England in luxury in the company of palefaced “Hurees and fairies.” But he returned to Bengal: “[I find] poverty in my own country is much better than wealth in this, and I consider the dark complexioned women of Hindoostan far preferable to the fairy-faced damsels of England.”19 Is this patriotism? How does one read the politics of this desire, this longing for a patrie, which is not yet a nation? Perhaps even more important is the question: how did this “patriotism” sit with the pre-modern cosmopolitanism of these writers? A certain fidelity to the dark damsels of Bengal did not rule out these writers’ affiliation with the greater Islamic culture. Their explicit critique of Hindu idolatry and priestdom—an insider’s critique of his “home” culture—presupposed a certain intellectual distancing from “home” which was conceived and lived in relation to practices of coming and going. Abu Taleb’s forefathers were buried in distant Baghdad (where he paid a respectful visit); he keeps meeting his friends and acquaintances in different parts of the globe and claims to be the representative of a cosmopolitanism of the Asiatic kind where races mingled, blood mixed with blood and, in the process, an entangled, promiscuous, culturally mediated history of dwelling and travelling, dwelling-in-travelling, emerged. In less than fifty years after their return, a total reversal took place. With the dissemination of Anglophone education, this erstwhile cosmopolitanism—a different cosmopolitanism—and even its memory, were relegated to oblivion. The erstwhile routes increasingly became one way streets to Europe, a metonymy for mobility and cosmopolitanism, Bengaliness becoming synonymous with parochialism. The next section analyzes the colonial Bengali self-image of inert isolationism in an era of enhanced interaction with the West, the formation of Bengali nationalism which redefined and in a sense reified “home” and formed the backdrop of the new culture of travel to the West.

“Il faut être absolument moderne” Western commentators have scripted colonial tourism as a “story of the eye” without problematizing what Van Den Abbeele called, “the narrativity of vision.”20 Antoinette Burton writes: 65

THE RUMOR OF GLOBALIZATION Indians travelling to the heart of the empire revealed that the privilege accorded… to the flaneur was open to appropriation, and that London itself [was]… open to colonization in the process… Their narratives provide historical evidence of how imperial power… could be interrogated by “natives”… [T]hey did not simply return the gaze, but demonstrated how readily available its disciplinary regimes were for contest and refiguration…21

This phony “postcolonialism” does not account for the trajectory of the colonial tourist’s gaze. The invocation of the figure of the flaneur (reminiscent of the “high modernism” of Baudelaire, Surrealism and Benjamin), even as a metaphor, is a gross decontextualization. The flaneur is an aesthete who looks for hidden meanings behind banal shop signs, destitute streetwalkers, and fleeting glances of passing women—in search of “authentic” experience.22 How can the commodified “tourist gaze” of our colonial visitors be compared to the aesthetoptics of the flaneur? Far from disinterested contemplation, our visitors were consumed by an intense anxiety to make the most of their time in the metropolis. Far from “contesting,” their gaze was complicit with the “disciplinary regimes” in question; the point of their visit was to decipher the code of such regimes, which would enable them to install similar regimes at home. The flaneur thrives on incongruities, anomalies and disjunctures; our visitors frowned on everything (prostitutes, thieves, tramps, squalor) of the cityscape which did not fit into their “image repertoire” of the “great city” acquired from fiction, guide books and tourist brochures. Finally, our visitors’ gaze was essentially derivative23 and their very corporeality, as embodiments of exotic Orientals, singled them out, turned them into objects of white man’s voyeuristic scopic drive rather than empowering them as “seeing subjects.”24 The question, then, to which an adequate answer must be found, is: did travel make any difference at all? Did our visitors “see” anything at all? For our travelers, England was “always there.”25 Our travelers were already “insiders” of the West; their love and passion were articulated through Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Byron, and Beethoven, their vision of ideal polity inspired by the constitutional monarchy of England, and their lifestyle modeled after the “ideal Englishman.” It is not for nothing that Chaudhuri, who lived half of his life in Oxford in self-imposed exile, has been called “The World’s Last Englishman.” We can begin to read our travelogues. The Suez Canal opened in 1869, and soon steamships came to dominate passenger traffic, rendering the voyage much shorter and easier. The 1870s and 1880s were also crucial for the formation of Bengali nationalism. It is remarkable that at least three 66


illustrious Bengalis—Dwarakanath Tagore, Rammohan Roy and Michael Madhusudan Dutt—had been to Europe before the 1870s. Yet, none of them wrote a travelogue. Thus, travel per se was not the cause of the rise of travelogue as a genre in Bengali. What was instrumental in its rise was something else: the development of vernacular prose and the four basic genres that help express the modern self: novel, biography, autobiography, and diary. We can postulate that the rise of the modern travelogue in Bengali was part and parcel of the project of fashioning a “modern” Bengali self. Consequently, the ambiguity and ambivalence inherent in the process of constructing this self, expressive of the discontents of colonial modernity as such, would find their imprints in the travelogues too. What are the textual strategies specific to “travelogue”? De Certeau has argued that travelogue accomplishes a spatializing operation which results in the determination of the boundaries delimiting cultural fields (“we” and “they”). Further, it reworks the spatial divisions which underlie and organize a culture. For these socio- or ethno-cultural boundaries to be changed, reinforced, or disrupted, a space of interplay is needed, one that establishes the text’s difference and gives it credibility. In our travelogues these two aspects are distinguishable only formally, because it is the text’s reworking of space that simultaneously produces the space of the text.26 Which is to say, there was a foundational circularity between the production of the other and the production of the text. As for the first aspect—drawing boundaries—our travelogues are, predictably, informed by Orientalism.27 How the boundary is actually drawn across space, (re)producing the geo-political myth of the great East/West divide, deserves study. The best way to do this is to follow the Bengali tourist in his account of the sea voyage commencing from Calcutta or Bombay, going across the Arabian Sea, through the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean, leading to Europe. Reading the narrative of this voyage is the best way to discern the location of the colonial tourist. The rite of passage to England consisted of brief stop-overs at Colombo (Ceylon), Aden, Port Said, Alexandria and Malta. Each of these was assigned a place and a valence in a hierarchy. Ceylon already had a place in Bengali folk memory as reworked and reinforced by colonial archaeology and nationalist pedagogy: civilization supposedly arrived in Ceylon through an ancient Bengali king who defeated its “savage” aborigines. Later, Buddhism traveled there from India. Vivekananda and Shastri, in particular, wrote at length about Ceylon in their travelogues, eulogizing its ancient 67


link with an “Aryan” India and the present decadence of post-Buddhist Ceylon which, along with India, have fallen on bad days.28 Though endowed with pleasing scenic beauty, Ceylon’s “glory” was buried in the remote past, linked with ancient, Aryan India. The next stop-over, Aden, presented itself as an arid stretch of parched desert. The quality of the landscape influenced the “national” character of its people, who are, wrote R. C. Dutt, “partly Arab and partly African with a constitution peculiarly fitted for the climate and soil of their country.”29 Many travelers mentioned the faculty of the Adenites who could recover coins thrown in the sea by the passengers, an acumen which rendered them sub-human in the eyes of our “civilized” tourists: “For hours they could remain afloat like some sea animal.”30 This is not the last time that we encounter the notion that Arabs or Africans are not quite human. The imprint of European historicism’s preoccupation with “origin” is clearly visible in our travelers’ analyses of the morphology of civilizations. The Adenites, a mongrel sub-human race of Arabs and Negroes, were base and degenerate; civilization could come to Aden only from outside. In ancient times, the torch-bearers of civilization were the Aryan Hindus who somehow relayed it to the present-day Europeans. This narrative of progress was only briefly interrupted by the rise of Muslim barbarians. Trailokyanath cites a Muslim historian called Ibn El Mojawir to establish the credentials of ancient Hindus who colonized Aden. The evidence of this ancient connection still exists, in the form of an underwater tunnel linking India with Aden. Aden’s rise under the Muslim rulers as a seat of commerce was linked inextricably with its Indian connection, just as its present prosperity owes its origin to its linkage with England: “The bazaar of Aden scarcely differs from that of an Indian town, the same filthiness and the same irregularity everywhere. But wherever the Englishman has gone, he has brought in his train commerce, peace and prosperity. Aden has recovered her ancient commerce which she lost owing to the tyrannous conduct of her former rulers…”31 There is little point in boring the reader with iterative descriptions of the journey through the Red Sea and along the North African coast. Their leitmotif can be captured by the clichéd triad: past glory, fall into decadence, and present progress through western colonization. The monotony of repetitious descriptions of pre-Hellenic civilization in North Africa or the romantic aestheticization of decay and ruins in Abyssinia, Nubia, or Egypt is only occasionally relieved by lively descriptions of Egypt, the “mother” of all civilizations which “came to decay under sway of the ignorant, orthodox 68


and debased Christians” who burnt the great library of Alexandria.32 However, this anti-Christian cant coming from a “Hindu” missionary (Vivekananda) is overshadowed by the celebratory descriptions of the Suez Canal as embodiment of the “progress through enslavement” paradigm which found more eloquent testimonies as the ship gradually sailed through Port Said to Malta. This is sometimes supplanted by the news of European military victories in Asian fronts.33 A sense of exultation is clearly visible in Chandra Sekhar Sen’s comments on Malta, viewed as the gateway to Europe: “There were ships and men from so many countries—France, Portugal, Turkey… etc. in the port! The variety of buildings in the strand had given the place a paradisiacal look. Hats off to Europe! How they have developed the land of the Muslims! What the Sultan could not have done in a hundred years, the Europeans have easily done it.”34 Thus, while travelling across space, our tourists were also travelling through a historical time whose telos was Europe: Asia and Africa were Europe’s past. It was through this temporalization of space—borrowing strategies of primitivization from the metropolitan discourse—that they reworked the physical space, producing the textual space of their narratives. A close reading of these travelogues establishes decisively that our tourists had internalized not just histories and geographies written by Europeans (which formed part of the school curriculum in British Bengal), but also much of contemporary Anglo-Saxon writing on travel. In many cases, descriptions of landscape, monuments, and people are so similar that the inescapable conclusion is that many of our travelogues were simply citations. This is only rarely admitted by the writers themselves, but here is an exception: after a long-winded description, which she claimed to have authored, Jagatmohini Chaudhury (1902) wrote: “One can easily compare what I have been trying to say with the words of Thompson. He wrote…”35 Then follows a long citation from George Thompson’s narrative of a voyage to India written in 1842. Is there a politics to this citation? The specifically literary or textual convention of citation has been subjected to rigorous analysis in recent times.36 But my concern here is with citation understood as a cultural strategy, which enables me to take citation out of its narrow literary context and understand it as a much wider cultural phenomenon. Derrida has written: Every sign, linguistic or non-linguistic… in a small or large unit, can be cited, put between quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable. This

69

THE RUMOR OF GLOBALIZATION does not imply that the mark is valid outside of a context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center or absolute anchoring [ancrage].37

Thus, citation need not necessarily be thought of as what Austin called “parasitic” upon the original context: Derrida subjects the origin itself to a radical critique. Our Bengali travelogues often cite, verbatim but without quotation marks, passages from western travelogues. But these are juxtaposed with other, non-western, vernacular narratives of places and times derived from Sanskrit epics, Bengali folk memory, pre-modern “Arabic geography,” etc. The comments quoted above on Ceylon, Egypt, and Aden are cases in point. Thus, these “subaltern” fragments are placed in a paratactical38 relationship with the hegemonic European narrative, in the sense that our authors do not try to negotiate a relationship between the two.39 And yet, this parataxis, understood as a trace of something that cannot be wholly enclosed within the anodyne space of “travelogue,” makes the moment of what I have called becoming travelogue something more, or less, than pure repetition. Every repetition is a repetition with a difference, every quotation is a quotation out of context. And the disruptive power of parataxis can alert us to the palimpsest character of the process of becoming travelogue, to the possibility of a politics of citation activating other dormant or dreamed-up times and places which the received geography of domination repressed in order to be. So much for what de Certeau called the “spatializing operation” of travelogue. As for the second textual strategy specific to travelogues—establishing a text’s difference, opening up a space of interplay, lending credibility— texts differ with regard to their constitutive details. However, these differences are not mere chance occurrences, for they have a specific function in what can be called “colonial discourse.” Our travelers, brought up in the tradition of Macaulaian pedagogy,40 were, in a sense, insiders to European (English) culture. But this Englishness did not exhaust their hybrid location. As Bhabha put it cogently, “to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English.” The effect of what he calls “a flawed colonial mimesis” is that there is always a certain excess floating on the surface of these texts, and this simultaneously annuls and reinforces their subservience to the metropolitan discourse. We will come across examples of such slippage when we read the texts. Bhabha calls it “mimicry”—colonial discourse speaks in a tongue “that is forked, not false.” And, “Colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say that the discourse of mimicry 70


is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference.”41 “I am now in that Great England of which I had been reading from my childhood and among the English people with whom providence has so closely united us.” So declared a Bengali babu after his arrival in England in 1886. He was effusive about “the moral influence of England in her vast empire in India, which enabled so many of her sons to break through the trammels of caste, to rise above old prejudices… and to seek education and enlightenment at the fountainhead of modern civilization.”42 Yet, this moral influence did not seem to permeate deeply enough in English society itself. A disappointed Tagore wrote: “Like a fool I expected that this small island will reverberate with Gladstone’s oratory, Max-Müeller’s discourse on the Vedas, Tyndall’s scientific theories, Carlyle’s deep thoughts and Bain’s philosophy. But, I have been disappointed. Women here are slaves of fashion, men are busy with their work, things go on as usual; with the exception of some occasional furor about politics.”43 Such slippage occurs continuously in our travelogues whenever the authority of autopsy is deployed to disseminate the received categories, without, however, challenging their power to shape the epochal optic and enunciative modalities. Quite a few of our travelers were important nationalist thinkers (R.C. Dutt, Tagore, Vivekananda) and their travelogues are still read as belle- lettres. Travel was formative of their persona since they spent large parts of their lives abroad. Therefore, it is in the fitness of things that we try to contextualize the experience of travel in the larger discourse of Bengali nationalism. In his seminal work on Bengali nationalism, Partha Chatterjee demonstrates that nationalist imagination in India was not a mere shadow of European nationalism. Bengali cultural nationalism, by dividing the social world into two domains—inside and outside—and by staking its claim on the former, had successfully launched the project of fashioning a “modern” but non-western self. The “outside” or the “material” domain relates to economy, statecraft and technology, where the West was unquestionably superior. The “spiritual inside,” however, was the domain bearing the “essential” marks of cultural identity where a massive project was launched to keep our distinctiveness intact. Chatterjee writes, “If the nation is an imagined community, then this is where it is brought into being. In this, its true and essential domain, the nation is already sovereign, even when the state is in the hands of the colonial power.”44 If we follow our travelers’ anxiety-ridden gaze, we see that they did not look at all aspects of the West in the same way. When they looked at the 71


political institutions, technology, work-culture, etc., that is to say, the socalled “outside,” they were, in general, immensely appreciative and eager to learn. But as soon as their gaze turned to the “inside,” to various forms of interiority—home, intimacy, women, courtship, marriage, child-rearing, and so on—they became critical observers weighing and analyzing carefully. This was a necessary consequence of the inside/outside divide. For, as soon as nationalism took upon itself the task of fashioning a non-western but “modern” self, it was the so-called “private” realm that became the site of nationalist surveillance and pedagogy. As opposed to the European bourgeois notion of the “private”—home as the place of refuge and repose—“home” in Bengali culture became the site of an intense struggle in the “public” domain. The colonial tourist’s gaze merely reflected these priorities. The British public sphere and civil society aroused great admiration. Commenting on the basic difference between India and England, Trailokyanath, who was in London during the granting of Home Rule to Ireland (1886), wrote: In Eastern countries… the country belonged to the king… It is quite different in England. There every individual is part and parcel of sovereign power… The dignified bearing of the people, when the Home Rule discussion was at its height, was surely a treat for the Indians… [E]very man and woman freely discussed the important matter and everyone felt that on him/her rested the responsibility of deciding the momentous question.45

This spectacle of “liberty,” as manifested in elections, political manifestations, parliamentary debates, and mass-media, impressed all of our visitors. Some, like R. C. Dutt, an astute political economist in the making, analyzed clearly the three-tier class-system of Victorian Britain,46 while others, like Vivekananda, tried to critique mass-politics as mass-deception: I have seen your Parliament, your Senate, your vote, majority, ballot… It’s the same thing everywhere… The powerful men in every society are driving the society the way they like and the rest are just a flock of sheep… Who are these powerful men in India?—the giants of religion. It is they who lead our society… and we listen to them silently and do what they command. The only difference with ours is that we don’t have the superfluous fuss about majority, vote, ballot and the attendant tug-of-war…47

This critique reached its limits when our travelers looked for and found the drawbacks of the so-called “hyper-materialism” of the West. These were, predictably, degeneration of moral values, poverty of the working class, crime, alcoholism, moral debasement of the lower orders, and so on. 72


Simonti Sen quips, “[A]ll these could be written by any nineteenth century [European] critic of industrial society…”48 Thus, in so far as the “outside” is concerned, our travelers’ vision of the West was largely shaped by Europe’s own self-description. The civic work of Bengali nationalism was carried out in the “inner” space of middle-class homes rather than in the “public sphere” of civil society. The question of how far travel helped to reconfigure that “inside”—the ghar—has remained largely unexamined. Apart from the copious descriptions of English domesticity in the travelogues, I have come across numerous articles in turn-of-the-century influential Bengali journals like Navya-Bharat and others, on “English home” (original in English). These have a common point of departure: although the English society appears to be intensely individualistic, the average, middle-class English home is a solid institution built on lasting foundations. This was not a plea for adopting the overall ethos of English family, but rather for “learning” selectively about the economy of affects obtaining there. What attracted the Bengali observer was the “openness” with which the family members treated each other and the “spontaneity” of their interactions. Shastri relates: The Hunt couple is very attached to each other. One day, when I was chatting with his family, Mr. Hunt came home and said “good evening” to me. Then he turned to Mrs. Hunt saying, “Sorry, I forgot to say ‘good evening’ to you” and gave her a peck. Lethy, their daughter, jumped up and exclaimed, “How come you kissed only mum? What about me?” She put her hands around her father and kissed him. How sublime! What a pure heart!49

If we contextualize this citation in the context of the assertion of Bhudhev (a major Bengali nationalist thinker) in Paribarik Prabandha (1882) that Bengalis are even ashamed of kissing their own children in front of their parents, Shastri’s delight would appear to be justified. Tagore makes quite explicit what was lacking in traditional Bengali domesticity. He wrote: Bengalis who return home after spending some time in England express dissatisfaction and complain that there is no home [the original in English] in our country. By this they perhaps mean that there is an atmosphere of uninhibited gaiety in English families. There the father, the mother, the brothers, the sisters, the husband and the wife all gather together around the hearth and by singing, talking and laughing create an atmosphere of delightful togetherness… The usual picture of our homes is unimaginable in this country [England]—in one room, the father-in-law… in the company of a few friends grumbling over the “unsanctified” behavior of his offspring…, in another room the wife, hidden behind her “veil” is receiving from

73

THE RUMOR OF GLOBALIZATION the mother-in-law her daily share of reprimand, and in yet another room the husband along with one or two of his young friends is engaged in idle gossip.50

Initially there was an endeavor to transplant the English home to the soil of Bengal. Those who came back from England often adopted the ways of the English (sahebiana). The Bengali society was scandalized and dismayed to see some of these men taking their wives for horserides in outdoor clothes. Exposure of one’s own zenana to the foreign masters was a rite of passage to coveted lackeydom. But apart from these sensational manifestations of sahebiana, there was undeniably a slow but cumulative process of reforming the Bengali sangsar (domestic unit), the English home being the template of “improvement.” Women’s journals like Bamabodhini and hundreds of manuals on domesticity which came out between 1870 and 1920, bear testimony to the zeal of this “reform.” To quote from one such manual: The house of any civilized European is like the abode of gods. Every household object is clean, set in its proper place and decorated… It is as if order had become manifest to please the human eye. In the middle of the room would be a covered table with a bouquet of flowers in it, while around it would be chairs nicely arranged [with] everything sparkling clean. But enter a house in our country and you would feel as if you had been transported there… to… atone for all the sins of your life. [A mass of ] cowdung torturing the senses… dust in the air, a growing heap of ashes, flies buzzing around… a little boy urinating into the ground and putting the mess back into his mouth… The whole place is dominated by a stench that seems to be running free… There is no order anywhere, the household objects are so unclean that they only evoke disgust.51

The Bengali sangsar may not have changed to the degree anticipated, but it is undeniable that the regime of affects active in the home, and the very nature of its interiority, underwent a certain transformation. It was from around this period that in the “enlightened” homes of the Brahmos (an elite, peer group of “liberated,” mostly upper-class Bengalis), the norm became for members of both sexes, adults and children, and their friends, to join together in adda (chatting) and participate in harmless merrymaking. Memoirs of members of these families attest to this. While this reflected a wider change in the nature of Bengali sociability, implying a certain hardening of the dividing line between the “home and the outside” (ghar o bahir), it is also a fact that most of these families had “England-returned” members. The enactment of this new interiority called ghar opened up the space for modern “friendship,” especially between men and women and between young men of incompatible castes and statuses. 74


Attitudes toward children can be taken as an index of the wider change in Bengali sociability. Shastri’s delight at doting English children falls in line with Tagore’s recollection: The children [of the family he lived with] call me Arthur uncle. Little Ethel doesn’t want to share her uncle with her brother, Tom. To tease her, Tom says, “My Arthur uncle!” Putting her arms around me, Ethel starts crying. With a big head and a solemn but chubby face, Tom is a nice boy. He asks me strange questions: “Uncle, what do mice do?” “They steal from the kitchen.” “Why do they steal?” “Because they are hungry.” Tom didn’t seem to approve of it as he had been taught to despise theft. He left the place… Ethel thinks of herself as a lady. She rests her back on the chair with great style and tells Tom, “Don’t disturb me.” One day, Tom slipped on the floor and started crying. I told him, “Don’t cry, big boy!” Ethel ran up to me and said proudly, “When I was a child, I fell in the kitchen but I didn’t cry.” Was a child? Indeed!52

Written in the early 1880s, this passage renders “childhood” visible through a certain affectation in style (which is difficult to bring out in translation). This is probably the first time that the resources of Bengali were used to fashion a language adequate to describe modern, psychological childhood. Did the Bengali discovery of “childhood” take place in England? The upshot of all this is that in the modern Bengali experience of travel, the notion of home is deeply implicated: the most important consequence of travel was to call in question, to open to negotiation, the notion of “home.” In order to set the stage for the next section, where I probe how “home” is conceived and lived in relation to practices of coming and going, I will read a “travelogue” by Krishnakamal Bhattacharya (1840–1932), Durakankher Brithabhraman (1858)—the narrative of an imaginary journey—which shows that literal travel of the author is not a prerequisite for a critique of one’s “home.”53 The title translates roughly as: “The Futile Wandering of an Aspirant Traveller.” A twenty-year-old westernized Bengali youth converts to Christianity in the hope of making it big in Europe and marrying a white woman. Nothing of that sort happens and, disappointed, he leaves for faroff lands to earn “glory.” Through strange twists of fate, success keeps eluding him, although he becomes entangled in mighty events of the day. Finally, the itinerant Bengali ends up in a remote Malabar forest with an untouchable woman and lives happily the sedentary life of a recluse. The wheel has come full circle. The Bengali youth who sighed for “Albion’s land” concludes the journal of his wanderings in a note of quiet resignation. Fame 75


and glory are not worth pursuing; what matters in life is peace, containment and tranquility. This is a complex text and can be read at many levels. One obvious way of reading it is to treat it as a thinly veiled allegory of disillusionment of the westernized “Young Bengal”—a celebrated circle of freethinking, rationalist radicals, mostly students of Hindu College, that formed around the firebrand mestizo-Bengali intellectual Henry Derozio in the 1820s. They took delight in denigrating Hindu practices and, in less charitable accounts, thrived on debauchery and alcohol. Infused with Mill’s Liberty, Bentham’s Utilitarianism and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, they rebelled against society, which they found oppressive and claustrophobic. Many of them lived tragic, sordid lives ending up in penury, disease, and premature death. Some, like Michael Madhusudan Dutt, converted to Christianity, married white women, wrote poetry in English and left for Europe in their restless search for “true home” in the cosmopolis. Others less fortunate, like Nimchand, the decadent, tragic hero of Dinabandhu’s immortal farce Sadhabar Ekadoshi, found their nemesis in debauchery and alcohol, and quoted Shakespeare and Milton to policemen during their drunken nightly brawls in the streets and brothels of Calcutta. Viewed against this intellectual landscape of the mid-nineteenth century, Krishnakamal’s gesture is obviously a critique, a decisive rejection of what Indians would call the maya (roughly, “mirage”) of unassimilated, borrowed pseudo-cosmopolitanism, characteristic of the generation of “mimic men” created through Macaulaian pedagogy. The narrative is symptomatic of a genuine crisis in dwelling, manifested in the “homelessness” of the westernized Bengali youth. The real tragedy of the lost generation of “Young Bengal,” however, was not that they could not find a “home” in the cosmopolis; it was rather that they could not get at the root of their problem—for all their angst, they never came to posing the question of dwelling as the question. Consequently, Krishnakamal’s title can be read as an epigram for the plight of the “Young Bengal” who were travelling west all their lives, literally or figurally. Their travels were, in essence, chronicles of a futility foretold— Durakankher Brithabhraman. However, the novel’s critical function must not be confused with the ironic Enlightenment genre of “philosophical tales” about travel. In Voltaire’s Candide (1759) or Rousseau’s Emile (1762), “Travel occurs as a part of a [narrative] strategy designed to deny it.”54 Travel, in these tales, through the devious economy of oikos55 merely reinforces the Law of the Father, 76


making paternal home the ultimate point de repère, a topos of solace and reconciliation for the castrated son. Krishnakamal was a Francophile and there are structural similarities between these tales and his narrative. But his Bengali protagonist did not come back to Calcutta to be reconciled with and castrated by the Father (colonialism). On the contrary, he found a true home conducive to authentic dwelling. In contrast to the ironic mode of Candide or Emile, Krishnakamal’s narrative is an allegory.56 When set against its background—the immediate aftermath of the 1857 rebellion, India’s first war of independence and its brutal, bloody suppression by the English—the narrative clearly reads as an allegory of proto-nationalist desire. After his futile wanderings, the disillusioned protagonist returns to a pre-social, Rousseauvian nature: there was no other place in British India for a rebel in 1858. I have read the life-travel of Krishnakamal’s protagonist, understood as a “national allegory,” leading to authentic solitude rather than solidarity. Things started changing around 1905 with Swadeshi, the first modern mass political movement challenging the legitimacy of colonialism. Written around that time was Tagore’s Gora, in which we find the tale of a “Bengali” youth, man enough to challenge Britannia’s right to rule us, discovering suddenly that he is actually Irish, brought up by Bengali foster parents after his biological parents were killed in 1857 by mutineers.57 Only after this journey to self-discovery does Gora find his true location, no longer in the hoary, Hindu past of a dead tradition (nativism), but in the sensuous present among the subalterns and women. By identifying consciously with his parricides with whom he has no primordial ties, Gora also affirms his own desire. No longer a renouncer, he declares his attachment to the woman to whom he was secretly and fatally attracted. Here is the paradigmatic national allegory—there is a one-to-one correspondence between Gora’s life as a narrative of rebellion against the father(s), leading to the recovery of his true self (ontogenesis) and the nation’s recovery of its authentic self through an initial loss and rebellion (Swadeshi movement) against a paternalist colonialism (phylogenesis). The end of the journey, in both cases, is signified by the discovery of new objects of desire. For Gora it was Sucharita, the modern but non-western “Indian” woman; for the nation it was the affective space of Bharatbarsha, British India reclaimed and appropriated by nationalism. The founding of the nation (jatipratistha) and its maturity saw to the end of one kind of travel. A mature Bengali nationalism had already negotiated Bharatbarsha as dwelling and, secure in that location, no Bengali traveler henceforth would think of England as if it was his or her native land. 77


Dwelling-in-Travelling: Toward a Vernacular Cosmopolitanism My preoccupation with nationalism and travel approaching resolution, in this section I will venture to read another kind of Bengali “travelogue.” Published between 1884 and 1921, these were written by Bengalis who were unschooled in the ways of the “new learning.” Compared to our earlier, elite travelers, they can be called “subaltern” in more than one sense of the term. They went abroad, not in order to “learn,” but for other worldly reasons. In his introduction to Routes, James Clifford asks, “Does a focus on travel inevitably privilege male experiences? What counts as ‘travel,’ for men and women, in different settings? Pilgrimage? Family visiting?… How, in such instances, does (women’s) ‘dwelling’ articulate, politically and culturally, with (men’s) ‘travelling?’”58 We will soon have occasion to engage with this question, but since we have no way of interrogating raw experience, we are condemned to ask how experience is constituted by historically inherited norms of its articulation. If our subaltern “travelogues” can be shown to embody a different kind of experience, it is because this experience was constituted by different literary conventions masquerading as “travelogue.” The trope that suggests itself as apposite for the interrogation of this generic camouflaging is irony, a term whose etymological meaning is suggestive of “pretense.” In the latter half of the nineteenth century, when the literary canons were fast changing in Bengal and, arguably, the very institution of “literature” was emerging, such generic camouflaging was common. For example, Devoganer Marttye Agaman (The Gods come to the Earth), a popular Bengali travelogue published in 1886, was a self-conscious play on the erstwhile genre of pilgrimage-narrative: gods come from heaven to visit the tirthas (pilgrimage-sites) of British India which included, alongside the old sacred places, the new commercial and administrative tirthas created by the British.59 The subaltern “travelogues” resulted from a certain negotiation between the erstwhile “diurnal” forms, tirtha-mahatya, rojnamcha, charitkatha,60 and the emergent “travelogue.” It is my contention that through the strategic confusion of genres, there emerges a certain interrogation, an immanent critique of travel of the touristic kind. The “diurnal” form called rojnamcha or karcha (diary) was a familiar genre in both Persian and Bengali.61 It has recently been argued, in the context of early English “diurnal” forms, that these were constitutive of/ constituted by a new time-consciousness associated with the dissemination of mechanical clocks.62 Time in narrative is always “dialogic” but there is no reason to think that duration as such is structured by clock-time. We have 78


diurnal forms in many pre-modern literary cultures. If narratives absorb, register and reconfigure the workings of time/space—chronotopes—in the cultures in which they are produced, it is certain that time in Bengali diurnal forms was structured by the chronotope of Nityakarmapaddhati, a genre of ethico-ritualistic Smriti texts which prescribe a quotidian regimen for good living and attaining Dharma. The duration that they measured is recursive and is foregrounded in the Brahmanical notion of Kala, a form of “messianic” time which is the very antithesis of the modern empty, linear, and homogeneous time.63 The imprints of pre-modern textualization of time and space are clearly visible in the “travelogue” of Hariprabha Takeda, a Bengali woman married to a Japanese man residing in Dhaka (Bangladesh). At bottom, it is no more than a rojnamcha, and the reason for writing and publishing it as a book was pragmatic rather than literary.64 The couple visited Japan in 1912. An adequate cultural translation of Hariprabha’s Bengali text is fraught with difficulties. Let us begin with a passage where she describes the motive of her visit: “When I was married [to a Japanese], nobody imagined that someday I would go to Japan. But I always had a desperate longing… I pined for the blessings of my parent-in-laws….”65 It is difficult to make a foreigner understand what Sasurbari (parent-in-law’s house) meant and still means to a married Bengali woman. Girls were married off before they attained puberty, and after marriage they rarely visited their parents. The wife spent the whole day with her in-laws in the female quarter of the house (andarmahal) where the mother-in-law reigned supreme. The parent-inlaws were considered substitute parents and were called “father” and “mother” by the wife and treated as such. Girls were taught from early childhood to think of Sasurbari as their true home, and of Baperbari (their parents’ house) as a mere transitory arrangement. Parents were advised not to get too attached to daughters. Thus, Hariprabha’s longing for her parentin-laws’ house is the yearning for home—dwelling—the “true home” for a Bengali woman. Travel is not perceived as “displacement” by Hariprabha; she went to Japan to be at home. On their way to Japan, the Takedas spent a night in Calcutta with a Japanese family. Hariprabha could not eat her meal properly because garlic was used in the curry. Like most high-caste Hindu women, onion and garlic were taboo for Hariprabha. Thus, although she was a Brahmo and literate, her own self-image is that of a dutiful, ordinary Bengali wife. This self speaks for herself when, in Calcutta, they go shopping for warm clothes: 79


“For the first time in my life I physically went to the marketplace like a memsaheb [European woman].”66 How does this self negotiate with a Japanese spouse? Quite simply by being a good Bengali wife and doing what a good Bengali wife would do for her husband. She seemed to have no problem with her husband’s Japaneseness (he ate things which she considered taboo). Hariprabha did not locate herself in that enchanted “in-between space” of two cultures. She was just an ordinary Bengali woman. When the ship calls at the first Japanese port, she is euphoric: “I feel great today, because I have set foot in Japan.”67 Eventually, she arrives at the railway station of the small town where her husband’s family lives, and is greeted by her in-laws. An overwhelmed Hariprabha writes: “We came home by a rickshaw.”68 This simple sentence can shatter the tranquil scenario of our labored scholarship on “border-crossing” and “hybridity.” She uses the Bengali word bari, instead of what would have been more appropriate here, basa, leaving us in no doubt that she considers her parents-inlaw’s house to be her unquestioned, true home and not a place of mere temporary sojourn. With a dose of evident pride befitting a Bengali wife, she notes in passing that her mother-in-law herself cooked the dinner and made her bed! The focus of her gaze is on small, domestic details. The cooking of rice, understandably, takes up a lot of space. A prized quality of the Bengali wife is the ability to deliver properly cooked rice—achieving that delicate balance between sogginess and firmness. A Bengali proverb says that a good housewife can judge the state of the rice by taking out just one grain from the boiling pot and squeezing it between her fingers. Hariprabha gives elaborate descriptions of how rice is husked from paddy in Japan (this was a woman’s task in Bengal when it used to be done in manually operated dhenki) and how that is different from Bengal. The Japanese way of cooking rice is mentioned thrice in the text, approvingly, because Hariprabha herself was fond of soggy rice (phena bhat), which also seems to be a Japanese favorite.69 Next in importance comes hair—how Japanese women care for their hair, how often they wash it, how they make their coiffure, etc. Bengali women have long hair stretching to the knees and hair is a valorized zone of the body. So, for Hariprabha, hair is a zone of engagement and occupies an important place in her “rhetoric of otherness.” Hariprabha describes in loving detail the everyday life of the family, the status of women, their attire, cuisine, the interiors, marriage and related customs. She does not seem to have done much sightseeing. As for Japanese mar80


riage, she notes with acuity that it does not have any “spiritual” significance. Her husband explained to his family the manners and customs of Bengal and the significance of satidharma (a wife’s unconditional chastity) in Bengali marriages. Hariprabha was impressed by Japanese humility, mild manners, mass-literacy, cleanliness, and the absence of restriction on women’s movements. However, she found it rather reassuring that despite this freedom, “The supreme duty of a women is to serve her husband, his relatives and the parents-in-law. If she fails in this duty, she would be humiliated. The husband can even desert the wife at the mother-in-law’s insistence.”70 The only aspect of Japanese life she did not seem to approve of was bathing in the nude: “Nobody goes around in this country in barefoot or bare bodied [unlike Bengal]. Their attire is also quite civilized [an oblique comment on European women’s revealing attire]. But, they do not feel any shame in bathing together stark naked even in public baths.”71 The recognition of Japanese otherness, however, was not a hindrance to feeling at home in her in-laws’ place or in Japanese culture at large. Her descriptions of various facets of Japanese life are interspersed with moving anecdotes of her interactions with her husband’s family and community. Her mother-in-law herself did Hariprabha’s share of the household chores, saw to it that she ate her favorite items, scrubbed her in the bath, covered her in warm blankets at night and never allowed her to touch cold water. Mr. Takeda’s brother’s wife often left her child with Hariprabha (signifying trust) and the whole clan went out of their way to make her welcome. When Hariprabha talks about such pampering by her in-laws, obviously she has in mind the treatment an average Bengali bride receives from her inlaws. To be treated well by in-laws was considered to be a great luck and to be pampered by them was a matter of fortune. Hariprabha’s in-laws came all the way to Kobe to see her off. After a tearful parting, she ends her book with the observation, “I do not want to take leave of such a simple, affectionate mother-in-law. Though a foreigner, she showered me with affection, tenderness and care, as if she was my own mother. I want to live with her the rest of my life. But, alas, there just is no such possibility!”72 Thus spatialization of time in Hariprabha’s narrative is foregrounded in the Bengali “women’s time” revolving around sangsar. Home and travel are thus experienced as occurring under the same temporal regime of Bengali sangsar, in stark contrast with our colonial tourists for whom travel to the West involved a voyage through a temporalized space separating the “backward” East from the “progressive” West. 81


The second “travelogue” that I am going to read was written by Shyamlal Mitra, who went to Egypt in 1882 and fought in the battle between Britain and the Pasha as a subaltern on the British-Indian side.73 This is also a straightforward rojnamcha. Arriving in Egypt from Bombay, he took part in the decisive battle in which England established her suzerainty over Egypt. After the war, in the ensuing confusion, he got separated from his battalion and had to travel all the way to Cairo to join them. Mitra’s English was poor and though he was a widely traveled man, his sensibilities were decidedly pre-modern and comparable, in many ways, to our eighteenth century travelers. This is quite evident from his view of history, his notion of agency, his perception of nature, etc. According to Mitra, battles are won not because of military superiority, but because of adherence to Dharma. The Pasha was a great warrior and patriot but, like Nana Sahib74 of India, he tortured innocent British women and children. Egypt had to atone for this sin by being subjugated to the British just as the “Mutiny” in India was suppressed by the British because of the sins of Nana Sahib. In Mitra’s mind, the battlefields invoked the scenes of war from the Sanskrit epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. In his long descriptions of Egyptian cities and countryside, there is no awareness of scenic beauty. There is no aestheticization of ruins and decay, no nostalgia; he thinks of the Pyramid more in terms of an engineering marvel than a relic. How did Mitra translate the Egyptian other to his Bengali readers? Strangely enough, the word yavan (meaning the bigoted Muslim), so characteristic of the Bengali Hindu nationalists, many of whom were Mitra’s contemporaries, does not occur even once in the text. There are a few scattered references to Arab sensuality, which is more than offset by a strong empathy for vanquished Egypt. On his way to Cairo, he witnessed British soldiers plundering Egyptian villages, raping their womenfolk, etc. He condemns these atrocities in strong terms, as a member of a conquered race. One day, he witnessed a British soldier about to rape a hapless Egyptian woman. Though exhausted with starvation, he immediately chased the soldier away and the grateful belle took Mitra to her home, holding his hand and thanking him profusely in Arabic. Her family fed him and let him rest in their house. He is overwhelmed: “The Egyptians consider hospitality to be a supreme Dharma. They even extend hospitality to enemies who seek refuge.”75 This amounts to asserting that in hospitality, Egyptians are the same as the Hindus. For, according to Dharma, a guest is equivalent to the god Narayan and there are stories in the Purans about great Dharmic kings of ancient times who cut off their own flesh in order to spare the guest. 82


Finally he arrives in Cairo and joins his fellow Indian soldiers. From then on, the oppression by his British superiors becomes a leitmotif of the text. One must not take these outpourings as manifestations of a dormant nationalism. For Mitra is convinced that British domination has been ordained by God and subjugation is our destiny. However, his stay in Cairo turned out to be quite pleasant. He found the Pyramids breathtaking (“The English have constructed great edifices and have developed science, but even today, they do not have the capability to build a pyramid”),76 and Cairo, magnificent (“If one puts together the beauties of Calcutta and Bombay, even then, it would not equal the grandeur of the great Cairo”).77 Born in 1866, Krishnalal Basak78 traveled all his active life as a performer in circuses. As a schoolboy, he ran away with a circus and traveled extensively in India, the Far East, Australia, and even Europe. Though the title of his book translates as “Various Travels,” it is more of an “exemplary (auto) biography” (charitkatha), which states at the outset that it was written expressly for the purpose of sensitizing Bengali youth to the need of taking up physical activities seriously and promoting the spirit of adventure. Writing about his travels as a way of life, he reminisces about the warm reception they received in most places from his audiences. Early in the book, in the course of his second round of travel, in Shingta, China, he observed, “So far I had been travelling mainly to earn my bread. But in Shingta, I realized, for the first time, that transcending all the differences of countries, languages, and ways of life, there is also a certain commonalty which unifies the human race.”79 As for the master race, Basak is often quite sarcastic. “The English inhabitants [of Australia]… asked me whether there are mountains and rivers in my country. When I told them that in this respect our country is just like theirs, they were quite amazed.”80 Basak’s troop had to be disbanded with the onset of the World War. He laments: In my troop there were all kinds of people—Maharastrians, Mysorites… Rumanians, Spaniards, … English, French, Italians, Russians, Muslims, … Chinese, Japanese, etc. and all of them contributed to its success. They are no longer with me but I have not forgotten them and I am sure that… they have not forgotten me either… My circus was like the temple of Jagannath for all the jatis of the world. How far I have been able to fulfill my responsibility as the doorkeeper of that temple, is a judgment that should be reserved for them. If the world did not get caught up in this gory, mad war… my troop would have remained intact even today.81

I invite the reader to ponder on the meaning of the metaphor of the temple of Jagannath (a famous Hindu shrine of Orissa) as a “sheltering” site 83


for multicultural, cosmopolitan gatherings. It is well-known that even today non-Hindus and, in Basak’s time, even lower-caste untouchables were not permitted to enter the temple. It is unlikely that he did not know this. Why then does he use the figure of a temple to capture multiplicity, variety, diversity, and difference? Pursuing the same line of reasoning, one can ask how, for Hariprabha, the Hindu, Bengali, patriarchal middle-class home became the site for a certain cosmopolitan cohabitation and negotiation? How could Mitra, with his pre-modern, archaic cultural baggage, conceive of the Egyptian other as another I? This cosmopolitanism, a different cosmopolitanism, a vernacular cosmopolitanism, is what authorized these heterologies. Implicated in this heterology is a certain notion of self, which is neither a citizen nor a subject and, if we try to bring these subaltern travel narratives, which prepare us neither for nationalism nor for citizenry practices, into a relationship with the larger narratives of class, nation and state, in the words of an Indian historian, a certain “intractability” results.82 Let us see how this intractability crops up. Rooted in the historic alliance between Reason and Capital, the subject was born at the end of the eighteenth century through a complex process, engendering a new entity called Man—the citizen of the world—assigned with the task of self-emancipation from every domination and subjection by means of a collective and universal access to politics. Modernity disenfranchises all other agencies which do not claim subjecthood for themselves. This subject, the citizen-subject, has a cosmopolitical content in that he or she belongs to a national state and each of these states is conceived as a partial and provisional representation of humanity, which in fact is the only true “subject of history.”83 Now, if this is the case, from what sort of location do our narratives of subaltern travel derive? Who authorizes them? Certainly not nationalism whose raison d’être consisted precisely in claiming citizenship on behalf of the nation-people, transformed into subjects by colonialism.84 The “cosmopolitanism” of our subaltern travelers does not require the support of the kind of subjectivity foregrounded in the narrative of citizenship, rights, and nation states. What enables Hariprabha to negotiate with a cosmopolitan, bicultural cohabitation is precisely her ability to reinscribe this cosmopolitanism with the cosmology of Bengali home and wifehood, whose moorings are firmly rooted in Dharma. Mitra’s recognition of Egyptian otherness is foregrounded in a “universal history” of subjection which is tellingly anti-Historical. In the case of Basak, whose cosmopolitanism is well-articulated, the moment of translation, again, presents an enigma. For 84


his narrative of the coming together of “humanity” is enacted on a site (a Hindu temple) which is anything but a part of the public space of civil society. It is at this point that these narratives of subaltern travel become “intractable” in the sense that, as such, they cannot enter History. We, qua historians, cannot translate these narratives back into our own subject positions. For, to do so would amount to a denial of the subjectivity which foregrounds these narratives. To say that these are mere manifestations of “false consciousness” amounts to anthropologizing their subjectivity, which is (epistemic) violence, not translation. On the face of it, it would be misleading to locate the voice of our travelers in the “hoary mists of tradition,” insulated from a corrosive modernity.85 Religious restrictions forbade foreign travel for upper-caste Bengali Hindus for a long time. In the nineteenth century, it would have been scandalous for an ordinary Bengali woman to marry a foreigner and travel abroad, let alone write a travelogue. Hariprabha is surely a product of colonial Bengali domesticity, the historically contingent result of a protracted negotiation with modernity.86 However, recognizing the necessary imbrication of these subaltern, vernacular narratives with the discourse of modernity does not mean that we will not be able to wrest a claim on their behalf—a claim centered not only on their being invested with a different subjectivity but, perhaps more importantly, their ability to reinscribe modernity with vernacular diacritics. In conclusion, I want to signpost a certain irony as constitutive of the aporia of what I call vernacular travel. In contradistinction to the “economy” of metropolitan travel analyzed by Van Den Abbeele,87 we confront in these texts an aeconomic mode of travel, travel as an “expenditure.”88 The trajectory of vernacular travel does not reinforce the oikos, one travels in order to lose, in order to find oneself at home in strange places. Equivocal and evocative, vernacular travel disrupts the transnational’s privileged access to translationality89 and the claim of the national to exhaust the affective space of solidarity, agency, and politics.

