Organización de la actividad contable

The Oxford English Dictionary defines disaster as an ill-starred event (disaster deriving from the word ‘astro’ or star): ‘anything that befalls of ruinous or distressing nature; a sudden or great misfortune, mishap, or misadventure; a calamity’.95 _Disasters

are generally understood to be sudden and natural events, and have long been interpreted as meteorological/geological hazards, or as events linked specifically with organisational behaviours or risk assessment policies and practices.96 With Kenneth Hewitt’s pioneering study on vulnerability, and later studies on anthropological, ideological, and social forces responsible for disasters, the paradigm of disaster studies shifted from sudden and natural hazards to outcomes of historical processes. These perspectives, anthropologist Oliver-Smith writes, have broadened the field and informed us that disasters should not be understood as exclusive natural phenomena but as ‘exosemiotic agents’, produced by the material practices of human beings and the levels of vulnerability and geographical violence, and implicated in the ideological discourses and perceptions of a place.97 Cultural studies scholar Eric Cazdyn writes that disaster, in the capitalist world-system, should not be understood as ‘natural’; they are rather ‘social in in genesis – products of human choices, political systems, even cultural assumptions’.98 Disasters are never sudden: people, especially specialists in the disaster fields, are aware of their impending occurrence. They are produced by the crisis that is in-built within the capitalist system: ‘systems are structured so that crises will occur,99 a point concurred by Naomi Klein in her influential book, The Shock

Doctrine (2007). For Klein, amongst the most pernicious of contemporary ideologies

is the understanding ‘that the triumph of deregulated capitalism has been born of freedom, that unfettered free markets go hand in hand with democracy’. Instead, she shows ‘that this fundamentalist form of capitalism has consistently been midwifed by the most brutal forms of coercion […] escalating levels of violence and ever larger

95 _{‘Disaster’, Oxford English Dictionary Online, Warwick Library Database <http://0-} www.oed.com.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/view/Entry/53561?rskey=ch5Xei&result=1&isAdvanced= false#eid> [accessed 18 Nov, 2016].

96 _{For an anthropological introduction to disaster studies, see Catastrophe and Culture: The} Anthropology of Disaster, ed. by Susanna M. Hoffmann and Anthony Oliver-Smith (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2002).

97 _{Anthony Oliver-Smith, ‘Theorizing Disaster: Nature, Power and Culture’, in Catastrophe and} Culture, p. 41.

98 _{Eric Cazdyn, ‘Disaster, Crisis, Revolution’, in ‘Disastrous Consequences’, ed. by Eric Cazdyn, South} Atlantic Quarterly 106.4 (2007), 647-62 (p. 648).

37

disasters are required in order to reach the goal’.100 The manufacturing of disasters comes from what Eric Cazdyn calls ‘pre-emptive measures’ taken by individual states to avert ‘crises’,101 such as the acts of the US and the UK in the Middle East in the wake of 9/11. War, drone strikes, and forced famines are part of these pre-emptive measures, which have destroyed the lives of millions, pushed countries into permanent states of war, and given birth to widespread religious and militant fundamentalisms.

These theoretical understandings of disaster as something historically, socially, and ideologically produced have initiated a close and productive dialogue between the fields of disaster studies and literary and cultural studies.102 In addition to finding out how literatures and cultures register disasters and their impacts, these studies have insightfully pointed out the link between a disaster’s orientation and the formal pattern of a literary work. There are different kinds of disaster, such as ‘slow’ ones and ‘rapid’ ones in Oliver-Smith’s terms,103 which may arise from similar systemic pressures such as capitalism and colonialism but are different in nature, type, and consequence. Famine, for instance, unlike a cyclone, is not the result of slow, non- visible geological plate tectonic movements; nor is it only about immediate effects. It is both (tangibly) historical and immediate in reason and in effect. Historian David Arnold tells us that famine is a specific kind of disaster which has a long and tangible history of genesis. It is both an ‘event’, a rupture of a distinctive kind and period, and a ‘structure’ that places into relief ‘a society’s inner contradictions and inherent weaknesses’.104 _{Like B. M. Bhatia, Arnold holds that the causes for the Bengal famine}

should not be located only in the immediate historical contexts of the war, but also in the longer trends such as late-colonial land policies, the decline of agriculture in the

100 _{Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (London: Penguin, 2007), pp.} 18-19.

