PostScript. 1
FOREWORD When the year began, there were these great hopes and plans and imaginations of the Society. Over the course of the two semesters, a few of these have been realised and most have been re-moulded, come what did. It's been a tumultuous, eventful and memorable year, and I hope we have left behind a space worth preserving.
Just as it is lovely to see so many people with their diverse interests and courses coming together for the love of literature, so PostScript presents this confluence in a tangible form. The space is always one of growth and transformation and this year was another stepping stone, and it feels just right to close it with this publication.
I extend my congratulations to all contributors as well as the editorial team for their efforts and dedication, despite the limited resources LitSoc always somehow ends up working with. And yet it's always been a good time, and we're always learning and creating this space anew; so it goes and so it will!
- Medhavi Dhyani President, 2018-19
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A MINUTE, IF YOU WOULD This edition of PostScript, more than anything else, is an attempt to record those who were and those who wrote and those who spent interminable nights trawling through endless sequences of words upon words, big words, small words, words in odd places, words that weren’t what they should’ve been, all in order to produce this collection of twenty-odd pages that we hope will be of greater interest than these words right here, dismal as they are in their desire to seize upon a point and stretch it to breaking. Once more, words.
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FOURTH PAGE: SELF-INDULGENCE, OBSCURE REFERENCES, KEYS TO THE CONTENT WITHIN POETRY inane cycles I’ll Write a Great Song (About You Someday)
Rahul Jose
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Pragati Nautiyal
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REMEMBERING SHIFA
PROSE, OR CLOSE ENOUGH AS MAKES NO DIFFERENCE Wishful Thinking Summing Up
Shounak Roy
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Akhil Sanil
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ECHOES: MEMORY AND LITERATURE “I wonder at this intrusion of the personal into my research”: The intersections of history and memory in M.G. Vasanji’s Book of Secrets “And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita”: Time, Memory and Addiction in Nabokov’s Lolita “…hearing about the inbetween”: Queering the Diaspora through Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette Will the Shibody Still Come? – Recollecting Culture Through Community Memory
Smriti Varma
15 g g 14
Amrita Chitkariya, Gauranshi Srivastava
g g g 18
Trishala Dutta
25 a 22
Ajay R. Raj
a 25
"The energy field above us contains the Index. We must get up there."
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INANE CYCLES Rahul Jose IIT Madras A knock. It passes. Another one. Don't bother. A murky world, of swirling figures. Ever changing, ever familiar, A release from the vapid linear. you could die here, but you wouldn't mind. Then it hits, a smiting so profane. The mists clear, your sinews sear, With the weight of a darkness you know too well. For a moment so feral, But just as fragile. A flashing hand, a tinny stream of chatter, you find yourself condensing into matter. your sinews are weeping, but are crushed into silence for you are no longer you. you have sublimated, to make way for Yourself. You have returned. You breathe of the cold air, Rank and sharp, prescient signs of blunt gyrations, soon to commence. You exhale, You release, You wash, You dip, You drench, You dry, You ingest, You belch and settle into threads that be, bearers of dead cells and rotting essences. You are one with the world, and the world is one with You, partaking of this soothing inanity we call sanity (really?), Motions and impressions of some order. Be on Your way. Finally it is as should be. How else it could be, You wouldn't know anyway. And neither should You. For You aren't you.
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I’LL WRITE A GREAT SONG (ABOUT YOU SOMEDAY) Pragati Nautiyal Miranda House
I'll write a great song about you someday With pretty lines reminding one of heartbreak Yet I fail over and over to string words the right way So I write this song only to soothe my mind today I can't understand all the feelings you left in my barren heart I stitch words together hoping it mends me before I fall apart Hold on to these pieces of my heart that I scatter along the way I promise my darling, I'll write a great song about you someday -I'll write a great song about you someday That evokes memories of love in people filled with hate Making one curse the ugly tricks played by fate The world rejoicing our story, for now I suffer and wait In silent nights and loud sites, when only you feel like home In places you have not seen, trying to find a way but I don't So this song remains a mess, a reflection of how I feel Sing this with me today, I'll write a better one when I heal -I'll write a great song about you someday Filled with memories of the little moments we'd shared In the song we'll come alive, falling in love one final time In the lines, the perfect rhymes, I'll write the exact words Describing how it felt when you came and changed my world My heart will bleed through the ink with which I'll write the song But once I write the last word, I will finally move on Leaving behind everything that bound me for so long Till then I'll sing this imperfect song Till then you'll be an imperfect song --
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REMEMBERING SHIFA A graduate of B.A. (Hons.) English and M.A. (Hons.) English, St. Stephen’s College, Shifa Christina Nicholson passed away on the 10th of October, 2018. Here, we record her words, and words written in remembrance by those who were dear to her and to whom she remains dear. Here, we pay tribute to her memory. Dear Shifa, I am asked to remember you. But the distance in time that is needed between the presence and absence for someone to be remembered hasn’t really moved at all for me. In a way, I can’t remember you because I can’t seem to forget. It is almost like we haven’t met for a while and you are busy doing the things you did. As if, it is just a matter of another paper presentation and form filling days and during exams that I will see you again soon. Sitting in cold on this bench behind the college church, where you liked to sit under half sun and half shade, talking endlessly about obscure books and teachers, mocking the system and laughing hilariously on the human conditions of being a literature student; I am trying to remember you. What I have sitting beside me is a sense of ennui felt in your absence but not exactly your absence. Your presence is too strong in this college that I am unable to deliberate the act of remembrance because you don’t seem absent from us and you never will. It’s natural for us, all of your friends and teachers, to keep you alive in our memories. While I do miss your presence, I wish to fill this ennui with what you had wished me to do: by constantly reading and returning to your words. You wrote ferociously and you typed even with a better pace that it was hard to keep up. ““Goodbye”, you had written in your poem ‘Ode to Goodbye’, “is not about being sad, upset or disappointed”, and quelled the gloom of your absence. “I celebrate this Goodbye as you are not part of my side of new beginning. For me this new beginning is the Time.” I had once asked about your writing’s consistent theme of Time. You laughed it off and said you don’t care about Heidegger. “We need to stop being so textual and start paying attention to the people who surround us”, you had said. With a profound being of yours, you always demanded deeper commitments from literature. As you wrote: “Which language do you dream in? Is it the language of zeros and ones? Or the language of human kind or any species for that matter? I’m hoping that your dreamland isn’t limited to your hard-drive or the data storage server rooms.” You believed and owned your words. In ‘Why I write?’ you write: “I have faith in what I write. I somehow believe that my writings are made for a much better and greater cause. I am the medium to create them. I know, I have been created for a better and bigger cause, for a meaning to the world.”
