Conclusiones del tercer capítulo

prominently through the castigating, ironic voice of the narrator. Reminding us of Lukács’ concept of realist ‘narration’ as participation in the narrative,386 _Devi’s

384 _{Ibid, p. 30.}

385 _{Ibid, p. 39.}

386 _{In the essay, ‘Narrate or Describe?’, Lukács makes a distinction between realist and naturalist art.} Realist novelists such as Balzac, Tolstoy, Stendhal, Scott, and others use narration taking the ‘standpoint of a participant’, while naturalists like Zola and Flaubert use ‘description’, ‘the standpoint of an observer’ (p. 111). While he finds the realist writers actively involved in the socio-economic practices of their times and trying to eke out the struggle between man and the social conflicts in the protagonists, making use of descriptions of inanimate objects interlinked with the main events of the narrative, the naturalists, writing in the aftermath of the 1848 Revolution in France, appear to react to capitalist dehumanisation mainly through the mode of observations; their criticism of the society and culture becomes their mode of participation, which is an isolated, clinical, still-life description. Lukács thus posits that the absence of participation or narration in naturalist art is mainly the absence of humanistic ideology (p. 143). See ‘Narrate and Describe?’, in Writer and Critic, pp. 110-48.

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narrator often enters her protagonists’ minds, extending the capacity or the limit of their consciousness and exposing the underlying structures or the forces that control the societies concerned. But unlike Tolstoy or Balzac who, Lukács found, were located in and reacting to the transitional period of crises (their countries’ socio-economic transition to capitalism), Devi is situated within the conjuncture of historical crisis, where the apparatuses of colonialism, capitalism, and the democratic postcolonial state combine to inflict caste, class, and gender atrocities on the peripheral postcolonial subject on an everyday basis, where the agitations by women, peasants, the urban poor, or lower-caste people are deemed anti-state and are brutally crushed, and where civil society appears to be more sensitive to the violation of human rights in Vietnam, Bangladesh, and other countries than in the immediate context in Bengal. Devi’s narrator thus uses the realist property of ‘narration’, but her intervention is forceful, energetic, and ruthless. Consider this section from Mother of 1084:

There is no longer any unrest or panic. No shop or market suddenly pulling down shutters, no doors to houses being slammed shut […] no black cars, helmeted policemen and gun-toting soldiers pursue some desperate lone young boy. Nor does one see bodies tied by rope to the wheels of police vans, still alive, being dragged and slammed against the asphalt […] Happy and peaceful households are back.387

This passage appears in the beginning of the ‘Noon’ section where Sujata visits Somu’s house in the refugee colony. The narrator describes the material conditions of the colony, recalls the bloody scenes of violence there during the movement, and then adds that there is nothing to fear anymore, that everything has become calm and composed. Note the trenchant irony in the words ‘happy and peaceful’. The graphic descriptions of horror, the bodies being tied to the wheels of police vans, and so on, heighten the irony here. The middle class did not come out to help these youths who dreamt about the end of class domination and structural oppression; instead, it demanded happiness and peace at the cost of ruthless annihilation of young people – the same happiness that makes Nandini virulent with anger and disgusted at the shamelessness and betrayal of the middle class. At the same time, by describing the ‘calm’ in terms of what was there just yesterday or the other day, Devi proposes that the spectre or ghost of that recent violence continues to haunt the ‘calm’, which

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therefore becomes just a surface reality, papered over something horrible and very different. The use of irony in the narrator’s commentary becomes more scathing, sarcastic, and direct in the evaluation of the role of civil society during the period:

Exactly a year and three months later, the writers, artists and intellectuals turned West Bengal upside down out of sympathy with and support for the cause of Bangladesh. Surely they must have been thinking the right thoughts, and mothers like Sujata must have been on the wrong track altogether [...] Since they could ignore the daily orgy of blood that stained Calcutta and concentrate on the brutal ceremony of death beyond the border, their vision must have been flawless. Sujata’s vision was surely wrong. The poets, writers, intellectuals and artists are honoured members of society, recognized spokesmen for the country at large.388

One cannot fail to notice the bitter tone and the pointed criticism here. The middle class is not concerned about police violence against the Naxalite youth. The poets and intellectuals who are the conscience keepers of their societies have decided to ignore the phenomenon, the everyday bloodbath, and to show their support for the Bangladesh liberation war. Devi has pointed this out in her preface to Bashai Tudu: ‘the hired writers pandering to the middle and upper classes content themselves with weaving narcissistic fantasies in the name of literature’.389 They do not care to pay heed to the current and immediate context. She represents this aspect through the character of the poet Dhiman Ray in Mother of 1084, who writes revolutionary Naxalite poetry to charm his upper-class (female) audience in big affluent parties.390 This also reminds us of what the literary critics Nirmal Ghosh and Phatik Chand Ghosh have found in their evaluation of popular Naxalite literature – the Naxalite as a romantic youth excessively suffering from idealism. The writers and artists followed suit and reaped commercial benefit from this. Through this passage, Devi thus points a finger at the irresponsible actions taken by the civil society, the critical thinkers, and the ‘honoured members of society’. But Devi does not only criticise these actions, she also points the way towards resolution. Her narrative tone shifts from sarcasm and irony to pity and concern at the question of how to represent the Naxalite, or the peripheral Santhal insurgent whose voice the state and the mainstream media have