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3

BETWEEN ELITE HYSTERIA AND SUBALTERN CARNIVALESQUE STREET-FOOD AND GLOBALIZATION IN CALCUTTA

“My virile food taketh effect, my strong and savoury sayings: and verily, I did not nourish them with flatulent vegetables! But with warrior food, with conquerer-food: new desires did I awaken…” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pt. 4, “The Awakening”) “Street [is] the only valid field of experience.” (André Breton, Nadja)

Bawdy Talk: Prolegomenon to Sensuous Scholarship As one grows older, one gets used to a kind of rock-bottom living: it becomes a habit. Certain of certain certainties, one dreads the unfamiliar. Like most middle-aged Bengali bhadraloks, street-food is an absolute no-no for me. In view of my beleaguered stomach, rendered vulnerable by years of assault of Giardia and Amoebiasis, those fiery chillies and the viciously sour raw tamarind are unlikely to be taken kindly by my system. This is a trait I share with most Bengali middle-aged Calcuttans brought up on contaminated drinking water. No wonder, the culture of pet (the Bengali word for stomach) has become a veritable cosmology for most urban Bengalis.1 But even if I had the robust stomach of a Bengali peasant from Burdwan who

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can digest even iron (as the Bengali proverb goes), it is doubtful if I would ever venture out of my bland jhol-bhat regimen. It is not befitting of a man of my age and class to fall for the lure of street-food. It is not “respectable.” This project of writing on street-food led to a veritable adventure. Armed with Gelusil tablets (“fast relief for chronic acidity”), I tasted fuchka, after decades, standing in a dusty South Calcutta street-corner with a dozen giggling adolescent girls and boys. The vendor gives you a cone made of sal-leaf stitched with a sharp kathi (something like a cocktail stick) and then those fragile, hollow balls of fried flour filled with the juice of tamarind, mashed potato, grams and red chilli-dust, keep pouring in until you say “no more.” After having about ten of such balls which must have set her whole alimentary system on fire, the girl standing next to me could take no more. Yet she looked almost ravished with her burning tongue sticking out and the pupils dilated; one could not possibly miss the sense of exhilaration writ large on her face, even as drops of tears descended her pimply cheeks.2 It is now my turn and it takes my system some time to absorb the shock of the very first ball. As I stand trying to remember exactly how long ago I tasted my last ball of fuchka, letting my system negotiate with the shock, like Proust’s sudden flash of “involuntary memory” as he tasted the famed Madeleine dipped in tea,3 a memory of my very ordinary suburban adolescence flashed up. It was the memory of one of those long summer vacations made insufferable by a merciless sun and the prickly-heat humidity of Bengali summer—it was the memory of my first teenage crush. We were a big family whose branches spread out to remote mofussil (suburban) towns of Bengal. I had a bunch of pubescent girl-cousins who visited us along with their uncouth brothers during the annual summer vacation. It must have been one of those early summer evenings when dark storm-clouds of kalbaisakhi (Nor’wester) started gathering in the sky, torn apart by flashes of thunderous lightning. One went to the streets with a sense of gloomy foreboding. That was the day I tasted my last fuchka, with the disappointment of unrequited love. Tempting the girl on whom I had a crush with the mouth-watering prospect of devouring fuchka and alukabli (at my cost), I managed to have a kind of last walk together to the crossroads where the vendors sold their stuff from little wooden carts, well beyond the parental gaze. As the rain broke out, we ran home and I remember trampling fallen scarlet krishnachura branches in bloom—the hell flames of desire.

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BETWEEN ELITE HYSTERIA AND SUBALTERN CARNIVALESQUE

Calcutta Street-Food: A Historical Ontology Forgive this little self-indulgence of a middle-aged man and let me assure you that this is not a ploy to turn away from the scholarly issues of the sociology and history of food. There are a variety of statutes prohibiting street-food in Calcutta (e.g. the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act, 1954, Calcutta Municipal Corporation Act, 1980, and others). The current statutes are successors to hoary old colonial laws which had more or less the same objective, namely suppression of street-food on grounds of hygiene and health. The vendors of street-food are too poor to be able to pay for the obligatory hawking license and that, in itself, makes them members of an underclass whose very existence is denied by law. It is held that street-food is made and sold under unhygienic conditions, prepared with contaminated water and is, therefore, instrumental in spreading water-borne diseases, especially during the summer. And yet, anybody familiar with Calcutta’s street-culture would know the inevitability with which street-food vendors crop up in every nook and corner in defiance of municipal law, petit-bourgeois prejudices and the unanimous disapproval of parents, police and pedagogues. Schools close their doors to them but their students manage, as we did, to make unauthorized transactions with the vendors of fuchka, alukabli, churan, various kinds of pickles, pounded green-mango and other sour fruits mixed with salt, chilli and savory condiments. Surely, Calcutta street-foods (by which I mean the food you can buy only on streets and nowhere else) are numerous: from roasted peanuts to jhalmuri or bhelpuri (puffed rice mixed with various spices and vegetables), from telebhaja (deep-fried vegetables in batter) to desi ice-creams and kulfis, from candy-floss to roasted maize, the gastronomic cartography of Calcutta is unlikely to be matched by any other city of the world.4 Much of this huge repertoire is contributed by non-Bengalis: Marwaris, Gujaratis, Punjabis, Tamils and upper-Indian Muslims living in Calcutta for generations. They have a far more variegated snack-culture than the Bengalis who seem to be wedded to what Mary Douglas has called the sacrosanct “meal.”5 The Chinese have lived in Calcutta for about two centuries now but the elevation of fried greasy noodles (chowmein) to street-food is a recent phenomenon and has to do with the vogue of South East Asian food sweeping the globe since the early 1990s. The roll, a kebab rolled in a paratha and covered with a piece of paper, the Calcuttan youth-food par excellence, was invented by the famed Muslim restaurant of New Market, Nizam, a watering hole of upcoming Calcuttans during the evening. 89


It is one of my contentions that, historically, the culture of street-food is not very old in Bengal. Before the late-nineteenth century and in the context of Calcutta, there is no mention of street-food anywhere in old Bengali literature, though references to food and meals are plenty, the Bengali investment on body being mostly through food.6 This is understandable because in a society ruled by caste and intricate codes of purity and pollution connected with eating and touch, the very anonymity of street-food would be unthinkable. There is little mention of street-food in the picturesque naxas of the nineteenth century to indicate that eating it was a popular practice in the halcyon days of the Bengali babu. The first reference to street-food, telebhaja and roasted grams along with chillichutney, occurs in Sachitra Guljarnagar (1871), one of those novels about the “mysteries” of the big city. From the turn of the century to the 1950s, one hears about various bhajas: bulbul-bhaja, sarebotrish-bhaja and haridaser bulbul-bhaja (claimed to be a favorite of Queen Victoria!) ruling the streets of Calcutta, though I have never seen these myself. These were perhaps the predecessors of the present-day chanachurs and jhalmuries which are still consumed in plenty.

Guy Debord is Dead, Fullstop The substantive conclusion to be drawn from this is that the rise of streetfood in the urban Bengali context is strictly correlated with the decline of the familial meal as a ritual activity and the rise of non-ritual eating (snacks) directed at sensual stimulation rather than assuaging hunger-pangs. I remember my mother calling my craving for street-food “dustu-khide” (naughty-hunger) as opposed to hunger proper to be satisfied by cooked food at home. The copy of a recent advertisement for a chocolate-nut bar (“thodi-si petpuja,” a bit of tummy-worshipping) showing a young, attractive girl smiling impishly, brings home the point about snack or junk food. Not nutrition but “distraction” is what is aimed at.7 The food-philosopher Falk has made a distinction between the premodern meal-ontology as opposed to modern or postmodern snack-ontology.8 He argues that the modern “alienated” person seeks a certain oral stimulation from junk food to fill the empty space it perceives inside: this “oral urge” is not the manifestation of “oral security” but on the contrary, a symptom of its absence. In effect, he argues that the postmodern free-floating individualism is a kind of infantilism where the early oral stage of sexuality is perpetuated. 90


I have problems with this kind of analysis which idealizes the so-called unmediated immediacy of the premodern as opposed to the domination of modern societies by “distraction” effected by image or simulacra.9 It commits us to too automatic, too simplistic a politics of representation.10 I prefer to operate with Foucault’s idea of modern power which works through a rhetorical incorporation of the subject in the very grid of power. Like Pascal’s “earth,” modern power is an “effroyable” sphere whose circumference is everywhere and center nowhere. In other words, I think that the systemic critique based on an idealized use-value as opposed to a “satanic” exchange-value, is no longer of much service. Following Ashis Nandy, I have learnt how to valorize the local, the strategic, the semiotic, the playful or even rhetorical resistances to narratives of power.11 It is in this context that the priority of image or simulacra, of form over content, of the signifier over the signified, assumes a certain political urgency. For Bengali adolescents or young adults, purchase or ingestion of “dematerialized” street-foods like fuchka, alukabli or hojmi, which have little or negative use-value, is pleasurable. Their consumption leads to what can be called furti (fun) as opposed to masti which is reserved for things more serious: alcohol, drugs, sex, heavy dancing or a combination of all these. Street-food is valued not because of its taste as such but because of its symbolic significance qua “junk” food prohibited by adults. What adults despise is invested with prestige, except, of course, for those conformist nerds growing like some kind of undergrowth beneath the main body politic of hardened, tough, lathkhor Bengali teenagers. It is the cultural image around the food—its exchange—rather than use-value in the symbolic economy—that is important. Eating these non-nutritious foods that break the code of diet and “meal” entails the membership of a cultural group and confers on the eater a certain non-conformist identity. These give rise to intensities, exude non-conformist values like youth, vigor, sexual attractiveness, humor and fun times. The lurid names of these totemic anti-foods, fuchka, current, etc., the manner in which these are eaten, involving finger-licking, exaggerated chewing, gulping, the blowing of nose, the place where these are eaten, busy, dusty street-corners and mostly in groups often exploding in laughter and using cult-language and argot, all these serve as a disorderly and carnivalesque counter to the sober and anodyne world of grey, restrained, constipated Bengali bhadralok adulthood. Food or drink comes alive in certain kinds of “assemblages” (Deleuze) and makes certain things possible only when conjoined with materialities, ambiances and historical conjunctures. 91


Nietzche’s diagnosis of the origin of anti-Semitic sentiments in Bismarck’s Germany from “a too exclusive diet of newspapers, politics, beer and Wagnerian music” is a good illustration of what I called the exchange-value of a particular food or drink in specific symbolic economies.12

Of Physiology and Pataphysics13 As is well known, some 10,000 taste buds cover the tongue of an average adult person. As we grow older, these decline in both number and sensitivity. By the time one is seventy-five, one has lost two thirds of one’s taste buds.14 Thus, from a strict physiological point of view, a certain proclivity to extreme tastes is likely to be typical of adolescence when taste-buds come to maturity. Further, speaking neurologically, taste is supposed to be associated with the automatic or lower brain functions, but the problem is that it is also influenced by other senses like smell, sight, hearing (Pavlov’s salivating dogs) and even by our inner time consciousness or memory (Proust’s Madeleine). Thus, if we recognize that taste involves all our other senses, thereby including the whole person, then the denigration of taste in the western philosophical tradition, from Aristotle and Plato to Descartes and Kant, as the bottom rung of the sensory hierarchy, and the putative supremacy of sight, i.e. mind, turns out to be just one more of those age-old prejudices handed down by what one of my black female students, majoring in Postcolonial Theory, called “a bunch of despicable dead white men.”15 Fortunately for us, we have the testimony of a truly great and virile philosopher who wanted to philosophize “with a hammer”: “nutrition, place, climate… are inconceivably more important than everything one has taken to be important so far… [i.e.,] ‘God,’ ‘soul’, ‘virtue’… ‘truth,’ ‘eternal life.’”16 He identified “the abstention from flesh” as one of the sources of the ressentiment of the priest, the others being “Catholic vegetarianism,” “fasting,” “flight ‘into the wilderness’” and “the entire antisensualistic metaphysics of the priest.”17 However, it would be naïve to conclude from this that we do not need “mind” in order to experience food or, for that matter, eating is something “pre-discursive.” The point rather is that the western philosophical discourse, which fetishizes brain as the seat of the self, is not sensitive to the fact that we are our bodies; that body is not something one merely owns. To be is to be embodied.18 The problem with “metaphysics” is not that it privileges discourse over “lived experience.” The problem is rather that it bends the discourse in a way that it becomes impossible to lend legitimacy 92


to other, contending, “local” practices. To challenge “metaphysics” in a straightforward way is to walk out of language to silence. Obviously, this is a trivial solution. Can we try other, more wily strategies?

From Pataphysics to Discourse Analysis The pataphysical gesture (think of Alfred Jarry’s deployment of the whole repertoire of French scatology in Ubu’s corporeal paroxysms) characteristic of the avant-garde’s debunking of metaphysics, is of course a time-honored way of critiquing it. But my strategy is somewhat different. What I try to show is how discourse shapes the palate, supposed to be so resilient as to remain unchanged through centuries of acculturation.19 In my view, it is not the “body in the mind” that needs rehabilitation through “embodied scholarship,” if by “body” we mean an unproblematic self-presence. The body is not textless.20 The task of sensuous scholarship is not to recover the repressed, withered, emaciated, primordial body lying buried beneath discourse. The task is rather to recover how body and its desire are constituted by discourse. The body has nothing to do with empirical corporeality, it is “phantasmic.”21 One of the consequences of the philosophical discourse of modernity has been to decouple the body (the word understood in its widest sense, including bodily comportment) from the mind, as would be evident to any reader of Hadot. Mores and manners have become dissociated from Reason whose seat is the disembedded mind. Kant’s disavowal of “manners” and his reduction of the ethical to its purely rational form, are well known.22 However, the point in rethinking philosophy as “spiritual exercise,” is not to depict a lurid radical alterity when manners, ethics and rhetoric were one, but to work towards a certain continuity to the present when the centrality of manners and rhetoric to ethical questions is still at issue. A workable regime of manners and demeanor is still very much on the agenda, as is evident from current debates on political correctness, sexual harassment, and civic virtues. After the Kantian “disenchantment” of ethics, philosophy seems to have “forgotten” about this. Yet, manners are still central to ethics. Their separation was made, in the first place, in an act of bad faith. Focusing on eating qua manner—eating as part of comportment—my project here is to re-introduce the question of ethics of the culture of food through the grid of flavor and taste, using the modern Bengali archive. The signs of a certain “civilizing process,” of an “education of desire,” become visible in British Bengal at around the end of the nineteenth cen 93


tury. Our equivalents of Erasmus were Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and Bhudev Mukhopadhyay. They invented “culture” understood in the modern sense to discipline the incipient nation. The postcolonial study of anticolonial nationalism as a counter-hegemonic enterprise is based on a particular rendering of the term “culture” borrowed from Gramsci’s idea of the educative and moral functions of the modern state, though the centrality of class in his argument has been somewhat dissipated by the more expansive notion of “people.” Culture, accordingly, has been understood in the anthropological sense of a whole way of life. Culture in the Foucaultian understanding as “conduct” is social engineering of sorts, whose emergence is best thought of as a part of the process of the governmentalization of social life characteristic of the early modern period, referred to by Foucault in the notion of “police.” The work of culture is to transform subjectivities. The postcolonials have consistently overlooked the “policing” and “disciplining” intent of canonical nationalist texts like Bankimchandra’s Dharmatattva (1888), Krishnacharitra (1886) and Bhudev’s Parivarik Prabandha (1881) and Aachar Prabandha (1894).23 I do not have the space here to get into an extended discussion of Bankimchandra’s idea of anusilan (exercise) and Bhudev’s idea of aachar (ritual) being very close to that sense of culture where it is figured as both the object and the instrument of government which targets at transforming conduct: the mores, manners and comportment of extended populations. All I can do in this article is to unravel the taste part of the story. Central to my interest here is a certain transformation in the Bengali palate implicated in Bankimchandra’s idea of change in the food-habit that must come through proper anusilan. Katu (jhal in colloquial Bengali) and amla had stable but extreme positions in the spectrum of Bengali taste hierarchy. The former comes from chillies and peppers and the latter from tamarind and amra, chalte and other very sour subaltern, desi fruits and vegetables. The genre of Calcutta street-food I am here concerned with still relies primarily on tamarind for sourness and red chillies for hotness. In fact, this is their differentia specificia. A historic disavowal of these two tastes comes across clearly in the nationalist effort to expurgate these from the enlightened neo-Bengali haute cuisine. In a critical passage in Kamalakanter Daftar, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay wrote: To tell the truth, I cannot find anything under the sun as harmful as tamarind. Whoever eats it, gets acidity and belches… The anglicized Bengalis who dine on tables using knives and forks, eating meals cooked by Faizu Khansama, have man-

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BETWEEN ELITE HYSTERIA AND SUBALTERN CARNIVALESQUE aged to avoid the menace of tamarind. Irrespective of the desirability of the wholesale adaptation of the new [western] manners by the Bengali, there is at least one feature of it which is redeeming: there is no need to wash down the rice with fish cooked in tamarind sauce. But think of the plight of those who have no choice but to eat meals cooked by Padi pisi [aunt] on a Munger stone plate sitting in a thatched hut! Padi pisi comes from high-caste Kulin stock, bathes daily early in the morning, is respectably attired in namabali [scarf printed with the sacred motif of god] and wears a bracelet made of the auspicious basil-wood. But when it comes to culinary skills, all she knows is how to prepare lentil dal and fish cooked in tamarind sauce. Faizu is a lowly Muslim but cooks like a chef.24

This denunciation of the humble tamarind by the great modernizer, Bankimchandra, will surprise many, especially his recent postcolonial commentators who conjure up a Bankimchandra embodying an authentic, earthy Bengaliness. Bankim’s denunciation needs to be read in conjunction with his other writings on “ethics” (Krishna-charitra and Dharmatattva). Bankimchandra, the epitome of the Neo-Stoic babu brought up on positivism and neo-Brahminical Puritanism, denigrated tamarind and women who use tamarind in cooking, as markers of the subaltern, the sensual, the unrefined and the uncivilized. Pradip Bose’s work on nationalism and Bengali cuisine goes on to establish decisively that cuisine and taste were key and contested arenas in nationalist reform of the “inside.”25 Through inculcation of a so-called civilizing “moderation” in taste and by adapting the milder flavors of European cuisine, abandoning the erstwhile Bengali “excesses,” the bhadralok conceived of eating itself (what to eat, how to eat, etc.) as spiritual exercise (anusilan). The new cuisine fabricated in the fancy kitchens of the Brahmos like the Tagores,26 the Rays and others, and the less Anglicized but “enlightened” clerks like Bhudev, had no place for subaltern items like tamarind or chillies patronized by the peasants, who turned to these to titillate their palate. The project of constructing a “new” taste contributing to building a more rational polity was formulated more clearly in Vivekananda’s Prachya O Paschatya in dry pedagogic style of sermonizing.27 A puffed-up charlatan whose claim to be the spiritual “savior” of the nation came from his selfcongratulatory anecdotes of rubbing shoulders with the whites, a pioneer entrepreneur in the business of exporting eastern “spiritualism” to the West, he lacked Bankimchandra’s finesse and humor. His housewife-like cant against street-food and spicy, fried, bazaar food reeks of lower middle-class self-hatred and of what in Bengali we call chunchibiou, phobia of pollution through touch and eating.28 And inevitably, the same “lentil dal and fish 95


cooked in tamarind sauce” remains the butt of “reformist” attack which now, in Vivekananda’s retelling, becomes characteristic of the barbaric semitribal (“Santhali”) cuisine of Birbhoom and Bankura!29 “True” Bengali cuisine has been preserved in East Bengal, the more one goes towards the “West,” “authentic” Bengali flavors are increasingly open to the dark, “savage” and “tribal” assaults of the non-Bengali spirit. However, Vivekananda’s “East Bengal” is deeply essentializing, for he does not count Barisal, Chittagong, Shilet and the Burmese border of East Bengal (whose fiery cuisines are laced with red chilli and “impure,” smelly dried fish, shuntki) as being parts of his ideal East Bengal, which consists only of two districts, Dhaka and Bikrampur, the seat of “authentic” Brahminical cuisine. Of course all these were thinly veiled allegories: these damning strictures were really strictures against sex and sensuality. He lacked Gandhi’s flamboyance and Bankimchandra’s restraint. His pathetic brand of Puritanism, throughout the twentieth century, has remained an important staple of the dark side of Bengali nationalism, the bloodthirsty, sex-starved, secretive terrorism documented in Kamalkumar Majumdar’s immortal story, Rukminikumar. The story of the marginalization of chilli and tamarind in the construction of Bengali haute cuisine in the late-nineteenth century remains to be told. All the “classic” (of course, “classic” in Bengali means nineteenth century) recipe books in Bengali from Bipradas Mukhopadhyay’s Pak-pranali (1885–1902) through Pragyasundari Devi’s Amis O Niramis Ahar (1900) to Baisnabcharan Basak’s Soukhin Pakpranali (1916), make passing references to tamarind only in sections on amla (where there are recipes of chutney and pickles), and chilli of course comes in as an inevitable ingredient, but such “excesses” are not to be indulged in. In fact, the very gesture of writing recipe books in Bengali in the late-nineteenth century signified the formation of a new “leisure class” whose women, suffering from worklessness, could indulge in the luxury of experimenting with new recipes. The mainstream Bengali culture is still very much a home-food eating type and “meals” are what really count. The change of taste among the bhadralok comes across clearly in Bipradas Mukhopadhyay’s Introduction: “Compared with the past, tastes have nowadays changed significantly. Unless one caters to the new taste, it is difficult to satisfy the eaters. So, one has to learn new recipes.”30 As for amla, he writes that it is a “revitaliser” for jaded tongues, it tickles the taste buds: “The tongue takes an excessive pleasure in devouring the amla taste.”31 The word he uses for pleasure is lalasa—the Bengali word for perverse lust. 96


A new wave of books on food start coming out from the 1920s onwards where the accent is entirely on health, nutrition, the chemistry of food, “balanced diet” and vitamins, rather than on taste and palatability.32 The popularity of these books, some of which ran into tens of editions, testifies to the success of “pedagogic nationalism” in making food an arena of reform and “regeneration.” It is around this time that “hygiene” becomes an important subject in the school syllabus. Many of these scientifically oriented books condemn bazaar food as necessarily adulterated and unhygienic. The focus has shifted considerably: from Bankimchandra’s semioticization of food, we have come to what can be called a scienticization of food. Taste and flavor have become subservient to “nutrition,” in which chemistry has become more decisive than taste. Scienticization notwithstanding, the cause of desi cuisine was strengthened in the course of cultural valorization of the nation as originary and primeval, largely an early-twentieth century phenomenon coinciding with the deepening of the swadeshi impulse. The archaic and the subaltern now get valorized as the “authentic.” The classic statement to this effect, which says that the “true” nation is to be found in the “folk” rather than in the “classical” sites, is contained in Dineshchandra Sen’s Brihatbanga (1935). The fad of the “folk” invaded Bengali food culture as well, as testified by Kiranlekha Roy’s Barendra Randhan (1922). Barendra is the ancient appellation of North Bengal and the book was published by Saratkumar Roy (husband of Kiranlekha), the famous Zamindar of Dighapatia of Rajshahi district (now in Bangladesh) who founded the Varendra Research Society, one of the key institutions which took upon itself the “recovery” of local history. The book is littered with words from the local dialect and the effort is to recover the “authentic” Barendra cuisine. Tamarind, again, emerges as a flash-point and the author says that, unlike the inhabitants of Rarh, the North-Central part of undivided Bengal, the Barendraites are not so fond of it. These historical subjectivities, “Rarh” and “Barendra,” were understood in a very different sense in our traditional genealogies, relating more to vamsa (lineage) rather than geographical regions. The “ancient” Bengali palate becomes a marker of the national and the authentic under “performative nationalism.” The best example of this kind of valorization of food is contained in Haraprasad Shastri’s novel, Bener Meye (1920). The novel is set in Buddhist Bengal (Shastri was a Buddhist scholar), in the year 995 AD in Saptagram, an ancient port on Bhagirathi. The story begins with the description of gajan (hook-swinging) festival, a 97


Sahajiya Buddhist festival, where the king of the realm has invited his spiritual mentor, Lui-Siddha, to be the high-priest. A feast will follow and fishes are being caught from the tank. It was one of the contentions of Shastri and other nationalist scholars that the Brahminical-Aryan influence in Bengal had not really penetrated deeply. Deep down, there are still strong undercurrents of folk Buddhism and Tantra, practices critical of Brahminism. So in the novel, the holy man, as a “true” Bengali, does not seem to be much interested in eating fish as such. He is more fond of what Shastri called antri (it is also called chanchra or kanta-chachchori), a subaltern but uniquely Bengali (and, in my opinion, delicious) preparation made from fish leftovers, oil and guts.33 Shastri makes the fondness for antri an essential ingredient of Bengaliness and a certain homology is easily established between the two subalternities: the subalternity of antri in the food hierarchy and the somewhat contrived subalternity of the Bengali race, which has not really succumbed to the invasion of Brahminism from above. The distinctiveness of the Bengali is thus established by an index which is flavor (North Indian “Aryans” would be nauseated by antri) and Shastri makes an eternity out of it: a thousand years have passed, but nothing has really changed! Homi Bhabha has rightly pointed out “the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative” nationalism as opposed to “the continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical.”34

Street-food as Carnivalesque My concern with nationalist reform and counter-reform of Bengali taste and cuisine has come to a resolution: I have tried to demonstrate that the “civilizing” project of Bengali nationalism tried to eliminate what they perceived as excess, the extremes in the spectrum of Bengali taste hierarchy, namely, tamarind and chilli. In the new Bengali haute cuisine which emerged in the late-nineteenth century, these two items were considered taboo, unfit for polite cuisine, and increasingly came to be recognized as markers of the subaltern. However, as these extreme tastes were repressed and prohibited in the dominant discourse, simultaneously, they were also made alluring. To prohibit something is also to invite people to transgress the taboo—this is how the economy of pleasure has always worked. Repugnance and fascination are the twin poles of the process in which a political imperative to damn the debasing low conflicts powerfully and often unpredictably with a desire for the other. The net effect of prohibition has thus 98


been to make chilli and tamarind tempting “transgressions” to certain sensitive sections of the population: young girls, adolescents, pregnant women and others. One of the recurring memories of my early adolescence is the clandestine preparation of a paste of tamarind or green mango with fiery chillies, and sharing it with a bunch of cousins or playmates. Today’s Bengali street-food, which uses tamarind and chilli in plenty, inheres the subalternity inscribed historically on the two tastes constitutive of the Bengali palate: katu (hot) and amla (sour). As for their quality of being tempting to young people, I want to hazard a certain homology between sexual flowering, adolescence and the burning hot and vicious sourness of a certain genre of Bengali street-food. The connection has been exploited recently by a top-selling Bengali teenage magazine whose advert runs as follows: Teenage mane fuchka, jhalmuri, adda, cricket and Anandamela (roughly: Teenage means fuchka, jhalmuri, chatting, cricket and Anandamela—the magazine). This decisively establishes the cultural locus of these anti-foods as lifestyle or status food. We need to note here that this positing of “teenage” as a distinctive part of the life-cycle, as some kind of a rite of passage to adulthood, and the affirmation of a certain carefree comportment that supposedly goes with teenage, is the result of a certain assimilation with the global market and its marketing norms, driven by the ideas of niche and segmentation. There is no notion of teen-age or adolescence in our traditional ideas concerning the four stages of life: childhood, youth, middle-age and oldage. Thus, the affirmation of “teenage” as a distinct stage of life is largely a result of assimilation with global consumerism. Since the publication of Bakhtin’s monumental Rabelais and his World in English in the late 1960s, the carnivalesque has become a fairly standard item in European cultural criticism.35 It is no longer simply a ritual feature of European Christian popular culture of the medieval period but also a mode of understanding, a positivity, what Stallybrass and White called “a cultural analytic.”36 Irrespective of Bakhtin’s motive for studying Rabelais in Stalin’s Russia, the carnivalesque has emerged as a metaphor for critical inversion of the official hierarchies. Central to the carnival laughter is what Bakhtin termed a “grotesque realism” which valorizes the body understood as corpulent excess. Thus the carnivalesque can act as a central organizing metaphor for popular culture at large. The explosive politics of the body, of the tongue, of the erotic, the licentious, the semiotic, which characterize our popular films, street-culture, gastronomic traditions, festivals, our bazaars, our maidans and our “outsized realities” in general, can be meaningfully captured with the trope of the not-so-Bakhtinian carnivalesque. 99


Having said that, one should also recognize that the carnivalesque has often been overrated for its emancipatory potential. Carnival as such is no emancipation, it is merely a sanctioned reversal of hierarchies. From observations of cultures like that in India where carnivalesque traditions are still alive (think of Holi, for example), it is quite plain that there is no a priori revolutionary vector to carnival or ritualistic transgressions. In other words, rather than treating carnival as a departure from discourse and code, one should rather think of carnival itself as a discourse. Hence, the “transgression” implicated in carnival is played out not outside of discourse, but alongside it. Which is to say, there is a rhetorical counter-investment in the discourse of carnival. As Eagleton has noted, by a temporary retextualization of what I want to call the “social text”—society as text and text as society—the rhetoric of carnival exposes the “fictive” foundation of the “real.”37 By the same token, it renders possible the thinking of the social on other (but equally “fictive”) lines. I have tried to document the elite hysteria around the carnivalesque elements of our culture in an attenuated form through the prohibition of excesses in matters of modern Bengali taste, whose formation is coeval with the formation of neo-Bengali domesticity under nationalism from Bankimchandra and Bhudev through Tagore and beyond. Cultural dynamic is complex and the repressed keeps returning, sometimes in forms which are even difficult to recognize. In Bankimchandra’s works, one can think of the periodic return of the figure of a sensual, earthy and gross female (prachina)—a figure embodying the vernacular, the ethnologically resistant, atemporal and archaic “woman.”38 Tagore’s Damini (in Chaturanga) and similar figures are cases in point. Tracing the map of the transformation of the earthy carnivalesque through the various trajectories and channels involves reading absences, migrations, concealments, fragmentations, internalizations and sublimations. The grotesque, robust body of carnival finds curious lodgments throughout the social body of nineteenth and twentieth century Bengal. In the long process of disowning the carnivalesque and its celebration of the body, the irruption of street-food as a marker of adolescent “rebellion” against the adult meal-ontology in today’s urban culture, is but a small fragment. But the carnivalesque does keep erupting, and sometimes from unexpected places. Social historians like Sumanta Banerjee, who meticulously documented the historic disavowal of the carnivalesque in modern Bengali high culture, seem not to believe in the return of the repressed.39 In 100


Badi Theke Paliye (1965), of Ritwik Ghatak, one of the greatest Indian film-makers, whose entire work is heavy with the traces of the half-forgotten dialect of the Bengali carnivalesque, we find a dream-like sequence about street-food involving school children and a grandfather-like figure (the seller) who looks like Santa Claus. This is not a solitary example. In spite of prohibitions, the repressed keeps returning as apparition, as art, almost as regularly as the hawkers of fuchka and alukabli who keep returning to Calcutta streets with their little hand-carts after the police, the pedagogues and the parents have departed from the scene.

