Conclusiones del tercer capítulo

Harbart450 _{is the story of Harbart Sarkar. Born in a once-rich ‘babu’ (colonial gentry)}

family in Southern Calcutta and losing his parents as an infant, Harbart grows up lonely and friendless in his uncle’s house and is abused by his cousin, Dhanna-da. Living in his own world of reading ghost stories and séance and afterlife-related books, he develops a strange vocabulary and an isolated form of living, which brings him neglect and insults such as ‘freak’ or ‘crazy’ from street urchins and his neighbours. It is from his nephew Binu, who comes to live with Harbart’s family for higher studies in Calcutta, that he receives respect as a fellow human being for the first time. Binu dies in the Naxalite police violence, and a disturbed Harbart ‘discovers’ his superhuman powers of ‘conversations with the dead’ soon after that. Binu and his Naxalite involvement thus play a very marginal role in the narrative, but they are crucial for Harbart’s charactorial transformation. Binu’s character is developed in fast brushstrokes. He is described very briefly in the fourth chapter as a studious, sensitive college boy who teaches young children in order to earn money and buys Harbart clothes from his earnings. He is inspired by Charu Mazumdar’s ‘clarion call’ for revolution.451 The Barasat police’s massacre of the Naxalites on 19 November 1970 motivates him to join the CPI (M-L)’s revolutionary politics. He wants Harbart to read Mao Zedong’s The Red Book and to understand the beauty of sacrifice for a collective socialist cause, rather than to ‘waste time’ in the ‘nonsensical’ world of ghosts and religion.452 This conversation between Binu and Harbart gives us some crucial insight into the ways in which Naxalism is figured in the novel:

Binu had given a different explanation to Harbart, who was interested in the afterworld.

What’s all that rubbish you read. It’s all fraud. Ridiculous. So-and-so died and came back as a ghost, such-and-such person became a spirit after death – every page is full of ghosts, have you ever seen one yourself? It’s not as though people haven’t died. Who knows how many have died in this house alone? Does it have to be untrue just because I haven’t seen it?

450 _{Harbart (Kolkata: Dey’s, 1993) was published in 1993 and won the Sahitya Akademi Award, India’s} most prestigious literary prize, in 1994. The novel has been translated twice into English. I am using the translation by Arunava Sinha (Chennai: Tranquebar, 2011).

451 _{Ibid, p. 49.} 452 _{Ibid, p. 49.}

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No just you, no one has.

Then what about the planchette?

What about it? I’ve seen it myself in Berhampore. You have? They came?

Why shouldn’t they? The people themselves push the glass towards the letters or shake the pencil. But why blame you. As long as few people continue to fool millions of human beings into working till they die, as long as they cheat them, ghosts and your gods and goddesses and religion will all survive. Listen to this. (Binu opened a small book, turned its pages)

‘Thousands of martyrs are embracing death as we watch, every living person’s heart is agonised whenever we think of them, is there any interest that we cannot sacrifice, any error that we cannot rectify? […]’ Have you any idea who wrote this?

Harbart shook his head. He had no idea about any of this. Mao Tse Tung.453

Binu is a rationalist. He does not believe in ghosts not only because no one has seen them, but also because he has ‘seen’ how a planchette (mediumship with spirits through devices on a wooden board) works, and so has seen how and to what effect ideology (ritual/religion) is produced. Nonetheless, there is a scientistic positivism underlying his dismissal of the supernatural. Note that he is also deeply moved by the aspect of the sacrificial. What he reads to Harbart is not the tactics of guerrilla warfare or the deplorable conditions of the peasants in China, but a particular passage in The

Red Book which is entirely about the idealisation of collective death, an agonised

apotheosis of the sacrificial. It seems that the drive towards death becomes more important for the Naxalite (exceeding Maoism here by some distance) than properly carrying out political plans and tactics for a sustained revolutionary politics.454 Harbart appears to be moved by Binu’s revolutionary talk and starts helping him.455 It is however important to note that Bhattacharya’s narrator does not speak of any growth of revolutionary or political consciousness in the character. Unlike Bashai who is

453 _{Ibid, pp. 48-49.}

454 _{Nabarun’s narrator does not tell us whether it is right or wrong to do so; he or she simply narrates} the events and leaves the judgement to the reader.