388 _{Ibid, pp. 50-51.}

389 _{Devi, ‘Author’s Preface’, p. xvii.} 390 _{Devi, Mother, p. 116.}

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long put down or are not ready to hear; the question of how to listen to them and engage with their problems meaningfully. This passage from Bashai Tudu is a telling example of such concern:

But one would lose Bashai if one refused to listen to what he had to say or didn’t care to understand what he said. And then without having understood him, when one tried to present him conveniently for the records as something different from what he really was, who would be the loser? Bashai Tudu? Or the new interpreters? Where were the research analysts of the future who would salvage the truth from the mountains of untruths and set the records straight? There were too many truths in the world distorted into lies in the records through the conspiracy of the administration. Isn’t there daily assassination of truths going on continuously?391

The narrator clearly suggests that no one is ready to listen to the tribal voice with sympathy. The researcher, the analyst, or the journalist, who goes from the ‘mainland’ of India to listen to the problems of the Adivasis in the peripheral regions, collects their data for sociological analysis and leaves. They either do not understand the demands of the tribal people or do not want to understand, as their interpretations are predicated on analysis of quantitative data, so that sympathy and love for the Adivasis never enter the frame. As Devi tells Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her interview in

Imaginary Maps: ‘The tribal and the mainstream have always been parallel. There has

never been a meeting point. The mainstream simply does not understand the parallel’.392 This is what Devi has been trying to show through her writings and activism: her everyday living with the Adivasis, her journalism and pamphlets exposing state atrocities or negligence, and her fictions highlighting the problem of life and living in the periphery. She plays the role of a patient listener – the character she finds lacking in the practical world of data collection for the government about the Adivasis. Spivak writes in her commentary in Imaginary Maps that ‘we must learn to learn from the original practical ecological philosophers of the world, through slow, attentive, mind-changing (on both sides), ethical singularity that deserves the name of “love” – to supplement necessary collective efforts to change laws, modes of production, systems of education, and health care’.393 Devi contributes to this

391 _{Devi, Bashai, p. 41.} 392 _{Spivak, Imaginary, p. x.}

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‘learning’ through her dual roles of activist and creative writer, teaching us how to practise the relationship of ‘a witnessing love and a supplementing collective struggle’.394 _{The term ethical singularity is vital in this context, but Spivak’s use here}

appears confusing. Ethical singularity, Spivak writes, is the ‘secret encounter’ between the (subaltern) leader and her or his respondent where what is not said is taken into consideration responsibly through what has been said. But since ‘it is impossible for all leaders (subaltern or otherwise) to engage every subaltern in this way, especially across the gender divide’, ethics always becomes the ‘experience of the impossible’.395

She corroborates this point by saying that this impossibility ‘is not identical with the frank and open exchange between radicals and the oppressed in times of crisis’.396 It is never clear what Spivak means by the times of crisis here. Are they the time-periods of upheavals, different from everyday struggles, when the subaltern’s singular voice is collectively represented? If so, what is the nature of such crisis? Is this a sudden crisis or has this been going on for centuries? It is also never clear when the subaltern can have a frank exchange with the intellectual, or whether it is at all possible to know that an open and frank exchange will have nothing secretive about it. I think a better meaning of this crucial term ‘ethical singularity’ lies in the idea that intellectuals should learn to become committed and ethical readers or auditors of the complex subaltern/tribal social forms and ‘knowledges’, of the accumulated nature of gender discrimination without attempting to fully ‘comprehend’ or ‘apprehend’ the tribal. Where writings by other authors often propose the possibility of sympathetic communication with the subaltern other (tribals, women, or tribal women), Devi asks us to do something much more difficult – to maintain sympathy and solidarity by accepting the failure in communicating with or understanding them. Her narrative is thus geared towards this failure of communication, or incommensurability, while attempting to generate, as in the case of Puran in his long short story ‘Pterodactyl’, ‘love, excruciating love’ for the wretched of the earth.397 _{But Devi also knows that this}

element of love and care is largely missing from what the state agents and official auditors did. Thus, her writings always feature a narrator who is either one of these agent-characters, or a supporter of such characters but who criticises their lack of

394 _{Ibid, p. 201.} 395 _{Ibid, p. xxv.} 396 _{Ibid, p. xxv.}

397 _{Devi, ‘Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha’ in Imaginary Maps: Three Stories, trans. by Gayatri} Chakravorty Spivak (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 95-196.