Street-food and Globalization Now what does globalization mean in terms of everyday life in places like India? Built into this question is a certain notion of the quotidian or the customary. Since social life is ordered by customs, we can approach the lives of those living in it in terms of the patterns of those customs or conventions themselves—the conventional practices, as it were, constituting specific, sharable forms of life made actual in the lives of particular individuals who had in turn internalized such general patterns in the process of acculturation. The more recent concept of the “everyday,” defined by one of its ablest exponents as “a transformational process by which macro-structural categories are ongoingly translated into manageable structures of sense at human scale,”40 goes a long way towards rehabilitating Lefebvre’s “everyday life.” The only problem is that it is very difficult to remain faithful to the notion of “custom” at a time of rapid social change, if by custom one means something relatively unchanging. Under late-capitalism, everyday life changes even in the not-so-long-run—say, a lifetime—and the recent theoretical shift towards micro-sociology of the Tardeian variety has been rather enabling in thinking about my project of writing about street culture in Calcutta. What I want to do in this section is to study the ensemble of practices associated with street-food, the broader aim being the discernment of the recent mutations in these practices which could be connected, however tenuously, with “globalization.” In terms of lived experience, one of the major shifts in late-twentieth century Calcutta has been the gradual emergence of consumption as the leitmotif of everyday life. In terms of food and eating, this has led to a certain dematerialization of food. All that was solid melts into the air—meaning that the erstwhile “solid” and “heavy” lives of our parents gave way to a lifestyle 101


which supposedly lacks depth, purpose and density. From the early or mid1980s onwards, we woke up to a certain bearable lightness of being brought about by the culture of cheap tape-recorders (a metonymy for lightweight electric and electronic gadgets),41 television soaps, synthetic fibers (first Terilyn and later, Tericot—as the Bengali would have it), the invasion of new (Indian) brands, the gradual emergence and acceptance of the notion of “flat” or apartment as residential dwelling (as opposed to the erstwhile badi) and, above all, eating standardized “fast” food.42 This “small history” of our non-metropolitan late modernity is yet to be written but the larger politics of the country also took a distinctive turn at this point marked by the collapse of the Congress hegemony, the rise of caste and religion-based “ethnic” politics, as well as the emergence of what Partha Chatterjee has called “political society”: a certain penetration of the institutions of the state in the everyday life of the poor. Rajadhyaksha has astutely noted the gradual erosion of the grip of the nation state on the everyday life of the people as a marker of this transition. The arrival of McDonald’s and various metropolitan brands of pizza in Calcutta in recent times completed the circle. In the earlier part of this chapter, I delineated the trajectory of the formation of modern Bengali food culture of which street-food is a part. The collapse of the erstwhile “meal-ontology” I averred there in connection with the rise of a mass-mediated “youth culture” is a phenomenon that happened in post-independence India. In Nehruvian India, middle-class Indian youth lacked the consumerist accoutrements (blue jeans, popular, non-traditional music, fast-food like hamburgers, etc.) of the post-Beat generation of the “free world.” But the spirit was willing even when the flesh could not partake in the pleasures of consumerism. Unlike South East Asia, whose tryst with the destiny of “mass culture” began around the same period, India’s mass as well as youth culture of those days had distinct vernacular components. We “recycled” western modernity in keeping with our needs and priorities. The best exemplars of this business of “recycling” are Indian cricket and Bollywood films. Street-food is a much less spectacular manifestation of this phenomenon of the vernacularization of “mass-culture” (I am aware of the oxymoronic nature of this nomenclature) and I am in no position to offer a pan-Indian perspective on it. As an anthropologist of “manners,” I have to restrict myself to the places and the milieus I know best and these happen to be Calcutta and its environs. But I am quite sure that similar narratives could be generated from Bombay, Hyderabad, Delhi or Madras. 102


I have already demonstrated the connection of street-food with “youth” and “teenage” culture. Now I wish to connect that discussion with the recent, post-Marxist discourse on late-capitalist “dematerialization” and “immaterialization.” These have often been invoked as tropes for capturing the qualitative transformation of the nature, form and organization of labor in recent times.43 This putative transformation of the nature of labor has been necessitated by what Negri calls “informatisation.”44 In my usage, immaterialization or dematerialization is used in a much more encompassing—one could say in an almost poetic—sense. I do think that the idea of “immaterialization” can have a much wider purchase if taken out of its narrow economic context and viewed in more general and epochal terms. I cite here a comment of Rilke from his letter to Witold von Hulewicz in 1925 where he seeks to explain his apprehension of the changing status of objects in his times: Even for our grandparents a “house,” a “well,” a familiar tower, their very clothes, their coat: were infinitely more, infinitely more intimate; almost everything a vessel in which they found the human and added to the store of the human. Now, from America, empty indifferent things are pouring across, sham thing, dummy life… A house, in the American sense, an American apple or a grapevine over there, has been nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which went the hopes and reflections of our forefathers… Live things, things lived and conscient of us, are running out and can no longer be replaced. We are perhaps the last still to have known such things.45

The collapse of “meal” ontology and the triumph of “snacks” take place under the script of this larger “dematerialization.” There is room in all this for moralizing and nostalgia. The narrative strategy of positing a plenitude in order to be able to lament about its subsequent loss is well-known. But the interesting thing about the contemporary history of India is that it telescopes a long series of changes and developments in a relatively short span of time. The pace of the process of dematerialization in the realm of food and cuisine is truly breathtaking. Between the 1970s and 1990s, I myself have witnessed the gradual transition from coal and cow-dung operated clumsy, smokey chulas to today’s sleek electric and gas ovens. This must have taken a good 200 years in Europe. And it is well-known that food is the most resilient part of cultural identity. Yet, the kind of flux that the Bengali food culture underwent in the last thirty years is truly astonishing: who could imagine a dhoti-clad Bengali babu, standing in front of the Writers Building, stuffing himself with greasy noodles cooked by some anonymous street-vendor, served on a sal-leaf plate? 103


If “dematerialization” does indeed name the process that is taking place in the realm of food, leading to a preponderance of snacks, ready-to-eats and fast foods of all sorts, including our street-food, its nature and trajectory in India are somewhat different from the West. The absence of an organized retail trade industry and the incredible ability of our so-called “informal sector” to seize opportunities and offer commodities at prices much lower than the organized sector, would lead to a scenario where “dematerialization” (understood usually as a metonymy for monopoly capital and the colonization of everyday life by the forces of commoditization) will, paradoxically, mean a shot in the arm of the informal sector (this has already happened in the cooked food industry in the larger cities of South East Asia). This has also to do with the specificities of the urban Indian palate, especially that of the youth, whose formation I have explored above. The multinational fast food brands aim at creating loyalties among young people first, but the peculiarities of the taste buds of our urban youth predisposed to certain tastes are incompatible with the tasteless, bland food offered by McDonald’s, KFC and others. Price is also an important factor. McDonald’s will never be able to offer the kind of tasty and very cheap street-food available in plenty in most Indian cities, thanks to the “informal sector” and its surprising inventiveness. India’s ability to appropriate other’s food is legendary: western bread has become “pawbhaji” in Indian streets, the metamorphosis of Chinese noodles into Indian “chowmein” has been accompanied with its indigenization through spices, oil and chillies. Nestlé made a valiant attempt to capture an emergent segment with its ready-toeat noodle brand, Maggie. The reason for its failure to catch on has to do with its blandness. Though hygienic and posh, Maggie comes nowhere near the stuff sold by the street vendors. It is doubtful if the Indian tongue, whose proclivity for chilli and spices is well-known, will ever accept the kind of standardized, bland food offered by McDonald’s and others of similar ilk. Who would want to eat a bland burger after tasting a properly made Indian roll? The surveys carried out by the WHO and other international agencies in collaboration with the local bureaucratic organizations like the All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health in the mid-1990s, whose purpose was to regulate and governmentalize street-food, clearly demonstrated that it is impossible to eliminate the small man from the street-food sector of India. This is how the project of empire is deferred, thanks to the resilience and inventiveness of the poor.46 104

4

“DREAM KITSCH”? FOLK ART, INDIGENOUS MEDIA AND “9/11” THE WORK OF PAT IN THE ERA OF ELECTRONIC TRANSMISSION To the Patuas of Naya

“All framing determines an out-of-field [hors-champ]. … In one case, the out-of-field designates that which exists elsewhere, to one side or around; in the other case, the out-of-field testifies to a more disturbing presence, one which cannot even be said to exist, but rather to ‘insist’ or ‘subsist’, a more radical elsewhere, outside homogeneous space and time.” Gilles Deleuze Cinema I: The Movement-Image “No one really dreams any longer of the Blue Flower. Whoever … [does so] must have overslept … The dream has grown gray. The gray coating of dust on things is its best part. Dreams are now a shortcut to banality. Technology consigns the outer image of things to a long farewell … It is then that the hand retrieves this outer cast in dreams and, even as they are slipping away, makes contact with familiar contours. It catches hold of objects at their most threadbare and timeworn point … And which side does an object turn toward dreams? What point is its most decrepit? It is the side worn through by habit and patched with cheap maxims. The side which things turn toward the dream is kitsch.” Walter Benjamin “Art teaches us to look into objects. Folk art and kitsch allow us to look outward from within objects.” Walter Benjamin

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“Made in the USA” If one no longer dreams of the blue flower, what is the stuff of our dreams? Our dreams are “Made in the USA.” I met Madhusudan Chitrakar in a remote village (Naya) in Midnapore (West Bengal, India), in a wayside shack while working as a consultant in a project of Jadavpur University (Calcutta). Madhusudan (age forty) is a traditional patua (painter of traditional scroll paintings called pat), Chitrakar or Patidar by jati (caste) though he can no longer afford to depend solely on his caste-occupation to make a living. The times have changed. His father was a full-time patua, eking out a precarious living, showing pat to villagers. Madhusudan’s wife, Hajra, helps him with his work of “keeping the tradition alive.” His father has lung cancer and is unlikely to live much longer. He had some formal education, he studied up to the 8th standard in the village school, while Madhusudan reads his native Bengali script haltingly. They never had any land. Buying a newspaper is a luxury for Madhusudan. But his father loves reading newspapers, even old ones, which offer him dreams of various belongings—to the nation, to the country and so on. To the extent the newspaper is a luxury (let’s not even think of television), and most people are illiterate anyway, belonging to the “imagined communities” has a price, literally. Not everyone can afford to be a citizen or, for that matter, participate in the so-called “mass-mediated spectacle.” So, there is not much point in foraying into the vast body of literature on the constitutive role of massmedia in shaping the subjectivities of the “consumer-citizens”1 in order to understand Madhusudan’s “Amricaner pat” (his words; if pronounced properly, it should have been “Americaner pat,” meaning the pat about America), painted roughly a year after “11 September”2 and sold to avid foreign tourists looking for exotic souvenirs and the Indian connoisseurs of “folk art” or “popular culture.” This is not to evacuate the embattled ground for representation painstakingly prepared by “cultural studies” over the last three or four decades. I do not want to relegate the lived times of these “simple” people (what Schiller called “the customs of country folk and the primitive world”) to a time before representation. Central to my concern here is the nostalgic slant of the Romantic and Neo-Romantic account, summed up famously in an aphorism of Feuerbach in 1872: “In unknowing man was at home in his dwelling; in knowledge, he is estran ged.”3 By reversing the usual connection between knowledge, representation and certainty, this surprising sentence stands at the crossroads of a 106

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historic disavowal of representation as such. In stating that unknowing fosters belonging, Feuerbach, crystallizing the Romantic critique of Enlightenment, argued not that instrumental knowledge has failed to produce, but that it has overproduced. As a result of this perverse excess, uncertainty has increased and the world is now covered with an inscrutable density of contingent representations. Hence, his yearning for what Hans Blumenberg termed “the enclaves of unknowing”: in the tradition of “historical sociology” inaugurated by Tönnies, the ideal of the closed, local, organic Gemeinschaft of the medieval town as opposed to the open, global and mediated urban Gesellschaft of the modern world. Today, the reach of mass-media everywhere is supposed to testify to the density of representation covering the surface of the earth. What I want to point out, this time against the grain, is that mass-media cannot be taken as a constant function cutting across all historical formations; it possesses different valences in different contexts. Further, the binary opposition between mass-media and folklore, between an unmediated, organic “life” and its “simulated,” “hyperreal” representation(s) in media where it doubles up as the enemy of “true” experience is not of much service in understanding the entangled world(s) we inhabit. Madhusudan (and the other patuas I met) is always on the lookout for new themes. Only the academic babus4 from Calcutta want the arty “traditional,” “authentic” stuff:5 those recursive, dull stories from Manasamangal6 or Ramayana.7 Madhusudan knows that god is dead. I observed that the patuas themselves do not “use” pat: it has no “use-value.” They paste filmi Bollywood pictures or colorful calendars with Islamic themes on the walls of their homes. The same is true for their neighbors and traditional clientele—the Hindu villagers whose gods and goddesses are the subject-matters of traditional pats.8 Nobody “needs” pat any more, except the urban, babu collectors of “folk art” and the discerning, reflexive Euro-American “posttourists.” Madhusudan owns a cheap transistor set and loves listening to the FM radio but he longs for a television—even a black-and-white one would do. And he experiments with new themes, hoping to come across gullible buyers and tourists. It needs to be pointed out in this context that the patua community at Naya is a close-knit one. When a new theme is incorporated in their repertoire, everybody does more or less the same thing. The individual variations are insignificant. In this particular case of the Amricaner pat, it was first conceived and executed by Mantu and Gurupada—two leading patuas of the community. The rest simply followed suit. Patuas are 107


still artisans, notions like “expression” and individual “innovation” are rather foreign to them. If you want a particular story to be rendered into pat, they will have no qualms about doing it. Also, there is no “copyright”: one is entitled to copy other’s works.9 The origin of pat—narrative scroll paintings with ballads—is lost in hoary obscurity. But there is definitive literary evidence to demonstrate that pat as a practice existed during the time of Buddha. As for the technique of narration, the Bengali pat is said to be “distinctly reminiscent of… the Buddhist narrative art … in the stone relief of Sanchi, Bharhuth, Bodh Gaya, and Amarabati… and… the mural paintings of Ajanta [sixth century BCE].”10 Pat was revived as Bengal’s “living national art” by Gurusaday Dutt, ICS (a covenanted officer of the elite colonial bureaucracy), the cultural nationalist and revivalist, during the 1930s as part of Bengali cultural (re)awakening.11 Pat is a performance—members of the Chitrakar or Patua caste exhibited their pat to their neighbors, receiving cash or rice in exchange. This castebased system of reciprocity (jajmani) atrophied long ago but pat continued to hold sway, especially in remote rural areas, at least until the 1980s. As I found out, it was the arrival of the cassette culture, television (in relatively affluent rural households) and video-parlors, which saw to the end of pat as an indigenous media. Many patuas recalled with nostalgia that, as children, they used to accompany their fathers and uncles to fairs and festivals where pat was shown to the eager rural crowds. Out of the five or six districts of West Bengal where there were sizable patua populations, only a few clusters have survived in the Midnapore and Beerbhoom districts, thanks to the emergence of an urban market, foreign buyers and the occasional patronage of the government.12 For all practical purposes, pat has been reduced to just pictures, the performative dimension being almost completely lost. In those days when pat partly served as a kind of local newspaper, there was a class of pat called “Kaliyug Pat” where contemporary (mostly sensational) events were depicted. Many of the surviving Kalighat Pats are about contemporary events.13 However, Madhusudan painted his Amricaner pat with foreign buyers in mind, who lapped it up, paying hard cash for this “intercultural” marvel. At the time of my interaction with Madhusudan (2004–5), apart from half a dozen individual foreign buyers, the Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, USA) had purchased an Amricaner Pat through a Calcutta middleman. Madhusudan showed me the photocopies of correspondence between the museum authorities and the middleman. The museum requested the middleman to provide them with an “indigenous” 108

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explanation of the pat and the middleman promptly cooked up a slightly “primitive” version of the standard story of the 9/11 incident and sent it to them in writing. So, when the image of the crumbling Twin Towers, carried by the circuit of global flows—“mediascape,” “touristscape,” etc.—reaches its locale in an “ethnic” garb, a hermeneutic circle seems to be completed.14 Yet, as soon as we look closely, this “recognition,” giving rise to what Baudrillard calls the moment of “ecstasy” arising out of a perfect communication characteristic of “post-modern,” “post-spectacle” system, seems a little premature.15 The Baudrillardian vision of late capitalism is a regime of pure homogeneity in which all resistance to instrumental control has disappeared and all heterogeneity has been submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment and exchange: any system can be interfaced with any other. I argue that the Amricaner pat, far from signifying such an imaginary perfection, is emblematic of stress—the privileged pathology affecting the world-system today. For, the Amricaner pat, pace Appadurai, is not just a conceit fabricated by the global image machines: it is less or more, as I hope to demonstrate in this chapter. What passes for the Global today are phenomena strictly localized in the North; the Global is no more than an inflated local. This is true not only of the MNCs and McDonald’s, but also of information, especially after “11 September.”16 However, mine is not a claim for the agency of some resurgent, lurid “local.” What I wish to point out is that the coding of a message may not, necessarily, control its reception: encoding and decoding are separate and autonomous processes. Even in this era of “deterritorialized,” “simulated” images, generated by what Armand Mattelart called “International Image Markets,” there remains the agentive moment of decoding.17 It is now incumbent upon me to demonstrate this. My interactions with Madhusudan and his neighbors reveal that the immediate incitement to this pat was a jatra performance in the locality called America Jvalche (America is burning) by a Calcutta troupe called Digvijayi Opera in the aftermath of “11 September.” It staged the crash on the World Trade Center building as a spectacle, using models, gunpowder and trompe l’oeil techniques.18 Jatra is an age-old indigenous performance tradition known for its brand of cheap melodrama, droll theatricality and flat, black and white depictions.19 Far from declining, the jatra style has permeated the whole gamut of popular performances in Bengal, from popular cinema to television soaps. These have become celluloid or televised jatras of sorts. Apart from the jatra, other 109


bits of information also went into the making of the pat. The ballad (supposed to accompany the gradual unfolding of the pat scroll) inventories these (see the Appendix for a rough translation of the ballad). It demonstrates the palimpsest character and heterogeneous nature of this information. These came from word of mouth and face-to-face interaction. Yet, this face-to-face milieu—neighborhood—cannot be posited in a way such that the impact of mass-media can be measured against it. Madhusudan had a rather diffuse awareness of the hardening of western attitude toward Islam, was familiar with the term Taliban, but had little awareness of the threat posed by the clash of the two fundamentalisms. These do not simply add up to the coherence of a discourse on terrorism, which is not simply or even mainly a story of rivalry between Bush and Laden acted out on an epic scale. Madhusudan’s version of 9/11 runs as follows. Once upon a time, there were two grandees called Bush and Laden who were good friends. One day, Bush made an off-the-cuff snide comment about Laden, which deeply upset him. Instead of reacting immediately, he went on a secret mission to Afghanistan. The pat then goes on to depict Laden’s clandestine preparations involving the bizarre ritual of Taliban terrorists drinking the blood of a slain dog and taking an oath of allegiance to Laden. In due course, the Taliban terrorists land up in the USA and the crash on the World Trade Center building takes place, causing massive casualties. Gradually terrorism spreads all over the world, including Calcutta, where two cops were gunned down in front of the United States Information Services building (by local mafia, and this event is unconnected to global terrorism). Somewhat inconclusively, the ballad ends with a call for peace but it is not clear who gave this call or how it is to be enforced. The visual, on the other hand, ends with Laden’s entry into the caves of Torabora in Afghanistan. The key to the meaning of the pat lies in the very first line of the ballad which states that the World Trade Center crash is an ajab event. The Bengali word ajab, derived from the ancient Arabic word aja’ib, means “marvelous.” The ajab is the site of excess, not unreal but super-real, challenging the quotidian regime of judgment and taste. Medieval Arabic and Indo-Islamic travelogues and other similar genres were authorized by an aesthetic of the marvelous, foregrounded in a different theory of the relation between language and “reality.” The patuas are subaltern Muslims occupying a position in between the two communities (the Hindus and the Muslims). While they practice Islam and go to the mosque, they also abide by typically Hindu jati (caste) restrictions and everyone has two names, one Islamic and 110

Plate A1

Plate A2

Plate A3

Plate A4

Plate A5

Plate A6

Plate A7

Plate A8

Plate B1

Plate B2

Plate B3

Plate B4

Plate B5

Plate B6

Plate B7

Plate B8

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another Hindu. Their traditional caste occupation is painting and depicting the images of the Hindu gods and goddesses in pat as well as in other mediums meant for ritual use (clay dolls and earthen saras). However, my point about the popular Bengali ajab can be made quite plainly by citing subaltern chapbooks sold on Calcutta pavements entitled “Biswer Ajab Khabar” containing obscure and fantastic information about the “marvels” of the world.20 The World Trade Center crash qua ajab is thus conceived as happening in a register which is radically different from the mundane and the quotidian. Shall I say it happened as if in a dream?

9/11 as Bengali Folklore Let us give Madhusudan a hearing. His story of the Bush-Laden conflict is highly colored by the jatra which incorporated some subsidiary narratives as props to support the main one about the 9/11 crash. In fact, the jatra was performed on three different stages simultaneously—two of these being subsidiaries, while the spectacle of the World Trade Center crash took place on the main or the central one (the jatra people use the term “cyclorama” to describe this system of multiple narration involving more than one stage). One of the subsidiary narratives woven into the main one was about the youngest son of the Chaudhuries—a rich Zamindar family of Sonarpur (a rural suburb of Calcutta). This son, like many of his ilk, went to the USA for higher studies. Before going abroad, he promised to his parents as well his fiancée that in due course he would come back to the country and undergo a proper desi wedding. Also, he vowed not to indulge in excesses such as sex, alcohol and other sinful pleasures offered by the affluent West. Exactly the opposite happened: he immersed himself in carnal pleasures, forgot all about his girl and never called his parents. The story of the youngest son of the Chaudhuries who perished in the World Trade Center crash is just one motif in the larger narrative of the increasing sinfulness of the world—a familiar motif in the puranic (Hindu mythological) grand-narrative deeply ingrained in the Indian mind. According to the puranic eschatology, there are four epochs in human history and the passing of each signifies progressive and cumulative pollution of the world. The last of these eras is kaliyug (the present is always located in kaliyug) when the earth is so full of sin and strife that its destruction becomes imminent. It is only after a grand and spectacular destruction (parlaya) that it would be possible to make a fresh start from a clean slate. I did not get the opportunity of watching the 111


jatra myself (by the time I met Madhusudan, it ceased to be a part of the repertoire of the Digvijayi Opera), but hearing him talking about his somewhat hazy recollection of the narrative of the jatra, I gather that it framed the 9/11 crash in a way—grounding it in various subsidiary narratives—such that the World Trade Center crash appears as a kind of grand finale, symptomatic of the imminent end of the kaliyug: a sign of the times to come. As for the other sources of information about 9/11, Madhusudan confessed that he did not register its importance when he heard the news on the radio on the morning of 12 September. He (as he now recollects) heard people casually discussing the event (published in all Bengali newspapers) in tea-shop Addas in the bazaar he frequents. He recollects that Vivekananda Maity, a local dada, was discussing the event with his clique when Madhusudan was sitting on a nearby bench, sipping tea. However he had no proper understanding of the significance of 9/11. He knows little about the wider world and international politics. He chuckled in disbelief when I told him that developments in the wider world affect his life and living conditions. He thinks that he and his likes are too insignificant to figure in rajniti—the blanket Bengali word for not just party politics but, more generally, for events and developments at large. When I chose as my exemplar the prices of everyday necessities like rice or onions (the price of onions skyrocketed a few years ago because of the then BJP government’s unwillingness to import onions in the face of a bad harvest), he seemed to concede my point. However, I found it quite difficult to explain to him the “worldhistorical” significance of 9/11 and its repercussion on the configuration of forces in the world today. The gaps in his understanding became quite blatant when he tried to explain the storyline of the pat. At the time I met him, he had two 9/11 pats ready for sale. I photographed both (see pictures numbered A1–A8 and B1–B8). Minor variations notwithstanding, these are more or less the same. The first frame of the first pat (A1) depicts Bush and Laden talking on mobile phone as friends. The second and the third (A2 and A3 respectively) are supposed to depict UN meetings and deliberations among various nations about the consequences of a sudden hiatus between Bush and Laden. Madhusudan was unable to explain the reason behind this sudden hiatus. He lamely points out that the conflict might be the result of some off-the-cuff comment of Bush during the phone conversation which Laden found deeply upsetting or offensive. However, Madhusudan is convinced 112

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that before this fall-out, Bush and Laden were on good terms and used to call each other quite often. Madhusudan did not know anything about the Gulf War or Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Frame 4 (A4) depicts the clandestine preparation of Laden and his followers somewhere in Afghanistan. Laden makes them drink the blood of a slain dog and take an oath of allegiance. Muslims are supposed to hate dogs and drinking the blood of a dog is a sacrilege (haram). According to folk Bengali Muslim belief, the idea behind making a Muslim drink a dog’s blood while taking an oath is that the drinker is condemned to redeem himself of the sacrilege by keeping the vow. Frame 5 (A5) depicts the rogue aeroplane approaching the World Trade Center. Frame 6 (A6) depicts the crash. Frame 7 (A7) depicts the devastation after the crash, including TV journalists video-recording the destruction and the debris. Frame 8 (A8) shows Laden’s entry into the cave of Torabora on horseback after the US army invaded Afghanistan. I was in touch with Madhusudan till the end of 2004 and he did not seem to be interested in the subsequent events, such as the invasion of Iraq. The narrative of global terrorism is thus reabsorbed in the traditional fairy-tale narrative of pat and its visual repertoire. This comes across clearly from the inspection of the visual: the predominance of non-mimetic elements, the over-all impression of frontality, the suppression of depth, the divisions of pictorial space, the linear application of colors, the absence of perspective, of foreshortening, of cast-shadows, of chiaroscuro, the decorative motifs deliberately subverting the reality-effect, etc. The emphasis on detail and decoration and the intricately painted border, subtly shifts attention away from the effects of verisimilitude (more on this later). The entranced viewer is within the narrative before he knows it. The message is clear: it is a “picture,” not a mimetic representation of “reality.”

Bad Folk Art The Indian narrative painting tradition(s)—what the art critic Gulammohammed Sheikh calls the “divyakatha” tradition—operates on the basis of a clear-cut “distinction of the physical world of mortals from that of the devas,” demarcating “the worlds of tangible reality and the region of the fabulous [alukika].”21 This is clearly discernible from the scales in which the figures are drawn. In Amricaner pat, the ordinary mortals are drawn in proportionate scale (in relation to the environment in which they appear), while the portrayal of larger-than-life figures like Laden and Bush—the 113


two main protagonists of the story—are done in dimensions quite opposed to the norm of proportionate scale. In the very first frame (A1), both Bush and Laden are depicted in ways which go on to show their larger-than-life stature as epic heroes. While their companions appear smaller in size, the background in which they are set (domed mosque for Laden and domed building for Bush) seems to suggest a kind of panoramic vista—a vast distance in clear visibility that the naked eye would not be able to encompass in a single glance under normal circumstances. This suggestion of vast space, against which the two figures are framed, is clearly a device for uplifting and denormalizing them in the viewers’ eyes. The depiction of the Twin Towers—used here as a kind of visual metaphor separating the two heroes—is clearly indicative of the fact that this is not “reality” in the form of life observed. It is this positioning that enables the two figures—looking frontally at the viewers but seated somewhat obliquely in a position from which it is normally not possible to gaze frontally—to “give” darshan to potential beholders.22 Frames in pat are not meant to convey the impression of a static “arrested movement” as in photographs or in painted pictures. Each frame garners several points of viewing to open upwards from the bottom of the picture to the distant horizon at the top. This, Sheikh observes, is achieved by successive lifting of the picture plains corresponding to the figure placed upon them at different operational levels. Designed as a gradually unfolding rather than a static backdrop… the vast area it encompassed made it imperative for the viewer to discover it by tracking its spaces along with the figure—in an extended viewing in time, so that the narrative taking place in such spaces, as seemingly focused on a single event in effect incorporate[s] several movements, quite evidently using the devices of continuous narration. While this method of spatial articulation invented continuously shifting horizon lines on a single plane, its true achievement lay in linking the mobile vision in imperceptible continuum.23

We should also note here that pat as a form—the narrative as well as the visual—resists narrative historicity: the process of locating a tale in a particular time and place. The notion of historicity questions the relevance of continuous narration and the co-existence of multiple events taking place on a single plane. But, it would now seem, with the episodic representation of a series of (contemporary) events in one pat, that pat has finally entered the time of history and that of the chronicle. But this judgment is definitely premature for, in our pat, there are various formal devices to subvert the tenor of a historical worldliness into what Sheikh calls, quite aptly, “a nazar” 114

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or “a vision.”24 One of these is the continuously running and intricately decorated border within which the narrative unfolds. Art-historians have commented on the epochal significance of the frame in the evolution of the visual economy of painting, but the frame is not the same thing as a wellpronounced border.25 Frame is something added-on: it is external to the picture and belongs to the space of the observer rather than to the space of representation. The frame thus acts as a kind of boundary or enclosure within which the work of representation takes place. But the frame is not just an enclosure, it is also a closure. Louis Marin observes: [T]o represent signifies to present oneself representing something else. Every representation… thus comprises two dimensions… first, reflexive—to present oneself— and second, transitive—to represent something. These two dimensions are… what contemporary semantics… conceptualized as the opacity and transparency of the representational sign. It was in exploring these two dimensions—subject-effect reflexivity and object-effect transitivity—in… The Port-Royal Logic… that I came across the frame. The frame, its operators and processes of framing and framework, and their figures, are among the mechanisms of which any representation can avail itself to present itself—its own function, its functioning, even its functionality as representation. …Let us recall… from oblivion… three mechanisms of the presentation of representation in painting…—the background, the field, and the frame, three mechanisms which… constitute the general framing of representation, its closure….26

Then Marin elucidates the constitutive role of the frame in the genesis of the institution of painting in the modern West: [A]n indispensable parergon, a constitutive supplement… [t]he frame renders the work autonomous in visible space; it puts representation into a state of exclusive presence; it faithfully defines the conditions of visual reception and of the contemplation of representation as such…. [The visible world as] the mercurial play of palpable diversity… is transformed by the frame into an opposition where representation identifies itself as such through an exclusion of any other object from the field of sight. Through the frame, the picture is never simply one thing to be seen among many; it becomes the object of contemplation. … The world here is entirely content, outside of which there is nothing to contemplate. … There is little point in adding that this operation of the frame and of framing is itself sanctioned by powers, inflected by institutions, marked by the urgencies of economic, social and ideological determination.27

Thus, the frame effects an “ontological cut” between the inside and the outside. In Derrida’s discussion, the parergon (par, around; ergon, the work) is a Möbius-like boundary—a frame marking what is inside the work but, 115


paradoxically, demarcating its outside in order to constitute what it contains. He writes: Parerga have a thickness, a surface which separates them not only… from the integral inside, from the body proper of the ergon, but also from the outside, from the wall on which the painting is hung… from the whole field of historical, economic, political inscription in which the drive to signature is produced… No “theory,” no “practice,” no “theoretical practice” can intervene effectively in this field if it does not… bear on the frame, which is the decisive structure of what is at stake, the invisible limit to (between) the interiority of meaning (put under shelter by the whole hermeneuticist, semioticist, phenomenological, and formalist tradition) and (to) all the empiricisms of the extrinsic which, incapable of either seeing or reading, miss the question completely.28

While Marin’s “frame” is conceived narrowly in art-historical terms and his semiotic reading of art-works is strongly inflected by a mimetic view of art, Derrida’s idea of frame as “the invisible limit to…the interiority of meaning” opens up a vast field unanticipated in traditional art-history. He writes: Hence one must know… how to determine the intrinsic—what is framed—and know what one is excluding as frame and outside-the-frame. We are thus already at the unlocatable center of the problem. And when Kant replies to our question: “What is a frame?” by saying: it’s a parergon, a hybrid of outside and inside, but a hybrid which is not a mixture or half-measure, an outside which is called to the inside of the inside in order to constitute it as an inside.29

We need to note here that in the (western) post-Renaissance visual culture, a very specific relationship between the “inside” and the “outside” was constituted and reinforced through founding acts like Alberti’s invention of the single-point perspective and its concomitant symbolic system (“Symbolic Form,” to borrow Panofsky’s well-known epithet inflected with the Neo-Kantianism of the famed Marburg school)30 in the fifteenth century, the dissemination of the Camera Obscura as an apparatus for drawing and painting in the seventeenth century, the kind of “metaphysics of interiority” constituting the “observing subject” connected with mid-nineteenth century optical systems of the stereoscope and phenakistoscope of which Jonathan Crary talks in his benchmark Techniques of the Observer 31 and, finally, the invention of photography, film, video and the computer screen in the twentieth century. So what is this relationship and how to characterize it? A great merit of the late Anne Friedberg’s landmark book, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, is that it demonstrates, with contextual and 116

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historical detail, the creeping centrality of the “window” understood as the frame of vision and its inexorable power in our lives. The everyday frames through which we see things—the “material” frames of movie screens, of television sets, computer screens, cell phone screens—provide compelling evidence of the dominance of the “window” as frame and its visual system. Friedberg brilliantly demonstrates that the virtual window has been the most successful single tool for mimesis, command, and control in the history of western civilization. It all began with Alberti in 1435 when in his De pictura, he famously instructed the painter to “regard” the rectangular frame of the painting as an open window. Alberti used the window as a metaphor for the frame— the relation of a fixed viewer to a framed view—and not as a “transparent” “window on the world” as has often been suggested. Alberti’s well-known “perspectival paradigm”32 may have met its end on the computer desktop where the “window” includes multiple perspectives within a single frame, but as computer “users” we still sit immobile in front of the flat, framed virtual space of the computer screen. “The frame becomes the threshold— the liminal site—of tensions between the immobility of a spectator/viewer/ user and the mobility of images seen through the mediated ‘windows’ of film, television, and computer screens. But the frame also separates the materiality of spectatorial space from the virtual immateriality of spaces seen within its boundaries.”33 Drawing from Wittgenstein’s incisive epigram, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world,” Friedberg writes: “the limits and multiplicities of our frames of vision determine the boundaries and multiplicities of our world. As the beholders of multiscreen ‘windows,’ we now receive images… in spatially and temporally fractured frames. This new space of mediated vision is post-Cartesian, post-perspectival, post-cinematic, and post-televisual, and yet remains within the delimited bounds of a frame and seen on a screen.”34 The word virtual (in “virtual window”) serves to distinguish between any representation or appearance that appears functionally or effectively but not formally of the same materiality as what it represents. “Virtual images have a materiality and reality but of a different kind, a second-order materiality, liminally immaterial. … [T]he virtuality of the image does not imply direct mimesis, but a transfer… from one plane of meaning and appearance to another.”35 Friedberg’s thesis is that the story of western visual culture “from Alberti to Microsoft” is largely a story of entrapment of vision—the word understood in its widest sense—in the “frame” of the “virtual window.” 117


She writes: Alberti’s… window served to frame the geometric, geophysical world… on the flat framed plane of representation. … [It] provided us with a Renaissance root for a “windowed elsewhere”—a virtual space that exists on the virtual plane of representation. … [In] [t]he screens of the twenty-first century… [t]he window’s metaphoric boundary is no longer the singular frame of perspective—as beholders of multiple screen “windows,” we now see the world in spatially and temporally fractured frames, through “virtual windows” that rely more on the multiple and the simultaneous than on the singular and the sequential. Meanwhile, the next generation… are transfixed in front of screens… They are living deep in their own virtually rendered elsewheres, and yet, like the generations before them, they sit in front of the frame of a window… [which] makes the intransigence of the frame a chilling constant, one with inexorable cultural power.36

But the “mobilized and virtual gaze”… is not… the global norm.37 … Which technologies will break through the frame and have us climb through the virtual window? And which will have us stay fixed—nose to the glass…—in front of the windows, caught in the hold of an image, framed in display?38 In the West, the “virtual window” understood as the frame, has engendered a certain relationship between the “inside” and the “outside,” as it were, and, in that process, constituted the inside qua “inside” and the outside qua “outside.” But there are other ways of negotiating this relationship—other insides and other outsides, so to speak. For example, what is the “inside” and what is the “outside” of the pat? How does the visual culture in which pat is embedded construct its frame? In our Amricaner pat, with its elaborate border consisting of figurative motifs whose function, apparently, is purely decorative, the “plastic space” is inclusive of the borderframe.39 In contradistinction to the (material) frame which is added after the picture is made and which we are instructed to neglect, relegating it to a certain institutionalized invisibility, the elaborate border of our pat is already a part of the plastic space (the border is added linearly from top to bottom as the vertical scrolls are being created). Thus, the relationship between the frame and what it (en)frames or encloses is not framed through a fiction of anteriority and deferral (as in easel painting). Unlike so many photographs or pictures of “9/11,” our pat does not even seek to represent an “event” through verisimilitude whose facticity is said to be beyond or before representation. As is well-known, ancient Romans used to have false windows and doors painted with views of the outside world in order to fool the gullible. There 118

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is this well-know story of rivalry over who is a greater painter resulting in a competition between the Greek painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius (Aristotle’s contemporaries), reported by Pliny the Elder. When Zeuxis unveiled his painting of grapes, birds flew down from the sky to peck at them. Zeuxis then asked Parrhasius to pull aside the curtain from his painting, only for Parrhasius to reveal the curtain itself was a painting, and Zeuxis was forced to concede defeat. Thus, the idea of the image in antiquity had nothing to do with the virtual: the words we now translate as “image” (Greek eikon and Latin imago) must be understood, as the commentators (Jean-Pierre Vernant, e.g.) never tire of telling us, not as any material picture, but as an abstract, spiritual “like.” The regular addition, after “image,” of the phrase “and likeness.” (Greek homoioos and Latin similitude) means that “image” is to be understood not as “picture” but as “likeness,” a matter of spiritual similarity. The awareness of image as an artifice, as something which cannot be seen as such without a paradoxical trick of consciousness, an ability to see something as “there” and “not there” at the same time (virtual), is a much later phenomenon whose inception coincides, more or less, with the emergence of the Cartesian-Kantian “subject” and what Heidegger calls “The Age of the World Picture.” In Alberti’s treatise, the subject to be painted was “historia”—narratives of great events and classical heroes. The “window” metaphor was deployed as a figure for the frame, it did not mean a mimetic rendition of what one would see out of an architectural window, looking onto the real world. But Alberti did place the human observer or spectator at the center of his problematic: the human was in a central position as a spectator in front of a pictorial world but was also the measure of that world (literally). The painter’s position was also to be the position of the viewer, framing and delimiting the image. The registration of the understanding of picture as representation, in the sense Marin attributes it, borrowing his notion sign from the Port Royale logicians, is found in Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1658). As Foucault elucidates: “[I]n this painting by Velázquez… representation undertakes to represent itself here in all its elements… [R]epresentation, freed finally from the relation that was impeding it, can offer itself as representation in its pure form.”40 From then on, writes Sheikh, “[t]he shadow of the artist hovered over every illusionistic [representationalist] picture like a ghost, asserting that the painting was his—and no one else’s—view taken from a particular point in time and space.”41 Las Meninas dramatically captured this new sense of illusionism: one has to stand at a particular spot at some distance from the 119


canvas in order to appreciate its uniqueness. This spot is nothing other than the point from where the painter himself took the view. As one stands at that point and looks in the picture, the painter [Velázquez] looks straight into the viewer’s eyes. It is this coincidence of the two gazes which spells out the larger “truth” of modern vision: seeing is essentially a matter of “point of view.” As space as such becomes contingent on viewpoint (“It is, therefore, solely from a human standpoint that we can speak of space”—Kant was to state near the opening of the Critique of Pure Reason), the vestiges of an absolute, deep space, of an order located in places themselves (think of the medieval Mappa Mundi), lost ground.42 In the pre-modern deep space, pictorial or otherwise, humans were placed alongside other created things, to be viewed by an omnivoyant God. The viewer, to reiterate, was thus not a subject standing before a picture—the picture was not a (virtual) “window” to the world.43 In pre-modern Indian art, the viewer is not considered as a witness but as an active participant in the realization of the image. Asserting that “[for Mughal paintings] the process of negotiating a figure-space construct as well as color was metaphoric,” Sheikh advances the claim that Indian paintings should be understood through the “gestalt of an incomplete work of art”— image-as-lack. To ground this idea of the image as lack, we need to acquaint ourselves with the wider Indian visual culture. It was a culture of disposability (as opposed to the aura of “uniqueness” of the work of art in Europe) in which “art” (including sculpture) circulated in India. Artworks were seen to be living while in usage: hence periodic repainting or remaking formed part of their basic raison d’être. Floor painting at the doorstep or murals on cow-dung walls meant continual effacement and ritual repainting, daily or seasonally. A Pabuj[i] phad when worn out is given a ritual funerary immersion in a river or a lake. An overused manuscript would make room for replacement by another of its kind. So the survival of originals is more out of accident rather than through an intent to conserve these for posterity. The visual culture that artists grew up in was presumably as ephemeral and regenerative as the painted picture.44 Until recently, Bengali pats were not meant to be preserved and were simply thrown away when worn out. Apart from disposability, the other things to note about Indian visual culture are: the collective nature of the work (several artists would collaborate on a single picture—this is still true for pat because the whole family participates in its making); the absence of the idea of authorship and the dependence of the image on literary, oral and 120