101 _{Cazdyn, ‘Disaster’, p. 652.}

102 _{In the field of literary-critical studies, apart from the works of Rob Nixon, Mark D. Anderson, and} Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee who will be discussed here, see Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007); Imre Szeman, ‘System Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster’, South Atlantic Quarterly 106.4 (2007), pp. 807-23; Graeme Macdonald, ‘The Resources of Fiction’, Reviews in Cultural Theory, 4.2 (2013), pp. 1-24; ‘Catastrophe and Environment’, ed. by Anthony Carrigan, Moving Worlds: Journal of Transcultural Writings, 14.2 (2015), pp. 1-140.

103 _{Hoffmann and Oliver-Smith, Catastrophe, p. 25.}

104 _{Arnold, Famine, p. 7; we ought to remember here Sumit Sarkar’s arguments about how} deindustrialisation and commercialisation of agriculture by the British for the production of cash crops in the late nineteenth century gave birth to a number of disasters.

38

province, the growing pressure of debt on peasants, and the subdivision of holdings, etc., which laid the ground for the ultimate crisis portended by mass starvation.105

This line of argument is echoed in the literary critic RobNixon’s work, Slow

Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), in which Nixon, like Arnold

and Oliver-Smith, talks of two types of disasters: ‘spectacular’ disasters, such as nuclear disasters or earthquakes, and ‘slow’ or ‘attritional’ disasters, like malnutrition, toxic drifts, epidemics, etc.106 _{Attritional disasters are those ‘that overspill clear}

boundaries in time and space (and) are marked above all by displacement – temporal, geographical, rhetorical and above all technological displacements’.107 In order to accommodate the nature of suffering over time and space, literary narratives of the attritional catastrophes undergo a significant stretch of their generic and stylistic codes and remodel the literary form (which Nixon shows through an astute study of literary works by Arundhati Roy, Wangari Mathaai, Mahasweta Devi, and others). Another literary scholar, Mark D. Anderson in Disaster Writing (2011), speaks of the relation between the nature of disaster and the kind of writing that disaster gives birth to: ‘Disaster narratives that arise following a single powerful event […] often mirror existing forms and draw on latent political narratives to endow the event with social meaning’, while disaster that recurs over time ‘often engender[s] its own aesthetics, allowing it to transcend its moment’.108 Thus, the ‘event’ of an earthquake in Mexico generates the ‘cronica’ (journalistic) form composed of collage techniques and public forum comments,109 while the structural/processual nature of the Great Drought of Brazil of 1877-1879 in the North-Eastern Sertáo region produces a combination of naturalistic and journalistic prose styles in the idiom of Émile Zola (whose emphasis on literary writing as scientific documentation influenced early twentieth-century Brazilian works on this region).110 _{Nixon and Anderson here imply that the}

temporality of a disaster determines the uneven form of literature based on it. However, time is not the only determining factor in the shaping of literary form. Space is also important. Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee notes in a study on famine, fevers, and

105 _{Ibid, p. 41.}

106 _{Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard} University Press, 2013), p. 2.

107 _{Ibid, p. 7.}

108 _{Mark D. Anderson, Disaster Writing: The Cultural Politics of Catastrophe in Latin America} (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011), p. 22.

109 _{Ibid, p. 165.} 110 _{Ibid, p. 78.}

39

other epidemics in Victorian India (2013) that the tropics, understood by the British imperialists as the ideological zone of disaster, compelled significant modifications within the existing genres of imperial travel writing, short stories, and the historical novel. There was a radical shift of literary modes between the gothic, the realist, the autobiographical, and the historical; and an unevenness of style, which exposed the contradictions and anxieties within the ‘palliative’ practices of the empire (i.e. imperialism as an act of care, a relief effort, to rescue the natives from themselves as well as from their disastered geography). In short, Mukherjee posits, ‘“disaster environment” demanded disaster styles of writing’.111

Disaster fiction has seldom been considered successful in literary terms. There is a dominant belief in critical and academic circles that disaster resists art, that a certain amount of time needs to pass before great art can be made as a response to disasters, or that novels written during disasters are mere journalistic interventions.112 In these arguments, the question that remains unexplored is whether the stylistic and formal changes are compelled by a disaster-born urgency. What is expected of art set in a time of immense horror, with corpses and carcases scattered everywhere? How to capture the immediate horror and situate the historical/analytical aspects? To engage with these aesthetic questions is at the same time to ask the historical ones: how was the famine manufactured? How was it seen by people or responded to? Or, how has the famine generated an enduring socio-political crisis in the postcolonial period? My contention here is that disaster writing or art should be understood broadly as expanded or re-purposed realism. My studies of novels and other kinds of literary works based on the 1943 Bengal famine show that the categories of disaster, more specifically famine here, and realism are interlinked. The primary reason for this claim is that, unlike Nixon’s understanding of famine as an attritional disaster, I find it to be simultaneously spectacular and attritional. The spectacular aspect of the event appears in its immediacy of devastation (starvation, everyday suffering, dying on the streets), while the attritional or slow aspect is understood in its temporal breadth, the slow

111 _{Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire: Famines, Fevers and} Literary Cultures of South Asia (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), p. 24.