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As an eternal optimist, you were also deeply skeptical about the given truth and never ceased to ask the big questions about existence. You write in ‘What’s the point?’: “Have you ever wondered about your existence, questioned your purpose and asked the reason why you are here? I have. I do. I do question God and myself on this. At times I get the answer through certain things hinting and pointing towards my purpose. It also shows that the journey is long and every moment I spend is a step closer to it. I also have this feeling that as I get closer to it, things are going to change into something more challenging. At times this gets frustrating. But then I realize this might be a necessary process that I need to go through in order to fulfill my purpose. Many times people have told me, your purpose is to show the Miracle of God and to prove existence of Jesus as a living God, as the saviour and protector of His people. And to show that He listens to us, He is there for us. He is watching over us. He is the Protector and Provider for whosoever believes in Him and has Faith in Him.” I was born with a certain blood disorder, doctors call it Thalassemia Major, where the body is not able to produce enough number of red blood cells. The treatment for this include regular blood transfusions and iron chelation medications. Recently, I was hit badly with heatstroke, which somehow stopped the functioning of my pancreas and lead me to the state of high blood sugar levels. I was admitted in a hospital and kept under observation in ICU for three days. Doctors examined and came to the conclusion that I have Diabetes Ketoacidosis (type 1). Cutting the long story short, I am now a patient of Thalassemia and Diabetes.” While you questioned the fate, you did not give up hope. You walked the long distances to engage in literary and critical dialogue for two years with our batch. You presented newer knowledge and participated with great enthusiasm than most. You pushed me out of the Stephen’s library and showed me the numerous small worlds existed around it. You showed me how to see creatively and interestingly. Most of all, you showed how to conceal. You concealed your Time. You kept the name philosophy outside your discourse and philosophised every living breath. You read and thought aloud and never for once winced at the labour of love for literature. You would insist on the ancient cultures of Agora of talking to everyone than simply quoting philosophers and yet would invoke Derrida in a casual gesture: “The centre marks its presence by its absence.” I learnt how to live the small joys, from you. I learnt how to unlearn the weight of social obligations from you. But the void that now sits permanently at the centre of your memories is omnipresent. There is no higher truth that your absence at this hour. This is our truth regarding you. You spoke of Truth: In my opinion, truth is needed to maintain the balance of things, to keep things in order of nature, in its true form. At times it may be possible that truth may have to take different forms, or be in disguise to maintain that order of nature. An ardent believer, we have often quarrelled and laughed over the existence of God. You would call me a ‘faithful atheist’. I would call you God’s patent kid. But your belief remained strong till the last hours, as you wrote: “For me, all of these things remain in the hands of God, for He has created our destinies and has already put us at work, for the plans He has created us for. In this Faith, I bid adieu for now!” Forever missing you, with all your friends at St. Stephen’s College. -
Raghav Verma 8
Gear Up Some fight, Some lose, And some tap-out of fear. In moments like these, firm up soldier. It’s just a warm-up, the real war is overhead next. Gear up your armor. Do not forget what defines you. Keep faith. Stand strong with the Words spoken ages ago. Fight with those Words etched in your hearts and minds. Love is the end and the beginning of it all. – Shifa Christina Nicholson ‘Gear Up’ was Shifa’s last post on her blog ‘Reiterating Thyself’ on 19 September 2018, almost a month before she was laid to rest. She reminded me twice to read it but because I was caught up with work, I gave it a quick glance and missed a crucial message that she was trying to convey through her words – to never give up no matter how hard it gets. Her battle with thalassemia was excruciatingly hard and took a toll on her with every passing second. There were incessant blood transfusions, needles, doctors, all of which she despised to a great extent. However, Shifa always knew she was more than her circumstances, more than her diseases, more than her shortcomings. She strived, every day to fulfil all that she set her mind to – whether it was becoming the president of The Computer Society, participating in plays or acing her academics, she did it all. Most of us juggled life back-to-back classes, assignments, attendance, FYUP – Shifa on the other hand managed to do so much more. Words were Shifa’s best friend, she loved expressing herself through her blogs, poems or sometimes through just a chat with a junior passing by the corridors or in the café. She was always lively with gleaming eyes and a warm smile. I can never forget her ringing laughter at my idiotic jokes that made no sense to me but always managed to crack her up. Whether it was catching up at Hudson Lane after college, or chilling at my house over sugar-free cold coffee, diet coke & amp, her favourite Giani’s chocolate ice cream – we spoke for hours, endlessly and I knew that over the past 4 years I had finally found my beautifully clichéd ‘best friend’. Shifa was a powerhouse of strength, which she derived from the Word of Christ, her unwavering faith and determination to fight her battles – big or small never deterred her from becoming the person she wanted to be. She chose to remain happy at every step of the way – and if that is not an example of resolute courage, then what is? -
Rachel Francis
Dear Shifa, Where do I even start? You were truly one of a kind. You taught us big lessons through small actions each day and for that I'll forever be grateful to you. It was an honour knowing you, Shifu. I'll always cherish our time together. With all my love, Po
I still remember the first time I saw Shifa; her eyes were gleaming with joy as she stepped out of the interview hall for college admissions. She comforted the anxious student in me with her words of 9
assurance. At the end of our brief encounter, she wished me good luck and walked away much to my bewilderment. I did not know that I would find a friend in her even before my journey in college had begun. The world might remember her as good daughter, sibling or a friend, but for me she was a beacon of hope. While her sickness rendered her broken and in pain, she would pick herself up, spread her wings and soar high again. Her resilience helped her get through more sorrow that most of us will ever know. It would have been easier for her to give up; surrender to the trials of her life and no one would have questioned her. She could have wallowed in self-pity, but she chose to fight till the moment she breathed her last. Sometimes I forget that she is no longer with us until I scroll past her contact in my phone and I am reminded of her smile that I saw on the first day I met her. She walked into my life empty-handed, but left me with a lifetime's worth of memories that I shall reminisce. After so much of pain, it could not have been easy for her to go on with her life. Her strength was a testament to how deeply she was in love with life and those who were part of her journey. She will remain in my memory as a friend who was always the first to pick up the phone and ask, ‘are you alright?’ or ‘do you need any help?’ She is not with us any more, leaving us to grieve her passing with love and memories; the silhouette of a girl smiling as she walked through the college corridor. May her soul rest in peace. -
Sanjana Wilson
The last couple of months have been a terribly tragic time for all of us, as our most beloved Shifa left us all too soon. One thing I can say is that Shifa would be so very proud of the way that everyone has been there for each other and pulled together, united in their support. It just goes to show that we all carry a little bit of Shifa inside ourselves; that deeply entrenched natural instinct to care for one another. I remember when I met her sister Lakshiya at the funeral service, she was holding her tears back and making peace with the fact that her elder sister was at rest. She kept reminding herself and us to obey what Shifa had told her to do –that is, to not cry over her demise, but rather smile for she was in a better place and looking down at all of us. I have known Shifa for 5 years now, and had she not told me, I would never have guessed on my own that she’s suffering from a major medical problem. It was during our post-graduation that I learnt about her illness. Despite her best efforts she wasn’t able to attend class regularly. But never did I ever see her lacking in her spirits to carry on with her studies and work at the same time. It was so inspiring yet so heart breaking to see such a young positive girl go through so much yet never giving up in life. She used to write beautiful blogs and ask my opinion on them. I was always in awe of her ever so endearing spirit to live with utmost grace, positivity and love above all. Shifa is so alive in every single one of us and between us we have so many amazing memories to share, so let’s just keep sharing them and enjoying them. She would want us to be happy. Laughter always got her through all her hard times and laughter will get us through ours. So I guess what I’m trying to say here is…and these are Shifa’s words, not mine, ‘This goodbye is not about being sad, upset or disappointed, for parting our ways in separate directions. Instead, The goodness behind this goodbye, Lies in the good feelings, best wishes, Well being of the cherished one.’