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various performative traditions (calligraphy, story-telling, dance, music, traditional theatre and so on). Painting, despite the influences exerted by European prints on the master craftsmen in the Mughal courts of Jahangir and Shahjahan (it was from this period that we get to hear the names of the individual ustads), never really attained the stature of an independent and autonomous activity, as in post-Renaissance Europe. The net result of all these was that, “[A] painting remained partially empty until the catalytic eye of an informed viewer inhabited/completed it.”45 This is brought out by various characteristic features shared by “high” as well as “low” Indian art: the tendency of not portraying emotions in the faces of characters, a predilection for portraying human images (in nonreligious settings) in profile, the accent on primary colors while the intermediaries are left to the viewer’s mind. Illusionism was unsuitable for most Indian paintings also because these are mostly outdoor visions. The physical practices of image-viewing in India—in manuscript illustrations, in murals, in scrolls, in icons painted on various media meant for darshanic viewing and in muraqquas—ruled out the convention of hanging framed pictures on the wall. As a result, the process of viewing pictures differs considerably: the Indian images prompt reading across rather than looking into the pictorial field. While the murals indicate a scanning method corresponding to the successive opening of spatial units as the viewer walks,46 scrolls unfold in time. In Bengali pat, the patua guides the viewer with the help of a stick which works as a kind of indicator connecting the visual of the pat with the gradual unfolding of the story narrated in the ballad. Sheikh is right in asserting that “[in] such practices the prolonged sequence of time involved in apprising the pictorial space is antithetical to the notion to which illusionism so faithfully adheres, of arresting a climatic moment.” Thus, the picture is not something autonomous—an enframed, self-enclosed, selfreferential, unproblematic presence—its material frame acting as some kind of a “pimp” (Degas). The absence of “frame” in traditional Indian painting—the word understood literally as well as metaphorically—means that there is no radical discontinuity, no “ontological cut,” between the world and the painted surface. Indian pictures are not privileged re-presentations of the world, but devices to participate in it. The proof of this is that the picture or an idol (murti) remains radically incomplete and devoid of life until and unless a narrator (e.g., the patua exhibiting his pat to the audience) connects it with a story or a priest “gives life” (pranpratishtha) to an idol by reciting mantra. The idol/art has no autonomous status: when not 121


in use, it lapses into its mute materiality, cut off from the animated world around it. So, if our Amricaner pat cannot be assimilated readily to the representational economy underlying the image of “9/11” disseminated by metropolitan media whose endless proliferation seems to accrue a hermeneutic surplus in the form of a greater sense of presence, if it is symptomatic of the existence of another world, of another worlding which, in Deleuze’s words, is a “radical elsewhere,” an “hors-champ” (“out-of-the-field”), testifying to a disturbing presence,47 should we then try to recycle the thesis of a “resistant” local asserting itself against the global hegemony of western imagemachines? Let us postpone our deliberation for a minute and try to think through another variant of the global/local binary. If there is an a priori vector of resistance ingrained in the local, what kind of theorization endorses this putative intransigence? Today, an influential body of thought endorses a “resistant” local in the name of the “everyday,” in the name of “dwelling,” “habitation” and so on. Heidegger wrote that “the public”— meaning the political, as mediated by media and representation—“obscures everything.” The Heideggerian take on the everyday in the name of “dwelling” is just one variant of a well-entrenched notion, which opposes the “particularism” of the everyday to the “universality” of the public realm. For Agnes Heller (a disciple of Arendt), whose account of the everyday both demonstrates its strength as well its dangers, the everyday is the realm of an alienation from species-being, expressed in class antagonism, private property, and the division of labor. Meanwhile, the politics of the everyday is that of a struggle to liberate the particularist masses into a realm of universality.48 In a peculiar reversal, in certain variants of postcolonial theory, this very anthropomorphism of the everyday—its immediacy, its narrativity, the fact that it is structured by the principles of economy and repetition49—is turned into signs of “resistance”—making it inherently resilient to the technologization and instrumentalization of lifeworld(s) under late capitalism. Yet, meta-language always accompanies language in use: it is utter nonsense to say that reflexivity is wholly absent from the everyday, that it is solely a preserve of the pre-reflexive and the immediate. And more ominously, as recent scholarship shows, the arithmomorphic “universals”—scientific, technical or philosophical rationalities—are permeated by anthropomorphism and narrative.50 Which is to say, the privilege accorded to the everyday and the “local” on the ground of their supposed immediacy, 122

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is largely a self-deception.51 It is at this point that Benjamin’s pioneering attempt to think through a “magic” or “myth” of the modern—collapsing the apparently irreconcilable binaries like the beckoning of the hi-tech and the enchantment of the primitive fetish—assumes a strategic significance.52

Dream Kitsch The myth of an originary and centered cosmos, of a self-enclosed “universe of recognition,” still persists in ethnology, as exemplified by Marc Augé’s recent study of the role of dream and myths in the age of satellite TV and the internet.53 The working of myth is presented as a source of creativity in “traditional” societies whereas the consequence of the invasion of the modern everyday by mass-media is shown to be destructive and disastrous. The invasion of “reality” by fictions fabricated by media and its images breaks down the time-honored, firm line of demarcation between ground reality and myth or dreams. We are not only losing our sense of reality, but also our ability to create those “fictions” (myth, collective memory and so on) which have for so long sustained our collective sense of identity. My analysis of the humble Bengali Amricaner pat goes on to show that the meeting of these two different narrative logics—that of the hi-tech and folklore, of kitsch and dream, of mass-media and myth—does not necessarily call for the deployment of the topos of a now and a then. The lived, real world has never confirmed this model of a universal rupture. Augé’s distinction between a fiction that is “fabricated” by media and a primordial, immediate “reality,” between likeness and presence, does not simply hold because what he calls “reality” is also a “fiction” in some sense: our worldly experiences are inescapably anthropomorphic and structured by narrative.54 It is far more productive, in my view, to think in terms of a more flexible logic of negotiation between mass-media and what remains today of the vernacular and the folk. For all his naïveté of the opposition of “good” myth to “bad” mass-media, Augé’s work underscores the need to think through the notion of “dream” as a form of thought and the centrality of dreaming in the human. What if we think in terms of dream-logic in negotiating a relationship between “9/11” and what Madhusudan makes of it—as it is churned through an image industry whose range extends from The New York Times and CNN to our own Digvijayi Opera?55 Recall here Freud’s analysis of the palimpsest nature of dream-image resulting from censorship, distortions, displacements, condensations, over-determinations and such 123


like—all characterized by an instability of energy cathexes. The conventional reading of Freud’s dream theory maintains a rigid distinction between a prior presence and its re-presentation in dream. And yet, as we have seen, 9/11 understood as an ur-presence has no privilege in Amricaner pat. It is about “9/11” and simultaneously, it is not wholly or even mainly about the events of 9/11. Consequently, if we include the Amricaner pat in the inventory of representations occasioned by the event, then “9/11” would become semantically so inflated, incorporating so diverse a range of meanings that it would lose all specificity: it would mean nothing at all. What Amricaner pat is to “9/11,” the Freudian dream image is to “reality.” “Reality” here refers not to a prior presence (as Lacanian readings of Freud have amply demonstrated),56 but to representations which refer, in turn, to other representations. It follows that the Amricaner pat has another history, another trajectory which is not erased, annulled or nullified by its “contamination” with mass-media and the global image industry. For better or worse, we live in a heterogeneous but entangled world. Globalization, far from homogenizing the irreducible plurality of the world(s) we inhabit, brings these into a relationship of tension with each other. The Amricaner pat has found a place in some US museums and I am writing a paper on it to go into a book on “globalization.” Thus these worlds clash with each other in open contradiction. This book is about the intensities and the energies released by this clash, which is ongoingly transforming the moral ground of our life together in this planet. I want to conclude here by going back to where I began: Benjamin’s early (1925) essay, Dream Kitsch, from which I cited a few lines to serve as an epigram for these jottings. As is well-known, this essay marks the beginning of Benjamin’s negotiations with Surrealism, especially with Aragon’s acclaimed novel, Le Paysan de Paris.57 There, in the modern everyday of big cities, banal commodities are shown to be saturated with the marvellous, a lyrically intense dream-world in which arises the basis for a “mythology of the modern.” The arcades there appear as “places where men go calmly about their mysterious lives and in which a profound religion is gradually taking shape. These sites are not yet inhabited by a divinity. It is forming there, a new godhead precipitating in these re-creations of Ephesus….”58 Benjamin’s appreciation of Aragon did not mean a passive acquiescence of this “dream world”; he wrote: “whereas Aragon persists within the realm of dream… [my] concern is to find the constellation of awakening. While in Aragon there remains an impressionistic element, namely mythology… here it is a 124

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question of the dissolution of ‘mythology’ into the space of history.”59 In fact, the entire argument of his “Dream Kitsch” essay is that the inter-penetration of the two realms (dream and history, myth and kitsch, lyricism and banality) is a historically specific phenomenon peculiar to late capitalism. Kitsch—the banal by-products of mass-culture resulting from eccentric, global circulation of things, are assimilated into dreams, thereby obscuring the oneiric “blue horizon” of the Neo-Romantics (the Surrealists) with a “grey coating of dust.” The dream does not open up a vista on the archaic as a promised horizon of lyrical escape, but is already saturated with the mundane objects of the modern everyday life. Further, in Benjamin’s “profane illumination” of dreams, kitsch (not in Clement Greenberg’s sense of sentimental, low-brow “art,” but as useless, outmoded artifacts, whose place in the prevailing regime of value is ambiguous) and the so-called “folk art” plays a special role. He wrote in “Several Points on Folk Art” that whereas “art teaches us to see into things,” “folk art and kitsch allow us to look out through things.” Thus, thinking through “folk art,” which can exist today only as kitsch, as some kind of a cultural detritus, can be a modest beginning towards a certain politicalization of things. Instead of aestheticizing pat, instead of aestheticizing the violence erupting out of the clash of worlds implicated in bringing pat under the exhibitionary (and tourist) gaze of metropolitan display qua ethnic painting, as has often been done in the recent past in London, Paris, New York and other “global” sites, we need to politicize the aesthetic. Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort…!

Appendix Translation of the ballad accompanying Amricaner pat: The plane crash in America is an ajab event. George Bush laments, O Laden! How deceptive you are! You caused such great damages. Oh God, tell us how to wipe our tears and grieve! The plane crash in America is an ajab event. Now let us lend our ears to Laden and his followers. He is saying: the enemy is about to get me, I’ll have to run for my life. O Khuda, everybody is blaming me! The plane crash in America is an ajab event. Bush is imploring the citizens of all countries: find us a way to capture Laden. Some say, it’s not Laden, it’s Ramji Singh; some say, it’s Abu Salem. 125


But nobody knows who’s truly behind the mischief. In Calcutta, many notables work in the American Center. That place also fell under terrorist attack. Many lives were lost to bullets. All these are fall-outs of the event at Pentagon. The terrorist cannot be easily recognized. They are causing bloodshed by targeting temples and mosques The Talibans have sworn by drinking the blood of a slain dog to continue the terror with human-bombs. The plane crash in America is an ajab event. [Journalists are] taking photographs and scribbling reports, The wounded are being taken to hospitals, Doctors are complaining that the place is overcrowded, Patients have to lie on the floor. They are coming all the time, without respite Nobody knows whether they’ll live or die. Everybody is weeping: the sky, the wind, and the plants. Children are weeping in their mothers’ arms looking for their fathers. But we all want peace, we don’t want war and terror. Peace is what we want, peace is what our country wants. The damage caused by the plane crash in America can never be recuperated.

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Plate 1. © Achinto Bhadra

















5

CROSSING THE HOWRAH BRIDGE: CALCUTTA, FILTH AND DWELLING FORMS, FRAGMENTS, PHANTASMS

“What I call a form-of-life is a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to separate something such as bare life.” Giorgio Agamben

Crossing the Howrah Bridge They come in hordes, mostly from Bihar, one of the poorest states of India, poor even by Indian standards. Clutching their tin suitcases, they arrive at the Howrah station and cross the bridge to Calcutta. The motif of moving to the city and becoming a part of its underclass is so timeworn that even their folksongs have registered it. They come to Calcutta to work as rickshaw-pullers, jamadars [cleaners of sewers], day-laborers, porters, pavementbarbers, cobblers, potters, blacksmiths and so on. In many cases, these are also their caste occupations and for generations now the Bihari countryside has been “subsidizing” Calcutta, so to speak, by allowing the latter to draw from the former’s pool of skilled labor. Menial work in the city being regulated by close-knit kin/caste networks, newcomers are mostly unwelcome. Yet, the lure of “the city of cash,” as Calcutta is known to these migrants, is great. One comes to the city not to

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become a citizen, not to become a city dweller, but to tide over lean seasons, to pay back a loan to the moneylender, to work as cash-earner for a big peasant family or to run away from the wrath of the upper-caste landlords or the dadas. A part of the (extended) family always stays back in the village and the bond with the village is never severed. Ramsharan is from the Arrah district of Bihar; he came to the city in his youth in search of work. He is from a landless family of the pashi caste whose traditional occupation is skinning the carcasses of dead animals. In Calcutta he could not find steady work for a long time and after going through a variety of jobs, he now runs a small tea-shack. I was sitting in Ramsharan’s shop in Nimtola—the cremation ground by the river Ganga where the city’s dead are burnt in pyres. The air was filled with the putrid stench of burnt human flesh. Stray dogs and buzzing flies distract the customers sitting on the benches, drinking tea from small khuries made of burnt clay. Struggling with the kerosene stove, he was explaining the meaning of the “artwork” (see Plate 1) he has done on the inner wall of his shanty. In his village, people paint folk or ritual motifs on the thatched walls of their houses to ward off evil. He is no painter but he did not want to leave the surface empty. Instead of the usual calendar with the picture of a god or goddess, he wanted a specific image imprinted in his mind. Long ago, while crossing the Howrah Bridge, the gateway to Calcutta (a sort of existential threshold for him), he saw an aeroplane flying quite low over the bridge. He had never seen an aircraft so close, so vivid. So he looked for a calendar or a big poster—the kind of cheap, garish posters sold on pavements—depicting the imposing Howrah Bridge, preferably with an airplane overhead. Not finding one, he decided to “make” a picture himself. He pasted some cardboard on the wall and then, with strips of white paper pasted with glue, he made his own Howrah Bridge. A notional aeroplane and a helicopter were added later on the top. Beneath the picture there is a wooden platform with a lota on it. A lota is the all-purpose bowl used in subaltern households all over the Hindi-speaking belt. Ramsharan did not want the lota to be included in the photograph because he thinks that its insertion in the frame will spoil the effect of the magnificent bridge and the aerial view of it he wanted to create. On closer interrogation, it turned out that the bridge, built on the holiest of holy rivers, the Ganga, has a quasimystical significance for him. Further, as a poor migrant, being able to make it to the Howrah Bridge is itself a kind of watershed in his life. The bridge has thus become an icon, capable of giving darshan. Hence his resist128

CROSSING THE HOWRAH BRIDGE

ance to the co-existence of the picture of the bridge and the lota in the same plane of (photographic) representation. Why is the Howrah Bridge so seminal in his imagination? And that too juxtaposed with “things that fly”? In Virilio’s genealogy of modernist kinetics, where he shows how the progressive loss of the tactility of material space and a pro tanto rise in the intensity of the government of time lead to a “total mobilization” of bodies and spaces, there are some mentions of a surpassed past when administrative-economic bottlenecks prevented the emergence of a unified realm. In the “Middle Ages,” Virilio writes, “The doors to the city [we]re its tollbooths and its customs posts [we]re dams, filtering the fluidity of the masses, the penetrating power of the migrating hordes.”1 Is Ramsharan, then, a residual signifier of some archaic past, waiting anxiously in History’s waiting room for deliverance? I think of Ramsharan as inhabiting the same present as those living in the swanky parts of Calcutta. In this age of “vagabond capitalism,” “flexible accumulation” and global division of labor (Calcutta, with its burgeoning IT sector, “software parks” and call centers, being one of the major beneficiaries of these developments), the typically third-world “informal sector” of sweat labor is no longer viewed as an economic blackhole (“low-level equilibrium trap” etc.), inscrutable in its dysfunctional opacity. On the contrary, it is precisely the heat of poverty and the dust of dispossession in these pockets which push down the wage and price levels, making Calcutta the preferred destination of Euro-American organizations outsourcing their work to places with vast pools of cheap labor. A certain temporalization of space (the East as the past of the West) crucially hinges on the positing of a unified spatio-temporality, so that speed, acceleration and circulation, and blockage, stasis or threshold turn out to be discrete conditions mutually excluding each other. The social thickness of our lived, entangled world, upon closer inspection, reveals itself to be composed of nonsynchronous and relatively autonomous segments that are at best organizable into something approximating a system. I refuse the epochal coherence Virilio assigns to the world. Not everyone occupies the same Now, Bloch tersely reminds us.2

A Small History of Dwelling: Nimtola, circa 2005 For the casual metropolitan observer strolling in the gentile parts of colonial cities such as Bombay or Calcutta, savoring the aura of postcolonial urban “decadence,” there is a temptation to think of the presence of Ramsharans 129


in that part of the town as solitary, incongruous or anomalous, lacking a context or ground. In his touristic ethnography of “public sleeping” in downtown Mumbai (Bombay),3 Arjun Appadurai casually characterizes these bodies (that is, the persons he encountered only as bodies) “sleeping… on park benches and street corners” as “simply taking their housing on the hoof.” These are, supposedly, “bodies that are their own housing.” That is to say, their sense of dwelling unproblematically coincides with the physical boundaries of their corporeal bodies, signifying an extreme form of dispossession. “Public sleeping is a technique of necessity for those who can be at home only in their bodies.”4 Taking a top-down, almost managerial view of “the housing problem,” Appadurai didn’t bother to wait for these sleepers to wake up and then to follow them to their dwellings, located in places deemed unfit for the visit of respectable metropolitan anthropologists. These generic labels— “homeless” or “street people”—are inadequate. The spatial predicament of poor migrants in big cities like Calcutta or Bombay cannot be viewed as mere anomaly or incongruity in a landscape of organization and order. On the contrary, they are very much part of the spatial economy of the city, rather than signifying its excess or fault line. To the extent these arrangements (that is, “public sleeping”) are institutionally negotiated and these institutions in turn tend to be become self-organizing, acquiring durability and density, the dwelling of the dispossessed cannot be viewed as a mere contingent and perverse side of the city’s spatial economy. It becomes a form of life that needs to be explored in its own terms rather than from the macro perspective of some well-meaning “housing policy.” In fact, there are vast, segregated areas of Calcutta and Howrah called jabardakhal basties [unauthorized slums or shantytowns] where only the likes of Ramasharan live. These shanties spring up by the side of the railway tracks, on the banks of the canals through which the toxic waste water of the city flows to the river and the marshlands, in bus-shelters meant to be for commuters waiting for buses—in fact, in any place where there is a bit of empty space. Devoid of all civic and other amenities (water, drainage, toilets, electricity), the residents of these shanties live a precarious existence because they happen to be the first casualties of the World Bank-funded urban cleansing drives. Compared to them, the residents of registered basties are a privileged lot. Ramsharan is lucky in this respect because he managed to build a small shack adjacent to his tea-shop. Though unauthorized and built with disposable materials like tarpaulin, bamboo, corrugated tin and asbes130


tos, he is happy with his achievement because his family now has a roof over their head. Not everyone is so lucky. Late at night, he often witnesses pitched battles among rival “sleepers” for a sleeping “lot” in the verandahs of dilapidated old buildings. There are organized rackets involving gangs, cops and the local mastans [ruffians] who auction off the available sleeping spaces to the potential “sleepers”—homeless working people, the beggars and destitute of the pada [locality]. The collection of tola [protection money] and its division among the contending parties often lead to serious trouble involving gunfights, murders and arrests. Ramsharan paid a hefty sum to the racket and still pays a weekly hafta. But that’s not the end of the story. His everyday life is shot through with fears (of the demolition of his shack by some passing police hallagadi), pressures, insecurities and deep-seated anxieties (loss of the izzat [honor] of his teenage daughter, for example). A roof: that’s about it really. They sleep on the floor in makeshift beds and there is a mud oven made by his wife along with a platform and small shelf to keep the utensils. They cook twice, with coal as fuel, and the room gets filled with smoke. Kerosene (purchased on the “black market” because they have no “ration card”—unobtainable unless you have a proper address and the right connections) is too expensive to be used as cooking fuel. The smoke is good in a way, Ramsharan points out, because it drives out the mosquitoes and the flies. Those who cannot afford to sit in peace under their own roof and eat khana cooked by their wives are unfortunate. Retorting to my quip that asbestos is dangerous and may cause painful disease and even death, he points out in a flourish that he would rather die under an asbestos roof than go without one. Appadurai’s point about dispossession under conditions of urban anomie and severe scarcity of space would not be disproved by the sheer fact that squatters sometimes manage to find a place. Rather, his larger argument has to do with habitus, defined by Bourdieu with reference to Poincaré, as the notion of “inner space” linked unalterably to our bodies and carried about with us wherever we go. “Bodies that are their own housing” would signify a radical breakdown in habitus in response to what can be called, after Benjamin, “the state of emergency” which is “not the exception but the rule” in the life of the oppressed. But dwelling is not coeval with the physical structure called a “house,” there is more to home than the mere fact of occupation of a building.5 “[D]o the houses in themselves hold any guarantee that dwelling occurs in them?”—the philosopher asked rhetorically.6 Transported in a time of what Bhabha called, in a somewhat different con 131


text, “unhomliness”7 and, a place where existence is marked by a tenebrous sense of survival, taking the measure of your dwelling in a state of incredulous terror, this question reverberates uncannily with meaning. Ramsharan’s home marks not just the strife, the violence inflicted on those who carry a sense of deep historic displacement, it also forces us to relocate the very question of home and its relation to the world. Dwelling, according to Heidegger, to cut a ponderous argument short, is a “staying with things.” Dwelling is a state of being, of “caring” for things, a “preserving.” Ramsharan’s shack is windowless and so dark that even during the day it takes time to get used to the flickering light emitted by the kerosene lamp. The only piece of furniture is the big earthen oven situated alongside a raised platform with a small shelf (see Plate 3). The shelf is decorated with glossy cellophane paper cut into patterns and changed once a year, during the Chat Puja ceremony when all victuals are ritually destroyed. The shelves contain cheap aluminium utensils (scrubbed with coal-ash and mud twice a day and washed clean with water). Ramsharan feels privileged to be able to live so close to the holy river that he can afford to clean his utensils with the auspicious Gangamaiki mitti, the mud scraped from the bank of the river Ganga. So, even when the very recesses of the domestic space become sites of most intricate invasions, dwelling does not make way to mere lodging. And this sense of dwelling, the desire to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for, is better viewed as a relentless and quotidian struggle rather than an idyllic, lyrical, bucolic equilibrium—“a primal oneness,” as the philosopher puts it in his lofty language, with the “fourfold”: earth and sky, divinities and mortals. As a matter of fact, the sky is rarely sighted—even the blinding light of the midday tropical sun rarely reaches the hovels. Sunlight and sky—these are luxuries reserved for those who live in the upper echelons of proper brick-built houses. In the alleyways, coal-chullahs are lit during the wee hours of the day filling the place with sulphurous, asphyxiating smoke. The men must be fed before they leave for work, and until they return in the evening, the outside—courtyards, pavements, alleys, sidewalks, the little platform around the tubewell where one goes to fetch the drinking water— is taken over by women and children who withdraw inside the enclosed domestic space as soon as the men come back from work. Out in the open, women chat among themselves, in a tongue that varies according to the dialect of the village they hail from. They talk about their daily lives, things they have cooked, about children, about the families they left behind in 132


their villages. They lash out at each other over alleged small thefts, share of tap water, casting of evil spells, over issues that are arcane and dark. Quarrels can go on for hours on end, depending on the gravity of the situation and the energy of the participants. Sometimes hungry men come back home to find women fighting among themselves over “trivial” issues. They are then beaten into silence.

Decolonizing Filth: Shit and (Non-)State Formation(s) The conspicuousness, or, one could almost say, the public display of filth in Calcutta as a whole, can be read as symptomatic of the cracks in the received wisdom contained in the municipal-civic “master discourse.” I want to read this as metonymic of a different constitution of the civic as such. Even in the upmarket quarters of the town, such as old Ballygunj, garbage is deposited in open vats with flies, dogs, cats and rats cordoning off the area. It is disposed of manually, in wheelbarrows, despite the fact that most “dustbins” (Calcutta’s sociolect for garbage dumps) also happen to be used as public toilets, making a vice out of necessity. The landscape of the shantytowns of Beleghata or Tangra (not far from Nimtola) built to accommodate the poorest of the working poor of the city, are laced with filth: filthy cesspools, filthy puddles, roads littered with garbage and used plastic bags and bottles, bodies of water that have become sewers and whose surfaces have become solid crusts of filth. Yet, this ubiquity of filth does not seem to have stroked the kind of bourgeoisie hysteria about filth which saw to an epochal interiorization of it in “the ‘body’ of the city” during the great metropolitan urban transformations of the nineteenth century.8 Calcutta never had its Chadwick or Mayhew. The paradox is that public indifference to filth is coupled with the most scrupulous attention to “private” cleanliness.9 The interiors of shanties, not to speak of proper houses, are kept squeaky clean. The spectacle of men, women and children washing themselves in the open with great gusto—in hydrants, in wayside taps, in tubewells, in rivers, lakes and tanks, in the jets of water leaking out through the huge municipal pipes—is a sight so familiar that any account of public culture in Calcutta would remain grievously incomplete without it. This postcolony was never haunted by the specter of the “the Great Unwashed” (an English expression which emerged in 1830s London out of the paroxysms about cleanliness and the bourgeoisie hysteria about dirt and filth). 133


The vortex of Calcutta’s symbolic economy of abjection is centered on the domestic sphere. The purity of the inside must be wrested from the “polluted” outside. This inside/outside divide inheres in the symbolic valorization of the body too, making the feet and the shoes the embodiments of impurity. Once waste is pushed out of the physical boundary of home, it then belongs to the “public” (a word that has passed into spoken Bengali and Hindi) domain, meaning a nebulous zone, a kind of negative “commons” which belongs to nobody in particular. “Public” is used interchangeably with sarkari, meaning pertaining to the authorities—government, for example, and therefore, everybody is entitled to dump rubbish there or even defecate in it. Innumerable well-meaning projects of municipal and other civic bodies to discipline pissing and shitting in public places or to sensitize the public about the evils of throwing garbage on the street, have failed. For India as a whole, the World Bank’s longstanding project of privatization of excrement (“to each his shit”) by encouraging rural people to build a privy in their houses rather than defecate in the wood, has not borne much fruit. Sewers and, more generally, waste disposal systems, literally connect the public with the private. Dominique Laporte’s insistence that “the state is the sewer,” is true in more than one sense of both terms.10 His History of Shit is not just an exercise in thinking of sewers as another technology of governmentality and management of “bio-power,” not a history of the removal and evasion of the negative, of the biological excess, but also of its active exploitation (shit is continually being recycled into gold). Like Foucault’s treatment of sexual repression (“the repressive hypothesis”), Laporte explores changing relations to shit not as inexorable denial and repression, but as the complex ordering and exploitation of the negative. Laporte’s excremental excursus goes on to demonstrate that abhorrence of shit isn’t simply instinctual or personal. Shit is out and out political. In India, the visibility of shit or persons defecating in public has given rise to a range of reactions, from plain horror or loathing to a kind of ecological and moral righteousness which derives its authority from fundamentalist assumptions about nature, purity and “human dignity.” Appadurai’s apologia for World Bank-sponsored public toilet projects amounts to such righteousness. He takes it as axiomatic that all other practices of shitting, except the one associated with western toilets with “good sewage systems, ventilation and running water… [are] humiliating practices.”11 In effect, his account denies a range of political responses and forms of power, thereby foreclosing other reactions to pollution beyond moralism or resentment. 134


His insistence on maintaining the moral purity of categories—dignity, humiliation, purity, pollution, right, wrong—excludes a more porous field of responses. But putting shit and filth up for reconsideration does not mean a passive withdrawal from activism. On the contrary, it means engaging with popular or subaltern practices as ethico-political responses and reflecting on their sources of authority rather than simply denigrating them from the vantage point of some absolute wisdom. In Calcutta, while top-down approaches to the problem of defecation in public or throwing garbage on the street have failed miserably, other grass-roots approaches have been partially successful. Planting saplings on the sidewalks and painting pictures of gods, goddesses or nationalist icons on the walls most vulnerable to pissing, have been highly successful. Formation of citizens’ committees consisting of persons with records of altruism and public sprit at the grass-roots level to enforce regulations concerning garbage disposal have been remarkably successful in localities with close-knit communities in North Calcutta. What these examples go on to show is that there are other authorities apart from and above those we commonly associate with civil society in liberal democracies: namely, the state, the municipality and so on.

Children in the Public Sphere “Homelessness” in the West also signifies anomie and moral deprivation, deriving from the supposed absence of the sheltering institution of society (family, marriage, childrearing) among the homeless. The predecessors of the category of the homeless—“the poor,” “la misère,” “the ragpicker,” “la bohème,” “pauper,” “vagabond,” “the rabble,” “lazzaroni,” Marx’s “lumpenproletariat”—had the undertone of moral depravity attached to them which was a fallout of their rootlessness. The thrust of this rhetorical economy of the discourse about the urban poor was to represent them as a spectacle of heterogeneity that defies categorization. According to Stallybrass, this unrepresntablity, this “specularized difference,” was constitutive of the “homogenizing gaze of the bourgeoisie.”12 But the breakdown of the moral community was not just a figment of bourgeoisie imagination.13 The “unrepresentableness” of a “surplus,” marginal population of disenfranchized and dispossessed urban masses living outside of any embedding context and divested of all robust social location, presented itself as a major problem of social optic. It was precisely in response to this crisis of social 135


representation that a whole range of new discourses (statistics, sociology, urbanism, etc.) and discursive objects (population, public health etc.) started emerging from around the middle of the nineteenth century.14 My foray into nineteenth century metropolitan social history is necessitated by the need to place things in perspective: today’s “homeless” and “street children” are discursive offshoots of the economy of discourse whose ostensible purpose is the government of poverty. In this context, I want to signpost here the unthought of the problem of urban poverty in what Chatterjee evocatively called the “East.”15 Under the hegemonic sway of the orchestrated discourse called the “global civil society” initiative which seeks to take over the business of governance of the social sector in poor countries like India, the urban poor exists as a normative figure in need of “empowerment.”16 In course of carrying out the business of empowering, the funded NGOs take as given certain normative assumptions about the urban poor and seek to imprint the semantics of citizenship (“the capacity to aspire”) which foreclose the Indian urban poor’s self-construction(s) as bustteedweller or squatter. Poverty in the “East,” to use Chatterjee’s enticing trope again, is seldom experienced by a stand-alone person in isolation, it occurs in the embedding context of family and kinship. There are thousands of poor rickshaw-pullers in Calcutta who spend larger parts of their lives in the city remitting their savings to their families in rural Bihar where they do not spend more than a few months every year during the busy agricultural season and the periods of festivals. What to make of this urban poor who do not aspire to be citizens, who experience their habitation in the city as transitory phenomena? Even the most vulnerable among the homeless street people of Calcutta, the “street children” or urchins, who appear to be “floating” or vagrant, have strong anchorage in family. As recent research shows, far from being “abandoned” by their families, as the funded NGOs working with the “street children” call them, the Calcutta street children are esteemed members of families to whom they return periodically.17 Bangladeshi children illegally crossing borders to come to Calcutta take great risks to go back to their families during Id festival, defying barbed wire and the risk of being arrested or shot by border guards. In the case of girls, who mostly work as household maids, the cash they earn is usually deposited with their parents for their wedding expenses. “Abandonment” is a category predicated on a western bourgeois understanding of childhood and family which construes the street children as victims of either a sinister underworld of trafficking cartels 136


and prostitution rackets, or as the unlucky offspring of negligent and lazy parents. The imputed essentialist assumptions about these children’s lives hegemonize their identities as children who left home to earn much-needed extra cash and who form kinship ties in the city itself. These children form “families” with other street children and older members from their immediate community, persons who do not fit within the western idea of family. Kinship is not to be conflated with blood-relation, another restrictive Eurocentric idea which has impeded understanding for a long time.18 The childbeneficiaries of programs run by NGOs, themselves disavow the category of “street children” by taking recourse to their kinship networks to distinguish themselves from pother shishu (literal Bengali translation of the category “street children,” as used by the NGOs).19 Even among the truly homeless who erect temporary, ramshackle tentlike structures on pavements or by the side of the tramways, or those who live inside sewage pipes dumped temporarily on the roadside, the ties of family and community do not seem to have broken down or disintegrated. They move away from one place to another in search of vacant spaces (but usually within a circumscribed locality, because of the nature of their fixedpoint work) as a community consisting of extended family units (jointfamily). Marriages take place through village kinship networks. Desertion of wife and children is not uncommon but rape or abduction of women by outsiders is virtually unheard of. Most stringent community punishments are meted out for such transgressions. Illegitimate children are also rare. Calcutta’s children on the street who use the street as their home, their place of work, and their sites of play, are neither out of touch nor out of place. Their putative “placelessness” has to do with the middle-class gaze that rests uneasily on their ubiquitous presence on the street and is constituted by the category’s (“street child”) all-consuming understanding of them as victims who have been denied some “ideal” childhood. Their inherent neglect, their psychosocial maladjustment, their being outside of a familial environment—all these are the tropes of an absent signified since there is no child behind the category “street child” except the one that the category itself sets in place. In poor households of outcast Calcutta, children are adored and considered as productive assets of the family. Education, when the parents can afford it, is considered as value-addition. Unless one idealizes the western bourgeois parent-child relationship as the norm, productive activities of the children—foraging, ragpicking, hawking, tending pigs and goats, getting into 137


petty crimes, selling vegetables and taking care of younger siblings—cannot be viewed as indexes of their victimhood. In fact, these cannot even be categorically separated from play as the latter remains enmeshed with work.

The Subaltern and the Citizen: On Reclaiming the Streets For the last five years or so Calcutta has increasingly been showcased, by a government claiming allegiance to a left-of-center agenda, as one of the more “progressive” cities of India, eager to respond positively to the dictates of neo-liberal global restructuring in order to attract Foreign Direct Investment. Funded by the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, WHO, Department for International Development (DFID, UK) and other international bodies, an urban cleansing of Calcutta is well under way. As a concerted effort is being made to improve the “image” of the city, control over decisions about the city’s future is being transferred from elected bodies to multinational corporations, “experts” of transnational organizations, real estate vested interests, foreign investors and funded NGOs, none of whom is accountable to any electorate. The most conspicuous examples of such disenfranchisement are the recent decisions regarding the hasty construction of numerous expensive “fly-overs,” “by-pass” expressways, satellite townships, vast complexes and shopping malls with foreign capital, a drastic reduction of pavement space and walkways. All these were done on the basis of ad-hoc, behind-closed-doors decisions, keeping the public completely in the dark. These go hand in hand with drastic reductions in the sphere of the activities of the elected civic bodies, including the Calcutta Municipal Corporation, whose various welfare-oriented activities benefiting the poor (schools, housing for the poor, clinics, etc.) are gradually being phased out. Predictably, the poor have to bear the brunt of this funkification. Eviction of squatters, hawkers and virtually forcible seizure of agricultural land with little compensation from the peripheral areas of the town, have become the order of the day. Plans are afoot to rid Calcutta of its famed rickshaws, a decision that would uproot at least 30,000 very poor Bihari migrants. This project of urban cleansing, if carried out unhindered, would also mean the beginning of the end of Calcutta’s colorful street culture, vibrant neighborhoods and above all, its distinctive political culture of survival, of solidarity, of being in common. Driven by the subaltern history of what Henri Lefebvre called the citadins (inhabitants of the city irrespective of their formal civic status), I have hinted how “non-state formations” emerge 138


out of the negotiations of the city form with the practice of dwelling of those with the moral attributes of an ascriptive rather than an associative community. “Dwelling” and “survival” are my tropes for marking out a political space outside of the fragile margins of metropolitan civility. A few months ago, in protest against the government’s decision to ban rickshaws from the streets of Calcutta, thousands of rickshaw-pullers took to the streets in a spontaneous and silent long-march. Rather than festoons and placards with political slogans written on them, as is the norm here in political rallies, they upheld little brass bells in their hands. These bells are used in rickshaws as horns. And this symbolism of the bell, meaning a kind of entitlement to subsistence as understood in the archaic idiom of politics of the caste-society, found tremendous purchase, even in the media. The decision regarding the rickshaws was stalled and, subsequently, invoking the “ethic” of ensuring the subsistence of subjects, the government declared the reversal of their erstwhile policy of banning hawkers from Calcutta’s streets. These are indexes of a certain defeat, however localized or temporary, not just of privatopia, but of neo-liberal public policy as such, which values efficiency and accumulation over and above the survival of the multitude.

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VIRTUAL FLESH DESI NETPORN, “FAT AUNTY” AND THE TECHNO-FOLK— Vernacular desire in the age of the world wide web

“Fantasy, however, is not the object of desire, but its setting. In fantasy, the subject does not pursue the object or its sign; he appears caught up in himself in the sequence of images.” Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis

Vernacular Desire in the Age of the World Wide Web This is a straightforward ethnography of an “Indian” porn site. One of the things I want to tease out of this ethnography is the idea of the vernacular. The vernacular conjures up lurid alterities—of sheltering autochthony, of hoary traditions, of primordial belongings and so on. If one understands the vernacular in this sense, the World Wide Web is certainly not the place to look for an irruption of the vernacular. The vernacular should not be conflated with the “ethnic.” Today, ethnic netporn is a global “culture industry” whose tentacles extend from distant Thailand, Philippines, Japan, India and Vietnam to parts of Russia and Eastern Europe, which supply Western Europe and the US with mail-order brides and underage prostitutes. Indian ethnic netporn has come into prominence in the course of the last decade. IndiaExposed.com, AmazingIndians.com, DesiPapa.com, DesiKamasutra.com,

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IndiaPassion.com, IndiaUncovered.com, AllhotIndians.com, Hardcore-IndianGirls.com—most of these sites have been established over the past decade or so. These claim to show “authentic action” from India. We read in The Indian Road Trip homepage that they feature “truly exclusive content [sourced] by a group of [western] photographers who captured the true beauty and sexuality of… the most exotic Indian women. So, follow our photographers on a sexed up road trip around this mystique [sic] land exploring 4 nasty cities to feast your eyes.”1 Like the audiences of many recent big-budget Bollywood films made with the off-shore market(s) in mind, a large proportion of the subscribers to these paysites are diasporic desis (a generic term for people of South Asian origin). The subscriptions come to around $30 a month. Resident Indians have to quench their thirst for sleaze from locally produced “blue films,” though pornography is illegal in India. The boom in Indian ethnic porn coincides with the recent acceptance of Indian girls in the mainstream porn industry.2 Angela Devi (appeared in Hustler), Anjali (“Adore Anjali” to fans), Nadia Nyce, Sunny Leone (Penthouse “Pet of the Year,” 2003), Priya Rai, Gaya Patal, Asha Kumar, Rina— all these brown-skinned pornstars with significant web-presence are diasporic Indians. Their “Indianness” is constitutive of their identity as pornstars, featuring prominently in their interviews and web-gossips generated around them.3 The rise of an “ethnic” segment in marketing is a fall-out of the identity politics generated by metropolitan multiculturalism.4 Just as farmers’ markets or organic food invoke a vague aura of community, so the ethnic reinforces a certain nostalgia for belonging—“a nostalgia for the present,” to use Jameson’s epithet. The vernacular, in contrast, is a location, which is before nostalgia. The paradox is that the vernacular is also, and unselfconsciously, deterritorialized and nomadic. It is this discrepant nomadism of the vernacular that I hope to probe in this essay. This paper builds on my ethnography of just one Indian porn site—Free Sexy Indians Forum (hereafter FSI, online since 2001).5 This is a free site, enabling people to upload and share pictures, videos and texts in the framework of a cyber-community (complete with a chat-room and a blog). Following FSI’s phenomenal success, many other masala (literal meaning: spicy) websites have come into existence. The contents of the various forums of the FSI (“Indian Sex Pictures,” “Indian Sex Videos,” “Indian Sex Stories,” “Indian Sex Talk,” “Bollywood Pictures,” “Non-Indian Pictures,” “My Wife and Girlfriend,” “Hot Sexy Toons,” “Sizzling Bollywood,” “Non142

Plate 1

Plate 2

Plate 3

Plate 4

Plate 5 (Savita Bhabhi)

Plate 6 (Shakeela) More pictures from FSI can be found at desipornessay.blogspot.co.uk

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Indian Pictures” and, lately, a forum in Hindi called “Antarvasana—Hindi Sex Forum”), though provided by the members themselves, are not necessarily produced by them. Not more than 20–25 per cent of the contents uploaded by the members are their own production (but these are, in most cases, what can be called genuine “amateur” porn). The contents are heterogeneous and hybrid, being lifted from various blogs, paysites, forums, archives, films, videos and even printed Indian porn magazines.6 Thus, the FSI can be called a People’s Porn Commons whose contents are produced under the conditions of a collaborative “deep remixability”—a term coined by the new media theorist, Lev Manovich. I use it to name a threshold beyond mere hybridity. According to Alexa, FSI’s traffic rank globally, is 2805. The territorial origin of the visitors is as follows: 81.3 per cent India, 8.4 per cent Bangladesh, 3.3 per cent Pakistan, 1.9 per cent United States, 0.5 perc ent Sri Lanka, 4.6 per cent others (as on 7 August, 2009). To give an idea as to what these figures mean in comparative terms: Hustler’s traffic rank is 7381 (4.1 per cent from India) and that of Playboy is 1474 (8.2 per cent from India). So, FSI fares quite well in comparison to these premier porn sites. FSI’s scale can be gauged by the fact that currently (7 August, 2009), it has 132,351 registered members, 38,429 threads and 958,538 posts. There must be, if Alexa is to be believed, a large number of unregistered visitors, several times the number of registered ones. In a recent interview to Globalpost, FSI’s site administrator, Mr Deshmukh, claimed that Savitabhabhi—a serialized graphic novel produced entirely by the FSI members—attracts sixty million visitors every month and the average time a visitor spends on the site is more than ten minutes.7 “Indian” in FSI means NRIs and diasporic Indians as well. Deshmukh claimed that almost 70 per cent of their traffic is from India, while the rest is from the UK, USA and eighty other countries. A large number of FSI’s members are from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan and the Middle East. Nowadays, various FSI clones have come into existence, catering to particular South Asian countries (e.g., Joubanjala.com for Bangladesh). Incidentally, the entire archive of FSI is available online.