455 _{‘One day Binu had sent Harbart with a good deal of money and a booklet of receipts with pictures} pf Mao Tse Tung and Lin Piao to one Bijay in the Lake Market area’. Ibid, p. 51.

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politically educated, or Poran Porel who at least knows about the links between class and caste oppression and mocks the powers that be, Harbart appears to have no consciousness of any politics whatsoever. He helps Binu because he loves him, because he loves to imagine revolutionary death and sacrifice.456 On his deathbed, Binu whispers to Harbart about a diary kept behind the image of the goddess Kali in the prayer room.457 A few days later, Harbart tells the family about a dream in which Binu told him about this diary. The narrator does not tell us why Harbart decides to reveal this piece of information (whether there is any political motivation behind his declaration), and narrates in a linear fashion Harbart’s joy in discovering the diary and the starting of his business, ‘conversations with the dead’. The timing of this declaration is interesting. He declares this after the death of Binu, who taught him to imagine the beauty of the sacrificial, the afterlife of the martyrs, and the necessity of death for the revolutionary cause. Binu is the one who during his life fought the bourgeoisie, the educated middle and lower-middle classes and their reactionary forces and ideologies, and who challenged the police and its repressive power in seeking to establish a ‘beautiful’ world. The class and society Binu fought against are also the ones that have humiliated Harbart throughout his life. His declaration thus appears to be political in a particular way: enabled by Binu’s invocation to revolutionary afterlife, Harbart, who has read about afterlife and the dead throughout these years, and has been termed crazy for his ‘strange’ vocabulary and behaviour, appears to make a different use out of it. He proclaims to know the afterlife and what the dead seek, which attracts middle-class and upper-middle-class clients, who disclose their secrets and fears in their desperate attempts to seek penance or material profit from the unknown. In these acts, Harbart appears to control their lives through his ‘irrational’ logic. Although Harbart is aware that his reasons are based on his learnings from books rather than any intuitive knowledge (the narrator clarifies that he sincerely believes in them and is not cheating his clients), he feels empowered through this act; more so, because he can detect the ‘irrational’, strange, and secretive aspirations and practices of the ‘rational’ and orderly middle classes, he can potentially control their lives too.

456 _{The narrator adds after a few lines: ‘Harbart had not come to know that the same Bijoy had died in} police firing in front of a snacks shop’. Ibid, p. 51.

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After his discovery, the rumour about Harbart spreads fast. Indeed, after his success in the first year, articles are written on him in local and national dailies. This fame fetches wealthy clients, promoters like Surapati Maarik who work on the ‘saintly businesses’, and finally the challengers, Prabir Ghosh and the West Bengal Rationalist Association who are on a mission to ‘rid the state of people like Harbart’.458 _{It is}

phenomenal how Harbart becomes so popular in such a short time. Why does this happen? Why does the ‘rational’ urban population believe in his newfound super- power so easily? Is it because he is considered a ‘freak’? Or, is there a case to be made about the supernatural and the non-rational being integral to the constitution of postcolonial urban life? The novel begins on May 25, 1992, the day that Harbart dies, and then goes back to his birth and develops the narrative in a Bildungsroman format. 1992 was an important year for India. In 1991 India declared the liberalisation of its economy, and from 1992, it opened its doors officially to multinational capitalism with policies of deregulation, huge tax exemption, and other lucrative deals for foreign companies, in order to recover the debt-and-inflation-ravaged economy.459 This is also the year that saw the demolition of the 1527-built mosque Babri Masjid and a resumption of the bloody communal violence between Hindus and Muslims.460 To put these two issues together, if the year propagated globalisation and deregulation as essential for development and as constitutive of the governance of the postcolonial ‘rational’ subject, the dark and ‘unreasonable’ events of communal violence also made it clear that the society was still at least partly feudal and partly neo-colonial in character.461 It is impractical to govern a country based solely on enlightenment values

458 _{Maarik tells him that he would help expand the business ‘in style’: ‘a glass-enclosed air-conditioned} swank office […] a woman to operate the computer. Shiny expensive books about all this on the shelves. Soft music. Dim lights. Carpet. Five hundred bucks a visit’, etc. Ibid, p. 95.