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We carry her with us every day wherever we go, so to Shifa from all of us here today…this isn’t a goodbye, it’s just a different kind of hello! -
Radhika Singh
My first memory of Shifa is from the very first class we had. We were a bunch of nervous (some more than others) first years who had just finished orientation and settled down in Room A. The first distinction that made itself apparent for that first hour was that the class seemed to be divided into those who wanted to be noticed and those who wished professor’s wouldn’t give them a second glance. Being of the latter category for the first 3 months, I was easily impressed with the kids around me who would raise their hands and involve themselves in the proceedings of the class – Shifa was one of them. She was a small figure but a giant in many other ways. She was the computer wiz in our class of littérateurs, the go-to when it came to Photoshop related activities for Lit Soc conferences and events. Many a warm afternoon was spent basking in the SCR lawn, contemplating life and snacking on whatever was available. We knew that she was often sick, but she had incredible drive and never complained about circumstances. I think what I most admired about her was her incredible work ethic. Work was simply never left incomplete. No matter how tired or ill she had been she made sure that she completed all her work before sitting for her final examinations. In the safe space that academia provided us to grow and question, Shifa was a classmate with whom many a lively discussions were had. It was easy to make her smile and she was always willing to laugh. That is how I remember her best and in this case, it is a very accurate memory of a warm and sunny person who made sure she fought till the end for a life she loved. -
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Ansila Thomas
WISHFUL THINKING Shounak Roy St. Stephen’s College
We seem to be in love with our own sadness. All-encompassing, all engulfing, overwhelming sadness. We walk the lonely drivel-ridden road of Life everyday, we reach turns and make our turns, we reach split pathways and make our choices. We go our own ways, only to reach the same destination. We receive what we want, but never seek. Lee Chandler in “Manchester By the Sea” encapsulates this feeling very succinctly and effectively when he breaks down in front of his nephew, after having lost everything that he ever held dear, and forced to take a path in life he never thought would come across. “I can’t beat it.” He says. “I can’t beat it, I cannot beat it.” I can recall very few instances of such beautiful usage of repetition to generate emphasis. We hear people talk. Sitting in our cars. Working. Walking. Sitting. Partying. Smoking. People talk. They talk about how well their lives seem to be going. Perhaps not completely hassle-free, but they have something to live for. Something that binds them to life, an intertwined mesh of their will to live, and the power to see themselves through every day. They walk into bars to catch a quick drink before heading home, they smile through their sighs, masquerading sadness with their acceptance of inevitability. They walk back home, slowly, amidst soft, unsure rain; eyes fixated on the wet pavement, probing for what’s unascertainable. They look up. Eyes gleaming. The sky has nothing new to offer. They stop under the lonely streetlight for a while. Yellow looks pleasant in the darkness. They reach home, throw their shoes into a corner, pull their socks off and fall on their beds. The room is small. A pizza slice lying on the pillow. The sound of raindrops against the window. They lie still. Stare into the ceiling. Eyes adjust to the darkness. They sigh. Their lives are unchanging, a variable constant, from which there is no escape. There is a clawing pain inside which doesn’t hurt anymore. Tears don’t come, they haven’t for many years. They close their eyes. Nowhere to go. There is no solace. “I have to go in! They are in there!” screams Lee Chandler as he looks, helplessly, at his own house up in flames, his wife lying unconscious beside him, groups of faceless people all around; his eyes have turned a deep red, tears rolling down his cheeks from looking at the fire for too long- his daughters are dead. Lee Chandler’s burning house is Life. We are outsiders, catching glimpses of material happiness going up in flames. Sadness envelopes us. The inescapability of the situation dawns on us. This is it. This is what binds us to Life. This is what keeps us going. We have nowhere to go. We are merely faceless spectators of our inescapable reality, a reality that can never be truly ours.
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SUMMING UP Akhil Sanil St. Stephen’s College
You walk in unwelcomed to a city that boasts of a pinkishness, a lie blatant as any other. But then what isn’t a lie? Philosophy runs in circles and on inane whims, veers off on unexpected tangents because of which I focus my attention onto the present, the immediate, the contextual. I am consoled by the prospects and promises that await me, so I move on from the surroundings. I am not troubled because I have distractions, like the wall graffiti of flying carpets and majestic turbans, or the trotting camel with a sway in the hips like that of a belly dancer. But they don’t seem enough, I search for more escapes. The iridescent hues from the hawker’s trinkets or the shine of the pungiwala’s oiled moustache do not seem to help much, and so I take refuge in the banal night. They say that the night is always young and it is never too late to do anything, but remember what I said about lies before. That for one is a truth, a naked one too. Perhaps the only truth, but I’m forced not to linger here longer because I hear my friends approaching after their festivities of the day. I lean back in the chair and surprisingly, am enthused by the moon specked seas on a souvenir drape my friend got for her mother. She asks – Why aren’t you buying any? I smile and avert her attention to my story of the peacock that flew up a tree because I hate questions just as much as I hate answers. I’m reminded of a time of puerile pleasures when it was okay to not know answers as to why the history and politics of the city break people. A time when you didn’t understand the necessity of justice, and more importantly, the hurt of justice denied. Such lessons of adulthood give a sense of purpose that was long elusive, and I’m gratified for the time being. The roof creaks because loud music can be violent, so I move to the terrace in a trance. An estranged solitude beckons me, and in a lofty gamble, I lose my love and logic to the Mohinis of hilltop forts. I’m tired and I salvage one last puff from the dying night, knowing that I have to ash my dreams too soon. Love is strange indeed.