Our Porn, Their Porn: The Global, the Ethnic and the Vernacular Pornography appeals to the intimate, private self. Yet, a porn site, by definition, is public. Sex is the great “hidden” of modern society and pornography’s explicit aim is “the triumphant uncovering of that-which-must-not 143


be-seen.” The tension arising out of the intricate dialectic between the public and the private is what gives porn its aura. Porn’s claim to connect with intimate, private desire needs to be viewed cautiously because what is at stake here cannot be grasped with a Romantic notion of the “private.”8 Wittgenstein wrote, “[W]hen one draws a boundary it may be for various kinds of reasons. If I surround an area with a fence or a line, the purpose may be to prevent someone from getting in or out; but it may also be part of a game….”9 Larry Clark’s short film, Impaled, which was his contribution to the collective film project entitled Destricted (2006), offers an illustration of what I want to convey here. The narrative begins with a series of interviews with aspirant actors for a porn film. Subsequently, some experienced porn actresses are also inducted. Then the director picks up a neophyte actor to do a “scene” with one of these women. But the camera does not stop running between takes, not even when there is the need to clean up after a messy attempt at anal sex. These scenes, which would not normally be included in a pornographic film, clearly have a message. Contrary to popular perception, pornography does not “show it all,” as Žižek puts it, but only displays that which can be coded as “pornographic.”10 Likewise, Pasolini’s Saló (1975) is a great example of what happens when depraved sexual (inter)action is shown in graphic detail without imposing on it what Cramer and Home called a “pornographic coding.”11 Far from being titillating, the film leaves the viewer repelled and repulsed. Cramer and Home are not alone in condemning commercial pornography as repetitive, restrictive and, therefore, destructive of imagination and desire. Their argument is: pornography destroys and impairs erotic imagination through “the frenzy of the visible.”12 In contrast to crass, standardized, commercial netporn, the so-called “indie,” “alternative” or “amateur” porn of the earlytwenty-first century promised “a non-industrial and erotically imaginative pornography.” Central to the aesthetics of indie porn is the idea of the “authentic.” The rough look and production values of “indie” porn produce a simulacrum of the “real” that is no different from the popular genre of industrial pseudo-amateur pornography. Thus, the new “indie” porn simply reinforces “the same business model.” I want to argue that there isn’t a universal, one shared “code” that would make sexually explicit visual representations “pornographic.” Frances Ferguson has observed, quite correctly, that: “What is pornographic about pornography… is less what it presents than the relative actions and relative assessments it offers of the various parties to it.”13 One recognizes something 144

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as pornographic “less because what it is than what it does in a particular situation.”14 So what does FSI or Indian amateur porn do to its viewers? How does it work in its specific, netporn context? In its early years, when ethnic porn had not yet become a marketing niche and the only porn available on the net was of Euro-American origin, Indian vernacular porn emerged as a kind of reaction against the “industrialization of fantasy.” FSI came into being as a result of the formation of a cyber counter-public consisting of heterogeneous groups of South Asians. I have come across scores of comments in FSI which assert that the typical commercial porn looks synthetic and repetitive. These comments are usually accompanied by pean to sari clad, dark-skinned, busty Indian beauties. Surfing the archives of the FSI, I find striking, un-posed, make-up-less, staccato, earthy images of ordinary Indian middle-aged women and couples which would not be considered as pornographic in any other milieu. Judging by the number of times these are posted and recycled in the net, it can be asserted that far from diminishing, their ability to incite arousal in the Indian porn-viewer seems to be going up with their age. This valorization of an old sexually explicit photo as “retro” (“Old is Gold”) itself signifies a certain discernment and reflexivity on the part of the viewer. It shows that there is a certain historicity to the vernacular pornographic gaze—signifying a scopic accumulation. And despite the increasing refinement of the quality of images posted in the FSI, these stark, bare, earthy images continue to be a significant proportion of the so called “aunty” pictures of FSI. These are the images which made FSI singular and unique. I will come back to “aunty” porn in a moment, but this is better done against the backdrop of the phenomenon of the emergence of branded Indian ethnic netporn. There are scores of porn paysites (e.g., Amazingindians.com, Desikamasutra.com, Indianroadtrip.com, etc.) specializing in Indian ethnic porn, whose contents are wholly or mostly procured from India, featuring dark-skinned, low-class Indian prostitutes. The film, Maid in India, featuring sex-workers from the brothels of Mumbai, is reputed to be an international best-seller. The trend began with Chamiya, the first hardcore Hindi “blue film” with dialogue and a storyline, produced in India. The FSI itself sells and promotes Indian Sex Dream Movies which offer the whole gamut of desi porn, ranging from low-grade, home-made “couple sex” to well-made, professional porn films shot in locations. There are also a number of paysites featuring dark-skinned diasporic ethnic Indian porn models (e.g., Adoreanjali.com, Gayapatal.com, Ashakumar.com, etc.). So, 145


Indian ethnic porn is of two categories—first, those shot in India, containing explicit glossy pictures and videos of Indian prostitutes paid to pose in front of the camera. These are, ostensibly, for the consumption of diasporic Indians. Second, sites featuring the up-market, slim, sophisticated-looking, diasporic Indian porn models (the sites are adorned with the graphics of the Taj Mahal, the Ashok Chakra, the Indian national flag, silhouettes of Gandhi, etc., and Indian classical music plays in the background while action unfolds) which have an international clientele. We need to probe the phenomenon of ethnic desi netporn in order to signpost the specificities of the vernacular porn with which it is often conflated. The desis (Indian diaspora) today are a cohesive, well-organized and well-represented group with formidable purchasing power. Desi netporn aims at this niche. It works through a certain fetishization of the ethnic Indian look, referring to an anomalous zone of eroticism, raising important questions about desire, nostalgia and recognition. “Nostalgia” is a composite word (nostos: “to return home” and algos: “pain”). Nostalgia for desh is not just a longing for “home” but also a search for lost time. Odysseus longs for home, Proust is in search of lost time. The diasporic investment on the fetishes of desh comes out of a desire to belong or to participate in another place-time, a mythical desh, a perpetual present interminably recycled, without, however, wanting to bear any of its historical costs. Obscene images of rough-looking Indian sex-workers have a visceral, haptic appeal. In Milan Kundera’s Ignorance, there is a narrative where the protagonist, long exiled in France, on returning home to Slovakia, is driven to uncontrollable lust when a woman makes a pass at him by using four-letter words in the vernacular. It is precisely the libidinal dissonance caused by images or words, which were once familiar but are almost forgotten, that lends a dash of visceral immediacy to desi porn. Today’s “immaterial” commodities work by pre-structuring and modulating desire. It does not command the user’s desire, but “empowers” it in a certain way: “Want some titillation? These are the ways you may have it, these are the possible scenarios: ‘ethnic’, ‘retro’, ‘amateur’, ‘mature’…” This is a distinctive form of power which works by saying not “You must!” but “You may!” This is how brand works and branded ethnic Indian porn needs to be viewed as branding of nostalgia by fetishizing the ethnic Indian look. Let us get back to the vernacular. I have visited the FSI site more or less regularly for the past six months or so. It seems to me that the vernacular, Indian male, heterosexual pornographic gaze is fixated on just one type of 146

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object: obese, (mostly) dark-skinned, middle-aged, married women. The threads have titles like “South Indian Aunties,” “Mallu Aunties,” “Mallu Women,” “Fat Housewives,” “My Mother,” “Sweet Bhabhi,” “Desi Aunties,” “My Wife,” “My Maid” or, more lyrically, “Cute Slutty Aunty,” “Everyday Sweet Aunties,” etc. The stories, the cartoons,15 the pictures, the videos—all categories and formats of vernacular Indian netporn go on to highlight just one type of erotic object whose generic name is aunty. Whether she is called bhabi, aunty, didi, maid, wife, housewife, or even mother, the flab and flesh of a maternal figure are at the center of the vernacular Indian pornoscopic drive. “Aunty” is clearly an “Indian” innovation and the metropolitan categories (“BBW,” “MILF,” “chubby,” “mature,” etc.) do not quite correspond to the vernacular “aunty.” The same “aunty” also dominates low-brow Indian printed porn and B-grade South Indian and other regional films. Film stills of “South Indian” softcore stars like Shakeela, Abhilasha, Pratibha, Reshma, Devika, Umamaheshwari are often posted in FSI. There is some academic work on the BBW (Big Beautiful Women) phenomenon on the web (BBW porn sites, dating sites etc.), but in India, the fat aunty fantasy is not confined solely to new media representations—as seems to be the case in West.16 The scope of the fat aunty fantasy transcends the narrow confines of “techno-voyeurism” and “techno-archaism.”17 In the vernacular world(s) of India and perhaps elsewhere, far from dispensing with the pre-industrial, the archaic and the folk, new media has made the “aura” of the folk and the cultic more rather than less real. While western scholarship on new media locates a new fusion between (new)mediatized eroticism and life, positing a certain plasticity between forms of erotic fantasies offered by the internet and lived “sex-lives,”18 resulting from the new proximity proffered by digitalization19 and the new possibilities of circulation offered by the internet, my research on low-brow Indian netporn goes on to demonstrate that the new media has not transformed vernacular eroticism, experience and organization of perception(s) in the direction professed by these theorists. I do not claim any originality for this argument. Researchers working on the reception of mechanical reproduction in India—from chromolithography, photography and cinema in the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, to television and cable TV in recent times—have arrived at more or less similar results.20 This can be demonstrated readily by showing that the radical possibilities offered by digital or even analog photography, not to speak of Photoshop or digital video technology, are plainly refused or denied in the fat aunty 147


iconography of the FSI kind. What the fat aunty pictures rely on is the image’s iconicity and frontality (qualities which make these images icons rather than symbols or indexes—the trio which fully describes the world of signs according to Peirce), its ability to invoke a prototype or an archetype (no Jungian connotation intended) whose roots lie deep in the Indic visual past. Photography, especially digital photography’s excessive data ratio, giving rise to what Munster called “proximity,” which remains a structuring concern of theorists writing on the impact of new technologies of reproduction on visual perception and which produces “a surplus and profane realism which exceeds the requirements of a narrow… [icon-based] iconography, has too many meanings” for any efficacious libidinal titillation.21 What it requires is not proximity, tactility or carnal density—a “frenzy of the visible”—but an austere tenacity that refers back to the prototype which acts through evocation rather than verisimilitude. Thus, for the semi-literate “subalterns” using new media, (digital) photography is deemed “a phenomenological failure,”22 at least in relation to pornographic images. This visual subalternity is not typical of the unlettered masses—even the Indian elite’s visual perception cannot escape this predestination. Almost since its inception, mass-mediated pornographic images have been understood as being the result of realizing the voyeuristic, pornographic potential inherent in the new technologies themselves. At the dawn of the photographic era, Baudelaire wrote: “It was not long before thousands of greedy eyes were glued to the peephole of the stereoscope, as though they were skylights of the infinite. The love of obscenity, which is as vigorous a growth in the heart of natural man as self-love, could not let slip such a glorious satisfaction.”23 Benjamin’s comment about the “contemporary decay of aura,” through a certain “proximity” possibilized by new technologies, was not directed specifically to pornographic images but it is easy to see that “the urge [that] grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its…reproduction,” is central to the incitement to visual pornography that divested the human body of its mystique by (re)producing graphic images of its “private” parts, enabled by stereoscope, photography and, finally, film and video. Benjamin continues: “To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose ‘sense of the universal equality of things’ has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object [covered or hidden parts of body] by means of reproduction.”24 With the moving image, the “inherent” obscenity of photography is brought out even more forcefully. Jame148

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son wrote: “pornographic films are… only the potentiation of films in general, which ask us to stare at the world as though it were a naked body.”25 Stanley Cavell is equally explicit: the “ontological conditions of the cinema reveal it as inherently pornographic.”26 In a fine essay on nineteenth century French pornographic photographs, Solomon-Godeau argued that the pornographic photographs that proliferated in France were not an extension of pre-existing erotic images carried over from painting and lithography, but constituted an entirely new genre embodying a new obscenity inseparable from the carnal appeal of an excessive realism—a new “purchase on the real” offered by the photography’s indexical, causal relation to naked female bodies.27 Thus, all the authorities are in agreement that a new level of obscenity was reached, as if automatically, with the dissemination of photography and cinema. But this argument relies on a sweeping and “wholesale homogenization of the spectator”28 whose subjectivity is rendered a function of an ahistorical and universal scopic “drive.” Which is to say, it is taken for granted that the “excessive” or “profane realism” characteristic of the modern western genre of visual pornography would simply follow the invention and dissemination of the photographic or the cinematic apparatus. The spectator is assumed to be endowed with an ocular possessive instinct, rendering him (rarely “her”) a quintessence of the bourgeoisie “possessive individual.”29 The technological determinism concerning the apparatus is premised upon the hypothesis that the new visual experience possibilized by photography takes vision very close to touch and that all humans, universally, are predisposed to this ocular possessiveness. It is the latter part of the proposition that makes the technological determinist argument ethnocentric, for it ascribes a certain function to visual perception as such (eye as an instrument of possession) which cannot be justified, especially in view of the anthropological work we have on “other” visual cultures and the evidence I present here. However, we need to make a firm distinction between Baudelaire’s and the commonsense “realist” arguments about the fantasy-inciting role of the hyper-real images, whose corporealized immediacy supposedly intensifies erotic imagination and craving without being able to bring it to climax. John Tagg wrote: “[E]ven in the most fully realized erotic image, suture cannot be sustained since the contradiction of the flat actuality of the paper and the fullness [read: presence, plenitude] of the body of desire is too great.”30 In this account, these images are viewed as means to an end— 149


physical, material sex. In contrast, Baudelaire’s condemnation of these images derives from a radically different logic. Baudelaire’s condemnation is not a condemnation of these images per se but the condemnation of the spectacle of the body of the spectator-observer in thrall to the viewing machines (stereoscopes) and their images. The “greedy eyes… glued to the peephole” through which the body received a “glorious satisfaction” associated with the onanism of “self love” suggests that a new masturbatory “carnal density of vision” resulting from the haptic immediacy of visual perceptions was made possible by the libidinal “discharge” of the bodyimage assemblage. Neither a passive submission to the power of the image, nor a voyeuristic mastery. What Baudelaire finds so disturbing in the bodyimage assemblage made possible by the new technology is precisely the suspension of the subject-object distinction and the “intensity” released thereof (“glorious satisfaction”). Needless to say, the economy of these engagements or intensities productive of what Massumi calls “affect”31 presupposes that “the object [of desire] cannot be grasped separately from the fantasy within which it is inserted.”32 The viewing experience itself is “suture” and not anterior to it. The true novelty of the new technologies is that their products are capable of combining with the corporeal body in such assemblages productive of “intensities.” By valorizing only the role played by technology, Solomon-Godeau and Jameson miss this point because they overlook the other side of the equation: the body of the spectator-observer. With these technologies, media transforms what it mediates—the body becomes media. And in that sense, this body is what Deleuze and Guattari called the “body without organs,” which is “opposed less to organs than to that organization of organs we call organism. It is an intense and intensive body. It is traversed by a wave that traces levels or thresholds in the body according to variations in amplitude. Thus the body does not have organs, but thresholds or levels.”33 Even a cursory look at the “aunty” pictures would convince the reader that (new) media has transformed almost nothing—these are simply photographic realizations of the icon or the prototype of the voluptuous mother, which has deep roots in Indic popular religious and cultural practices involving an archaic valorization of powerful female bodies, mother goddesses or the pre-Oedipal oral mother with large breasts, belly and thighs. Popular Indian traditional media abounds in such icons (various facets of Kali or Shakti, and the numberless local mother goddesses, cult deities, village deities, etc.).34 The icon of the nayika or rasika in the nine150

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teenth century Kalighat pats belongs to the same genre, though the voluptuous women depicted there appear more as women of pleasure than as powerful mother. The only transformation that this icon seems to have undergone in the net is a certain negotiation with the indexicality of photography. The “aunty” pictures are photographs of real women though there is a tendency toward the abstract from the contingent and the singular— what Benjamin called “the tiny spark of contingency… with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject.”35 In popular pre-print icons (terracotta, stone or metal statues, woodcut prints, scroll paintings, manuscript illustrations, etc.) of gods and goddesses, the convention is to leave the eye empty, expressionless and to idealize the proportions of the body instead of adhering strictly to anatomy and expression. In keeping with that convention, the aunty pictures in FSI and vernacular printed pornography, while stressing the relevant portions of female anatomy (breasts, thighs, hips, belly, the pelvis, etc.) seem to have little or no interest in the face as such. There are hundreds of postings featuring “aunties” in which the face is not shown at all or it is masked and the number and the frequency of these threads far exceed those showing faces. There is, thus, little interest in the image as a trace of the real. Why this strange denial of the advantages of photographic reproduction and digitalization? While western media theorists stress the tactility and immediacy of the “new” vision engendered by photography and film, emphasizing the increasingly blurred boundary, interface or “infraction” between seeing and touching, between physical and ocular possession (Jean Clair, the French theorist, wrote that “the gaze is an erection of the eye”—a notion that gives the nerve endings of the ocular organ something of the tumescent sensation of the male sexual organ),36 between perception and representation (the apparatus-theorist Baudry wrote that cinematic images are representations “mistaken for perception”),37 signaling a certain shift from a mode of vision to a Spinozaite affect-tion, in our aunty images we notice not just a resistance to the “surplus” or “excessive” realism of photography but a self-conscious recoiling back from proximity, tactility and haptic immediacy to an iconic frontality and the cultic-auratic distance. Benjamin’s “aura” has distance as its cardinal feature: “We define the aura… as the unique phenomenon of a distance…”38 More generally, the aura is: “A strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close it may be.”39 While aura decays under the regime of photography, the cultic also dies a natural death through the 151


image’s repeated exposure and exhibition. Neither of these seems to be happening in India. Technology seems to have made the icons more real, not less. In sum, vis-à-vis our aunty porn, digital photography’s problem is its noise, its exorbitance—too much proximity, a surfeit of information— which obscure the symbolic simplicity of the icon referring back to the prototype. Thus, we are entitled to think of the vernacular netporn viewers as formative of a cyber counter-public attesting to the non-normative potential of the internet as such. The immense popularity of home-made suggestive color drawings of aunties (where depth and details are self-consciously denied) posted in FSI’s picture forum goes on to substantiate my argument. There is also one sub-genre of non-nude, sari-clad aunty pictures, mostly of well-known ageing South Indian actresses, which are immensely popular. To go by the accompanying comments, the viewers strip these images in their imagination and contemplate how wonderful it would be to be able to possess them. These pictures are thus what Pinney called, in another context, “compressed performances.” Thus, Benjamin’s prediction of the decay of aura through mechanical reproduction or, more recently, the new media theorists’ prognosis about a certain invasion of commercial sexual fantasy manufactured by the internet in the real sexual life of ordinary people and the diminishing boundary between online porn and offline sexuality (note that this is a variation on Guy Debord’s old theme: “All that was once directly lived, have become mere representation”) find little support in the relationship between vernacular netporn and its users, which is predicated on a different relationship between erotic fantasy, media and “sex-life.” In the mediatized West, so runs the argument, people bank more on far-fetched, mass-mediated fetishistic fantasies imbibed from netporn, indulging less in “real” sex, prioritizing fantastic fetishes over physical copulation. Arvidsson, like Cramer, goes to great lengths to point out that what he finds sickening is not so much a certain empowerment of erotic imagination (at the cost of “real” sex) but rather the commercial underpinning of the new economy of desire: “The imagination is empowered, but it is also put to work as an important source of profit.”40 The relationship posited between fantasy and the “real” in this argument seems to me jejune and theoretically suspect. For the moment, let us stay with the fantasies we come across in FSI and try to figure out what these fantasies tell us about vernacular erotic imagination. There is no dearth of 152

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fantasy here (the aunty itself is a figure of fantasy) but these fantasies are pre-netporn fantasies. Netporn simply transposes these fantasies from the “real” to the cyberspace. “Real” in my usage signifies a rhetorical convention, since I do not subscribe to a real distinction between the really real and its phantasmic doubles fabricated by the media or technology in general (the Lacanian “real” is something altogether different but let us not get into it now). To my mind, all fantasies, tout court, are (un)real. Sexual fantasy, understood in its psychoanalytical sense, cannot be isolated from the origin of the drive (Trieb) itself: at its very inception sexuality is “detached from any natural object, and is handed over to fantasy, and, by this very fact, starts existing as sexuality.”41 No fantasy, no sex! The fantasies pictured in FSI and elsewhere are mostly typical vernacular male fantasies about parts of female body which predate the net: the navel, the feet (adorned with payal and painted with mehendi), nose with nosering, breasts cupped in lacy brassieres and the typical Indian fantasy about fleshy, shaved or unshaved armpit. While the nose-ring (a culturally valorized symbol), feet (inherited from the Indo-Islamic imaginary: the motif of the beautiful feet of the dancing girl has erotic-aesthetic connotation as brought out beautifully in landmark Bollywood films like Pakeeza or Umrao Jaan) and breast are quite common “fetishes” throughout the subcontinent, explaining the navel and especially the armpit would require some situated knowledge of the phenomenology of female attire vis-à-vis the Indian male gaze. It is only in recent times that ordinary Indian middle-class (especially younger) women could afford to wear tops that leave the arms bare, and that, too, in relatively affluent urban areas. The furor over the sleeveless blouses of female newsreaders in the Dooradarshan, India’s state-owned national TV station during the BJP era, is still in living memory. So, women’s armpits and navels were/are rarely visible in public and there are strong prohibitions against “revealing” (by Indian standards) attire of women.42 In the 1980s, eyebrows were raised when the camera lingered voyeuristically on the navel and the cleavage of the noted Bollywood actress Madhuri Dixit, gyrating in tune with lusty music in her famous song-and-dance sequences. In the 2000s, with the ascendance of “daring” directors like Ramgopal Verma, deep-focusing on the midriff or cleavage of heroines is no longer a big deal in movies, but in real life it can still get women into trouble with various authorities, including the vice squads sponsored by the Hindu Fascists whose recent harassment of young women in Bangalore, Bombay (Mumbai) and elsewhere hit the headlines. Clearly, the aura of 153


prohibition around certain parts of the female body makes these more desirable, as is the case with navel and armpit.

That Obscure Object of Vernacular Desire Earlier I remarked that the figure of the aunty is itself a fantasy. This needs elaboration. Why “ordinary” or “everyday” aunties appear as “super hot,” “sexy” and “sizzling” when viewed as (net)porn? I came across numerous appreciative comments in FSI to the effect that members get a certain kick out of watching nude photos of “respectable [looking]” maternal women whose “sex-appeal” remains unnoticed in the quotidian context. In the FSI members’ usage (whose English is often poor),43 the so-called “respectability” is a comment on the comportment and demeanor of middle-aged maternal women. It means comely and ample but emphatically asexual. There are other words for a sexy or voluptuous look. It is thus a certain estrangement—caused by the emplacement of these pictures of “respectable” maternal figures in the net—rather than their intrinsic worth as sex objects, which is productive of the libidinal investment made on them qua objects of desire: aunty. I am reminded here of the Freudian idea of das unheimliche, the familiar made unfamiliar, usually translated as the “uncanny.”44 On the way to the uncanny, he hits upon its antonyms, heimlich, heimisch, vertraut (the familiar). His digging into heimlich’s etymology has some unexpected surprises for us: heimlich means, “belonging to the house, not strange, familiar, tame, dear and intimate, homely etc” (p. 126). Although Freud stuck to just one meaning of the unheimlich—the uncanny as a sub-species of frightening (p. 124)—in subsequent deployment of the term (by Bhabha, for example), the unheimlich lost its association with dread and fear, coming closer to a sense of eerie estrangement of/from home and the familiar. The unheimlich in this sense creates a certain cognitive dissonance. It is this dissonance that is productive of intense sexual longing. Though Freud does not mention anything pleasurable about the unheimlich, he offers an etiology: “[T]he unheimlich is something familiar that has been repressed and then reappears… ”(p. 152). Further, “[W]here the uncanny stems from [repressed] childhood complexes, the question of material reality does not arise, its place being taken by psychical reality” (p. 155). The “aunty” fantasy does not signify a straightforward sexual desire for “aunties,” for fantasy in the psychoanalytic sense does not mean a free-floating, random escapist fancy. Fantasy has a 154

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very definite relationship to desire which is not just repressed and frustrated but also organized by wider societal-psychical conditions. Images of “aunties” are titillating when distanced, defamiliarized, estranged and placed in the netporn context where these work more through connotation rather than denotation,45 as icons invoking (through its cultic “aura” rather than through “haptic immediacy”) an archetype or prototype (of the voluptuous mother or courtesan). The desi aunties in the net are overweight, ample and obese but unlike the western BBW, they are not “monstrously obese” or “gigantic.” It is not their “excessive corporeality”46 which draws viewers to aunty pictures. In India, the “norm” itself is different and differential, and “progressive virtualisation” through media has not (yet) reached a stage where “female bodies become mere support for incorporeal signs or shrink into vestigial anorexic artifacts.”47 Thus the perverse allure of “excessive corporeality”—its (concocted) lewdness in certain contexts—is simply absent in India because “slim” is not yet normative. The images of “aunties” found in FSI are not radically different from the real bodies of ordinary, middle-aged women walking in the streets of Indian towns and cities without anybody paying any special attention to them. The only difference is that the aunties making it to FSI’s forums are mostly naked (rarely nude) or semi-naked. It is this banality and the mundane-ness of the object of vernacular fantasy that need to be interrogated. Speaking generally, I want to break away from the temptation of rationalizing the wider, human impact of new media in terms of a fatalistic teleology of progressive “virtualisation” and “disembodiment.” Though the practitioners of this genre of criticism swear allegiance to Bergson and Deleuze and claim to derive from Deleuze’s seminal idea of the virtual, they forget that the Deleuzian virtual is not about a facile virtualization, meaning a hollowing out of “reality” through media, image and representation; not about the virtuality of the real but about the reality of the virtual. The arguments that could be made against my point about the “realness” of aunty porn is that my theorization of aunty porn amounts to nativism— fetishization of the “authentic.” In the wake of Gonzo, “alternative,” “indie” and “feminist” porn of the late-90s, and the progressive integration of art, performance, fashion and business through the rise of the “porno chic,” Florian Cramer, stressing the vital mediating role of the internet, comments: “Indie porn is not at all ‘independent’ but in fact commercialized and sealed off from free channels, even positioned in opposition to them; 155


… pornography, just like pop music, now sells only by virtue of difference, including difference from itself.”48 He makes an argument against the normalization of obscenity and a neutering of the subversive power of pornography through its commodification: “The [affective] ‘exploitation’ of the porn viewer consists in the false promise of obscenity…” (p. 172). In “alternative” porn, “[T]he power of sex and of the obscene imagination [is]… play[ed] down as a game without consequences, rationalize[d] and repress[ed].” (p. 174). The other argument that could be made about my valorization of aunty porn as a different kind (not genre) of porn is the clichéd argument that India’s socio-economic development has not yet reached a stage where “the ‘industrialization of fantasy’… repositioned… fantasizing from a private, essentially recreational and non-productive activity, to an integral, productive element of the value chain of the booming sex/porn industry.”49 This amounts to saying that, “We have (simulated and kinky) fantasies, they have (immediate, full-blooded) real sex!” Arvidsson even tries to marshal empirical evidence for his argument from dubious “interviews” of sexworkers. Our desi surfers are jaded veterans rather than neophyte nerds shopping from a low-brow segment of the market. Besides, speaking in a crude sociological vein, there is no dearth of evidence to demonstrate that the Indian fantasy space (dubbed “private” and “recreational”) is thoroughly invaded by media. The progressive Bollywoodization of all arenas of life— from fashion and advertisements to news presentations, politics and the arts—demonstrates this.50 Amir Khan, a leading Bollywood actor and producer, recently stated that “the way we look at love and sex is completely defined by our Bollywood films, television serials and ads.”51 But perhaps more damagingly, Arvidsson’s distinction between simulated, synthetic fantasy and “real life” sex is theoretically unsustainable, as we will see shortly. My basic problem with Cramer and Arvidsson is that they do not problematize the look of the viewer/spectator/observer, presuming that everybody looks in the same way, that pornographic pictures are transparent and immediately readable signifiers of eroticism. Victor Burgin, arguing against the (once) dominant view (“scopophilia” à la Mulvey) which reduced looking to the visible, has argued that, “We cannot tell what is going on in the look simply by looking at it.”52 Burgin draws our attention to the complexity of vision invested with desire—the libidinally invested scopic drive. He shows that, though, as described by Freud and Lacan, the look is in some 156

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ways analogous to touch—it puts out its exploratory, aggressive “shoots”— “it equally clearly also takes in objects, from physical space into psychical space—just as surely as it projects unconscious objects into the real.”53 I enlist Burgin as my ally because his critique of scopophilia gives an entry point into the look, though he himself is heavily invested in the ethnocentric theorization of the look as a substitute of touch and physical possession. At the heart of the Freudian notion of scopic drive—in fact in the very idea of drive (trieb is very different from the instinkt) as such,54 there is a deep-seated notion of nature as an antagonist, as an evolutionary competitor for survival, as an object of aggression and domination. This is brought out by Laplanche’s exegesis on the Freudian notion of scopic drive originating in an animal-like (snail being the example) exploratory groping (tâtonnement) and collecting of samples (prise d’échantillons) from the external world. “Thus the non-sexual activity of looking, in the movement of propping [“anaclisis”], becomes the drive to see in the movement when it becomes representative, that is to say the interiorization of a scene.”55 Freud imbibed this “nature” from the nineteenth century zeitgeist, his compatriots being Marx and the Nietzche of The Will to Power. The idea of vision as an approximation of touching and possession—from which most late-twentieth century theorizations of vision derive56—imparts to the image, to the very conception of the image, especially enticing, erotic images, what WJT Mitchell called a certain “predatory character.” In the analysis of the erotic images, the metaphors of entrapment, capture, illusion, seduction, etc. are so pervasive that it is difficult to think of the image in terms other than a desire for an unlimited consumption of reality, invoking the fantasy of an instantaneous, unmediated appropriation of the world and the other. En passent, let us note that the relationship between the traditional Indian image vis-à-vis the viewer calls for a very different conception of image and of vision as such.57 From Baudelaire to Mulvey through Gombrich, the pornographic image was considered as one of the best examples of the uniquely western ideainstitution of the image as a natural and transparent sign. The more recent commentators we discussed above are specifically concerned with analyzing the rupture caused by pornographic photography or film or video which, understandably, are much more immediate and tactile than their predecessors (e.g., painting). Yet, deciphering a photograph requires as much (culturally acquired) training as does a film or a video. And this is brought out 157


very clearly through the photos and clips uploaded in FSI. Stylistically and also from the point of view of content (no fetishes or “unnatural” positions, straightforward fornication, ordinary women in everyday attires, the ambiences being mostly domestic interiors, etc.), these are not just another genre of porn, these are of a different kind altogether. It is doubtful whether typical (western) consumers of porn would find these “pornographic” at all. These even lack the usual characteristic of “amateur” porn, which is not an absence of code but names a particular and fairly explicit code which consists in giving the product a “real life” look, and for which there is an explicit, well-known and changing set of conventions (think of Bertrand Bonello’s film, The Pornographer). In order to think more analytically about the visual subalternity of vernacular porn, it is essential to make a point about the nature of photography as such (because aunty porn is primarily photographs). By common consent, the photograph, being indexical, requires minimal decoding. Barthes wrote that being “absolutely analogical,” it is a “message without a code” which “must thus be opposed to the drawing which, even when denoted, is a coded message.”58 The hoary western idea of the image as transparent and natural sign (epitomized by Zeuxis’ legendary grapes which are decoys rather than representations) reaches its apotheosis in photography and Gombrich went so far as to assert that even a genre of photography as highly coded as the “erotic nude” is a “natural” image readily grasped by all. What makes photography a quintessence of the so-called “natural image” is the fact that its (illusion of ) “naturalness” is based on a perspectival view of the visible world (reproduced in two dimensions). Unlike Panofsky, Gombrich and the votaries of the “testimony” or “truth” value of photography,59 think of perspective as a natural rather than conventional procedure. In a gesture of unabashed ethnocentricism, Gombrich presented what an Indian art-theorist calls the “window vision”60 as vision per se: “Perspective is the necessary tool if you want to adopt… the “eye-witness principle.”61 In more unguarded moments, he avers that the dynamic inherent in the realistic western tradition impels the artist to shed off more and more conventions, leading to a point where the picture would no longer just represent but become almost a replica of the visible. Photograph is the quintessence of the image as natural sign.62 Our aunty pictures are “erotic nude(s),” but their appeal is strictly confined within a particular visual public. These are highly coded images deriving their authority from culturally invested proto- or archetypes. These are, 158

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as I said, icons of sorts. “Icons,” according to Peirce, “represent their objects only in so far as they resemble them in themselves” but, similarity or resemblance is so capacious a relationship that almost anything can be assimilated into it.63 This is the reason why Eco wants to get rid of icons altogether: “iconic signs are partially ruled by convention but at the same time motivated; some of them refer to an established stylistic rule, while others appear to propose a new rule… [S]o, iconism is not a single phenomenon, nor indeed a uniquely semiotic one.”64 Goodman noted that resemblance, unlike representation, is both reflexive and symmetric.65 However, resemblance is not necessary for reference—strictly speaking, almost anything can stand for anything else.66 The point in getting into this debate is to justify the semiotic status of the aunty pictures as icons rather than as indexes, though these happen to be photographs. What do these pictures connote and evoke? Throughout this essay, I’m trying to argue that there is a clear iconographic continuity between the aunty pictures and the pre-photographic (manuscript illustration, sculpture, miniature, pat, patua paintings, oleograph, woodcut, chromolithograph, etc.) stylized genre of erotic pictures or statues of voluptuous woman variously called nayika, rasika, sakhi, sundari, bibi, etc., in various local artistic traditions. The pictures and statues are visual transcriptions of the highly codified descriptions of women found in pre-modern Sanskrit and vernacular poetry (kavya) and the normative shastras (Kamasutra, the Shilpashastras, etc.).67 The iconographic continuity between a voluptuous courtesan depicted in Kalighat pat or the erotic sculptures of Khajuraho and the aunty picture of FSI is so strong that even an untrained eye can discern the homology. The next section attempts to analyze the impact of the invasion of the photographic image on pre-photographic visual imaginaries, but what is clear from the continuing popularity of the aunty pictures in “underground” vernacular sexual subcultures is that the initial response to “mechanical reproduction” is a certain refusal of the mimetic magic of photography, entailing a re-auraticization of photography itself.68 This is “techno-folk” whose visual strategy consists of a certain defamiliarization: photographs of “everyday aunties” become auratic icons of the voluptuous nayika through their emplacement in the (net)porn context.