112 _{See Paul Varughese’s criticism of Bhabani Bhattacharya’s novel So Many Hungers!, qtd in} Chandrasekharan, Bhabani Bhattacharya (New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1974), p. 56; for a different analysis of the impossibility of novel-writing in the aftermath of the Great Asian Tsunami, see Deckard, ‘“Calligraphy of the Wave”: Disaster Representation and the Indian Ocean Tsunami’, in ‘Catastrophe and Environment’, ed. by Anthony Carrigan, Moving Worlds: Journal of Transcultural Writings, 14.2 (2015), pp. 25-45.

40

genesis and the accumulated nature of its formation (the ‘structure’ in David Arnold’s terminology). The writers of the Bengal famine seem to have this understanding in mind in their use of form and mode, which range from journalistic reportage, gothic horror, melodrama, satire, irony, and historical analyses, and through which the conjunctural nature of famine is presented. For example, Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s novel Manwantar (1944; Epoch’s End),113 which was primarily about the fear and panic that the Second World War and the Japanese bombings created in Calcutta and not directly about the famine, nonetheless refers to a number of concrete historical reasons for the disaster. The novel ends as the famine approaches the city with starvation, violence, and death. Bandyopadhyay uses various stylistic features and modal choices to register the social conditions: naturalistic imagery to capture the immediate horrible effects, melodrama to render pain, analytical accounts to explain longer factors responsible for the disaster, and episodic structure to suggest the impossibility of writing a linear narrative at a moment of huge social crisis. What is noteworthy is that a comparison between this novel and his earlier fiction, notably

Ganadevata (The Temple Pavilion) or Kalindi,114 shows that the formal and modal

issues in this novel have undergone significant shifts and improvisations but have not departed entirely from the conventions of realist writing. I argue that these shifts have taken place because the writer attempts to understand the nature of the disaster and responds to the question of how to realistically represent it.115

113 _{Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, Epoch’s End, trans. by Hirendranath Mookherjee (Calcutta:} Mitralaya, 1945).

114 _{Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, ‘Kalindi’, in Tarashankar Rachanabali Dwitiyo Khando (Kolkata:} Mitra and Ghosh, 1975), pp. 1-260; ‘Ganadevata’, in Tarashankar Rachanabali Tritiyo Khando (Kolkata: Mitra and Ghosh, 1986), pp. 103-370.

115 _{As I argued in the previous chapter, there is a vital link between the terms realistic and realist, but} they are not interchangeable. The impetus to represent something realistically about a disaster often comes from the perception of the enormous horror that one witnesses. Realistic art offers the therapeutic possibility that these difficult moments of trauma and healing are a collective experience and act (that thousands of others are also suffering from the trauma arising from a tragedy and that we are not alone). There are a number of strategies and resources which are implemented to make a narrative realistic about hunger, some of which I discuss here through the works of Bhattacharya and Chakraborty. For a comparative analysis, see these novels: Hamsun’s Hunger (1890), O’Flaherty’s Famine (1937), Devi’s Khsudha (Hunger; Kolkata: Karuna, 1981), and Ollikainen’s White Hunger (2015). For the realistic in narrative, see George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); and Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).

41

The question of disaster and realist representation has been raised by Anthony Carrigan in an essay, ‘Towards a Postcolonial Disaster Studies’.116 Charting brief histories of disaster and postcolonial studies, Carrigan argues for a decolonised disaster studies where the epistemological and cultural practices of a catastrophe- based text, especially from the Global South, would be read politically through their links with the histories of colonialism, imperialism, and current forms of global capitalism. Reading Kamau Brathwaite’s magnum opus, MR (Magical Realism) where Brathwaite asks us to understand ‘the intimate relationship between power, exploitation, violence, and disaster’ and ‘a multivalent concept of “nature” as material and metaphysical entity’,117 Carrigan argues that magical realism in Brathwaite’s multiple, often elusive definitions becomes more of ‘an alternative epistemology or