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sympathy.398 As her narrator in Bashai Tudu puts it: ‘Where were the research analysts of the future who would salvage the truth from the mountains of untruths and set the records straight?’399 The binary opposite of the speaking subaltern and the deaf/unsympathetic listener is what makes her narration so sharp, so critical, and comparable to an act of journalistic and social activism. Devi’s role as a writer and activist is thus situated in her powerful design of narrator, in her socially responsible and ethical attempts at listening to the tribal’s problems and making us aware of them. As Neil Lazarus writes in a reading of ‘Pterodactyl’, the ‘responsibility for establishing this link (between sustainability of the human life and recovery of forms of aboriginal sociality) lies not with those who have been displaced, dispossessed and marginalised by “India” (local avatar of the “modern”), but with the likes of Puran Sahay and, more generally, ourselves (her presumptive readers)’.400

This takes us to the final and probably the most obvious aspect of Devi’s critical irrealist writing: the absence or non-death of the Naxalite/insurgent figure in the narratives. These novels are about the absences of the Naxalite/insurgent figures who have been made present through the thoughts and memories of their near and dear ones. Properly speaking, the main protagonists of the novels analysed in this chapter are Sujata and Kali; they are physically present in the narratives and it is through their quests that the Naxalite/insurgent figures appear. However, it is Brati and Bashai that these novels are truly about, and who take up most of the narrative space through memory-narrations. Devi chooses her titles very skilfully. Mother of 1084 is a novel about a mother, Sujata, but the reader is left to wonder what 1084 stands for. When it is made clear that it is the number of Brati’s corpse, the focal point and the appeal of the title seem to shift from the mother to the corpse. She is no longer the mother of a human being, but of a dead body. When Brati was alive, he was enquiring and visionary. He asked uncomfortable questions of the bourgeois order, pointed fingers at the bitter truths and hidden guilt of the established society. Therefore, he was not allowed to live in this ‘rotten’ world, had to be killed and reduced to a number. This novel is about Brati’s life and political faith. But it is also about the number 1084.

398 _{Thus, not only do the narration and the role of the narrator become important in Devi, but the} abundance of characters such as journalists, food officers, clerks, accountants, in short the bureaucrats, appears to be significant as well, especially in relation to postcolonial modernity and the periphery. 399 _{Devi, Bashai, p. 41.}

400 _{Neil Lazarus, ‘Epilogue: The Pterodactyl of History?’, Textual Practice, 27.3 (2013), 523-36 (p.} 528).

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Perhaps it is important here to add that although the narrator describes Brati as soft, sincere, curious, and determined, Brati’s actual physical details are never communicated to us. We read of the various scars on his chest, the clotting of cold and dark red blood on his neck, and his mutilated face, from which, as the dom (carrier of the deadbodies) at the morgue says, Sujata would not be able to identify him. Note the passage here:

There were three bullet holes on his body, one on the chest, one on the stomach, one on the throat. Blue holes. The bullets had been aimed upon close range. The skin around the holes was blue. The cordite had left its burns. Chocolate- coloured blood. The cordite had scaled the skin around the hole to leave it parched and cracked into hollow rings […] Brati’s face battered and smashed by the blunt edge of a sharp, heavy weapon. […] Sujata bent down to take a closer look at the face. She would have liked to caress his pace with her fingers. She would have liked to call him by his name, Brati, Brati, and run her fingers over his face. But there was not an inch of skin left smooth and clear to bear the touch of her fingers. It was all raw flesh, all battered and smashed’. 401

Not only is the face unidentifiable, Devi’s narration here, alternating between the emotions of a suffering mother and an objective reporter-like narratorial voice, makes the aspects of state torture and motherly pain strikingly poignant. There is no face left. Sujata has to rather identify him through his birthmarks. There is a suggestion here that the body may not be Brati’s. The corpse in the title of the novel carries this feeling of absent presence. It could be argued that the novel is about 1084 and not about Brati, son of Sujata. It is through the State’s dictates and a coercive approval from Brati’s mother that 1084 becomes Brati. There is no doubt that Brati was killed in the police encounter, and it is to show the brutality of police torture that Brati’s character has been developed in a particular way. But this does not invalidate the idea that the corpse could be anyone’s, that this is a novel about a corpse, about the reductive transformation of life into corpses during the Naxalite period. It is a novel about a number, about how some dreaming youths and their struggles were reduced to a matter of numbering, of how they were inhumanly killed, dehumanised and quantified before their corpses were set on fire. At the same time, if we think of Brati’s corpse as a kind of ‘every corpse’ that testifies to state violence, the withholding of identity also becomes a gesture of refusing the power that comes with this violence. That is,

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anonymity here enacts an oppositional possibility while testifying to accumulated state power. The novel’s title, therefore, is bitterly critical of the state and its inhuman acts.

This anti-statist element is also present in the other novel, Operation? – Bashai Tudu. The word ‘operation’ stands for ‘a strategic movement of troops, ships, etc., for military action’.402 _{In this novel, ‘operation’ suggests Bashai’s various operations/acts}

of jotedar-killing. That these acts require military discipline, training, and acumen are amply indicated through Bashai’s successful guerilla operations, pointing also at the fuller meaning of the term ‘subaltern’ in the peripheral context. At the same time, the use of the word also has a predominant state-based meaning, especially if we remember that there have also been four operations from the state, by the police and the army, to kill Bashai. Indeed, the novel ends with another military operation for him. A military operation is generally undertaken when the state considers a situation a socio-political crisis and wants to quell it through repressive force. The element of crisis is read in such a way that it becomes impossible to see the point from the other