Fat and Photography In this section I want to investigate the relationship between image and desire: I want to find out how mechanically reproduced images reconfigure 159


desire through reconstituting the body, the gaze and the look. My starting point is that desire is always other’s desire and what we call “self-image” always comes from the outside. The radical exteriority of desire is discernable from the fact that the “aunty” images invoke a certain prototype which came from without, from sources (history and tradition—image-repertoire) which are, strictly speaking, outside of the individual. Far from prioritizing the resilient self as a resource, I would like to think of the self as a mere fabrication, after the fact of image. Thus, what mechanical reproduction accomplishes is not so much a move away from immediacy to representation, from “real” sex to “mass-mediated” fantasy, from the real to the virtual, but rather a movement from one regime of virtuality to another, from one kind of fantasy to another. I approach the relationship between image and desire somewhat obliquely. Let us begin with Indian matrimonial adverts (marriages in India are negotiated through these advertisements) which, in recent decades, exhibit a marked preference for “slim” brides.69 The subaltern/elite, vernacular/westernized divide comes in sharp relief when, for example, we read in Jaanlo, “The How-to Site for Indians Worldwide” (read: diasporic, yuppy Indians) about tips for securing a beautiful desi bride from India. It makes an amusing read. Under the title, How to know whether your Indian bride is really beautiful?, the author, K. Vijay (“Darklord”) writes: [Middle class] Indians are generally very conservative, especially when it comes to Marriage… Most of us spend years in school, striving hard to build a secure future. Many Indians sacrifice personal life for their career… We are always in a hurry even when it comes to choosing a life partner. The boy will be thousands of miles away from home working for a foreign company, while parents look for a bride. All the decisions are made fast… after looking at… photos or web cam chats. This article is written from real experience… If this offends you…, all I can say is, “the truth is bitter.” Photographs Lie … manipulated by an expert to make karupamma look like kushboo. Girls show only what they want you to see… Most pictures usually have just the face stuffed with makeup… What you see will do no justice to the real appearance. I have seen cases where pictures are forged… Never!! Never!! Fall for a girl by her pictures. First meeting is not enough—This is when you can know, whether the face you saw in the picture is really hers. However her body is a totally different story… She knows exactly what she lacks and what you are looking for. She spends years researching her appearance and finding innovative ways to… camouflage. It all comes down to this moment. The life you earned after years of struggle…—she is going to get it all. All she has to do is make you fall for her in these 10 minutes. So she… packages herself nicely… masquerading behind a Saree. Saree hides… girls (particularly the obese ones) prefer Saree not because it’s tradi-

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VIRTUAL FLESH tional. It’s because, it is very convenient to hide all that extra pounds. An elegantly worn Saree can easily take your eyes off a tire in her midriff or her huge thighs… Western clothes help… So if she comes in a Saree, let her know that, it may not be appropriate outside India… If she becomes defensive… then… she is concealing something. It’s time to stop and look for someone else. Trust me, if she has a good figure, she will definitely make sure that you see it. … Many girls prepare for marriage by going to Fat camps… she will gain all the pounds back, much faster than the time she spent to lose them. Many Indian girls… are characterized by large hips and very huge thighs. … [S]tarvation may make them look normal, they will go back to their original state soon after marriage. So it always helps to check… old photographs… [S]ince obesity can be genetic, you can check her brothers, sisters and parents…70

This (somewhat contrived) loathing for fat, I contend, is typical of westernized Indians. For them, corpulence has the connotation of the archaic, the vernacular and the subaltern—desi—while “slim” is the sign of the postcolonial cosmopolitan-modern. Perhaps in this self-conscious disavowal of, and distancing from the corpulent desi femme fatale, lie the key to an understanding of today’s Indian male middle-class desire. A slim wife becomes a kind of mimetic capital, an accoutrement of affective citizenship as the uncouth, hick town desi immigrant professional gradually works his way up the social ladder to respectability and recognition. While this attests to the power of the image-repertoire in shaping desire, it does not explain how a certain kind of image (the “slim” look) acquires a compelling force—how it comes to prevail as the norm and becomes normative. Feminist scholarship has demonstrated that the recent Euro-American concern with body weight and shape is a necessary consequence of women’s emancipation—women becoming “subjects” exercising the liberalhumanist self-ownership. In the tradition of possessive individualism, the self is understood as an entity of accumulation and appropriation—an experimentalist engaged in what Rousseau called in Emile “the physics of self-preservation,” which involves the self in a continual negotiation with the space s/he inhabits. So long as women were subordinated, their bodies were considered as the property of their men. Women’s emancipation extends to them the proprietary rank of the humanist subject. Liberal feminism thus inherits and recapitulates the spatial phenomenology of possessive individualism. Unfolding the narrative of entitlement from a woman’s point of view, feminism amplifies woman into the world. And this expansionism is exactly what anorexia nervosa resists when it repudiates the basic site of femininity, the female body. “It is thus at the site of the body,” writes 161


Brown, “that the practice of self-proprietorship, the ongoing negotiation between self and self for self, is most deeply registered.”71 She concludes: “While… feminism… would extend the rights and real estate of men to women, the anorectic would repudiate liberal property relations in favor of a radicalized form of self-proprietorship: dispossession.”72 Harriet Faard has stressed the role of the “male gaze” in shaping feminine self-image: “One of anorexia’s cultural conditions of existence is a particular kind of gender ideology that represents women as the sex-object… Such an ideology acts upon us as a kind of Foucauldian discipline… Our bodies are usurped through a thousand Lilliputian disciplines [waxing, depilation, starving etc.]… Thus our desire to please others is confused with our need to care for ourselves.”73 Faard’s account draws our attention to the crucial role of stereotype in bringing about the bodily aesthetic of thinness, though her resort to a repressive “discipline” is rather unfortunate. Drawing from a tradition of scholarship which would have women as mere victims, she forgets that the self (though I prefer Lacan’s “subjectivity” over Foucault’s “self ” or Deleuze’s “desire”) is founded on specularity—it is through images which are outside of us that we become ourselves. Hence the choice is not between regimes with or without images, but between images that are debilitating as opposed to those that are enabling. The ascendance of the “slim” look, as is wellknown, goes back to the late 1960s, when the fashion and media industries started projecting systematically the androgynous “Twiggy” look. Thus, a purely contingent development “elsewhere”—an almost randomly fabricated, fictive and exterior image projected on the social screen—becomes the epochal optic through which generations of women see and model themselves and are seen by men. The mirror which society holds up to us—the cultural gaze, so to speak—goes on to determine not just how we want to look but our very identification with our “own” looks. Lacan’s insistence on the fictiveness and exteriority of the image which founds the ego is founded on the constitutive role of a certain méconnaissance—the structuring identification with the mirror-image at the formative stage of the human ego. In Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Seminar XI, hereafter FFCP), he wrote: “What determines [the subject]… in the visible, is the gaze that is outside. It is through the gaze that [the subject] enters light…”74 Lacan’s “gaze” is not what I called the “cultural gaze.” He clearly makes a distinction between the gaze and the look, relentlessly de-anthropomorphizing the gaze, asserting 162

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that it is “unapprehensible,” signifying merely “the presence of others as such.” He situates it outside of any voyeuristic matrix (thus, theorists like Mulvey, who equate the male voyeur with the gaze and aligns the male look with the camera, are wrong). For Lacan, the gaze always exceeds the look: the gaze remains outside desire, the look stubbornly within. So, we have to account for that agency which determines what the viewer sees when s/he looks. This will take us to the three diagrams from Lacan’s FFCP (p. 91 and 106) which clarify the relation of the subject to gaze.

1. Object

image

3. The gaze

Geometral Point point of light

image screen

screen

2. Picture

The subject of representation

In diagram 1, the looking subject’s transcendental position (the Renaissance ideal) and mastery75 are troubled by the intervening “image.” In occupying the “seeing position,” the eye emerges from “the function of seeingness,” which both precedes and antedates it, and thus always exceeds it. Diagram 2, by inverting the triangle in 1, situates the subject at the site marked “picture” and the gaze at that marked “point of light.” Thus, while locating the subject within visibility, it also dramatically separates the gaze from the human eye. The gaze represents the intrusion of the symbolic in the field of vision. Lacan says that the gaze is a marker of social ratification: to “be” means “to be seen.” Again, a third term mediates between the two ends of the diagram, indicating that the subject is always seen (Lacan uses the term “photo-graphed”) in the shape of the “screen.” While discussing Gombrich’s idea of the image which ascribes to the viewer a transcendental position implying a scopic mastery of the world, I registered my resentment. In clear contrast, here Lacan is pointing out the viewer as function— the viewing subject disappears at the perspectival vanishing point. The viewer is the object of the gaze. The third diagram superimposes the second over the first, suggesting that diagram 1 is always circumscribed by diagram 2; even as we look, we are in 163


the “picture,” and so, a “subject of representation.” The gaze occupies the site of the “object” in diagram 1, and that of “point of light” in diagram 2. In this double capacity, it is now at an even more emphatic remove from the eye. And again, the relation between the terms on the left and the right are mediated by the “image,” the “screen” or the “image/screen,” and which we designate simply as “screen.” To sum up, Lacan’s gaze simply means the dependence of the social subject upon the Other for his/her own meaning, thus being independent of any individual look, and exterior to the subject in its constitutive effects. By contrast, the look is always finite, always embodied, and always within spectacle. Further, the look being both a psychic as well as a visual category, it is unavoidably marked by lack and vulnerable to the lures of imaginary. Our problem being to account for the epochal cultural gaze that determines what is normative in a particular regime of vision, I would like to signpost, following Kaja Silverman, the screen as the site at which social, cultural and historical variations enter the field of vision.76 “The screen represents the site at which the gaze is defined for a particular society, and is consequently responsible for the ways in which that society experience the gaze’s effects, and for much of the seeming particularity of that society’s visual regime.”77 The screen, Lacan insists, is opaque, and hence, intraversible. Thus, the subject has no choice but to assume the shape predetermined by the screen. Diagram 2 is crucially concerned with the process whereby the subject assumes the form of a representation or becomes a picture—a process involving three terms: subject, screen, and gaze. Lacan’s “screen” is related to Caillois’ “mimicry.” Caillois describes this mimicry (in insects) as photography at the level of the object rather than at that of the image—as “a reproduction in three-dimensional space with solids and voids: sculpturephotography or better teleplasty.”78 But, for Lacan, “mimicry” is not a simple assimilation to space but rather a visual articulation: not just the reproduction of an image, but also, “it is, for the subject, to be inserted in a function whose exercise grasps him” (FFCP, p. 100). More than parody or deformation, what is stressed here is the passive duplication of a pre-existing image. But Lacan also talks about mimicry in another sense, associated with “travesty, camouflage, intimidation,” which is limited to the human subject who, unlike the animal, is not entirely caught up in this imaginary capture. “Man, in effect, knows how to play with the mask as that beyond which there is the gaze. The screen is here the locus of mediation” (FFCP, p. 107). “[I]f [the subject] is anything in the picture, it is always in the form of the screen”(FFCP, p. 97). 164

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Lacan’s third diagram explicitly conflates the “image” with the “screen.” The slippage between these two terms suggests that by “screen” he in fact means the image(s) through which identity is constituted. The screen is “something… like a mask, a double, an envelope, a thrown-off screen, thrown-off in order to cover the frame of a shield,” which “the being gives of himself, or receives from the other” [emphasis added] (FFCP, p. 107). The screen can thus assume the status of a defensive weapon (shield) or a lure or a tool of seduction. Throughout FFCP, Lacan stressed the passivity of the look while the screen would give shape and significance to how we are seen by “others as such,” how we define and interact with the agency to whom we attribute our visibility, and how we perceive the world. Hence the screen consists of the normative representations which shape the way we look at things. It is time we returned to our question which necessitated this digression: what determines the epochal shift in the image-repertoire making the ideal of thinness visually normative? Women’s emancipation as such cannot account for this change—we need to account for the concomitant shift in the visual register—the screen—through which a new normativity emerges. Faard has drawn our attention to the visual field: she clearly understands the relationship between the “screen” and the “look.” She laments the fact that women view themselves through a cultural screen foisted by the “male gaze.” What is specific to our era of mediatization and informatization is not so much the founding of subjectivity on “fabricated” images but rather the specific logic of the organization of the images and the value(s) conferred upon those images through the larger organization of the visual field. Throughout this book, I have critiqued the idea that because of a certain mediatization of the world, we have become more dependent on images. What is specific to our time is not the specular foundation of subjectivity but rather the terms of that foundation. And photography plays a preeminent role here. In the mediatized West, the camera is somehow internal to the screen: the screen is structured through its implicit relation to camera, people depend upon the camera/gaze for their specular affirmation. The other technologies—cinema, television, video and the internet—to the extent that these disseminate the photographic “look,” merely reinforce the image-repertoire consisting of photographic images. Which is to say, the images which intervene between people and the world are primarily photographic in nature: one looks at the world through an imaginary viewfinder. More importantly, people experience themselves-as-spectacle in relation to 165


it. As Susan Sontag observed: “We learn to see ourselves photographically…”79 I emphasize the word “learn” because there is a certain pedagogy, a certain education of desire, involved in this learning. I will have more to say on this process of “learning” in relation to “vernacular” desire. Barthes is the theorist of this phenomenon of the phantasmic photograph. It entails the “advent” of oneself as “other.”80 The apprehension of oneself as image has a profoundly self-alienating aspect: photograph, as Metz wrote, effects a “cut” inside the referent.81 “It is as though our bodily Gestalt were itself suddenly objectified, transformed into a representation— and not for us, as in the mirror transaction, but for a visual agency radically exterior to our look. Das Heimliche suddenly becomes unheimlich.”82 While there is evidence that people living in pre-photographic cultures do not readily recognize their own images in photographs,83 even in the West the experience of being photographed had a mortifying experience on subjects. However, at the same time that the photographic transaction mortifies, it also confers “reality” to subjects: people in “industrialized countries” believe that they are “made real by photographs.”84 The clicking of the camera signifies that “recognition” upon which subjectivity depends. Kracauer wrote that through the wide dissemination of photography, “the world itself has taken on a ‘photographic face’….”85 The contemporary field of vision, at least in the West, is defined by the photographic because bodies have developed a certain anticipatory congealing: people have internalized the “picture” to the extent that they offer themselves to the gaze already in the guise of a particular “picture.” It seems to me that “picture” needs to be more generally understood as the photographic imprinting of the body, and that imprinting is not always apparent to the subject in question. It may be the result of the projection of a particular image onto the body so repeatedly as to induce both a psychic and a corporeal identification with it. Even the subject who arrives at some understanding of his or her specular dependency generally does not then call into question the authority of the visual ideal. Assuming even a limited agency with respect to the image through which one is seen, necessitates an attempt to control the circumstances under which one’s selfconstituting “photo” is taken. This entails a constant transformative labor at the site of ideality. When Faard talks about women’s bodies being “usurped through… Lilliputian disciplines,” she is actually talking about this transformative labor. Darklord’s detailed exposition and graphic examples of what Indian brides 166

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do to deceive their prospective husbands fit quite well with Lacanian “mimicry.” Yet, the imprinting of the body with image—photographic or otherwise—is not peculiar to the “postmodern” West and is not necessarily disempowering. Commenting on Keïta’s studio photographs of posed African subjects taken on the eve of the country’s independence, Okwui Enwezor has justly celebrated the enabling quality of the pose and the camera’s role as an instrument of grassroots democracy that empowers the masses.86 Pre-photographic visual cultures, as I have argued earlier, are equally “contaminated” with images, and these images are as fictive as the photographic ones and come from sources which are exterior to individuals. The real power of photography qua image lies in its indexicality and its ability to concoct a certain haptic immediacy which is destructive of the “aura,” as Baudelaire and Benjamin understood quite clearly. And what is scandalous about our aunty pictures is their temerity—their refusal to yield to the lure of photography while continuing to play with it as if it is just another variety of image. Das unheimliche becomes das heimliche!

Fat Becomes Fantasy The coexistence of structurally different kinds of normative images in the visual field opens up the possibility of admitting a certain heterogenity in the constitution of the screen. This means that the image-repertoire consists of images which are ontologically heterogeneous, coming from disparate times, disparate scopic regimes and embodying disparate ontologies. Not everyone inhabits the same Now. This radical heterogeneity in the constitution of the field of vision, however, does not mean some kind of a free play. And only when we recognize that there are very real stakes behind the promotion of certain images as normative, that the struggle for “oppressed pasts,” for visual subalternity, assumes a certain political urgency. In India, the promotion of the slim look, for example, is tied up with the interests of a number of “cultural” industries like fashion, cosmetics, film, advertising, television, tourism, leisure, health, etc. which happen to be the “vanguard” industries as the country becomes the hunting ground of the MNCs eyeing the Indian market. These industries are critically dependent on “immaterial,” “specular” images and it is in their interest to promote certain images as normative.87 Media de- and re-territorializes images, creating structural disjunctions in the visual field. While images of diet-thin bimbos dominate the Bolly 167


woodized mainstream, the contending visual imaginaries are driven underground, relegated to a kind of subterranean existence, (re)animating B-grade regional language films, videos, folk and vernacular theatres (e.g., Bengali Jatra, Bihari Nautanki, etc.), striptease-like dance-shows, Mujras, etc. These, in turn, are being re-indigenized and reinvented in response to a new vernacular spectatorship—audiences which can no longer connect with mainstream Bollywood but whose expectations are, nevertheless, shaped by it. In this emergent segment, a new “narrative contract” is being negotiated. I want to think of the FSI as an extension of this vernacular media characterized by a certain visual subalternity.88 The visual field, Debord notwithstanding, does not exist in isolation; it needs reinforcements from other arenas. The persistence of the institution of kinship and caste-based arranged marriage in India goes on to demonstrate that as yet there is no social demand on women in general to appear as autonomous subjects. “Sexiness” and excessive preoccupation with appearance are frowned upon as frivolous or even lewd. The prevailing Indian norm of the “sacrificing” mother, sister and wife is the binary opposite of possessive individualism.89 So, the desire for a “slim” wife in an arranged marriage where the amount of dowry is often a bone of contention, as demonstrated by frequent dowry deaths, is very much a male, mimetic desire—the desire of a miniscule elite to mimic the metropolitan model without, however, confronting its egalitarian, democratic ideals. This desire is literally “other’s” desire. The disavowal of fat epitomized in Darklord’s missive that views the spouse more in sexual-specular terms is not unequivocal. It is not unusual to come across introspective conversations in FSI about the female body. I reproduce below some such fragments with the intent of understanding what can be called the libidinal economy of (virtual) corpulence. In response to the fat aunty pictures posted in a thread entitled Old is Gold, BinnyBangalore wrote: “You have a bad taste, clearly indicates that you are a pervert, because your post has all unattractive, obese women, dirty looking. Improve your taste man” (date: 6 December, 2007). XYShiva, more typical of FSI, however, reacted differently: “Pl. post more pics of big women. Big is beautiful, Fat is fantastic, Old is Gold. Women and wine more matured and aged taste better. My mother is 5ft 6in, 42 36 45, 95 kg. long thick hair reaching her knees well matured 50 yr, fat curvaceous, sexy desirable and fuckable. Sexually very active” (15 February, 2007). Nadkok was more explicit: “Aren’t these middle aged types add voluptuousness? … 168

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It’s flesh all around and one enjoys the feeling of fullness… [M]iddle aged women in India… have almost a non existent sex life… May be once a fortnight where the hubby jerks off within minutes and does it simply by lifting up the saree in dark… no foreplay… and leaving the woman highly dissatisfied and the societal suffocations doesn’t allow her to vent out her sex drive… Anyway, enjoy her beauty” (17 November, 2007). Earlier, while launching a new thread (“My mature aunty from Vizag”), he wrote: “I have been actually quite bored with the perfect female body… it gets so mechanical…[and] artificial… that’s the reason such an over bloated tummy which otherwise is actually ugly could be a turn on… it looks natural, so Indian (and thereby I imply the carelessness most women force themselves of neglect after child birth) and is in a way erotic… so here’s more of her outstretched, ever growing thulthul [an onomatopoetic, meaning flabby and pendulous; italic mine] tummy” (5 November, 2007). An appreciative Nutcase_24 wrote, “Super thread dude… please continue… love this chubby South Indian aunty so much… adorable ass and fatty boobies full of milk… best part is she looks submissive and horny… wonderful… really” (19 November, 2007). Lingaraj, another admirer of fat aunties wrote: “Nandkok, please don’t get disheartened by criticism, there are thousands like me who stand firmly by your side. Meaty women are always a hit in India. We are all fed up with professional sex models and your threads are a great relief ” (27 December, 2007). Keshef wrote: “Can u imagine the amount of jism/spunk that was ejaculated thanks to ur pics? There is a dirty mature aunty fucker in all of us!!!” (25 January, 2008). Nandkok wrote again, “She looks so typical Indian aunt when she is dressed. Any middle aged aunt you would come across on streets. And that’s what adds to the rawness… she is just one of those thousands of middle aged aunts each of us encounter in our daily life… can we imagine the kind of fire and heat they have… believe me each of them has… it’s just a matter of gaining their confidence” (5 October, 2008). Again, “Now that she is topless and free from her bra… she intends removing her mangalsutra also as a true traditional pativrata bharatiya naari, she doesn’t want to wear mangalsutra while making out with a guy other than her hubby” (21 October, 2008). More appreciative comments from the same person: “Here guys, pic from another series… Notice: her THUNDERING THIGHS… this is something so voluptuous to Andhra women once they are 30+… In fact, we in Andhra, prefer such full bodied women to skinny skeletons people call shapely beauties… these buxom full bodies beauties have so much flesh… all around… it’s like “paisa wasool” (27 October, 2008). 169


With all these comments in the background, especially the admission that, “There is a dirty mature aunty fucker in all of us!!!,” Darklord’s phobia of fat would turn out to be a text-book example of the Freudian “disavowal” (verleugnung). Together, these bring to the surface a certain split—a historic fracture in the vernacular libido—which is deeply divided between an “archaic” sensuality and a half-hearted, “surface” desire for modernity and “civilizing” good taste. The former is necessarily in a position of subalternity to the latter. This rhetoric of the postcolonial libido bears a structural resemblance to the old nationalist problematic of “inside-outside.”90 But what is distinctive about the present one is its valorization of the affective “interior” through figures that connote not just plenitude, bliss, assimilation to the maternal body (“mother,” “India,” “Andhra,” breasts overflowing with milk, “roundness,” “fullness,” etc.) but also stand out as markers of an excessive enjoyment—an obscene jouissance—achieved through transgression (mother-son incest, “sex-slave,” “fire and heat” etc.). There is an amassing of jouissance through a libidinal valorization of one’s own desire’s subalternity (“dirty”). It is, as I said, a certain estrangement of fat through its emplacement in the (net)porn context that makes it productive of visualpornographic pleasure. The visceral metaphors must not deceive us: this fat or flesh is virtual to the extent that it is fantasmatic in nature and is internal to the subject who masturbates thinking about images of fat women and enjoys catching himself looking at their pictures. He is caught up in a game of his own making. And that’s how fantasy works—always, everywhere. As Žižek put it: “a fantasy constitutes our desire, provides its coordinates; that is, it literally ‘teaches us how to desire.’”91 In a different register, it is possible to think of the libidinal draw of the bloated “thulthul tummy” in terms of narcissism and regression to what Julia Kristeva called the “abject.” Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from the mother’s body in order to be. Sudhir Kakar, the Indian psychoanalyst, has written extensively on such regression typical of Indian men.92 My object of study being the image and its embedding visual-cultural space rather than sexuality, I cannot afford to go deep into vernacular sexual desire as such.93 Lacan’s frequently misunderstood dictum that “there’s no such thing as a sexual relationship” means that inventing a fantasy is the prerequisite of sexual pleasure—there is no universal matrix or formula guaranteeing a harmonious sexual relationship. Arvidsson’s and Cramer’s argument which juxtaposes mass-mediated fantasy to spontaneous, corporeal sex is founded 170

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on naïve, commonsensical ideas. Fantasy does not mean a hallucinatory satisfaction of desire in the absence of real objects. The emergence of sexuality as such cannot be defined without a simultaneous positing of fantasy: “sexuality is detached from any natural object, and is handed over to fantasy, and, by this very fact, starts existing as sexuality.”94 The origin of fantasy comes about at that “mythical moment” at which hunger and sexuality meet. In course of the ingestion of milk, “there has been a metonymical displacement” from “milk” to breast and from “ingestion” to “incorporation.” “Breast” here does not correspond to the anatomical organ but is fantasmatic in nature and internal to the subject….”95 Laplanche and Pontalis comment: “sexuality lies in its difference from the function… The ideal…of auto-eroticism is ‘lips that kiss themselves.’”96

Conclusion: Rethinking the Politics of Vernacular Cyberporn Cramer and Arvidsson use the word “fantasy” to designate the irreality of netporn and a certain invasion of the “real” by the virtual. It is my contention that underlying this distinction is a deep distrust of not just fantasy but of the virtual as such. This anxiety has been active in theorizing the internet and the web almost since its inception. William Gibson’s (Neuromancer, 1984) oft-quoted epithet about cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination” (by the same token, isn’t “reality” itself a “consensual hallucination” to the extent that “every access to social reality has to be supported by an implicit phantasmic hypertext”?)97 paved the way for a thinking about cyberspace which views it with deep cynicism and distrust—lacking not just “reality” but having a dangerous, anti-social, seductive potential as well. Arvidsson writes about the dangers of “virtual” fantasies while Cramer writes about an originary, unrepresentable, metaphysical “obscenity” which is invoked only to be betrayed by the simulated and sham obscenity of commercial pornography. Their point against commerce is well-taken but, sadly, the argument against profit and exploitation is conflated with a metaphysical agenda of restoration of a mythical wholeness and self-presence to the body. In contrast, Lacan’s emphasis on the specularity of the self, his assertion that, “Truth has the structure of a fiction,” his concept of the phallus as a signifier implying that the phallus as such is a kind of prosthetic, artifactual supplement, his teaching that desire realized (staged) in fantasy is not the subject’s own, but the other’s desire, enable us to think of the cyberspace as an enabling, empowering supplement, an affirmative enhancement of the 171


human rather than a phantasmic double that saps the real of plenitude and self-presence. Another variant of the “seduction” argument runs as follows. Rana Dasgupta writes that the woman baring herself on the screen is merely a decoy. “She is only a lever for another, much more potent… relationship… Internet porn is… about the dream of being conjoined with technology itself… the dream of the cyborg… Web pornography is the bed on which the Internet and its devotees lie wrapt in erotic intercourse, the desire for understanding momentarily, ecstatically abandoned.”98 Apart from the fact that cyborgs are not what they used to be,99 there’s not much new in talking about an emergent genre of experience in which the organic and the machinic become approximate to each other. Baudelaire anticipated this argument, in principle, more than a century ago. But more interestingly, there is nothing to show that surfers in FSI are just avid seekers of contents. On the contrary, I came across intense introspection and a variety of reflexive texts which go on to show that, far from manic absorption, the surfers maintain an ironical distance from not just what they see but also from what they themselves do when confronted with images. I have already cited some of these comments. And the point in citing more is to make the point that far from solitary absorption, there is a distinct element of reflexivity and theatricality in their engagement with the cyberspace. Žižek thinks that, “[T]he use of computers… as a tool to rebuild community results in the building of a community inside the machine, reducing individuals to isolated monads….”100 My claim about the internet in India is not about community—there is a surfeit of it, obviating any need of reinforcement. My point is about sociality and publics. Ever since the inception of modern politics in India, there has been a widespread apprehension that the “public sphere” or the formal political domain of statist politics is artificially grafted on our polity.101 The “public sphere” in India acts more as a principle of exclusion and, according to historians of political discourse, “real” politics takes place in the informal “inside”: in the field of family, kinship and culture. Recently, Dipesh Chakrabarty has demonstrated, through his sensitive exploration of the Bengali middle-class institution of adda, how the contending, informal socialities shape culture in India.102 The subaltern socialities productive of counter-cultures that interest me here are too informal and too embedded in the fabric of everyday life to qualify as Tocquevillian “association,” but unlike Chakrabarty’s modernist, cerebral adda, are not simply face-to-face communities. I am concerned 172

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specifically with semi-institutionalized male socialities of ribaldry which have traditional sanctions and still play a certain role in reinforcing solidarities at the grassroots. The only academic work I know which focuses on such socialities is Lawrence Cohen’s fascinating study of the tradition of socialization among the men of the community centered on graphic pornographic caricatures published and circulated during the Holi festival in Banaras.103 In the Appendix, I cite an online conversation from a FSI forums, Indian Sex Talk, to clinch my argument that far from a “trap,” inciting a retreat to a reclusive, masturbatory solitude, or an epochal regression from the “real” pleasures of the body to a catatonic onanism, the FSI and other vernacular “porn commons” of its ilk, reinforce, regenerate or even open up counter-cultural, vernacular spaces, animating and instituting counter-publics, which the postcolonial, puritanical, Nehru-BJP brand of sanitized Indian public culture represses in order to be.104

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APPENDIX

“Why do the pussies of most Indian women smell and taste so bad?” (Thread started by CuddlybearXL on 23 July, 2009, in Indian Sex Talk.) “FSI members please comment on this. Most Indian women don’t shave or trim their jhaants and don’t keep their pussies very clean… This is especially true in smaller towns and villages… In… Mumbai, Delhi, etc,… sophisticated women are the only ones who smell and taste good. Rest all smell like a fishmarket! As for their gaands, just forget it!” CuddlybearXL, 23 July, 2009 “The silence of the majority of guys here proves that they are all virgins and have never smelled even the pussy of a woman…! Would love to hear from any genuine women here…” Titan04, 23 July, 2009 “You have eaten the wrong pussies dude. … India is a hot country so with the sweat come the smell. So next time u r in India tell ur lovely lady so that u will both take a shower b4 u go to bed.” CuddlybearXL, 24 July, 2009 “Titan, see my statement: “In… Mumbai, Delhi, etc …!” … But in spite of being choosy, one cannot judge the contents from the packaging! My point is still that the vast majority are filthy and foul. … [A]n issue of bad hygiene. With even city dwelling women of course, in desperation, a quick wipe… is required, but spoils the enjoyment somewhat, much like a KLPD!” Auntylover010, 24 July, 2009 “So the second edition of ‘Fragrant Pussies’ is out in the market. Seems you have reaped huge ‘profits’ from the first… Lucky man!” CuddlybearXL, 24 July, 2009

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THE RUMOR OF GLOBALIZATION “Not that easy ‘reaping profits’… in India, to lick and fuck a choot, one needs to be always carrying a lota and towels, soap etc… Khud saaf karo, phir kaam karo.” Auntylover, 25 July, 2009 “Aisi baat nahi hai dost… humare samagra prayaas ka nateeja hai ki aajkal gaanv dehat mein bhi auraten ang pradarshan aur choot chamkaane ke gur seekh gayi hain… Lagta hai ab humein apni dukaan bund karni padegi.” Uber, 26 July, 2009 “Seems like you do a lot of cunt and gaand sniffing… across India! Anyway, if that’s your cup of tea, who am I to ask you to cease…? However, what you can do to raise the standards of cleanliness and hygiene… is trim the jhants of those you sniff, introduce them to enemas and generally tell them about the importance of keeping the cunt and gaand non-smelly. You’ve got your work cut out for you. So just do it…” CuddlybearXL, 26 July, 2009 “Uber, in that case, I am appointing you, a bird brained piece of shit, to carry out this important mission… Please report to HQ for appropriate training in this regard, which will last for at least 6 weeks. You will hold road-shows, make presentations and distribute literature to women, examine their pussies and gaands, sniff, lick and eat them and fill out detailed reports. For this u will be receiving handsome remuneration. Later u will train other trainers and be recognised as their director and supervisor. U are right, lets not complain, but do something concrete. With a team of sniffers headed by u, we can sniff out any foul smelling chutiya like yourself anywhere.” Uber, 27 July, 2009 “Cuds, it’s you who is the cunt and gaand sniffer, not me. So the work you’ve proposed should rightly be done by you, it’s your area of specialization, not mine. As for being a ‘bird-brained piece of shit,’ the description fits you nicely, as confirmed by what we see from your postings. I think you are one frustrated choot who does a bit of posturing… Keep writing, asshole…” CuddlybearXL, 28 July, 2009 “You are the Vinoba Bhave. U suggested that instead of complaining we should take some concrete action. So who else would be better suited to carry out this noble deed of emancipating Indian women than u? Besides, imagine a job where u can sniff, lick and eat millions of pussies and gaands… that too for a handsome remuneration! U will work independently, but under my supervision of course. Just think about it, Uber and Gober, both go together.”

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APPENDIX Uber, 28 July, 2009 “Cuddly… On ethical ground I will not trespass into an area where you and your ilk are undisputed masters. So, keep that ‘handsome remuneration’ to yourself… but see that you do a good job. You’ll be benefitted yourself when you go to these smaller places in your next cross-country jaunt. Here’s wishing you a lifetime of great rural and semi-rural cunt-sniffing and gaand licking and getting your bum vigorously fucked with increasing regularity! Jai Hind !” CuddlybearXL, 28 July, 2009 “Uber Gober, this is not a forum to talk about ethics and also to say Jai Hind! It is an insult to our Bharat Mata! My offer to you was extremely generous and the remuneration very rewarding. It’s sad that u have lost this wonderful chance to crawl into shitholes and pee holes. Bears never ever let any bum go by without assaulting it.” CuddlybearXL, 28 July, 2009

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION: DESECRATING THE GLOBAL FROM VERNACULAR

MARGINS

1. Imaginary in my usage needs to be understood as something positive and enabling rather than in its Lacanian sense. It has no kinship with Debord’s idea of image. 2. Arjun Appadurai, “The Production of Locality,” Modernity at Large: The Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 178–200. 3. Kaushik Ghosh, “Between global flows and local dams: Indigenousness, locality, and the transnational sphere in Jharkhand, India,” Cultural Anthropology, 21:4, 2006, pp. 501–534. 4. Raminder Kaur Kahlon, Atomic Bombay: Living with the Radiance of a Thousand Suns, (forthcoming). 5. Rustom Bharucha, The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking through Theatre in an Age of Globalization, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001). 6. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (tr. Brian Massumi), (London: Athlone, 1987), p. 226. 7. Ibid., p. 21 (translation slightly modified). 8. Saskia Sassen (ed.), Deciphering the Global: Its Scales, Spaces and Subjects, (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 2. 9. Ibid., p. 3. 10. Appadurai, op. cit., p. 178. 11. Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., p. 217. 12. See, for example, Daniel Miller (ed.), Worlds Apart: Modernity through the Prism of the Local, (London: Routledge, 1995). 13. Sassen, op. cit., p. 6. 14. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, (tr. F. L. Pogson), (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1910), p. 115.

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pp. [6–8]

NOTES

15. Doreen Massey, For Space, (London: Sage, 2005), p. 27. 16. Michael Curry, “Toward a Geography of a World without Maps: Lessons from Ptolemy and Postal Codes,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 95:3, 2005, pp. 680–91. 17. R. A. Marcus, “How On Earth Could Places Become Holy? Origins of the Christian Idea of Holy Places,” Journal of Early Christian Studies, 2:3, 1994, pp. 257–71. 18. Diana L. Eck, “The Imagined Landscape: Patterns in the construction of Hindu sacred geography,” Contributions to Indian Sociology, 32:2, pp. 165–88. David E. Sopher, “The Message of Place in Hindu Pilgrimage,” National Geographical Journal of India, 33:4, 1987, pp. 165–88. 19. Massey, op. cit., 2005, p. 55. 20. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, (tr. C. Porter), (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), p. 77. 21. Arjun Appadurai, op. cit., pp. 27–47. 22. Mamadou Diouf, “The Senegalese Murid Trade Diaspora and the Making of a Vernacular Cosmopolitanism” (tr. Steven Rendall), Public Culture, 12:3, Fall 2000, pp. 679–702. 23. T. S. Oakes, “Ethnic tourism and Place identity in China,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 11, 1993, pp. 47–66. 24. A. Gupta and J. Ferguson, “Beyond ‘culture’: space, identity, and the politics of difference,” Cultural Anthropology, 7, 1992, p. 8. 25. Arturo Escobar, “Culture sits in places: reflections on globalism and subaltern strategies of localization,” Political Geography, 20, 2001, pp. 139–174. 26. J. K. Gibson-Graham, A Postcapitalist Politics, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 27. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 28. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 179. 29. Appadurai, op. cit., p. 181. 30. Suzana M Sawyer, “Empire/Multitude-State/Civil Society: Rethinking Topographies of Power through Transnational Connectivity in Ecuador and Beyond,” Social Analysis, 51: 2, 2007, pp. 64–85. 31. Felix Padel and Samarendra Das, Out of this Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminium Cartel, (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2010). 32. Escobar, op. cit., p. 156. 33. Amita Baviskar, In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005). 34. Raul Zibeshi, Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces, (tr. Ramor Ryan), (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010).

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35. Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 153–176. 36. Aristotle, Metaphysics (tr. W. D. Ross) in Richard McKeon (ed.), The Basic Works of Aristotle, (New York: Random House, 1970), X, 5, 1054b25. 37. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (tr. Paul Patton), (London: Athlone, 1994), p. 28 (emphasis mine). 38. C. V. Boundas, “What Difference does Deleuze’s Difference make?” in CV Boundas (ed.), Deleuze and Philosophy, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), p. 4. 39. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 88. 40. Deleuze, 1994, op cit., p. 28 (tr. slightly modified, emphasis mine). 41. Bruno Latour, “Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social,” http://www.brunolatour.fr/articles/article/82-TARDE-JOYCE-SOCIAL-GB.pdf (accessed on 3/4/2010), p. 7. 42. Jan Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 1961, cited in Chunglin Kwa, “Romantic and Baroque Conceptions of Complex Wholes in Sciences” in John Law and Annemarie Mol (ed.), Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 24. 43. Kwa, ibid., p. 25. 44. G. W. Leibniz, Monadology, cited in Kwa, ibid., p. 26. 45. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (tr. Tom Conley), (London: Athlone, 1993). 46. Tarde cited in Latour, “Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social”, op. cit., p. 4. 47. John Law, “And if the global were small and noncoherent? Method, Complexity and the Baroque”, in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 22, 2004, pp. 12–36. 48. Gilbert Simondon, “The Genesis of the Individual,” in Jonathan Crary & Sanford Kwinter (eds.), Incorporations, (New York: Zone Books, 1992), pp. 297– 319. 49. Leibniz, cited in Law, 2004, op. cit., p. 23. 50. Law, ibid., p. 24. 51. Scott Lash, Intensive Culture, (London: Sage, 2010), p. 40. 52. See Jean-Francois Lyotard, Enthusiasm: The Kantian Critique of History (tr. G Van Den Abbeele), (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). 53. Alain Badiou, St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism,(tr. Ray Brassier), (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 54. Sassen, op. cit., p. 1. 55. Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, op. cit., p. 25. 56. Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Society (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft), (tr. and edited by Charles P. Loomis), (New York: Harper & Row, 1963 (1887)).

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57. George Ritzer, The Globalization of Nothing, (London: Sage, 2004), p. xi. 58. Ibid. 59. Ritzer, op. cit., p. xvi. 60. John Law, Organising Modernity, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), p. 138. 61. Latour, 1993, op. cit., p. 76. 62. Latour, 1993, op. cit., p. 55. 63. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978– 79, (ed. Michael Senellart, tr. Graham Burchell), (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 57–8. 64. Ibid., p. 20. 65. John Frow, Time and Commodity Culture, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 1. 66. Latour, op. cit., p. 76. 67. Éric Alliez, Capital Times: Tales from the Conquest of Time, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 68. Guy Debord, Extract from “Commentaires sur la cociete du spectacle,” in Iwona Blazwick (ed.), An Endless adventure… An Endless Passion… An Endless Banquet: A Situationist Scrapbook, (London: Verso, 1989), p. 142. 69. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How anthropology makes its object, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. xi. 70. Ibid., p. 154. 71. See G. C. Spivak, “Philosophy” in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 32. 72. Frederic Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, (Verso: London, 2002). 73. Ernst Bloch, “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to its Dialectics” (tr. M. Ritter), New German Critique, 11, Spring 1977, p. 22. 74. Chakrabarty, op. cit., p. 250. 75. George Kubler, The Shape of Time, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), p. 28. 76. Frow, op. cit., p. 9. 77. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, (tr. F. Raffoul and D. Pettigrew), (New York: SUNY Press, 2007), p. 50. 78. “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it…,” Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, (tr. R. J. Hollingdale), (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 38. 79. Stuart Elden, Speaking Against Number: Heidegger, Language and the Politics of Calculation, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). 80. Etienne Balibar, “Citizen Subject,” in E. Cavada, P. Connor, J. L. Nancy (ed.), Who Comes after the Subject?, (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 33–57. 81. Benedict Anderson, cited in Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed:

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Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), p. 6 (emphasis added). Henceforth, page numbers for citations are given in text. 82. Arjun Appadurai, “Number in Colonial Imagination,” in Appadurai, 1996, op. cit., pp. 114–38. 83. Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, op. cit., p. 461. 84. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (tr. Robert Hurley et. al.), (New York: Viking Press, 1977), p. 246. 85. V. A. Zelizer, The Social Meaning of Money, (New York: Basic Books, 1994). 86. Mark Granovetter, “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness,” American Journal of Sociology, 91:3, 1985, pp. 481–510. 87. Frow, 1997, op. cit., p. 10. 88. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, (tr. D. Nicholson-Smith), (New York: Zone Books, 1995), p. 1. 89. Appadurai, 1996, op. cit., p. 35. 90. I have in mind his Sphären trilogy which has remained untranslated, though many excerpts and shorter pieces have been published in English. 91. Bruno Latour, “Whose cosmos, which cosmopolitics?,” Common Knowledge, 10, 2004, pp. 450–62. 92. A play much loved by Calcuttans of my generation to go by the number of Bengali adaptations in circulation. 93. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations (tr. M. Joughin), (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 174. 94. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 254. 95. G. C. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, (eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg), (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 308. 96. “I dare to think that it is this outsized reality… that… deserve[s]…attention… A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty… Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Solitude of Latin America, Nobel Prize Lecture 8 December, 1982. 1. THE RUMOR OF GLOBALIZATION: GLOBALITY-COUNTERWORKS AND THE LOCATION OF COMMODITY 1. The Strait Times, 19 June, 2002, Singapore, cited in The Statesman, 20 June, 2002, Calcutta.