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“I WONDER AT THIS INTRUSION OF THE PERSONAL INTO MY RESEARCH”: THE INTERSECTIONS OF HISTORY AND MEMORY IN M.G. VASSANJI’S THE BOOK OF SECRETS Smriti Varma Hansraj College
The roots of that present lay in the past and so I made voyages of discovery into the past, ever seeking a clue in it, if any such existed, to the understanding of the present. The domination of the present never left me even when I lost myself in musings of past, events and of persons far away and long ago, forgetting where or what I was. If I felt occasionally that I belonged to the past. I felt also that the whole of the past belonged to me in the present. Past history merged into contemporary history: it became a living reality tied up with sensations of pain and pleasure. -
Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India
Nehru elaborated upon his personal concept of history as perhaps an interaction of the past and present, situated in a continuum. He saw the past as vital, as a significant participant in the trajectory of history, carrying a weight which historians all over the world needed to heed in order to move forward. This moving forward was the act of writing history, wherein the very act of putting words to paper became a method for liberating the individual and the collective society from what he called was “the burden of the past.” The purpose of this burden, ultimately, was to understand that our lives do not exist in a vacuum, that the past occurs as “an aspect of that living present,” and finds its strength in its memory (Nehru 36). This concept holds significance as we begin to grapple with M.G. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets, published in 1994 and the personal vision of history and memory propounded in the novel as enormously powerful shaping forces which are both capable of inciting terrible curiosities as well as means and methods of liberation. This view of history and memory filters itself throughout the text as an understanding of silences which guard the spaces of personal history, and of articulating these silences through the agency of individuals, primarily the central character’s, Pius Fernandes, as he attempts to unravel the unsaid and the unknown in a diary written more than sixty years ago. As Pius engages with the past to liberate the present, history and memory serve defining roles within the narrative as energetic, uncontrollable forces which determine not only the large monumental movements and events of our past, but also the trajectory of personal lives. M.G. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets masterfully scrutinizes these shadow lines between the private and the public, between what is known and what is remembered. The past and present overlap repetitively in the course of the narrative, and history is relocated from its existence in the past and made into “a living tapestry, to join the past to the present,” in Vassanji’s words. The novel becomes an exercise in historical reconstruction of this repository of memories, thus creating a matrix wherein each of the characters locates their subjective narratives. This paper seeks to analyse the nature of this reconstruction, of this joining of the past and the present, in The Book of Secrets 14
through Homi Bhabha’s theories concerning the dualism of culture and the moment of the “unhomely,” as the moment when the enormity and smallness of the world come sharply together. This will be done at two levels primarily – firstly, through the cultural negotiations of the characters in the text and secondly at the level of the symbolic “book of secrets” which is written as the narrative advances but also exists in a history of events. The text, set in East Africa, focuses on Pius, a schoolteacher who emigrated from Goa and settled in Dar es Salaam, and the investigative journey he undertakes into the colonial past of East Africa and subsequently, his own after encountering a British colonial administrator, Alfred Corbin’s diary, written in 1913. The coded histories and unarticulated silences he encounters in this journey form the central trunk of the text, with the beginnings of one story tying its end to another. Through this journeying into the past, Pius creates a meshwork of lives connected to each other until he finds the same threads reaching towards himself. The entire narrative of The Book of Secrets, thus, becomes an exercise in subjectivity itself – wherein the very act of looking back to one’s past, and making sense of it through its retelling becomes a method for narrating the self and for reconstructing past events through imagined landscapes. This is a chaotic history given definition through the power of memory. The narrative, in this sense, does not simply take a group of characters and place them in a multiplicity of time periods and settings which occurred in the past. It becomes much more than a simple spatial and temporal movement of people, but is a re-imagining of their very experiences and how these may be connected. This concept of “looking back” and retrospection runs pervasively throughout The Book of Secrets, building up a monolith to the causal nature between moments of history and the repercussions that ripple throughout time due to the same. This is an act of historical reclamation, a process through which Vassanji lifts the very veil of a layered past to give precedence to the way individuals experience history. Thus, Pius’s revisitation of the past becomes a space for not only exploring the unknown, but also imbuing it with a sense of the self as he begins forming these connecting threads. The novel becomes a personal memory house, wherein the continuity of history is explored as Pius engages in his private myth-making. Homi K. Bhabha, in his essay titled “The World and The Home,” uses the word “unhomely” to capture, what he says is, “the estranging sense of the relocation of the home and the world in an unhallowed place.” This unhomely moment is located in what Bhabha believed to be the essential dualism of culture – that is, the manner in which culture situates itself in a norm and aspires towards stability and consistency, while at the same time changing rapidly due to the demands made of it by its environment, and by individuals who constantly construct it with multiple, diverging meanings. This dual understanding of culture imbue it with a sense of change as well as constancy, an intersection of time and space wherein individuals “home” themselves as well find those homed selves “unhomed.” This conception of culture locates itself as a fundamentally modern phenomenon, where a chaotic culture is characterized of numerous, chaotic histories, each building a cause-andeffect relationship with the personal stories of the numerous individuals located around them. Bhabha believed catastrophic moments in history often lead individuals towards this sense of the “unhomed” – a point in time wherein personal and public histories merge and interweave to create a world of dislocation and imbalance. At such a moment, the boundaries between the home and the homeland blur, wherein the structure of the home, symbolizing one’s personal histories, is thrust into the domain of the public, or the impersonal and the homeland invades the space of the personal and the intimate. “In a feverish stillness, the intimate recesses of the domestic spaces become sites for history’s most intricate invasions,” writes Bhabha. Thus, the domain of the private expands, while the public shrinks, reversing the two binaries. “In that displacement,” Homi Bhabha says, “the border between home and world become confused; and uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting” (141). 15
If history is the public chronicles of modern nation-states and the movements which went into their making and unmaking, then memory becomes the personal repository of individuals wherein they locate their personal losses, gains, and sense of identities. Thus, “history” and its meaning references the public or the political invariably in the minds of people, while memory is a concept much more suited to the small, individual lives history is peppered with. This general conception of both the categories is challenged in The Book of Secrets, until both the categories bleed into each other, signaling to formation of the public and the private as mutually intermixing entities as given in Bhabha’s theory. The keywords here become the public and the private, as well as the past with the present. Each takes place and is mirrored at two levels in the text, firstly in the cultural locations and negotiations of the characters in the novel, and secondly at the level of the writing of the “book of secrets” through the course of the narrative as a book which comes into being during the corresponding investigation of Alfred Corbin’s diary. Each significant character in The Book of Secrets encounters and engages with diasporic movement through cities or continents – Corbin moves from England to the small East African town of Kikono as a colonial adminstrator, Mariamu belongs to the Shamsi Muslim community which came from Gujarat to Africa, Pipa, her husband, is an Indian born in the German town of Moshi in East Africa who later becomes a Shamsi, Ali, Mariamu’s son, runs away from Dar to London with Rita, his future wife, and Pius – investigating these histories, is himself a Goan who moved to Dar es Salaam in East Africa for teaching. Thus, each of the characters signify a hybrid, meshwork of identities whose instability lies in their shaky foundation. For these characters, the diasporic moment becomes the unsaid catastrophe of their lives, throwing their lives into the domain of the public, signifying the ever alive tussle between the home and the homeland, the self and the public, memory and history. This merging of identities, thus, reinforces the sense of the unhomely in the narrative. The “book” of The Book of Secrets is written throughout the course of the narrative and presented to the reader as the text at hand itself, and not the elusive Corbin’s diary whose investigation forms the major portion of the novel. This feature, known as historiographic metafiction, becomes even more interesting in the novel due to the symbolicism of Corbin’s diary as belonging to the “past” whose historical unmaking or unfolding leads to the making of another diary about its investigation, which belongs to the “present.” The past and the present, thus, become joined ventures, in these memory projects, wherein journeying to the past becomes a metaphor for locating oneself in a public history, in that “unhomely” moment of being. History and memory, thus, break down as watertight compartments for the public and the personal respectively. This is done by challenging the categorization of history as objective and factual throughout the course of the narrative by showing how history and the events it encapsulates are as much about silences and the exclusion of details as memory is. History, thus, as a narrative of facts, opens itself up to analysis, interpretation and discursiveness in the novel, and breaches its own central sense of objectivity. At the same time, the novel’s fragmented and broken structure of recalling and recollecting memories builds upon an alternative understanding of history as a curated repository of memories. The very barrier between the two is removed, thus creating a matrix in which the characters of the novel locate their personal, subjective narratives. The narrative engages with history at the level of historiography or the way history-making and formation takes place. This conception of historiography is broken apart into two kinds of history, the first being state-sponsored history, or one that the narrator encounters in newspapers and archives, and the other being experienced history or the way individuals deal with events and narratives and shape as well as are shaped by them. The first carries the air of objectivity, while second is a fundamentally subjective approach to history, wherein the lives of individuals, their memories and their experiences are treated as significantly as the event itself. With such a flexible 16
understanding, it is easy to say memory is a false and problematic thing which sometimes betrays us by presenting narratives which might be untrue or differently formed. If history is equally subjective as memory, then history too follows the same pattern: of being false, problematic, a thing to doubt. In such a landscape where no objective realities exist, the best is to bury the past. For Rita, this becomes her argumentative point as she asks Pius to give her the diary, so she may bury it along with the histories it was re-opening. For Rita, “history is surface,” a project of no fruits, a speculative study, a concept wrought with subjectivity. For this very reason, she wishes to forget it. The faultlines created by the disorientation of diasporic movement form a central portion of the narrative, from which branches out the numerous stories and histories of individual characters. This is an individuated approach to history, to see how each character engages with the sense of history which surrounds them – thus bringing history down to the level of subjective reality. Therefore, the memory project which Vassanji engages in becomes the attempt to find words for countering and reconciling the silences of personal and public histories and giving breath to them, such that a process of healing could begin. This notion of travelling to the past and merging the past and present does not hold up without an exploration of the way time is shaped in the novel. The narrative jumps numerously in both space and time, wherein the multiplicity of subjective realities present in the text – Pius’s, Corbin’s, Pipa’s, Rita’s, Gregory’s and the ever elusive Mariamu’s, - become markers of the way time is experienced individually rather than historically in the text, thus becoming almost unreal in its conception as linear. This repetitive jumping of space and time, hence, loses meaning as the novel continually denies itself and its characters a chronological sense of history which occurs in a nexus. This is reflective of Bergson’s understanding of time as psychological, as existing in the consciousness of individuals. Similarly, strands of events find their endings elsewhere, giving the pattern of a time which doubles back upon itself repeatedly. This defamiliarising, alienating sense of time is given rhythm and definition in the pages of The Book of Secrets, a definition which opens up the text to a dialogue which not only explores the way individuals interact and react to cultures, but the trajectory their lives follow as they get caught up in the flow of history surrounding and resounding around them. It is perhaps this characterization of the novel which becomes its greatest strength.