modeof understanding than a conventional literary genre as such, which emerges in

contradistinction to the catastrophic epistemologies embedded in western colonialism.’118 _{Brathwaite seems to grasp at the root of the debate here that a literary}

form is essentially a mode of consciousness, understanding, and expression. But Brathwaite’s linking of magical realism with ‘the literature […] of optimistic catastrophe’ and of social realism with ‘the literature of negative catastrophe’ appears problematic to me.119 For Brathwaite social realism betrays the linear, sequential narrative of colonialism and progress, and, subsequently, of catastrophe, and is unable to capture the counter-hegemonic narrative of the underprivileged and the subaltern. Magical realism, on the other hand, is experimental, layered, and radical in representing the historical continuities and discontinuities in the colony. I think this reading does not do justice to the formal heterogeneity within social realism, and, in not qualifying the use of the terms such as realism, social realism, critical realism, etc., it puts all these terms under a homogenising epistemology (threatening in the act the very thesis of epistemological and historical difference within the practices of magical realism constructed by Brathwaite).

Realism in the colony, as I discussed in the previous chapter, is used in an immensely critical fashion; it is highly political in energies and deeply self-conscious

116 _{Anthony Carrigan, ‘Towards A Postcolonial Disaster Studies’, in Global Ecologies and the} Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches, ed. by Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 117-39.

117 _{Ibid, p. 125.}

118 _{Ibid, pp. 126-27; emphasis in original.}

42

in the practices of combining Western and indigenous aesthetics. When the realist framework is used to render the event of a disaster, the form goes through further complication and improvisation. Mihir Bhattacharya’s essay, ‘Realism and the Syntax of Difference’ (2004), gives us a useful lead here.120 Bhattacharya considers the Lukácsian thesis on the individuation of the novel through world-historical ‘types’, but adds that to realise the ‘historicity of aesthetic strategies’ is to also recognise many other ways of constructing a realist text. The ‘organic’ sequential mode of narrative, a product of the bourgeois era, he argues in the same spirit as Meenakshi Mukherjee (1985), was imported and implemented in British India but ‘it never swamped different fictional means of constructing a sequence’.121 He studies the famine narratives of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay (Ashani Sanket or The Ominous Sign) and Manik Bandyopadhyay (Chintamani), written between 1944 and 1946, in order to show the range of techniques that these authors used within the form of realism. Whereas Bibhutibhushan’s story, set in a village, is narrativised largely through what Bhattacharya calls the relation between ‘motivation’ and ‘device’ (the construction of famine narratives through allusions, fragmentary discussions, and sudden scenes of horror), Manik Bandyopadhyay by contrast practises an ‘analytical’ style of writing. Rather than locating ‘narrative truth’ in the ‘epistemic’ boundaries of the villagers (that the historical reasons of the famine as something impossible for the villagers to understand, which Bibhutibhushan suggests through a conspicuous absence of analytical discussions of the famine on the villagers’ part, and through showing briefly in the end the disaster’s devastating effects on these vulnerable and ignorant people, inviting pity and sympathy), Manik presents historical causality in the expression and arrangement of images, in diction and rhythm, and in the use of dialects, and attempts to situate the links between these and the larger historical conditions and forces such as imperialism and colonialism. Manik’s realism violates the epistemic boundaries to present the ‘unrepresentable’, which, as a Marxist and social activist, he ‘perceived to be a much needed form of cultural practice in the contemporary phase of the evolution of the indigenous form of Indian modernity’.122 Bhattacharya concludes that Manik’s imagistic and syntactical improvisations and the analytical registers he uses to express

120 _{Mihir Bhattacharya, ‘Realism and the Syntax of Difference: Narratives of the Bengal Famine’, in} The Making of Indian History: Essays Presented to Irfan Habib, ed. by K. N. Panikkar, Terence Byres, and Utsa Patnaik (London: Anthem Press, 2004), pp. 478-500.

121 _{Ibid, p. 491.} 122 _{Ibid, p. 480.}

43

the deeper structural changes in society arise from his engaged understanding of world-historical forces and their effects on the contemporary colonised Indian society.123 To this line of argument I would like to add that it is not only the world historical forces that realism registers through its various capacities, but also the trauma and suffering, the possibility of releasing the tragedy and the depth of pain created by the famine, what Margaret Kelleher in The Feminization of Famine calls literature’s power of ‘quasi-intuitiveness’ to express the ‘inexpressible’.124 _For