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2. Daniel Miller, “Consumption as the Vanguard of History” in Daniel Miller (ed.), Acknowledging Consumption, (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 1–57. Also, David A. Cricker and Toby Linden (ed.), Ethics of Consumption: The Good Life, Justice, and Gobal Stewardship, (Langham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998). 3. Robert D’Amico, “Desire and the Commodity Form,” Telos 35, Spring 1978, pp. 88–122. 4. “Saster China Jinis Bikrir Gujab, Hujuge Bhir Indoore,” Anandabazar Patrika, Calcutta, 26 May, 2001; “Saster Gujabe Thaw China Panya Bikeretarao,” Anandabazar Patrika, Calcutta, 27 May, 2001; “Big Draw: The China fair that never was,” The Telegraph, Calcutta, 26 May, 2001. 5. “Taste of China” [Cover story], India Today, New Delhi, 11 December, 2000. 6. Anandabazar, 27 May, 2000, op. cit. 7. See Denis Vidal, “When the Gods Drank Milk: Empiricism and Belief in Contemporary Hinduism,” South Asia Research, 18:2, 1998, pp. 149–171. 8. L. K. Advani’s (deputy prime minister of the erstwhile BJP-led cabinet) Rathayatra prepared the ground for the demolition of the Babri mosque in December 1991 which sparked off communal riots all over the country killing thousands of Muslims. It is remembered as a watershed when Indian politics, after about half a century of state-backed “secularism,” entered a “communal” phase. 9. Arvind Rajagopal, Politics after Television: Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 72–150. 10. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 178–200. 11. Arjun Appadurai, “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination,” Public Culture, 12:1, 2000, pp. 1–19. 12. Martha Nussbaum makes a case for inculcating the responsibilities of global citizenship through distinctive educational programs. There is, thus, a distinctive pedagogy of the global: it is an ethical project. See Martha Nussbaum and her respondents, For Love of County: Debating the limits of patriotism, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). Also, Martha Nussbaum, “Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism,” Journal of Political Philosophy, 5, 1997, p. 1–25. For a trenchant critique of globality as ground, see G. C. Spivak, “Cultural Talks in the Hot Peace: Revisiting the ‘Global Village,’” in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (eds.), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 329–348. 13. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity and the Politics of Difference,” in J. X. Inda and R Rosaldo (eds.), The Anthropology of Globalization, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 73. 14. Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspectives, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1986, pp. 3–63.

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pp. [39–40]

15. John Frow, “Invidious Distinction: Waste, Difference and Classy Stuff,” in Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke (ed.), Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), pp. 25–38. 16. Bruno Latour, “One More Turn after the Social Turn: Easing Science Studies into the Non-Modern World,” in E. McMullin (ed.), The Social Dimensions of Science, 1992, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, p. 277. 17. John Frow, “A Pebble, a Camera, a Man Who Turns into a Telegraph Pole,” Critical Inquiry 28, (Autumn 2001), p. 271. 18. Karen Barad’s fascinating new work on materiality, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007) appeared too late to be incorporated in this work. According to her reading of Niels Bohr, the apparatuses (human or nonhuman) that we know reality through are always both material and discursive. This makes Barad coin the adjective “material-discursive.” By way of looking at things, the looking subject makes the things matter (in both senses: gives them meaning through discourse, and therefore makes them materialize in a specific way). What it means to matter is therefore always material-discursive. Likewise, there can be no such thing as epistemology (knowing) without ontology (mattering), which leads Barad to coin the term onto-epistemology. Because specific practices of mattering have ethical consequences, excluding other kinds of mattering, onto-epistemological practices are always in turn onto-ethico-epistemological. Though my vocabulary in this essay remains representationalist and this representationalism is justified by the kind of crude “Marxist” materialism I go on to exorcise, the thrust of my work here is on the ethical consequence of a particular practice of (subaltern) “matter-ing”: what happens when consumables appear as animate, as politically and symbolically valorized? In that sense, the tenor of my argument is in agreement with her thesis. However, see also, François Laruelle, “The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter,” (tr. Ray Brassier) Pli 12, 2001, pp. 33–40. 19. Stephen Gaukroger, “Romanticism and Decommodification: Marx’s Conception of Socialism,” Economy and Society, 15:3 (1986), pp. 287–333. 20. See, for example, William Pietz, “Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx,” in E. Apter and W. Pietz (ed.), Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 119–151. 21. Karl Marx, Theorien uberden Mehwert, Vol. III, 1910, p. 355, cited in I. I. Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, (tr.) M. Samardzija and F. Perlman, (Detroit: Black and Red, 1972), p. 28, footnote 7. An interesting “deconstructive” reading of Marx’s binary opposition between use- and exchange-value can be found in G. C. Spivak, “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value” in G. C. Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 154–175.

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22. The inscription of the thing with the finality of human “use” is a cornerstone of productivist metaphysics (Marx wrote: “Every product of labour is, in all states of society, a use-value”). In holistic societies, things qua sacra are forever in a state of flux, their material boundaries are indeterminate, like the human and super-human beings with whom they are enchained through endless cycles of prestations. (cf. Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, (tr. Mark Poster), (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975). Historical evidence as well as ethnographic work show that symbolic exchange and not use is the prime-mover in holistic societies. See Cecil Barraud, Danniel de Coppet, et al., Of Relations and the Dead: Four Societies Viewed from the Point of View of Exchange, (tr.) S. J. Suffern, (Oxford: Berg. And, Natalie Zemon Devis, 1994), The Gift in Sixteenth Century France, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 23. Alain Desrosières, “How To Make Things Which Hold Together: Social Science, Statistics and the State” in P. Wagner, B. Wittrock and R. Whitley (ed.), Discourses on Society, Volume XV, (Amsterdam: Kluwer 1990), p. 195. 24. Marx wrote: “The form of wood… is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless, the table continues to be wood, an ordinary sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness.” Capital Vol. I, (tr. B. Fowkes), (New York: Vintage, 1977), p. 163. See also, Peter Stallybrass, “Marx’s Coat,” in Patricia Spyer (ed.), Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, (New York: Routledge, 1977), pp. 183–207. 25. See Desrosières, op. cit., p. 199. 26. See my “Taking Callon to Calcutta: Did Economist-Administrators Make Market in the Colony? An Argument out of India,” (forthcoming). 27. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, (tr.) D. Nicholson-Smith, (New York: Zone Books, 1995), p. 33. 28. John Frow, Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 8. 29. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, (tr.) lan Cunnison, (New York: Norton, 1967). 30. See, for example, Marilyn Strathern, “Qualified Value: The Perspective of Gift Exchange” in C. Humphrey and S. Hugh-Jones (ed.), Barter, Exchange and Value: An Anthropological Approach, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 169–91. 31. Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). 32. Paul Brass, “National Power and Local Politics in India: A Twenty-year Perspective,” Modem Asian Studies, 18:1,1984, pp. 89–118. 33. Maitreesh Ghatak and T. W. Guinanne, “The Economics of Lending with Joint Liability: Theory and Practice,” Journal of Development Economics, 60, 1999, pp. 195–228.

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34. Haricharan Bandyopadhyay, Bangiya Shabdokosa, (New Delhi: Sahitya Academy, 1967) (BS. 1340), p. 2137. Ganendramohan Das, Bangala Bhasar Abhidhan, Vol. II, (BS 1344), (Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 1979), p. 2090. Nagendranath Vasu, Viswakosa, Vol. 21, (Delhi: BR Publishing Company, 1988) (1886–1911), p. 239. 35. Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia, (Berkley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 9. Also, Bruno Latour, “Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social” in Patrick Joyce (ed.), The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences, (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 117–32. 36. Mary Poovey, “The liberal civil subject and the social in eighteenth-century British moral philosophy,” in Joyce, op. cit., pp. 44–61. Also, Eric R. Wolf, “Inventing Society,” American Ethnologist, 15:4 (November 1988), pp. 752– 761. Alain Touraine, “Sociology without Society,” Current Sociology, 46:2 (April 1998), pp. 119–143. 37. Rabindranath Tagore, “Swadeshi Samaj” (BS 1311), Rabindra Rachanabali, Vol. XII, (Calcutta: Govt. of W.B. (centenary edition), 1961), pp. 683–702. 38. Rabindranath Tagore, “‘Swadeshi Samaj’ Prabandher Parishista” (BS 1311), Rabindra Rachanabali, op. cit., p. 706. 39. Rabindranath Tagore, “Shoksabha” (BS 1301), Rabindra Rachanabali, Vol. X, (Calcutta: Govt. of W.B., 1989), p. 293. Also, Partha Chatterjee, “Two Poets and Death: On Civil Society in the Non-Christian World” in Timothy Mitchell (ed.) Questions of Modernity, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 35–48. 40. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 197. 41. Ibid., p. 232. 42. Claude Lefort, “Marx: From One Vision of History to Another” in Claude Lefort (tr. JB Thompson), Political Forms of Modern Society, Boston: MA: MIT Press, 1986), pp. 139–80. 43. Friedrich von Schiller, Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, (tr.) J. A. Bias, (New York: F. Ungar, 1966 (1796)). 44. See Thomas L. Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility,” I and II, American Historical Review, 90, 1985, pp. 339–361 and pp. 547–566. Also, Allan Silver, “Friendship and trust as moral ideals: An historical approach,” European Journal of Sociology, 30, 1989, pp. 274–97. A. Silver, “Friendship in commercial society: Eighteenth century social theory and modern sociology,” American Journal of Sociology, 95, 1990, pp. 1474–1504. 45. John Pocock has reminded us that “property was a juridical term before it was an economic one, it meant that which was properly one’s own, that on which one properly had a claim…,” JGA Pocock, “Authority and Property: The Ques-

187

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tion of Liberal Origins” in JGA Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 56. 46. Alain Pottage and Martha Mundy (ed.), Law, Anthropology and the Constitution of the Social, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 47. Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism, (tr. Guy Oakes), (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986 (1919)). 48. McKim Marriott, “Hindu Transactions: Diversity Without Dualism,” in B. Kapferer (ed.), Transactions and Meaning, (Philadelphia: ISHI Publications, 1976), p. 111. 49. Ibid., p. 109. 50. Mauss, op. cit., p. 52 51. Charles Tilly, “The Time of States,” Social Research, 63:2, 1994, pp. 267–295. 52. Sheldon Pollock, Homi K Bhabha et al., “Cosmopolitanisms,” Public Culture, 12:3, 2000, p. 581. 53. Chatterjee, 1994, op. cit., p. 197. 54. Ibid., p. 195. 55. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, (tr. Paul Foss), Paul Pattern et al., (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983), p. 10. The Byzantine debate about image and presence (which has recently been revisited by Marie-José Mondzain in Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary (tr. Rico Franses), (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005) can be said to have an originary bearing on all subsequent controversies in the West. Baudrillard suppresses the theological underpinning of the debate. See, in this context, Regina Mara Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). 56. Debord, op. cit., p. 17. 57. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, (tr. Paul Patton), (London: Athlone, 1994), p. 127. 58. William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” Res 9 (1985), pp. 5–17. “The Problem of the Fetish, II,” Res 13 (1987), pp. 23–45. “The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa,” Res 16 (1988), pp. 105–123. 59. Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (tr. C Porter and H MacLean), (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 60. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of Image before the Era of Art, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994). 61. Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003). 62. Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modem Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 118. 63. Jacques Rancière cited in CV Boundas, “What Difference does Deleuze’s Difference make?” in C V Boundas (ed.), Deleuze and Philosophy, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), p. 10.

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64. Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics, (Melbourne: re.press, 2009), pp. 187–228. 65. Ibid., p. 187. 66. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (tr. Ray Brassier), London: Continuum, 2008). 2. WRITING HOME, WRITING TRAVEL: TRANSLATION, TRAVEL, AND DWELLING IN BENGALI MODERNITY 1. See Jeff Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Also, his Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008). 2. See, for example, Pico Iyer, The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls and the Search for Home, (New York: Vintage, 2000). 3. Another variant of this story has been corroborated by Chaudhuri himself. 4. For example, Shibnath Shastri, an eminent Bengali, went to visit Devizes, where for the first time in his life, he heard a skylark singing and, “I immediately thought of Shelley.” Shibnath Shastri, Englander Diary, (Calcutta: Bengal Publishers, 1957 [1888]), p. 102 (all translations from Bengali texts are mine). 5. Josef Borocz, “Travel-Capitalism: The Structure of Europe and the Advent of the Tourist,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34 (1992), pp. 708—41. 6. Simonti Sen, Views on Europe of the Turn of the Century Bengali Travellers 1870– 1910, Ph.D. thesis (unpublished), 1995, Department of History, University of Calcutta. 7. Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-facement” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 69. In G. C. Spivak’s opinion, this is an interrogative sentence, not a declarative one. (Personal Communication, New York, March 2011.) 8. Mohan Lal, Travel in the Panjab, Afganistan, Turkistan to Balk, Bokhara and Herat; and a visit to Great Britain and Germany, 2nd edition, (London: H. W. Allen & Co, 1846). 9. Subodh Chandra Mukerjee, Le Rasa, (Paris: Alcan, 1927). 10. Diana L. Eck, “The Imagined Landscape: Patterns in the Construction of Hindu Sacred Geography,” Contributions to Indian Sociology (n.s.) 32, 2 (1998), pp. 165—88. Also, P. V. Kane, “Tirthayatra” in History of Dharmasastra, Vol. IV, (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1953), pp. 552–827. 11. See my “‘Home and the World’: Voyage, Traduction et domicile dans la Modernité Bengalie,” Génèses: Sciences sociales et histoire 35, 1999, pp. 5–30. 12. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “A Theory of Tourism,” (trans. G. Gemünden and K. Johnson), New German Critique 68 (Spring-Summer 1996), p. 122. 13. Judith Adler “Origins of Sightseeing,” Annals of Tourism Research 16, 2 (1989), pp. 7–29.

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14. Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Madhusudan Rachanavali, 1991, Calcutta: Patra’s, p. 385 (original in English). 15. Partha Chatterjee, “Five Hundred Years of Fear and Love,” Economic and Political Weekly, 30 May, 1998, p. 1335. 16. Mirza Sheikh Itesamuddin, Shigurf-Namah-I-Velaet or Excellent Intelligence Concerning Europe being the Travels of Mirza Itesamuddin in Great Britain and France, trans. J. E. Alexander, (London: Parbury, Allen & Co, 1827). 17. Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan in Asia, Africa and Europe during the Years 1799–1803, 2nd edition, Vols. I & II, (trans. Charles Stewart), (London: Longman & Co, 1814). 18. Ibid., Vol. II, p. 264 (italics mine). 19. Itesamuddin, op. cit., p. 195. 20. Georges Van Den Abbeele, Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), p. 64. 21. Antoinette Burton, “Making a Spectacle of Empire: Indian Travellers in Finde-Siècle London,” History Workshop Journal 42 (1996), p. 128. 22. On the aesthetoptics of the flaneur see Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, (Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1995). 23. Burton herself (op. cit.) tells us, “Baedeker guides, together with Cook’s tours and a variety of package deals, were part of a well-established industry catering to tourists…” (p. 132), “The itinerary of travel through the city was a path recommended by guide books…” (p. 133), and “Quite a few” of our travelers “had read Dickens and Mayhew …” (p. 129). 24. From Abu Taleb to Tagore and well beyond, the visitors were constantly under surveillance. Far from being “seeing subjects,” they often felt that they were mere mobile exhibits. They often complained about intrusive stares, patronizing gestures, and occasionally even abuses. 25. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, “England” in The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, (Mumbai: Jaico, 1998 [1951]), pp. 115—48. 26. Michel de Certeau, “Montaigne’s ‘Of Cannibals’: The Savage ‘I’,” in Heterologies: Discourses on the Other, (trans. Brian Massumi), (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 67–69. 27. Edward W. Said, Orientalism, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). 28. Swami Vivekananda, “Paribrajak” in Swami Vivekanader Bani O Rachana, Vol. VI, (Calcutta: Udbodhan Karyalaya, 1962), pp. 88—90. Shastri, op. cit., p. 10. 29. R. C. Dutt, Three Years in Europe, (Calcutta: Bengal Medical Library, 1871), p. 4. 30. Ibid., emphasis mine. 31. Trailokyonath Mukherjee, A Visit to Europe, (Calcutta: Arunodoy Roy, 1902) p. ix.

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32. Vivekananda, op. cit., p. 97. 33. Prafulla Chandra Ray, the Bengali scientist, heaved a sigh of relief when the news of European victory in the battle of Tel-el-Kabir (1882) reached him. See his Autobiography of a Bengali Chemist, (Calcutta: Orient Book Company, 1958), p. 42. 34. Chandrasekhar Sen, Tour Round the World, (Calcutta: Kshetranath Sen, n.d.), p. 11. 35. Jagatmohini Chaudhury, Englade Sat Mas, 1902, Calcutta: Deva Press, p. 33. 36. Marjorie Garber, ““ ” (Quotation Marks),” Critical Inquiry 25 (Summer 1999), pp. 653–7. 37. Jacques Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context” in Limited Inc., (trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman), (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 12. 38. The literal meaning of parataxis is: placing of clauses one after another without words to indicate coordination or subordination. 39. For example, after a long citation from some “Arab geography” connecting ancient India, Aden, and the Ramayana, Trailokyanath made skeptical comments about its historicity. Mukherjee, op. cit., p. xi. 40. It is customary to refer to T. B. Macaulay’s infamous “Minute” of 2 February, 1835 as the document instrumental in the creation of the Bengali colonial elite. The oft-quoted statement in that “Minute” reads: “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” These westernized natives formed the vanguard in the process of dissemination of “modern” ideas in India. (“Minute on Education,” in, W. Theodore de Barry (ed.), Sources of Indian Tradition, 1958, Vol. II, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), p. 49.) 41. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 85—87. 42. Mukherjee, op. cit., p. 6. 43. Rabindranath Tagore, “Europe Prabasir Patra” in Rabindra Rachanabali, Vol. I, (Calcutta: Viswabharati, 1995 [1881]), p. 803. 44. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 6. 45. Mukherjee, op. cit., p. 60. 46. Dutt, op. cit., pp. 14–15. 47. Swami Vivekananda, “Prachya O Paschatya” in Swami Vivekanander Bani O Rachana, Vol. VI, (Calcutta: Udbodhon Karyalaya, 1962), p. 161. 48. Simonti Sen, op. cit., p. 268. 49. Shastri, op. cit., p. 134. 50. Tagore, op. cit., p. 810

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51. Anon., Streesiksha, Vol. I, (Calcutta: published by the author, 1877), pp. 28–29. 52. Tagore, op. cit., p. 828. 53. Krishnakamal Bhattacharya, Rachana-Samgraha, (Calcutta: Subarnarekha, 1997), pp. 3—34. 54. Van Den Abbeele, op. cit., p. 95 55. See fn. 87 below. 56. On allegory, see Fredric Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital,” Social Text 15 (Fall 1986), pp. 65—88. 57. Rabindranath Tagore, Gora, (trans. R. Tagore), (London: Macmillan, 1924). 58. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 6. 59. Durgacharan Ray, Devoganer Marttye Agaman, (Calcutta: Dey’s, 1984 [1886]). 60. Devipada Bhattacharya, Bangla Charit Sahitya, (Calcutta: Dey’s, 1982). 61. See, for example, Bijoyram Sen, Tirthamangal, (Nagendranath Vasu (ed.)), (Calcutta: Bangiya Sahitya Parisat, 1906); and Jadunath Sarbadhikari, Tirthabhraman, (Nagendranath Vasu (ed.)), (Calcutta: Bangiya Sahitya Parisat, 1916). Both are travel-diaries of pilgrimage. 62. Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries and English Diurnal Form 1660– 1785, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 63. Raimundo Panikkar, “Time and History in the Tradition of India: Kala and Karma” in L. Gardet et al. (eds.), Cultures and Time, (Paris: UNESCO Press, 1976), pp. 63–88. Also, Thomas R. Trautmann, “Indian Time, European Time” in D. O. Hughes and Thomas Trautmann (eds.), Time: Histories and Ethnologies, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), pp. 167–97. 64. Hariprabha Takeda, Bangamahilar Japanyatra, (Dhaka: Dhaka Uddharashram, 1915). 65. Ibid., p-3. 66. Ibid., p-5. 67. Ibid., p-18. 68. Ibid., p. 23 (emphasis mine). 69. For Japanese investment on rice see Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Rice as Self: Japanese Identities through Time, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 70. Takeda, op. cit., p. 25. 71. Ibid., p. 49. 72. Ibid., p. 47. 73. Shyamlal Mitra, Misharyatri Bangali, 1884, Calcutta: Aditya Chattopadhyay. 74. Nana Sahib was a North Indian leader of the 1857 uprising (“Sepoy Mutiny”) in British India. 75. Mitra, op. cit., p. 38. 76. Ibid., p. 79. 77. Ibid., p. 83.

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78. Krishnalal Basak, Bichitra Bhraman, (Calcutta: Swaraswati Library, 1921). 79. Ibid., p. 28. 80. Ibid., p. 58. 81. Ibid., p. 85. 82. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts,” Perspectives [Newsletter of the American Historical Association], Nov. 1997, p. 38. 83. Etienne Balibar, “Citizen Subject” in E. Cadava et al. (eds.), Who Comes after the Subject?, (tr. J. B. Swenson Jr.), (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 33—57. 84. In this respect, Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s massively Oedipalized dedication in his Autobiography is telling: “To the memory of the British Empire in India which conferred subjecthood on us but withheld citizenship; to which yet every one of us threw out the challenge ‘civis brittannicus sum’ because all that was good and living within us was made, shaped, and quickened by the same British rule.” (Chaudhuri, op. cit., dedication, unpaginated.) 85. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 146. 86. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Difference-Deferral of (a) Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal,” History Workshop 36 (Autumn 1993), pp. 1–34. 87. Modern touristic experience “remain[s] circumscribed within an economic point of view. Whether the voyage be loss or gain, what is at stake is… something that can be lost or gained. To be able to talk about loss or gain, however, also requires… something [unchanging] in relation to which one can register a loss or gain… [Thus] the economy of travel requires an oikos (the Greek for “home”) in relation to which any wandering can be comprehended… [O]ikos… then acts as a transcendental point of reference that… makes of all travel a circular voyage insofar as that privileged point is posited as the absolute origin and absolute end of all movement at all… [S]o circumscribed a voyage can no longer be considered a voyage, since it never goes outside the range of the oikos,” Van Den Abbeele, op. cit., pp. xvii–xviii. 88. See George Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, (tr. Allan Stokel), (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 116–29. 89. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, op. cit., pp. 171–97. My allusion is to Bhabha’s elliptical phrase, “the transnational as the translational,” ibid., p. 173. 3. BETWEEN ELITE HYSTERIA AND SUBALTERN CARNIVALESQUE: STREET-FOOD AND GLOBALIZATION IN CALCUTTA 1. Stephan Ecks’ PhD dissertation (Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Politics), Digesting Modernity: Body, Illness and Medicine in

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Kolkata, 2003, (unpublished) contains interesting insights on the culture of the belly in Calcutta. 2. Writing on Brillat-Savarin, Barthes noted a certain homology between desired food and sex: both are a “great adventure of desire.” “The question however remains,” Barthes muses, “why the social subject… should assume sexual perversion… as the purest form of transgression, while gastronomic perversion… always implies a… gently obliging avowal which never departs from good manners.” Later he notes that “between these two pleasures, there is a capital difference: orgasm.” Gastronomic pleasure does not lead to orgasm. Surely, BrillatSavarin’s bourgeois casuistry of taste would have no place for the kind of anti-food I am talking about. Baudelaire also held a grudge against him for not understanding the “excess” implicated in wine. For Brillat-Savarin, wine was a mere accompaniment to food, almost an appetizer. For Baudelaire, it was a drug, a transgression. See Roland Barthes, “Reading Brillat-Savarin,” in Marshall Blonsky (ed.), On Signs (tr. by Mathew Ward and Richard Howard), (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 61–75. 3. See Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis, (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 151–239. 4. Recently, I watched a film on Calcutta street-food in Brixton, made by Angus Denoon, chef and film-maker. 5. Mary Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal,” in Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 249–75. 6. Taponath Chakravarti, Food and Drink in Ancient Bengal, (Calcutta: P. Chakravarti, 1959). 7. Margaret Morse, “An Ontology of Everyday Distraction: The Freeway, the Mall, and Television,” in Patricia Mellencamp (ed.), Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 193–221. 8. Pasi Falk, The Consuming Body, (London: Sage, 1994). 9. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith), (New York: Zone Books, 1995). 10. For a critique, see John Frow’s awesome Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 11. Ashis Nandy, “The Discreet Charms of Indian Terrorism,” in The Savage Freud, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 1–31. 12. The full quotation reads: “I… do not like these speculators in idealism, the antiSemites, who… rouse up all the horned beast elements in the people by a brazen abuse of the cheapest of all agitator’s tricks, moral attitudinizing (that no kind of swindle fails to succeed in Germany today is connected with the undeniable and palpable stagnation of the German spirit; and the cause of that I seek in a too exclusive diet of newspapers, politics, beer, and Wagnerian music),” F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, (tr. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale), third essay, sec. 26, pp. 158–9, (New York: Vintage, 1969).

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13. Alfred Jarry, “Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician,” in R. Shattuck and S. W. Taylor (eds) Selected Works of Alfred Jarry, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965), pp. 173–256. The expression “pataphysics” is Rabelais’. 14. I am drawing here from G. Armelagos and P. Farb, Consuming Passion: The Anthropology of Eating, (New York: Washington Square Press, 1968) and, J. S. Wilentz, The Senses of Man, (New York: Thomas Y. Crowel, 1968). 15. For other, non-western traditions see Eugene Eoyang, “Beyond Visual and Aural Criteria: The Importance of Flavour in Chinese Literary Criticism,” Critical Inquiry 4, Autumn, 1979, pp. 99–106. 16. F Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, (tr. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale), third essay, sec. 10, p. 256, (New York: Vintage, 1969). 17. F. Nietzsche, ibid., first essay, sec. 6, p. 32. 18. See Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason, (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1987). Also, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, (New York: Basic Books, 1999). 19. See P. Rozin, “The Use of Characteristic Flavourings in Human Culinary Practice,” in Charles M. Apt (ed.), Flavour: Its Chemical, Behavioural, and Commercial Aspects, (Boulder: Westview Press, 1978), pp. 111–29. 20. See Ian Hunter and David Saunders, “Walks of Life: Mauss on the Human Gymnasium,” Body and Society 1:2, 1995, pp. 65–81. 21. John Frow, “Never Draw to an Inside Straight: On Everyday Knowledge,” New Literary History 33:4, 2002, pp. 635–3. 22. Jeffrey Minson, “Men and Manners: Kantian Humanism, Rhetoric and the History of Ethics,” Economy and Society 18:2, 1989, pp. 190–220. 23. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, “Krishnacharitra” (1886) and “Dharmatattva” (1888) in Visnu Basu (ed.) Bankim Rachanabali: Sahitya Samagra, (Calcutta: Tuli-Kalam, 1987), pp. 407–583 and pp. 584–679 respectively. Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, Parivarik Prabandha, (Hugli: Bodhoday, 1881). Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, Achar Prabandha, (Hugli: Bodhoday, 1894). 24. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, “Kamalakanter Daftar,” in Visnu Basu (ed.) Bankim Rachanabali: Sahitya Samagra, (Calcutta: Tuli-Kalam, 1987 [1875]), p. 54. 25. Pradip Bose, “Adarsa Paribarer Adarsa Randhan Pranali,” Anustup 32(1), 1997, pp. 14–40. 26. Chitra Dev, Thakurbarir Andramahal, 1997, Calcutta: Ananda, pp. 110–20. 27. Swami Vivekananda “Prachya O Paschatya,” in Swami Vivekanander Bani O Rachana, (Calcutta: Udbodhon Karyaloy, 1966 [1900–02]), pp. 149–215. 28. Ibid., pp. 172–79. 29. op. cit., p. 179. 30. Bipradas Mukhopadhyay, Pak-Pranali, (Calcutta: Ananda, 1987 [1885–1902]), p. 28.

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31. Ibid., p. 248. 32. See Chunilal Basu, Khadya, 6th edition, (Calcutta: Anil P. Basu. Charuchandra Bhatacharya, 1936 [1910]), Bangalir Khadya, (Calcutta: Gurudas Chattopadhyay & Sons. Ambikacharan Datta and Khsitinath Ghosh, 1926), SwasthaVigyan, (Calcutta: Grantha-prachar, 1918). Prafullachandra Roy and Haragopal Biswas, Khadya-Vigyan, (Calcutta: Chakravarty, Chatterjee & Co, 1936). 33. Haraprasad Shastri, “Bener Meye,” in Satyajit Chowdhury (ed.), Haraprasad Shastri Rachana Samgraha Vol. I., (Calcutta: Paschimbanga Rajya Pustak Parsad, 1983 [1920]), p. 202. 34. Homi K. Bhabha, Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 145. 35. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (tr. Helene Iswolsky), (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987). 36. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). 37. Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin: Towards a Revolutionary Criticism, (London: Verso, 1981), p. 149. 38. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, “Prachina O Navina,” in Visnu Basu (ed.), Bankim Rachanabali: Sahitya Samagra, (Calcutta: Tuli-Kalam, 1987 [1892]), pp. 249–53. 39. Sumanta Banerjee, Parlour and the Street: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta, (Calcutta: Seagull, 1989). 40. John Frow, “‘Never Draw to an Inside Straight’: On Everyday Knowledge,” New Literary History 33:1, 2002, p. 633. 41. A Rajadhyaksha, (1990) “Beaming Messages to the Nation,” Journal of Arts and Ideas 19 May, 1990: 34–52. 42. Robin Leidener, Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 43. Emma Dowling et al (ed.), Ephemera 7:1, February 2007 (theme issue: Immaterial Labour). 44. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire, (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2000). 45. Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, (tr. J. B. Greene and M. D. Herter), Vol. 2, (New York: WW Norton, 1947), pp. 374–75 (emphasis in original). 46. Although a great admirer of the Ashish Nandy brand of pop-sociology as manifested in his journalistic writings, I am not entirely in agreement with his pessimistic judgments put forward in “Sugar in History: An Obituary of the Humble Jaggery,” Times of India, 16 July, 1994 and “Philosophy of Coca-Cola: The Simple Joy of Living,” Times of India, 27 August, 1994.

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p. [106]

4. “DREAM KITSCH”? FOLK ART, INDIGENOUS MEDIA AND “9/11”: THE WORK OF PAT IN THE ERA OF ELECTRONIC TRANSMISSION 1. See, for example, Mike Featherstone “Postmodernism and the Astheticization of Everyday Life” in Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman (ed.) Modernity and Identity, (London: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 265–90 2. The inverted commas around 11 September indicate what can be called the citationality of 11 September or 9/11. Commenting on the event after a few weeks, Derrida said to his interlocutor: “When you say “September 11” you are already citing, are you not? You are… recalling, as if in quotation marks, a date or a dating that has taken over our public space.” A little later, by way of clarification, he wrote, “I am speaking here of the discourse that comes to be, in a pervasive and overwhelming, hegemonic fashion, accredited in the world’s public space.” (See Jacques Derrida, “Autoimmunity—Real and Symbolic Suicides: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida” in Giovanna Borradori (ed.), Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 85 and 93). These two comments point toward two different logics of framing 9/11. First, it might be argued that it is a singular event and its singularity is so absolute that by pronouncing “9/11” one is not using language in its usual referential function but pressing it to name something that is in fact unnamable and beyond language: terror and trauma. As Hal Foster explains, “Lacan [following Freud] describes the traumatic as a missed encounter with the real. As missed the real cannot be represented; it can only be repeated… repetition is not reproduction in the sense of representation (of a referent) or simulation… Rather repetition serves to screen the real understood as traumatic… repetition produces a second order of trauma, here at the level of technique.” (Hal Foster, “Death in America: Shocked Subjectivity and Compulsive Visual Repetition,” in Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, Yves-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, Denis Hollier and Silvia Kolbowski (ed.), October: the Second Decade, 1986–1996, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 354– 8). Second, this repetition is not automatic: one is incessantly exhorted to repeat the image(s) of 9/11 by the immensely powerful western media machine that seeks to monumentalize it as a great world historical event. And this they do through the repetition of the 9/11 images—it becomes what Allen Feldman has called, a “mediatic event.” He writes: “Aggressive technologies of image making and image imposition… do not simply refract or record an event, but become the event by materially transcribing a political code onto… cultural memory… by immersing spectator-participants in fear-provoking simulations of space–time actuality… thereby blurring whatever boundaries still pertained between war, desire and pleasure.” (Allen Feldman, “On the Actuarial Gaze: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib,” 2005, Cultural Studies 19:2, p. 205, emphasis mine). The actuarial gaze has a certain “ocular aggression” built into it and the risk that is sought to be

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invoked by it has a “cinematic structure.” Feldman clarifies: The actuarial gaze… practices an aesthetics of space–time compression that renders the unfolding disaster serviceable to the expansion of… [a diabolical] scopic regime. Consider media’s stabilization and synchronic reorganization of diachronic fragments in the circular video repetition of the attack, burning and collapse of the World Trade Center. The actuality aesthetic of televisual witnessing used mechanical repetition and digital manipulation, such as freeze-framing, and slow motion, to reverse, spatialize and petrify violence; thereby extracting the event known as 9/11 from the chaotic temporal debris and from the affective flows of terror and disorder. (Ibid., p. 211) Under this “aesthetics of catastrophe,” as Rosalind Morris has argued cogently, the event quickly becomes its image and the imaginary investment in images obstruct social relations based in fully symbolic, that is, linguistic practices. She terms this compulsive predilection for images that resists translation, “fetishism,” which is shown to be part of a wider “technical fundamentalism” characteristic of today’s America (Rosalind C. Morris, “Images of Untranslatability in US War on Terror,” Interventions, 6:3, 2004, pp. 401–23). 3. Cited in Joseph Leo Koerner, “Hieronymus Bosch’s World Picture,” in Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison (ed.) Picturing Science, Producing Art, (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 317. 4. In British India, Babu meant a native Indian clerk. The word was used as a term of respect attached to a proper name, like “Mr” or “Sir.” But later Babu, without the suffix, was generally used contemptuously as signifying a semi-literate native, with a mere veneer of modern education. In the early twentieth century, the term Babu was frequently used to refer to bureaucrats and other government officials, especially by the Indian media; in this sense the word hints at corrupt and/or lazy work practices. Now it also refers to the educated, well-to-do, effete upper middle-class. 5. On “authenticity,” see Larry Shiner, “Primitive Fakes: ‘Tourist Art,’ and the Ideology of Authenticity,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 52:2, 1994, pp. 225– 34. 6. Manasamangal is a Mangalkavya (literally, poems of well-being)—a genre of Bengali epic poem written approximately between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, depicting the greatness of popular, indigenous deities. The poems are known as Mangalkavya because it was believed that listening to these poems about the deities brought both spiritual and material benefits. 7. The Ramayana is an ancient Sanskrit epic attributed to the poet Valmiki. 8. It should be added here that the subject-matter of pats can also be folk Islamic themes like the gospel of Satya Pir and also a variety of secular themes. 9. Anthropologist Frank J. Korom spent extended periods among the patuas of Midnapur. He claims to have come across discussions on “originality” and “copyright” among the more progressive patuas. See Frank J. Korom, Village of Painters: Nar-

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rative Scrolls from West Bengal, (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2006). In fact, since there is fierce competition among the patuas for buyers and patrons, it is in their economic interest to protect a particular theme or motif. 10. Hitesranjan Sanyal, “The Nature of Peasant Culture in India: A Study of Pat Painting and Clay Sculptures of Bengal,” Folk: Journal of the Royal Swedish Folklore Academy, 26, 1984, p. 125. 11. Gurusaday Dutt, Folk Arts and Crafts of Bengal: The Collected Papers, (Calcutta: Seagull, 1990). 12. In a Bengali anthology on pat in West Bengal published in 2001, we find mention of six districts—Bankura, Purulia, Birbhoom, Howrah, Twenty-four Parganas and Midnapore—where working patua communities existed in recent past. (Asok Bhattacharya, (ed.)) Paschimbanger Patachitra, (Calcutta: WB Folk and Tribal Cultural Centre, 2001). The essays in that anthology were written much earlier, in the 1980s and 1990s. As of now, there are just two clusters of patuas still practicing their art and both are in Midnapore. Birbhoom also has a few patua households. For a stylistic analysis of the regional schools, see Kavita Singh, “The Content of the Form: Stylistic Difference and Narrative Choices in Bengali Pata Paintings” in B. N. Goswamy (ed.), Indian Art: Forms, Concerns and Developments in Historical Perspective (History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization, PHISPC, Vol. VI Pt. 3, General editor: D. P. Chattopadhyay), (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 2000), pp. 341–59. 13. See Jyotindra Jain, Kalighat Painting: Images from a Changing World, (Ahmedabad: Mapin, 1999). 14. “Touristscape” is my neologism after Arjun Appadurai’s “ethnoscape,” “mediascape” etc. 15. Baudrillard writes: “Today the scene and the mirror have given way to a screen and a network. There is no longer any transcendence or depth, but only the immanent surface of operations unfolding, the smooth and functional surface of communication. In the image of television, the most beautiful prototypical object of this new era, the surrounding universe and our very bodies are becoming monitoring screen.” The erstwhile categories of Critical Theory like alienation or reification are unable to capture the problems of the present: “[T]he consumer society was lived under the sign of alienation; it was a society of spectacle—but at least there was spectacle, and the spectacle, even if alienated, is never obscene. Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theatre, no more illusion, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication. We no longer partake the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication… Ecstasy is all functions abolished into one dimension, the dimension of communication. All events, all spaces, all memories are abolished in the sole dimension of information.” See Jean Bau-

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pp. [109–115]

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drillard, The Ecstasy of Communication (tr. Bernard and Caroline Schutze), (New York: Semiotext(e), 1988), p. 12, 21–23. 16. Roberto Savio, (2002) “Post-September 11th. New Concepts of Information,” International Development, 45:4, 2002, pp. 17–22. 17. Armand Mattelart, Xavier Delcourt and Michèle Mattelart, “International Image Markets” in Simon During (ed.) The Cultural Studies Reader, (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 421–37. 18. Interview with the proprietor, Digvijayi Opera, 396 Rabindra Sarani, Calcutta 700006, 15 February, 2004. This troupe usually produces palas (plays) based on contemporary themes. For example, in 2004, their production was called, Saddam—The Captive Hero. 19. To the best of my knowledge, the only ethnographic monograph on contemporary Bengali jatra is in Swedish: Christina Nygren, Brokiga Bengalen: Resande teatersällshap, religiösa festivaler and populära no”jen in indisca Västbengalen och Bangladesh, (Stockholm: Carlsson Forlag, 2006). 20. Anonymous, Biswer Ajab Khabar, (Calcutta: Raju Sachdev Publication, 2006). 21. Gulammohammed Sheikh, “Story of the Tongue and the Text: The Narrative Tradition” in Amiya Dev (ed.) Narrative: A Seminar, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1994), p. 253. 22. In his magisterial work on Indian chromolithographs, Christopher Pinney has drawn our attention to the embodied, corporeal aesthetics (as opposed to the practice of disinterested representation) immanent in the Indian practice of darshan, of seeing and being seen by the deity, which is physically transformative. See Christopher Pinney, Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India, (London: Reaktion, 2004). 23. Sheikh, 1994, op. cit., p. 261. 24. Ibid., p. 262. 25. Meyer Schapiro was probably the first to note the significance of the historic emergence of frame: “Besides the prepared ground, we tend to take for granted the regular margin and frame as essential features of the image. It is not commonly realized how late an invention is the frame. It was preceded by the rectangular field divided into bands; the horizontals as ground lines or strips connecting and supporting the figures were more pronounced visually than the separate vertical edges of the field. Apparently it was late in the second millennium BCE (if even then) before one thought of a continuous isolating frame around an image, a homogeneous enclosure like a city wall. When salient and when enclosing pictures with perspective views, the frame sets the picture surface back into depth and helps to deepen the view; it is like a window frame through which is seen a space behind the glass. The frame belongs then to the space of the observer rather than of the illusory, three-dimensional world disclosed within and behind. It is a finding and focusing device placed between

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the observer and the image.” See Meyer Schapiro, Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist and Society, (New York: George Braziller, 1994), p. 7. 26. Louis Marin, “The Frame of Representation and Some of its Figures” (tr. Wendy Waring) in Paul Duro (ed.), The Rhetoric of the Frame: Essays on the Boundary of the Artwork, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 79–80. 27. Ibid., p. 82. 28. Jacques Derrida, Truth in Painting (tr. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod), (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 60–61. 29. Ibid., p. 63 (emphasis added). 30. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (trans. Christopher S. Wood), (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). 31. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 32. See Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, (tr. John Goodman), (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 33. Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 34. Ibid., p. 7. 35. Ibid., p. 11. 36. Ibid., pp. 243–44. 37. Ibid., p. 245. 38. Ibid., p. 242. 39. I have borrowed the phrase “plastic space” from Pierre Francastel’s Peinture et Société: Naissance et destruction d’un espace plastique de la Renaissance au Cubisme, (Paris: Gallimard, 1994). 40. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (translator’s name not mentioned), (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 18. 41. Gulammohammed Sheikh, “The Viewer’s View: Looking at Pictures,” in T. Niranjana, P. Sudhir and V. Dhareshwar (ed.) Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India, (Calcutta: Seagull, 1993), p. 143. 42. Michael Camille, “Before the Gaze: The Internal Senses and Late Medieval Practices of Seeing” in Robert Nelson (ed.), Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 197–223. 43. Joseph Leo Koerner, op. cit. 44. Gulammohammed Sheikh, “Making of a Visual Language: Thoughts on Mughal Painting,” in B. N. Goswamy (ed.) Indian Art: Forms, Concerns and Developments in Historical Perspective (History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization, PHISPC, Vol. VI Pt. 3, General editor: D. P. Chattopadhyay), (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 2000), pp. 299–302. 45. Ibid., p. 306. 46. See Richard Lannoy, The Speaking Tree, (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 45–48.