WORKS CITED Homi, Bhabha. “The World and the Home.” Third World and Post-Colonial Issues. No. 31/32 (1992), pp. 141-15. JSTOR. Web. 1 Feb. 2019. Nehru, Jawaharlal. “The Past in Its Relation to the Present.” The Discovery of India. Oxford University Press, 1989. Print. Vassanji, M.G. The Book of Secrets. Picador, 1997. Print.
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“AND THIS IS THE ONLY IMMORTALITY YOU AND I MAY SHARE, MY LOLITA”: TIME, MEMORY AND ADDICTION IN NABAKOV’S LOLITA Amrita Chitkariya and Gauranshi Srivastava St. Stephen’s College
Nabakov couldn’t have been more right when he said –“I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it becomes”. These words manifest themselves through his most celebrated work, Lolita. Notwithstanding the revulsion it elicited for its controversial content, Lolita has carved a niche for itself and has stood the test of time. Despite an immense amount of scholarship and extensive research, there haven't been enough discussions on Lolita as a journey of an addict and his negotiation with time and memory. This paper is an attempt at understanding how this negotiation is inextricably linked to the perception of time, how desire dictates this transaction and the role of the text in both channeling and immortalizing the memory. Memory in Nabakov’s Lolita doesn’t simply exist as a recollection of a past experience but actively shapes Humbert Humbert’s present and future through the course of the novel to the point that it transforms itself into a mania. The novel, then, stands as a testimony to Nabakov’s belief that “a fully conscious self both fuels and is itself fueled by the ceaseless absorption of experience into memory, an on-going process in which past, present and future are figured in dynamic interdependency and not simply in succession” (Hasty, 226-7). The said mania is a product of Humbert Humbert’s overpowering urge to resurrect Annabelle’s memory through/in Dolores Haze, a memory of an incomplete sexual encounter/ “possession” (Nabakov, 145) that haunts him. Humbert’s refusal (bordering on absolute denial) to acknowledge the ephemeral nature and subsequently the impossibility of the experience he is out to recreate in all its details has strong undertones of addiction. An addict loses the teleological sense of time since he or she persistently aspires towards the first-time experience of it and is always dissatisfied. Following from this, the addict rejects the understanding of time-flow as unidirectional and tries to extend the duration of intoxication through the famous refrain of ‘just one more’. Humbert Humbert is also seen as being caught up in this temporal limbo, inhabiting the past and the present simultaneously but never really living in any of these moments, as he attempts to recreate and bring his incomplete sexual encounter embedded in his memory, to a completion – “But that mimosa grove – the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since – until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another” (Nabakov, 14). However, even though he says that he has broken the “spell by incarnating her into another”, Dolores always falls short of becoming Annabelle completely. Further, Humbert’s trip with Dolores around America can be read as a desperate endeavor to extend the timeperiod of his libidinous high.
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Following this line of thought, Avital Ronell in Crack Wars takes a step further and argues – “To the extent that drugs delineate the experience of experience as a moment which slips or turns away from responsible consciousness and self-stability, they offer a reflection of the non-present nature of experience whose marked interpretability follows lines of delay and reconstitution, forgetting and Nachtriiglichkeit” (Ronell, 56). Humbert’s addiction too constitutes his experience out of fragments of memory, as a sequence of events that are pieced together and framed and reframed in retrospect. In this, time becomes his substance of abuse as he runs against it to freeze Dolores/Lolita in time to satiate his desire. This idea will be further developed on towards the end of our presentation. Considering Nabakov’s admiration for Flaubert and his famous speech on Madame Bovary, it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to say that Humbert’s addictive personality owes its influence to Emma Bovary in more than one way. Emma’s obsession with keepsakes to conjure up particular moments from the past, creating an illusion of time but failing nevertheless has strong connotations of addiction. For example, after the ball Emma attends, the cigar-case Charles picks up and she keeps, becomes a memory of the event but also an object to relive that experience. Further, her adventurous adulterous affairs with Rudolphe and Leon are also her frantic attempts at recreating the high of dancing with the Viscount at the ball. Like Humbert Humbert, Emma is also a victim of addictive temporality as Elissa Marder in her essay “Trauma, Addiction, and Temporal Bulimia in “Madame Bovary” argues – “…unlike the alcoholic, not only is there no twelve-step program to address Emma’s predicament, but the fluid substance that she abuses is not alcohol but time itself. Through the representations of time as well as verbal time (tenses) of representation…we can already read Emma’s free-fall into the addictive temporality that leads inevitably to her death and dissolution” (Marder, 60). In this light, it is also interesting to probe into the question of genre of Lolita. Lolita is presented as a realistic account of a criminal or as it is also called, The Confessions of a White, Widowed Male. Humbert claims a ‘photographic memory’ while presenting his case to his jury that is the readers (Carter 1). The reader can be led astray by Flaubertian descriptions pervading the novel and Humbert’s control over the narrative. However, given the notoriously unreliable narrator of the memoir, Nabokov forces the reader to exercise caution and plays with the realism of the account. Nabokov himself sees memory as an agential phenomenon. In his autobiographical account, Speak, Memory, Nabokov underscores his approach to memory marked by commitment to reason, humanity, genius. For Nabokov, involuntary memory is secondary and not the only avenue of communion with the past. Nabokov insists upon the “will's capacity to subject the past to its insistent call” (Reed). Thus, the active character of memory, the effort of recollection, the narrative insistence on the vantage point of the present, and the reinscription of the past's otherness are crucial aspects of both Nabokov’s autobiography and Humbert’s memoir. Nabokov weaves in this understanding of memory in one of the passages where Humbert recalls the image of Annabelle and Lolita: “I remember *Annabel’s+ features far less distinctly today than I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita. There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: “honey-colored skin,” “thin arms,” “brown bobbed hair,” “long lashes,” “big bright mouth”); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita)” (7). Carter goes further to comment on the similarity between the photographic nature of the text and Humbert’s eye as the camera lens in the dark chamber of the prison recollecting these 19