459 _{Stuart Corbridge and John Harriss, Reinventing India: Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism, and} Popular Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), pp. 143-72.

460 _{Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India (New York: Columbia University} Press, 1996), pp. 449-81; for a brief history of this period, see Barbara Metcalf and Thomas Metcalf, Concise History, pp. 265-94.

461 _{This is also why there was a furore in Calcutta around the same time with the death of Balak} Brahmachari, a.k.a. Birendra Charkraborty, who was the leader of a religious sect known as Santana Dal. After Brahmachari died, his followers declared the death as a Samadhi (the last stage of meditation without physical consciousness). They said he would rise again, as he had on a previous occasion, and guarded his dead body closely, allowing no one to enter the ashram. After many complaints from the neighbours, and after the influential local daily Ajkaal had started covering the incident widely, the police were sent to the area to remove the dead body, resulting in multiple skirmishes with the followers. Finally, the rotten body of the ‘saint’ was removed, making many think that this delay was a deliberate case of state lobbying (as the Santan Dal workers were traditionally CPI (M) voters). For a longer reading, see Chatterjee, Politics of the Governed, pp. 40-80. Bhattacharya would later write a novel, Mausoleum (Kolkata: Dey’s 2007) based on this incident.

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that has evolved from thousands of years of different knowledge- and culture-regimes. It is equally unrealistic to shape the people’s subjectivity based exclusively on a system of instrumentalist knowledge-gathering and bureaucratic rationality. The current postcolonial modern state can preach that reason is its governing drive, but that does not uproot or invalidate years of local, custom-based ritual and cultural practices, or people’s belief in such practices. This is why a publicly-marked ‘weird’ person like Harbart can suddenly and persuasively declare that he can talk with the dead and be a medium between the other-worldly and the worldly. Thousands of people gather at his place and listen to his dramatic speeches on afterlife and on the various geometrical spheres that the living and the dead belong to.462 The attraction of the ‘irrational’, Bhattacharya suggests here, is precisely that it exposes the myths of material development even as it is produced by the latter. As Harbart is challenged by the Rationalist Association for his ‘trickery’ and threatened with arrest, he replies: ‘Fine. That’s fine. We’ll take care of you too […] When they were leaving, Harbart was chanting as he danced around the room – oh my god how I humped them! Cat bat water dog fish! Cat bat water dog fish!’463 The narrator adds that it is never clear what Harbart means by the word ‘we’, but the readers may wonder if he means the group of people who practise these kind of acts, i.e. the fortune-tellers, sorcerers, astrologers, and the like, who use ‘non-rational’ means to calculate and speak about the human past and future. ‘We’ may also refer to the majority of people who believe in these acts of afterlife and fortune-telling, or those who find it unnecessary and unfitting for a postcolonial society to erase these practices and to instead embrace the ‘hyper- rational’ instrumentalist drives for a regime of reason and normality. Throwing a counter-challenge at the Association in his own vocabulary, in vulgar Bengali slang, Harbart feels empowered. He dances around in joy and utters his nonsensical composition, ‘cat bat water dog fish’, suggesting a verbal triumph over reason, science, and the borrowed Anglicised manners and practices (manifest in the Association members’ westernised dressing and use of English). Although in the next scene Harbart is found dead in his house, there is a cryptic suicide note that says he is on some sort of a pilgrimage.464 Hence, we are given the warning that his death should