201

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NOTES

47. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, (tr. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam), (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 15. 48. Agnes Heller, Everyday Life, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). 49. Rita Felski, “The Invention of Everyday Life,” New Formations, 39, 1999/2000, pp. 18–22. 50. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (trans. Catherine Portez), (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1987). George Lakoff and Rafael E Núñez, Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind brings Mathematics into Being, (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 51. John Frow, “Never Draw to an Inside Straight: On Everyday Knowledge,” New Literary History, 33:4, 2002, pp. 635–3. 52. Walter Benjamin “Little History of Photography,” in Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (ed.) Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1927–1934, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 510. 53. Marc Augé, The War of Dreams: Studies in Ethno Fiction (trans. Liz Heron), (London: Pluto Press, 1999). 54. See Stephen Crites, “The Narrative Quality of Experience,” in L. Hirchman and S. Hirchman (ed.) Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences, (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 26–50. 55. On the metropolitan career of the image of “9/11” see Steven Chermak, Frankie Y. Bailey and Michelle Brown (ed.), Media Representations of September 11, (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003). Also, Retort, “Afflicted Powers: The State, the Spectacle and September 11,” New Left Review 27, 2004, pp. 5–21. Terry Smith, “The Dialectic of Disappearance: Architectural Iconotypes between Clashing Cultures,” Critical Quarterly, 45, 2003, pp. 33–51. 56. Samuel Weber, Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan’s Dislocation of Psycho-analysis (tr. H. Levine), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 38–58. 57. Miriam Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,’” 1987, New German Critique, 40 (Winter), pp. 179–224. 58. Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant (tr. S. Watson Taylor), (London: Pan Books, 1980), p. 28. 59. Walter Benjamin, “Paris Arcades,” in Walter Benjamin: The Arcades Project (tr. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin), (Cambridge, MA: Belknap (Harvard University Press), 1999), pp. 278–80. 5. CROSSING THE HOWRAH BRIDGE—CALCUTTA, FILTH AND DWELLING: FORMS, FRAGMENTS, PHANTASMS 1. Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, (tr. Mark Polizzotti), (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986), p. 7.

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2. Ernst Bloch, “Nonsynchronicity and the Obligation to its Dialectics,” Mark Ritter (tr.), New German Critique, 11, 1977, pp. 22–31. 3. Arjun Appadurai, “Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai,” Public Culture, 12:3, 2000, p. 627–51. 4. Ibid., p. 638. 5. Tim Ingold, “Building, Dwelling, Living: How Animals and People make Themselves at Home in the World,” in Marilyn Strathern (ed.) Shifting Contexts: Transformations in Anthropological Knowledge, (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 57–80. 6. Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking” in D. F. Krell (ed.), Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 323– 39. 7. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 1–18. 8. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, “The City: The Sewer, the Gaze and the Contaminating Touch” in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 125–48. 9. Sudipta Kaviraj, “Filth and the Public Sphere: Concepts and Practices about Space in Calcutta,” Public Culture, 10:1, 1997, pp. 12–32. 10. Dominique Laporte, History of Shit (tr. N. Benabid and R. el-Khoury), (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 11. Arjun Appadurai, “The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition,” in V. Rao and M. Walton (eds), Culture and Public Action, (Stanford, MA: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 59–84 (emphasis mine). 12. Peter Stallybrass, “Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat,” Representations, 31, 1990, pp. 63–90. 13. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1957), pp. 77–111. 14. Mitchell Dean, “A Genealogy of the Government of Poverty,” Economy and Society, 1992, 21:3, pp. 214–55. Also, Colin Mercer, “Geographies for the Present: Patrick Geddes, Urban Planning and the Human Sciences,” Economy and Society, 1997, 26:2, pp. 211–32. 15. Partha Chatterjee, “Community in the East,” Economic and Political Weekly, 33:6, 1998, pp. 277–282. 16. Appadurai, 2004, op. cit., p. 63. 17. Sarada Balagopalan, The “Street Child” and a Child on the Street: On the Production and Consumption of “Reform” and its Effect on Children’s Self-constructions, 2006, Occasional Paper, Delhi: Centre for Studies in Developing Societies. 18. David Schneider, A Critique of the Study of Kinship, (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1984). 19. Balagopalan, op. cit.

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NOTES

6. VIRTUAL FLESH: DESI NETPORN, “FAT AUNTY” AND THE TECHNOFOLK—VERNACULAR DESIRE IN THE AGE OF THE WORLD WIDE WEB 1. http://tour.indian-roadtrip.com/home.html?nats=NzQzODE6Mzo0OA,0,0,0,0 (accessed 5 August, 2009). 2. On the scale of the netporn industry see F. S. Lane, Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age, (New York and London: Routledge, 2000). C. Adams, “How much of all Internet traffic is pornography,” 7 October, 2005, http://www.straightdope.com/colums/051007.html (accessed 5 August, 2009). 3. See Sunny Leon’s (a Canadian Sikh) interview with Lukeisback.com (an online “adult entertainment industry” magazine), http://www.lukeisback.com/stars/ stars/sunny_leone.htm, (accessed 10 August, 2009). 4. Carlos A Forment, “Political Practice and the Rise of an Ethnic Enclave,” Theory and Society, 18:1, 1989, pp. 47–81. 5. http://www.freesexyindians.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=3 (accessed 5 August, 2009). 6. These printed magazines from which photographs are scanned are samples of what Sanjay Srivastava termed “Footpath Pornography.” See his “Pedestrian Desires: Footpath Pornography and the Aesthetics of Fluid Space,” Passionate Modernity: Sexuality, Class and Consumption in India, (New Delhi and Oxford: Routledge, 2006), pp. 167–202. 7. Jason Overdorf, “Meet India’s first porn star,” Globalpost, 4 May, 2009, http:// www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/090430/indias-first-porn-star (accessed 12 August, 2009). 8. See Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy (tr. Jeremy Gains), (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986). 9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, (tr. G E M Anscombe), (London: Wiley Blackwell, 1973), p. 138. 10. Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 109–11. 11. Florian Cramer and Stewart Home, “Pornographic Coding” in Katrien Jacobs, Marije Janssen, Matteo Pasquinelli (ed.), C’LICKME: A Netporn Studies Reader, (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2007), pp. 159–167. 12. Linda Williams, Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of the Visible,” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 13. Frances Ferguson, Pornography, the Theory: What Utilitarianism Did to Action, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 9. 14. Ibid., p. 8 (emphasis in the original). 15. Savita Bhabhi, a buxom, nymphomaniac woman, the protagonist of the serial-

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ized graphic novel with the same title, is about to become the Indian porn-toon icon par excellence. See Globalpost, op. cit. 16. Michael Goddard, “BBW: Techno-archaism, Excessive Corporeality and Network Sexuality” in C’LICKME, op. cit., pp. 187–251. Also, Laura Kipnis, “Fat and Culture” in Nicola B. Dirks (ed.), In Near Ruins, (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 199–220. 17. Goddard writes: “BBW is primarily an Internet phenomenon and it is the distinct properties of the net itself that have enabled its emergence and continue to provide an ideal space for the valorisation of an excessive corporeality that would normatively be seen as monstrous,” C’LICKME, op. cit., p. 188. 18. Adam Arvidsson, “Netporn: The Work of Fantasy in the Information Society” in C’LICKME, op. cit., pp. 69–76. 19. Anna Munster, “Digitality: Approximate Aesthetics,” CTHEORY 14 March, 2001, http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=290, (retrieved 8 August, 2009). 20. See Christopher Pinney, “Photos of the Gods”: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India, (London: Reaktion, 2004). Ashis Rajadhyaksha, “The Phalke Era: Conflict of Traditional Form and Modern Technology,” Journal of Arts & Ideas, XIV-XV, 1987, pp. 47–78. Arvind Rajagopal, Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 21. Christopher Pinney, “Mechanical Reproduction in India” in Gayatri Sinha (ed.), Art and Visual Culture in India 1857–2007, (New Delhi: Marg, 2009), p. 78 (emphasis in original). 22. Ibid., p. 79. 23. Charles Baudelaire, “The Modern Public and Photography” cited in Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 222. 24. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Illuminations, (tr. Harry Zohn), (London: Fontana, 1992), p. 217. 25. Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible, (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 1. 26. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 45. 27. Solomon-Godeau, op. cit., p. 220. 28. Linda Williams, “Corporealized Observers: Visual Pornographies and the ‘Carnal Density of Vision,’” in Patrice Petro (ed.), Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 5. 29. CB Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, (London: Oxford University Press, 1962). 30. John Tagg, The Burden of Representation, (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 88. 31. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, 2002, Duke University Press: Durham and London, pp. 23–45.

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pp. [150–154]

NOTES

32. Jean Laplanche, Problématiques III: La Sublimation, (Paris: PUF, 1980), p. 66. 33. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (tr. Daniel W. Smith), (Mansell: Continuum, 2003), p. 44. 34. On the devi or the mother-goddess, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s fascinating essay, Other Asias, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 174–208. 35. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (ed.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 1927– 1934, (Volume 2), (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 510. 36. Cited in Solomon-Godeau, op. cit., p. 229. 37. Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Realism in Cinema” (tr. J. Andrews and B. Augst) in Philip Rosen (ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 312. 38. Benjamin, Work, op cit., p. 216. 39. Benjamin, Little History, p. 318 40. Arvidsson, op. cit., p-71. 41. J. Laplanche and J-B. Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality” in V. Burgin, J. Donald and C. Kaplan (ed.), Formations of Fantasy, (London and New York: Routledge, 1986), pp. 27–28. 42. Every now and then one comes across newspaper headlines reporting enforcement of “stringent” dress codes on women. For example, in June 2009, the authorities declared a ban on girls wearing jeans, danglers, sleeveless blouses and high-heels on the campuses of all undergraduate colleges in Kanpur. See: http://www.4to40.com/newsat4/index.asp?id=2709&news=Sleeveless_blouses (accessed 3 July, 2009). Also, Vinay Bahl, “Shifting Boundaries of “Nativity” and “Modernity” in South Asian Women’s Clothes,” Dialectical Anthropology 29, 2005, pp. 85–121. 43. In FSI, the use of English as a medium of communication is often debated. South Indians often use their own language and scripts and the demand for an exclusive forum for Hindi-speakers led to the creation of a Hindi forum: Antarvasana. Here is a comment from a member (Pantypounder) dated 6 June, 2005: “I must inform you that [my] interest in this site seems to be falling. I belong to a small minority that wants sophisticated erotica and interaction. Friends of mine who are members have expressed their unhappiness at the level of English language content… The posts are becoming so crude and almost incoherent that it is difficult to spend time on this site.” A fellow member (Godfather) from Sicily responded: “We would like to point out that FSI is not in the business of running a language institute and English is not part of our worldrenowned curriculum. FSI was primarily formed to focus on issues pertaining to promoting lewdness, nudity, free sex and all manner of Indian sexual perversions… As a pantypounder, I would suggest you initiate various branches to

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impart free Higher English language skills to FSI members, starting with the hometown of Shakespeare…” (8 June, 2005). 44. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (tr. David McLintock), (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), p. 124. Page numbers for subsequent citations are in the text. 45. Panofsky wrote that the denotation of a representational visual image is what all viewers from any culture and at any time would recognize the image as depicting. See Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), pp. 51–3. All viewers? 46. Goddard, op cit., p. 188. 47. Ibid., p. 187. 48. Florian Cramer, “Sodom Blogging: Alternative Porn and Aesthetic Sensibility” in C’LICKME, op. cit., p. 175. Page numbers for subsequent citations are in the text. 49. Arvidsson, op. cit., p. 70. 50. See Rachel Dwyer, All You Want is Money, All You Need is Love: Sexuality and Romance in Modern India, (London: Cassell, 2000). Rachel Dwyer, Bollywood’s India: Hindi Cinema as a Guide to Modern India, (London: Reaktion, forthcoming). Thanks to webcams and digital cameras, the “private” familial space in India is increasingly invaded by the pornographic gaze. The Bollywood film Kalyug (2005) deals with a (fictional) newly married couple caught on camera at a hotel during their honeymoon. The video is released on the internet and the bride ultimately commits suicide. The husband, in pursuit of revenge, delves into the world of underground pornography to seek out the criminals who profited from the film. Such events are increasingly becoming common in India. A Kannada porn video entitled Mysuru Mallige (Mysore Jasmine) shot into fame featuring two engineering students from the Malnad College. Another video, DPS Dhamaka, featuring two kids from a Delhi public school, was circulating as a popular MMS clip. These videos were not made to be marketed and the persons who shot these claimed that these were leaked. Such incidents of leakage are increasingly becoming common, attesting to a certain mutation between the public and the private, thanks to the wide availability of cameras. It seems that what turns on the Indians is not so much kinky, simulated fantasies but real-life sex of others. Incidentally, all these clips are available in FSI’s Indian Sex Videos forum. 51. http://movies.rediff.com/slide-show/2010/mar/11/slide-show-1-interview-withdibakar-banerjee.htm (accessed 10 October, 2010). 52. Victor Burgin, In/Different Spaces, (Berkele: University of California Press, 1996), p. 64. 53. Ibid., p. 72. 54. See Jacques-Alain Miller, “Commentary on Lacan’s ‘On Freud’s “Trieb” and the psychoanalyst’s desire’” (tr. Bruce Fink), in R. Feldstein, B. Fink, M. Jaanus

207

pp. [157–162]

NOTES

(eds.), Reading Seminar XI, (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996). 55. Laplanche, La Sublimation, op. cit., pp. 102–3. 56. See for example, Laura U Marks, The Skin of the Film, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 57. In Photos of the Gods, Christopher Pinney demonstrated that in the vernacular sensorium, vision is not a means of appropriation—images look at the viewers and they “get” darshan. 58. Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image” in Image-Music-Text, (tr. Stephen Heath), (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 43. 59. Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, (Cambridge: MA: MIT Press, 2008). 60. Gulammohammed Sheikh, “The Viewer’s View: Looking at Pictures” in T. Niranjana, P. Sudhir and V. Dhareshwar (ed), Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India, (Calcutta: Seagull, 1993), pp. 143–54. 61. Ernst Gombrich, “Image and Code: Scope and Limits of Conventionalism in Pictorial Representation” in Wendy Steiner (ed.), Image and Code, (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1981), p. 16. 62. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” (tr. Hugh Gray) Film Quarterly, 13:4 (Summer, 1960), pp. 4–9. 63. CS Peirce, “A Sketch of Logical Critics” (1909) in The Essential Peirce. Selected Philosophical Writings, Vol. 2 (1893–1913), edited by the Peirce Edition Project, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 460–461. 64. Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 216. 65. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), p. 4. 66. Ibid. 67. On pre-modern Indian erotic ideals see Daud Ali, “Romantic Love, Self-Regard and the Courtly Environment in Early Medieval India” in D. N. Jha, and Eugenia Vanina (ed.), Mind over Matter: Essays on Mentalities in Medieval India, (Delhi: Tulika, 2009), pp. 178–204. 68. Christopher Pinney’s Camera Indica, (London: Reaktion, 1997), analyzes this process in the context of contemporary Indian posed studio photography. 69. Satarupa Dasgupta, “Bride and Prejudice: A Comparative Analysis of Matrimonial Advertisements of Indian Women Published in Newspapers and Matrimonial Websites,” International Communication Association, Dresden International Congress, 16 June, 2006 (typescript). 70. http://jaanlo.com/howto/how-to-know-if-your-indian-bride-really-beautiful (accessed 4 December, 2008). 71. Gillian Brown, “Anorexia, Humanism, Feminism,” The Yale Journal of Criticism, 5:1, 1991, p. 195. 72. Ibid., pp. 196–97.

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73. Harriet Faard, “Anorexia as Crises Embodied: A Marxist-Feminist Analysis” in H. Faard, S. Resnick, R. Wolf (ed.), Bringing It All Back Home, (London: Pluto, 1994), pp. 116–17. 74. Jacaques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (tr. Alan Sheridan), (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 128. 75. See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 25–66. 76. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectvity at the Margins, (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 150. 77. Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World, (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 135. 78. Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psyhchasthenia” (tr. John Shepley), October, 31, 1984, p. 23. 79. Susan Sontag, On Photography, (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977), p. 85. Emphasis added. 80. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, (tr. Richard Howard), (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 12. 81. Christian Metz, “Photography and Fetish” in Carol Squiers (ed.), The Critical Image, (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990), p. 158. 82. Silverman, Threshold, op. cit., p. 197. 83. Anthony Forge, “Learning to See in New Guinea” in Philip Mayer (ed.), Socialization: The Approach from Social Anthropology, (London: Tavistock, 1970), pp. 269–291. Also, MH Segall, DT Campbell, MJ Herskovits (ed.), The Influence of Culture on Visual Perception, (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966). 84. Sontag, op. cit., p. 161 85. Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” Critical Inquiry, 19:3, 1993, p. 433. 86. Okwui Enwezor, Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography, (New York: International Centre for Photography, 2006). 87. In this context, see Julie Guthman and Melanie DuPuis, “Embodying neoliberalism: economy, culture, and the politics of fat,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24, 2006, pp. 427–448. 88. Lotte Hoek’s ethnography of Bangladeshi B-grade film has been useful for my thinking about visual subalternity. 89. See Manisha Roy, Bengali Women, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). P. Guzder and S. Krishna, “Sita-Shakti: Cultural Paradigms for Indian Women,” Transcultural Psychiatry, 28, 1991, pp. 257–301. 90. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 91. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, (London: Verso, 1997), p. 7. 92. Sudhir Kakar, The Inner World: A Psychoanalytical Study of Childhood and Society in India, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 52–112.

209

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NOTES

93. See G M Carstairs, The Twice-born: Study of a Community of High Caste Hindus, (London: Hogarth, 1957). I am grateful to Ashish Nady for this reference. 94. Laplanche and Pontalis, op. cit., pp. 27–28. 95. Burgin, op. cit., p. 89. 96. Laplanche and Pontalis, op. cit., p. 26. 97. Žižek, Fantasies, op. cit., p. 143. 98. Rana Dasgupta, “The Thrill of the Online Peephole,” New York Arts 7:4, 2002, http://www.ranadasgupta.com/texts.asp?text_id=21 (accessed 4 July, 2008). 99. Apart from Donna Haraway, see also, Bernard Stiegler, Techniques and Time I, (tr. George Collins), (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 100. Žižek, Fantasies, op. cit., p. 139. 101. Partha Chatterjee, “Two Poets and a Death: On Civil Society in the NonChristian World” in Timothy Mitchell (ed.), Questions of Modernity, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 35–48. 102. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Adda: A History of Sociality” in Provincializing Europe, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 180–213. 103. Lawrence Cohen, “Holi in Banaras and the Mahaland of Modernity,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2:4, 1995, pp. 399–424. 104. For a genealogy of this public culture going back to the colonial times, see Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Colonial India, (Palgrave: New York, 2002).

210

INDEX

9/11 29, 33, 105–106, 106fn, 108–114, 118–126

Augé, Marc 123 aunty, fat 145–148, 150–154, 156, 158–159, 168–173 Austin, JL 70 autobiography 61–63, 67

Abu Taleb 7, 64–65, 66fn Aden 67–68, 70 Advani, LK 37, 37fn Afghanistan 110, 112–113 Agamben, Giorgio 127 agency 15–16, 32, 36–37, 44, 52–57, 61, 82, 84–85, 109, 163–166 ajab 110–111, 125–126 Asian Development Bank 138 Alberti, Leon Battista 116–119 Alliez, Eric 20 amor mundi 22 amor fati 22, 22fn Anderson, Benedict 23–24, 26, 71 Appadurai, Arjun 2, 4–8, 12–14, 28–29, 37–39, 59, 108, 109fn, 130–131, 134–135 Arendt, Hannah 22, 45, 122 Aristotle 5, 9–10, 92, 119 art 29–30, 105–126; and framing, 112–121, 115fn, 128; folk art, pat, 29, 106–118, 107fn, 108fn, 120–125, 128, 151, 159; jatra, 29, 109–112, 168; kitsch, 105, 123–125; traditional art, 107, 120 Arvidsson, Adam 152, 156, 170–171

Bakhtin, Mikhail 99–100 Balibar, Étienne 23 Bamabodhini (journal) 74 Banerjee, Sumanta 100–101 Bangabasi (journal) 46 Barad, Karen 40fn Bartaman (newspaper) 43 Barthes, Roland 39, 88fn, 158, 166 Basak, Krishnalal 83–85 Baudelaire, Charles 66, 88fn, 148–150, 157, 167, 172 Baudrillard, Jean 39, 54, 54fn, 108–109, 109fn Baudry, Jean-Louis 151 Beijing 35–36 Benjamin, Walter 6, 66, 123–125, 131, 148–149, 151–152, 167 Bennett, Jane 56 Bergson, Henri 5, 9–10, 30–31, 56–57, 151, 155 Bhabha, Homi 10, 70–71, 98, 131–132, 154 Bhadra, Gautam 32

211

INDEX Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) 37fn, 112, 153, 173 Bharucha, Rustom 2 Bhattacharya, Krishnakamal 75–77 bin Laden, Osama 33, 110–114 Bloch, Ernst 21, 129 Blumenberg, Hans 20, 107 body 52, 80, 89–93, 98–100, 130–131, 148, 153–155, 159–161, 168–172; and cleanliness, see hygiene; and feminism, 161–162; and sensory hierarchy, 92–93, 166, 167; and taste, 89–92, 170–172; Body without Organs, 25, 150 Bohr, Niels 40fn Bollywood 102, 107, 142–143, 153, 156, 156fn, 167–168 Bourdieu, Pierre 5, 51, 131 Brown, Gillian 161–162 Burgin, Victor 156–157 Burton, Antoinette 65–66, 66fn Bush, George W 110–114 Bose, Pradip 95

Ceylon 67–68 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 21, 31–32, 64, 172–173 Chatterjee, Partha 3, 19, 23–24, 26, 31–32, 47–48, 52, 64, 71, 102, 136 Chattopadhyay, Bankimchandra 94–95, 97, 100 Chaudhuri, Nirad C 60–61, 66, 84fn Chaudhury, Jagatmohini 69 China 7–8, 83; and dumping goods, 36; Chinese bicycles, 42, 52–54, 57 Clair, Jean 151 Clark, Larry 144 civil society 24–25, 27–28, 47–48, 72–73, 85, 135; and governance, 25; and the public sphere, 72–73, 172–173; global civil society, 38–39, 57, 136 Clifford, James 78 Cohen, Lawrence 173 commodity 20, 36–41, 48–51, 56, 101–103, 146; and daan, 26, 42, 50–52; and gift, 26–28, 49–50, 52–54; and mass culture, 102–103, 107, 123, 148; art commodities, 106–109; commodity fetishism in Marx, 40, 42, 54–57; in Taussig, 42–43, 52, 54 Communist Party of India (Marxist) 43 community 5, 32, 38, 42–43; and Gemeinschaft, 5, 17, 44, 47–48, 107, 139; and Gesellschaft, 48, 107, see society; and identity, 11, 137, 142, 173, see nationhood; and samaj, 47, 49; imagined community, 71, 106 complexity 12–14 consumption 2, 3, 26, 35–36, 39, 52–53, 91, 101, 106, 157; and hysteria, 36, 52–53

Caillois, Roger 164 Calcutta 21, 26, 30, 35–42, 44–46, 60–61, 87–102, 106, 111, 127– 139; Howrah Bridge, 127–139 capital 11, 23, 84, 138, 161 capitalism 2, 4–8, 20–21, 25, 41, 48, 101, 108, 122, 125, 129, 167; and dematerialization, 38, 103–104, 146, 167; and globalization, 3, 6–8, 23, 129, 167; and time, 11, 17, 20–21, 23, 42–43, 129; and value, 39–40, see commodity; printcapitalism, 61 carnivalesque 32, 91, 98–101 caste 44–47, 52, 71, 74–75, 79–80, 84–85, 90, 95, 102, 106, 108–111, 127–128, 139, 168 Cavell, Stanley 149

212

INDEX cosmopolitanism 7, 29, 38, 51, 61, 64–65, 76, 83–85, 125, 161 Cramer, Florian 144, 152, 155–156, 170–171

and repetition, 9–12, 16, 70, 155–156 Douglas, Mary 89 drive 66, 116, 147, 149, 153, 156–157 Durkheim, Émile 11, 45, 48 Dutt, Michael Madhusudan 64, 66, 71, 76 Dutt, RC 68, 72 dwelling 17, 51–52, 59–60, 65, 76– 79, 102, 106–107, 122, 127–139

darshan 114, 114fn, 121, 128–129, 157fn Dasgupta, Rana 172 de Certeau, Michel 67, 70 de Man, Paul 62–63 Debord, Guy 2fn, 20, 28, 54, 90–91, 152, 168 democracy 2, 15, 23, 25–27, 32, 43–46, 49–50, 52–53, 167; and clientelism, 44, 49–53; and corruption, 43, 51, 130, 138; and governance, 23–24, 49–50, 138 Department for International Development (UK) 138 Descartes, René 22, 39, 56–57, 70, 92, 117, 119, see representation, space desire 18–19, 36, 52, 132, 152, 159–164, 170–172; and affect, 25, 150; and auto-eroticism, 169–171; and autonomy, 52; and consumption, 36, 52–54, 144, 146, 149, 152, 156–157, see commodity; and patriotism, 65, 76, 77, 161; and pleasure, 88, 88fn, 90–91, 96, 98–99, 106fn, 144, 146, 154, 158–159, 164–168, see body, porn desi 7, 141–146, see porn deterritorialization 2–3, 25, 41, 60, 108–109, 142, 167–168 Deleuze, Gilles 2–4, 8–13, 16, 25, 30–31, 41, 55–57, 91, 122, 150, 155, 162, see Guattari Derrida, Jacques 4, 69–70, 70fn, 106fn, 115–116 difference 6, 9–12, 16, 59, 64, 69–71, 84, 135, 171; and mimicry, 69–71;

Eagleton, Terry 100 Eco, Umberto 159 Englishness 62–75, 70fn Enwezor, Okwui 167 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 63 ethnic ethnic art, 125, ethnic netporn, 7, 141–146, see porn, ethnic politics, 24, 102, see nation ethnography 30–31, 130 ethnology 123 ethnos 5 Escobar, Arturo 7–8, 10 event 6, 25, 31, 45, 60, 108, 114, 118; ajab event, 110–118 everyday 10, 27, 41, 51, 101–102, 122–124, 154 Faard, Harriet 162, 165–167 Fabian, Johannes 20 fabulation 30–32 Falk, Pasi 90 Fanon, Frantz 3 fantasy 141, 145–147, 149–150, 152–157, 159–160, 170–172 Ferguson, Frances 144–145 fetish 40–42, 55–56, 106fn, 123, 146, 152–155, see commodity Feuerbach, Ludwig 106–107 film 31, 53, 116–117, 144–145, 148–149, 151, 156–157, see photography

213

INDEX flaneur 66 food 32, 87–104, 88fn, 100; and halal, 113; and manners, 93–96; and sensuality, 88fn, 89–90, 96, 98–99; junk food, 89–90, 102; street food, 87–89, 94–96, 98–102 Foucault, Michel 19, 24, 26, 45, 91, 94, 119, 134, 162 Free Sexy Indians Forum (website) 142–154, 154fn, 157–159, 168–173 Freud, Sigmund 123–124, 154–157, 170; and Lacan, 124, see Lacan Friedburg, Anne 116–118 Frow, John 19–20, 39 fuchka (street food) 88–89, 91, 99–101

Hinduism 35, 37, 65–69, 76–79, 82–85, 107, 110–111, 153; Hindu nationalism, see nation home 59–60, 65–66, 72–81, 85, 130–134, 146, 154; and dwelling, 59–60, 77, 79–81, 106, 122, see Heidegger; homelessness, 60, 130–132, 135–137; Unheimlichkeit, 131–132, 154–155, 166–167 Home, Stewart 144 Husserl, Edmund 4 hygiene 87–89, 97, 129–131, 134; and filth, shit, 133–135 Indianness 62–75, 70fn, 142 indigenous movements 2, 8–9 International Monetary Fund 4, 36 internet 141, 147, 152–155, 165, 171–173, see porn; and cyberspace, 171–172 Islam 7, 15, 29, 37fn, 65–69, 82–83, 89, 107, 110–111, 113, 153 Itesamuddin, Mirza Sheikh 64–65

geometry 4–5; and topology, 5 Gemeinschaft 5, 17, 44, 47–48, 107, 139, see society Gesellschaft 48, 107, see society Ghatak, Ritwik 101 Gibson, William 171 Gibson-Graham, JK 7 gift 26–28; and daan, 42–43, 49–54, see commodity; and Mauss, 42, 50 Goddard, Michael 147fn Gombrich, Ernst 157–158, 163 Goodman, Nelson 159 governmentality 24, 49–50, 134–136 Gramsci, Antonio 94 Guattari, Félix 3, 8–9, 16, 25, 150, see Deleuze Guha, Ranajit 18

Jameson, Frederic 20, 142, 150 Japan 79–81 Jarry, Alfred 93 Kakar, Sudhir 170 Kant, Immanuel 11–12, 18–20, 22, 26, 39–40, 56–57, 92–93, 116, 119–120 Khan, Amir 156 Kracauer, Siegfried 166 Kristeva, Julia 170 Kundera, Milan 146 Kwa, Chunglin 12

Hadot, Pierre 93 Harman, Graham 56–57 Heidegger, Martin 18, 22–23, 30–31, 57, 59–60, 119, 122, 131–132 Hegel, GWF 18–20, 24, 47–48 Heller, Agnes 122

Lacan, Jacques 2fn, 10, 106fn, 124, 153, 156–157, 162–167, 170–172 Lapalanche, Jean 157, 171 Laporte, Dominique 134

214

INDEX Latour, Bruno 6–7, 11–12, 14, 16–19, 30, 40, 56–57 Law, John 12–14, 17 Lefebvre, Henri 101, 138 Leibniz, GW 11–14, 57 locality 2, 4–8, 12–18, 30, 37–39, 43, 45, 49, 60, 91–93, 97–98, 104, 122–123; and neighbourhood, 109–110, 131–135; and realism, 38, 57, see Appadurai

sha, 77; and nationalism, 3, 24, 32, 37fn, 46, 65–67, 71–73, 76–78, 82, 84, 95–98, 100, 108, 135; and samaj, 45–47 Navya-Bharat (journal) 73 Negri, Antonio 103 NGO 4, 38, 44, 136–138 Nietzsche, Friedrich 22, 22fn, 60, 88fn, 92, 157 nostalgia 8, 40, 48, 82, 103, 108, 142, 146 Nussbaum, Martha 38fn

Manovich, Lev 143 Marin, Louis 115, 119 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia 33fn Marx, Karl 18–19, 24, 28, 36, 39–42, 40fn 47–48, 54–57, 103, 135, 157 Massey, Doreen 6–7 Massumi, Brian 150 materiality 12, 40, 40fn, 55, 117, 121–122 Mattelart, Armand 109 mediatization 2, 52, 106, 110, 122, 165, see film, internet; and television, 107–109, 117 Metz, Christian 166 microfinance 44 micropolitics 4–5 mimicry 10–11, 70–71, 164, 166–168, see Bhabha, difference Mitchell, WJT 157 Mitra, Shyamlal 82–84 Mukherjee, Trailokyanath 70fn, 72 Mukhopadhyay, Bhudev 73, 94, 100 Mukhopadhyay, Bipradas 96 multitude 5, 39 Mulvey, Laura 156–157, 163 Munster, Anna 147

object-oriented philosophy 56–57 obligation 27, 50–54, see rights Orientalism 66–67 Panofsky, Erwin 116, 155fn, 158 Pascal, Blaise 91 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 144 pat 29, 106–118, 107fn, 108fn, 120–125, 128, 151, 159, see art Patkhar, Medha 2 Peirce, CS 148, 159 personhood 26, 44, 48; and cosmopolitanism, 51–52 photography 114, 116–118, 128– 129, 142, 147–151, 154, 157–160, 162–167, see film Pietz, William 55–56 Pinney, Christopher 114fn, 152 Pirandello, Luigi 30 place 4–8, 11, 50, 60, 70, 92, 102, 114, 137–138, 146, see locality; and theology, 60; and topos, 7, 40, see geometry; non-place, 17, 22, 26, 50, see Augé Plato 4, 54–56, 96 Pocock, John 48fn Poincairé, Henri 5, 131 polis 5 Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand 171

Nancy, Jean-Luc 21–23, 26 Nandy, Ashish 91 nation 3–4, 7, 15, 24, 38, 50, 68, 85, 94–95, 102, 106; and Bharatbar-

215

INDEX Poovey, Mary 45 population 21, 24–27, 60, 94, 98–99, 136, see governmentality porn 141–173; aunty, 145–148, 150– 154, 156, 158–159, 168–173; desi and ethnic netporn, 7, 141–146; Gonzo and indie, 155–156, 156fn; premier (Western) porn, 143, 145 postcolonial literary criticism 61 postmodernity 21, see time postmodernism 28, 36–37, 54 Proust, Marcel 88, 92, 146

Roy, Arundhuti 2 Roy, Kiranleka 97 Roy, Rammohan 67 Sahebiana 74 Sakai, Naoki 9 Samaj 43–49, see nation Sassen, Saskia 4–8, 14–15, 29 Schapiro, Meyer 115fn Schiller, Friedrich 60, 106 Schmitt, Karl 48 Schoolmen (Scholastics) 55 Sekhar Sen, Chandra 69 Sen, Amartya 23 Sen, Simonti 61, 73 Shastri, Haraprasad 97–98 Shastri, Shibnath 61fn, 73–74 Sheikh, Gulammohammed 113–115, 119–121 Shiva, Vandana 2 Silverman, Kaja 164 Simmel, Georg 39 Sloterdijk, Peter 29, 29fn smriti 44, 46, 78–79 social 2–5, 11–12, 14, 19–20, 25, 28, 38, 40, 43–50, 55, 77, 94, 100–102, 129, 135–136, 162–164, 171–173, see civil society, community Solomon-Godeau, Abigail 149–150 Sontag, Susan 166 space 4–7, 11, 16, 23–24, 30, 64–65, 67–69, 73, 79, 81, 90, 113–125, 118fn, 129–131, 151, 153, 156–157, 161, 164, 170–173, see place; and image, 113–125, see art, photography; and writing, 67, 81; Cartesian space, 22, 39, 56–57, 117, see Descartes; intensive space, 7; spatial economy, 130 spectral 57 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 11, 31–32, 38fn, 40fn

Rancière, Jacques 56 Ray, Prafulla Chandra 69fn Real 10–12, 23–24, 30, 37, 42–43, 54, 100, 123–124, 144, 149, 151–153, 155–157, 160, 170–173 Reason 15, 18–19, 84, 93 repetition 9–12, 16, 70, 106fn, 155–156, see difference representation 5, 10–12, 36–37, 39–40, 40fn, 47–48, 54–56, 84, 106–108, 113–124, 135–136, 144, 166; and concept, 9, 13, 16–17, 21–22; and history, 6, 55; and image, 2fn, 53–56, 90–91, 113–122, 128–129, 151–2, 155fn, 156–166; and immediacy; 41, 115–124, 160; and res extensa, 22, 39–40, 56–57, 117, see Descartes; and the spectacle, 28–29, 41, 54–55, 106–109, 106fn, 122; and subject, 60–63, 84; and the virtual, 116–119, 155, see virtual rhizome 3, 14–17 rights 5, 18, 23–28, 4–53, 84, 162; as adhikar, 26–28, 49–53 Rilke, Ranier Maria 103 Ritzer, George 17–18, 26 rojnamcha 78–79, 81 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 161

216

INDEX tion, 69; and home, 6, 60–63, 74, 79–81, 85fn; and selfhood, 67, 70–75, 84–85; Enlightenment travelogues, 76; Sanskrit and IndoPersian travelogues, 62–63, 79–81; subaltern travelogues, 78, 83–85 Trinamul Congress 43

spectacle 29, 41, 54, 90–91, 106, 108–109, 109fn, 165–167, see Debord Stallybrass, Peter 40fn, 99, 135 state 3–5, 15, 19–20, 24–25, 27–28, 36, 38, 45–53, 60, 71, 84, 94, 102, 130, 133–135, 138–139, see governmentality; and democracy, see clientelism, nation Stoicism 22, 95 Strathern, Marilyn 45 street-children 130, 136–138 subaltern 5, 8, 29, 49, 70, 78, 95, 97–98, 110, 138, 148, 160, 167, 170; subaltern agency, 16, 32; subaltern imaginary, 10, 40fn, 78, 111, 128, 158 Suez 67–69 Swadeshi movement 77, 97

Unheimliche see home universality 5, 8–9, 13, 15, 20, 23–24, 41, 84, 122–123, 144–145, 149, 170 urbanization 17, 100, 108, 131–138 value 36–43, 40fn, 54–56, 91–92, 107, 125, see commodity, Marx; and jurisprudence, 41 Van Den Abbeele, Georges 65, 85, 85fn Velázquez, Diego 119–120 Verma, Ramgopal 153 vernacular 2–7, 26, 28–29, 30–33, 50–51, 57, 60, 67, 70, 84–85, 100, 102–103, 123, 141–142, 144–147, 151–153, 156–161, 157fn, 166–173 Virilio, Paul 129 virtual 10–13, 26, 116–120, 155, 160, 168–171 Vivekananda, Swami 72, 95

Tagg, John 149–150 Tagore, Dwarakanath 66fn, 67, 71, 75 Tagore, Rabindranath 45–47, 77, 95, 100 Takeda, Hariprabha 79–81, 84–85 Tarde, Gabriel 11–12, 101 Taussig, Michael 42, 54 terrorism 29, 110–112 thingness 39–40, 50 time 4–6, 9–11, 19–20, 23–34, 47, 50, 78–81, 92, 106, 114, 119, 121, 129, 146, 151, see capital; and coevalness, 20, 167; and the commodity, 42, see capital; and epoch, 19–21, 60, 64–65, 111–112, 129; and synchronicity, 20, 23, 129; and temporalization, 64, 69, 81; and writing, 78 Tönnies, Ferdinand 5, 107 travelogue 7, 60–85, 110; and cita-

Weltanschauung 20, 22 White, Allon 99 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 117, 144 World Bank 36, 130, 134–135, 138 World Health Organization 104, 138 worlding 29–31, 50, 122 Zizek, Slavoj 144, 170, 172

217

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