instances like camera obscura (4). It is interesting to note how Humbert’s description of Dolores is like a photograph in an attempt to freeze the nymphet in time, “I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita……..the word “forever” referred only to my own passion, to the eternal Lolita as reflected in my blood” (43). Humbert’s memoir thus transforms from merely an autobiographical, confessional account into an addict’s attempt at immortalizing and resurrecting his experience. James D. Hardy and Ann Martin in “Love, Time, Memory in Nabokov’s Lolita” go further to comment on the narcissism of Humbert Humbert where the memoir is not an immortalization of Lolita but rather an immortalization of Humbert’s desire. Hardy and Martin compare Humbert’s tale to Wordsworth’s “The Prelude: The Growth of the Poet’s Mind” which talks about the development of the artist. They note that the text of Lolita, that is, the entirety of Humbert’s memoir, is an anecdotal illustration of that first line “the “light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul”; a narcissistic declaration of desire (54). Interestingly, Nabokov believed that he had the authorial power to recreate memories, “By writing, the creative perceiver is able to imaginatively fashion and ‘refashion’ memories ‘retrospectively, by the very act of evoking them’” (Green, 92). Picking up from Avital Ronell, the creation of experience for an addict happens through the framing and reframing of fragments. As Hardy and Martin also state, the memoir, a narrative form structured by time, is used by Humbert Humbert to illustrate how he has denied time. Lolita, the nymphet, a construct of Humbert Humbert, is frozen between these pages like Humbert himself is frozen in his thwarted encounter with Annabelle. Moreover, Nabokov deftly brings the reader’s attention to the artificiality of this “very special memoir” by the unreliability of Humbert Humbert, “Please, reader: no matter your exasperation with the tenderhearted, morbidly sensitive, infinitely circumspect hero of my book, do not skip these essential pages! Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let's even smile a little” (86). Thus, Humbert’s legitimacy depends on the imagination of his readers. We write our stories but our stories also write us. Humbert’s memoir, a careful construct of his memories, is what keeps him alive. Not only does he construct this fascinating and repulsive tale which documents his life but also the figure of Lolita which is the pivot of this narrative. As stated earlier, Lolita was the incarnation of Annabelle for Humbert. However, Lolita was a mere stencil into which Humbert tries to fit Dolores. The creation of Lolita was the only way in which Humbert could relive his experience with Annabelle without dealing with the passage of time. Lolita thus is an exceptional work which brings forth the fallibility of memory, a factor which is essential and relevant to our times. Collective memory is constantly refashioned to suit the needs of those in power. Humbert Humbert’s play extends beyond words, “Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!” (20), to time, to memory and finally to the gullibility of his reader. He transcends time and memory, immortalizing himself and his Lolita in literature and popular culture forever.
WORKS CITED Carter, Courtney. “Photographic Memory in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.” 6 April 2017. Haverford College. Hardy, James D. and Martin, Ann. “Light of My Life” Love, Time and Memory in Nabokov’s Lolita. North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2011. Web. 20
Green, Geoffrey. "Visions of a "Perfect Past": Nabokov, Autobiography, Biography, and Fiction." Nabokov Studies. (1996): 89-100. Project MUSE. Web. 04 April 2019. Marder, Elissa. “Trauma, Addiction, and Temporal Bulimia in “Madame Bovary””. Addictions. 27.3 (1997): 49-64. Web. Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. UK: Penguin Putnam Trade. 2000. Web. Reed, Matt. "Homo lepidopterist: Nabokov and the Pursuit of Memory.." The Free Library. CLIO. 2000. Web. 04 April 2019.
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“...HEARING ABOUT THE INBETWEENS”: QUEERING THE DIASPORA THROUGH HANIF KUREISHI’S MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE Trishala Dutta St. Stephen’s College
Caught between worlds that collide as often as they collude, are we representatives of anything but ourselves? -
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture
Inquisitions of queer diasporic identity narratives always seek to configure spaces of belonging, and work on shaping them through displacement and attachment. These spaces are reimagined and reconstructed through the use of memory. Memory establishes a connection between a collective or an individual’s past, between origins, heritage, and history. Identities that have been fragmented by displacement, dislocation or migration are given form and texture trough memory, and remembering. Gayatri Spivak claims the subaltern consciousness is always subjected to presuppositions, memories, and generalizations of the élite (203) which means that the memory of the subaltern is monopolized by the dominant machinery. The process of remembering both at a collective, and a personal level, is always related to the memory politics of the social institutions that both structure and validate what can be remembered and how. Theorists such as Joan Scott and Michel Foucault have written about the instances of power shaping our processes of remembering and our conceptions concerning the past. This can be picked up as an important point to analyse the role of memory in queer studies: it is important to analyze how the normative outlines the other and remembers the other as the Other. Consequently, the other is forced to constitute its self in terms of the very memory-politics that produce the othering effect. Within the postcolonial field of studies, the act of re/membering becomes a crucial reconstructive force, which along with the Foucauldian methodological tool of “counter memory” provides an alternative space for the telling of histories which have for the longest time been relegated to the margins. In the context of queer studies, remembering queerly, that is in a way that creates space for historical queer experiences, becomes a strong reconstructive force. The categories of ‘queer’ and ‘diasporic’ both imply a disruption of the fixed identity categories, making impossible the attempt to definitively ascertain location, both sexually and geographically/nationally. That is, the mobile body of the diasporic queer serves as the “mediating figure between the nation and diaspora, home and the state, the local and the global”. In Queer Diasporas, queer is defined as a particularly peripatetic mode of sexuality, a “mobility of sexuality across the globe and body” (3). The queer body is seen as a transgressive agent, who challenges not only the normative categories of desire but the stability of national identity. Queer diasporic cultural forms and practices point towards invisibilized histories of racist and colonialist violence that continue to resonate in the present and are made visible through 22
bodily desire. It is through the queer diasporic body that the alternative histories are brought into the present, histories which were conveniently forgotten by mainstream nationalist and diasporic discourse. According to Marita Sturken, a scholar of cultural memory and visual culture, even our most subjective memories are entangled with cultural memory which is constituted within the multilayered network of language, shared experiences, popular culture, fantasy, and collective desires. (1999, 233–234.) Similarly, the normalizing fantasies of official memory shape our own queer memories and the ways in which “queer” becomes inscribed into our cultural memory. Personal and cultural memories remain intertwined and create one another in the domain of the politics of queer memory. This idea of queer memory will be explored in the context of Hanif Kureishi’s screenplay “My Beautiful Laundrette”. Gayatri Gopinath in her book Impossible Desires talks about a particular scene in My Beautiful Launderette, a film about queer interracial desire in Thatcherite London where a white working class boy, Johnny moves to unbutton the shirt of his Pakistan-born lover, Omar. Omar initially acquiesces to Johnny’s caresses, but then abruptly puts a halt to the seduction. He turns his back to his lover and recalls a moment from the past where he is standing with his immigrant father and sees Johnny march in a fascist parade through their South London neighborhood: ‘‘It was bricks and bottles, immigrants out, kill us. People we knew . . . And it was you. We saw you,’’ Omar remembers bitterly (2). Johnny recoils in shame as Omar brings into the present this image from the past of his younger self. But then, as Omar continues speaking, Johnny slowly reaches out to draw Omar to him and embraces him from behind. The final shot frames Omar’s face as he lets his head fall back onto Johnny’s chest and he closes his eyes. The scene depicts the transformation of the racialized queer body as a historical archive for both individuals and communities, one that is excavated through the very act of desiring the racial “Other”. In Johnny’s desire for Omar, Gopinath sees an intertwining of the legacies of British colonialism in South Asia. In Omar’s memory of having seen Johnny march, Omar in a sense reverses the historical availability of brown bodies to a white imperial gaze by turning the gaze back onto Johnny’s own racist past. The scene’s ambiguous ending– where Omar closes his eyes and