462 _{However, the narrator tells us that he learns of this world from his ‘after-world’ readings.} 463 _{Bhattacharya, Harbart, p. 114.}

464 _{The note reads, ‘The guppy of the tank is off to the ocean. | Want to see the double chyang? Dying} to see | the double chyang? Cat bat water dog fish’. See Bhattacharya, Harbart, p. 131. Though the police or the family and neighbours are not able to recover the meaning or context, the reader has

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not be taken as the end of the game; he will come back. The fact that his corpse explodes in the crematorium furthers the sense of puzzle and mystery for the police and the journalists, the bourgeois ‘rational’ subject. Through these acts, Bhattacharya indicates that the mysterious and puzzling co-existence of the religious, ritualistic, non-rational, immaterial elements and the rational, material, and scientific aspects of society is a fundamental aspect of the nature of Indian urban society. Erasing people like Harbart as part for the drive towards westernising society and culture is to overlook the historico-cultural constitution of the society itself.

Harbart registers this aspect of the ‘irrational’ and the uneven in the everyday

‘rational-normal’ in the distribution and arrangement of urban space. As the brief Naxalite part of the novel ends, the narrator comments that ‘The fetid, dank, inconsequential period that followed was so wearying as to be unparalleled in history, at any rate. And it was doubtful whether anything changed even over centuries in the fragment of the city where Harbart lived’.465 The Naxalbari movement failed to bring any substantial social or political change, and was followed by a time of gentrification where the urban space was re-arranged in alignment with the shifting aspirations for the globalised consumerist culture: ‘the multi-storeyed structures put up by real-estate promoters to replace the old buildings had ensured a change of taste’.466 What this change meant for the urban poor is that people like Harbart with their ‘weird’ imaginations and cultural practices would have to live with these current transformations of space and society, and to continue to be neglected, victimised, and rendered invisible. As I will shortly show through the (dissenting) examples of Harbart, the urban poor would have to use nooks and corners and live in slums and

already seen Harbart’s physical and psychological growth thanks to the novel’s Bildungsroman narrative, and would know that the first line refers to an abuse Harbart received from his cousin, Dhanna-da, about him being a ‘guppy of the tank’, which means weak, limited in knowledge, and unfamiliar with the world outside. The latter half of the line about going to the ocean resonates an earlier episode in which Harbart shouted at the people of the Rationalist Association, challenged them, abused them, and ran them out of his house. The line therefore means that he is not a small and weak fish anymore; he is about to meet the bigger fishes and come back with them. The ‘double chyang’ reference comes from the Howrah (West Bengal) railway labourers. Chyang is a fish of shallow and filthy water. The allusion makes the point that it is unwise to oppress the labourers, ‘filthy’ people, for they possess such weird powers that there would be no hope for the powerful. How Harbart knew of this phrase, the narrator informs, is never known. The references to ‘cat bat’ and others in the third line were used by Harbart whenever he encountered anything aristocratic, anglicised, and refined in manners. He uttered this phrase repeatedly to register his verbal triumph over the use of English and scientific logic by the Rationalist Association.

465 _{Ibid, p. 55.} 466 _{Ibid, p. 55.}

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shanties that are shaded off from public life, because the bourgeois-consumerist arrangement of space has hardly given them a recognisable place, capital or visibility, and wants them to be quarantined or liquidated for a sanitised vision of the city.467 But since these people are also needed by the bourgeoisie as a labour-force, the urban poor would still have to be there, even if rendered invisible. Space thus appears to be a potent trope through which Bhattacharya situates his notion of postcolonial modernity. This notion of space has a historical link with the fantastic. José B. Monleón tells us that the fantastic genre emerged with the rise of modernity in Britain. It was born in the nineteenth century when mercantile and industrial capitalism attempted to suppress and supersede older feudalist forms of knowledge and belief systems, paving way for the return of the ‘irrational’ in the form of the sublime and the gothic as cultural forms integral to the material development of society: ‘unreason was now the