succumbs to Johnny’s caresses—may suggest that Omar gives in to the historical amnesia that wipes out the legacies of Britain’s racist past. Yet the meaning and function of queer desire in the scene are far more complicated than such a reading would allow. For Johnny, if desire for Omar becomes a way of acknowledging and erasing his racist past, for Omar, queer desire is precisely what allows him to remember (4). Indeed, the barely submerged histories of colonialism and racism erupt into the present at the very moment when queer sexuality is being articulated. Queer desire does not transcend or remain peripheral to these histories but instead it becomes central to their telling and remembering: there is no queer desire without these histories, nor can these histories be told or remembered without simultaneously revealing an erotics of power and sexuality. The movie was subject to scrutiny, following its release in 1985, a time when there were ongoing debates on queer sexuality and dominant notions of communal identity both in South Asia and in the diaspora. These debates primarily spoke of the ways in which queer bodies, desires, and subjectivities became sites in the process of the production and reproduction of culture, tradition and community in the diaspora, and as Gayatri Gopinath notes “they also signal the conflation of “perverse” sexualities and diasporic affiliations within a nationalist imagery” (6). If conventional diasporic discourse is marked by an overwhelming nostalgia for lost origins, for ‘times past,’ queer diaspora mobilizes questions of the past, memory, and nostalgia for radically different purposes. Rather than invoking, an imaginary homeland frozen in an idyllic moment outside history, what is remembered 23
through queer diasporic desire and the queer diasporic body is a past time and place driven with contradictions and the violences of multiple uprootings, displacements, and exiles. Another central concern that the movie bring forward is the notion of home. Home as a conventional space of domestic comfort is renovated. A challenge is posed to the traditional definition of ‘home’ warrants the need for questions of sexuality to interrogate dialogues on home, nation, belonging, for they immediately make apparent that dominant notions of home that have naturalized privileged sexual categories at the expense of others. The space of the home in My Beautiful Launderette has been “queered” by the gay protagonists, Omar and Johnny, through the non-heteronormative acts that they perform which troubles the very circuits of the traditional domestic, bourgeois space of the home. Leaving behind the heteronormative structure of the home, an alternative space to belong, a new home is created- in the room of the laundromat. It is against the backdrop of the refurbished laundrette that the sexual bonds between Johnny and Omar climax, crossing the thresholds of race, class, and normative sexuality along the way. The queer, sexual act thus in some ways reconciles Johnny’s class difference with Omar’s racial difference. It also serves as the catalyst for a dialogue on race, space, and sexuality to ‘erupt’ into the present moment. In conclusion, to acknowledge the function of memory as an inventive social practice is also to reckon with the traffic between personal and cultural memories and that all memories are part of a complex and ever-changing script that can be separated neither from discourses of nationality, sexuality, nor from debates over the home. My paper especially, seeks to debate the narrated scripts of embodied diasporic reality, and look for queer desire where it normally exists, in the margins, behind closed doors, in poorly-lit alleys, or dark rooms in laundromats.
WORKS CITED Bhabha, K. Homi. Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994. Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Duke University Press, 2005. Spivak, Gayatri Chakraborty. Can the Subaltern Speak? Columbia University Press, 1987. Sturken, Marita. The Image as Memorial: Personal Photographs in Cultural Memory. The Familial Gaze. University Press of New England, 1999.
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WILL THE SHIBODY STILL COME? – RECOLLECTING CULTURE THROUGH COMMUNITY MEMORY Ajay R. Raj St. Stephen’s College
Introduction The Malayalam Calendar is intricately linked with the seasonal patterns of the land. Each month comes with its own ritual performances, usually associated with the agricultural patterns of the time. Karkitakkam, which is the last month of the Malayalam Calendar is characterized by incessant rains due to the south-west monsoon. The heavy rains result in a languid and economically barren month with the seasonal work schedule coming to a stand-still. This results in Karkitakkam being characterized as an auspiciously negative month bearing dark omens. To escape this auspicious negativity, several specific ritual practices are observed. This paper will be examining one of these ritual performances usually performed in the Northern Malabar region called Shibody. The Performance The performance of Shibody is marked by the appearance of three mythical characters in the month of Karkitakkam to each household. These characters are not associated with the gods of the greater traditions but are rather associated with the local OBC deities of the little traditions. The Katathanaadu region where this ritual tradition is performed is populated majorly by the Theeya community who belong to the OBC category. The three appearances are spread across the month beginning from the first of Karkitakkam till the thirty-first. In the first appearance which is known as GulikanPaduka, a song is performed to the regional deity of Gulikan. This deity shares several characteristics of the god Kaala. The ritual is observed in order to make a plea to Gulikan to eliminate the hardships of Karkitakkam (Kali) through his blessings. The ritual of GulikanPaaduka was largely performed in the beginning of the month of Karkitakkam. The second appearance is known as Shibody. This ritual is a performance in which the performer puts up the role of Shibody and he comes to each household by invoking the gods of the hills. In the invoking, he requests the gods of the hills (Maladevas) to come to the village and he also requests the familial gods (Kuladevas) to move to the hills. This request is made under the belief that the people will be protected by the Maladevas from the hardships of Karkitakkam. Meanwhile, the familial gods augment their strength and energy by moving to the hills. The ritual is performed in the middle of the month, mostly on the fourteenth of Karkitakkam. Regionally, it is also known as aadimasavaravu, since karkitakkam is also known as aadimaasam in the region. The third appearance is known as vedanpaaduka. This is also an oral ritual in which a song is devoted to the god Vedan, the regional variant of the god Shiva. Observed during the very end of 25
Karkitakkam, the purpose of the ritual is to revert back to the previous order, by calling back the familial gods and sending away the maladevas. The performance is a song of praise to Shiva, the most significant of the maladevas, requesting protection from the hardships of karkitakkam. The song ends with a hopeful gaze towards the coming prosperity of the harvest festival Onam which falls in the month of Chingam, the first month in the Malayalam calendar. The fourth appearance is the invocation of Onapottan marking the end of the ritual in the month of Chingam. Onapottan marks his visit by blessing each family. There are certain norms and practices to be followed by the households during the performance of this ritual. In Gulikan Paaduka, a dark liquid is to be made through a composite of water and ash. While the song is being performed, they must move this liquid around the lightened lamp and dispose it towards the south side of the house. The south is considered to be the place where Gulikan resides. During Shibody, the same ritual is followed with the exception that the liquid is to be red in colour, prepared by mixing chili powder with water. For the third appearance, white liquid is to be used by mixing limestone with water. For the appearance of Onapottan, a ritual offering of rice and vegetables, symbolizing prosperity is to be made. Caste Dynamics To sustain the narrative of the ritual, the songs are performed by men of the Malaya community, a Dalit population in the Kadathanaadu region. The performance of Shibody is a right (known as Cherujanmavagasham) given to this community by the Naaduvazhi, the ruler of Kadathanaadu. Within the Malaya community itself, divisions are made as to who performs where in the region. These rights are granted to a family over an individual and it is passed on from one generation to the next. This ritual would often mark the only time people of this caste were permitted to enter upper-caste households. This occasion would imply an elevation of their status from a subjugated lower-caste to a deity, at least during the time of performance. The people of the household would be allowed to eat their meals only after the entry of the deity-performer. Thus, this performance becomes for the Malaya community a symbol of subaltern struggle, reversing caste hierarchies and placing them, even if only for a brief period, in a position of superiority. The subaltern nature of this performance is reflected in the absence of the Brahmanical gods and the shift of the paradigm towards OBC/SC gods. Memory Within Culture The Shibody performance in itself can be considered the culmination of a the accumulated memories of several generations, originating with perhaps an anxiety about adverse climatic conditions and the hardships wrought by nature during this time period and a desire to control it by pleasing deities. This process would gradually develop, evolve and systematize itself into the more formal tradition of Shibody as it was performed. This can also be tied in to other traditions within the same cultural space revealing an interest in the preservation of memory. Karkitakkavaavu, observed on the no-moon day of karkitakkam is an occasion where food is prepared and placed in a closed room with the belief that the familial ancestors will appear and partake of it. This becomes an opportunity to remember the ancestors themselves. The food that is prepared would be the favourite food of the ancestors and the way in which it is prepared and the traditional recipes used all imply the passing on of cultural memories through oral means. 26
For the performers of the Shibody ritual, the performance itself and the oral tradition and memories of past performers are all linked to their own survival as it is through the performance of this ritual that they earn their means of living during this time. Hence, this becomes a memory of survival. Erosion of Culture In the beginning of the 90s, this ritual culture gradually began to erode, primarily due to the coming of modernity within the Malaya community. This modernity took root in multiple ways, primarily the emergence of second generation of those who benefitted from land reform policies of the EMS government of 1957. By utilizing reservations in the educational and employment government sectors, the people of the Malaya community achieved upward social mobility, leaving behind their agricultural roots to take up these new opportunities. This was hastened by the establishment of multiple institutes of higher education within the Northern Malabar region. The 90s also marks the Gulf-boom with a large increase in migration to the Gulf countries. Though migration may not have been large within the community itself, the job opportunities created by the subsequent inflow of capital into the region was also instrumental in this shift away from traditional occupations. These jobs proved to be more financially lucrative as well as shifting away from the demeaning and dehumanizing nature of agricultural practice within the region. In addition, these jobs were also caste-anonymous. This newly educated generation of the Malaya community left behind this ritual performance possibly because of the negative connotations of caste subjugation which it presented. Recollection Though this culture came to an end towards the end of the 20th century, the 21st century marks a process of recollection. A significant factor triggering this process of recollection is the emergence of folklore as an active discipline due to the presence of diverse myths and cultures that the region encompasses. This shifted these ritual performances into an academic framework, which necessitates resource-persons, a role filled by the members of the Malaya community. So, there is a shift of their roles from merely performers to resource-persons. So the discipline of folklore, by elevating the community from performers to vital resource-persons creates an environment fit for recollection. In such a process of recollection, there is an intrinsic claiming of the cultural right of this community to perform the ritual (Cherujanmavagasham). The educated members of the community who had rejected this practice for its caste-nature would now actively trace back their caste lineage in order to claim this right which was originally granted on a caste basis. Another factor contributing to this process of recollection is a recent trend within Malayalam cinema to make films based on regional myths. The most recent of these would be Odiyan. The Odiyan community is a Dalit community settled in Palakkad, also known for ritual performances, magic-tricks and frightening people. Movies such as these require resource-contributors which makes art itself and popular culture, in addition to the academic discipline of folklore, a space for upwards mobility. Through this process of converting specific cultural memories into popular art, several details are often lost in translation leading to a more standardized art product, bereft of its cultural meanings. This connects with the notion of cultural industry put forward by Adorno and Horkheimer.
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In the transformation of what used to be an orally transmitted literature into written forms, especially through the disciple of folklore, the essence of memory, experience intrinsic to the form is lost. The subaltern dimension of the literature is also lost in these new popular conceptions. Out of the four appearances of the Shibody ritual, the only one that remains in practice even today is the coming of Onapottan on the day of Onam. The survival of this practice may be linked to the memory of obligations these performers had to the families of the region who would possibly have helped their ancestors survive during this harsh month. In addition, this memory of obligation would also contain the auspicious respect provided by these households, to the Malaya community during this time, making it worth remembering. Conclusion - Future In general, folklore points towards the traditional practices and popular politics of the gods of the Brahmanical pantheon. This study brings an alternative approach, highlighting the narrative of subaltern gods and goddesses. This opens up a new avenue for further research on how these gods and goddesses become symbols for subaltern movements and struggles. These deities become linked to the formation of entire communities making this study deeply useful. The study of these ritual practices in English opens these traditions up to larger audiences which in turn opens up new fields and opportunities for further study. The visual culture, which is a subdivision within the study of this cultural practice, as exemplified by the attire worn by the performers, is another field worthy of study. The art of conceptualizing these visual elements, the fine-art of creating them and the natural products used in their manufacture all become aspects to be studied within this field. In these studies, it is possible to rediscover a truer narrative, more distinct and specific than the generalized art-product of popular culture.
WORKS CONSULTED Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm. Menon, D. M. (1993). The Moral Community of the Teyyattam: Popular Culture in Late Colonial Malabar. Studies in History, 9(2), 187–217. https://doi.org/10.1177/025764309300900203 Vadakkiniyil, Dinesan. “Images of Transgression: Teyyam in Malabar.” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, vol. 54, no. 2, 2010, pp. 130–150. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23182479.
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EDITORIAL BOARD (2018-19) Co-Editors Kshitij Anand Akhil Sanil Editorial Team Ariane Jouve-Villard Rheanna Mahajan Nidhi Krishna Swadha Singh Upamanyu Yaddanapudi
EXECUTIVE COUNCIL (2018-19) President Medhavi Dhyani Logos Convenor Asmita Pal Academic Coordinator Raginee Sarmah Treasurer Nandini Desiraju Joint Secretaries Kannita Biswas Semanti Debray Madhulika Raj Singh
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