Indi@logs - Revistes Digitals de la UAB

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Editor/ Editora
Felicity Hand (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
Guest Editor Vol 3 /Coordinadora del volumen 3
Isabel Alonso Breto (Universitat de Barcelona)
Deputy Editors/ Editores adjuntos
E. Guillermo Iglesias Díaz (Universidade de Vigo)
Juan Ignacio Oliva Cruz (Universidad de La Laguna)
Assistant Editors/ Editores de pruebas
Eva González de Lucas (Instituto Cervantes, Kraków/Cracovia, Poland/Polonia)
Jacqueline Hurtley (Universitat de Barcelona)
Maurice O’Connor (Universidad de Cádiz)
David Prendergast (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
Christopher Rollason (Independent Scholar)
Advisory Board/ Comité Científico
Ana Agud Aparicio (Universidad de Salamanca)
Débora Betrisey Nadali (Universidad Complutense)
Elleke Boehmer (University of Oxford, UK)
Devon Campbell-Hall (Southampton Solent University, UK)
Alida Carloni Franca (Universidad de Huelva)
Isabel Carrera Suárez (Universidad de Oviedo)
Pilar Cuder Domínguez (Universidad de Huelva)
Bernd Dietz Guerrero (Universidad de Córdoba)
Shyama Prasad Ganguly (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India)
Taniya Gupta (Universidad de Granada)
Vijay Kumar Tadakamalla (Osmania University, Hyderabad, India)
Somdatta Mandal (Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, India
Belen Martín Lucas (Universidade de Vigo)
Mauricio Martínez (Universidad de Los Andes y Universidad EAFIT, Bogotá, Colombia)
Vijay Mishra (Murdoch University, Perth, Australia)
Alejandra Moreno Álvarez (Universidad de Oviedo)
Aparajita Nanda (University of California at Berkeley, United States)
Jyoti Nandan (Australian National University, Australia)
Antonia Navarro Tejero (Universidad de Córdoba)
Virginia Nieto Sandoval (Universidad Antonio de Nebrija)
Mariam Pirbhai (Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada)
G.J.V. Prasad (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India)
Elizabeth Russell (Universitat Rovira i Virgili)
Dora Sales Salvador (Universidad Jaume I)
Sunny Singh (London Metropolitan University, UK)
Cynthia vanden Driesen (University of Western Australia, Australia)
Aruna Vasudev (Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema NETPAC, India)
Layout/ Maquetación
Despatx/ Office B11/144
Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Germanística
Facultat de Lletres
Edifici B
Carrer de la Fortuna
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
08193 Bellaterra
Barcelona
Spain
Contact/ Contacto
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http://revistes.uab.cat/indialogs
Supporting Association: Spanish Association of India Studies/ Asociación Española de Estudios Interdisciplinarios
sobre India http://www.aeeii.org/
Indi@logs, Vol. 3, 2016, ISSN: 2339-8523
Violences / violencias
Table of Contents/ Sumario
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Editorial. Violences: Around and Inside
ISABEL ALONSO BRETO
3- 6
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Articles/ Artículos
Women as Martyrs: Mass Suicides at Thoa Khalsa During the Partition of India
ARUNIMA DEY
7-17
Reasons for Violence: a Study of “Another Community” by R. K. Narayan
19-35
CRUZ BONILLA
Blood for the Goddess. Self-mutilation Rituals at Vajreshwari Mandir, Kangra
ALEJANDRO JIMÉNEZ CID
37-55
Reflejos de violencia y política internacional en la pintura abstracta
contemporánea de Nepal: una cuestión sin resolver
ANDREA DE LA RUBIA
57-79
Text, Representation and Revision: Re-visioning Partition Violence in Khushwant
Singh’s Train to Pakistan and Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas
AFRINUL HAQUE KHAN
81-97
Conflicts During the Planning of Indian Independence and its Partition in Pour
l’amour de l’Inde by Catherine Clément and Indian Summer by Alex von
Tunzelmann. An Embodiment Approach to Violence
TAGIREM GALLEGO GARCÍA
99-113
Regresando a Sri Aurobindo: sobre el enigmático dragón de la violencia
EDGAR TELLO GARCÍA
115-135
The Indian Diaspora in the UK: Accommodating "Britishness"
MAURICE O’CONNOR
137-150
La India: turismo, experiencia personal e imagen en la obra Roda el món
i torna al Born, de Oleguer Junyent
CAROLINA PLOU ANADÓN
151-167
S. Patwardhan & J. Krishnamurti: la mujer hindú y la relación guru-shishya
RAFAEL QUIRÓS RODRÍGUEZ
169-188
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Miscellanea/ Miscelánea
Special Dossier Sri Lanka
Chelva Kanaganayakam: A Tribute
SENATH WALTER PERERA
191-193
Terror, Trauma, Transitions: Representing Violence in Sri Lankan Literature
MARYSE JAYASURIYA
195-209
Poetry After Libricide and Genocide
CHERAN RUDHRAMOORTHY
211-228
Reading Lesson
SUVENDRINI PERERA
229-233
At Sunset
APARNA HALPÉ
235-239
It Must Be
AMEENA HUSSEIN
241-251
Checkpoints
JEAN ARASANAYAGAM
253-260
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Indi@logs
Vol 3 2016, pp. 7-17, ISSN: 2339-8523
DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.5565/rev/indialogs.34
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WOMEN AS MARTYRS: MASS SUICIDES AT THOA KHALSA DURING THE
PARTITION OF INDIA
ARUNIMA DEY
Universidad de Salamanca
[email protected]
Received: 18-03-2015
Accepted: 06-06-2015
ABSTRACT The paper is an attempt at understanding the mass suicides committed by women during the communal
riots instigated by the partition of the Indian subcontinent. Firstly, the position and the role assigned to
women are investigated by applying Giorgio Agamben’s concept of bios and zoē within a gendered
perspective; this forms the introductory theoretical framework of the topic. The core part of the paper
concentrates on one significant event which took place in the village of Thoa Khalsa, Rawalpindi district
(now in Pakistan) in March 1947, where ninety women took their own lives as a desperate attempt to
avoid rape, abduction and religious conversion, thereby averting the ruination of their community’s
honour. Bhisham Sahni’s depiction of the episode in his semi-autobiographic novel, Tamas, along with
testimonies and print media sources, allows for exploration of the notion of national and religious honour
and, more importantly, whether the suicides were a decision made by a person actively responsible for her
own fate or rather someone passively succumbing to the patriarchal expectations of the state and
community.
KEYWORDS: Indian Partition; communal violence; suicide; Indian women; patriarchy; honour; Thoa
Khalsa; Bhisham Sahni.
RESUMEN Mujeres mártires: suicidios en masa en Thoa Khalsa durante la Partición de India
El presente ensayo pretende comprender los suicidios en masa que tuvieron lugar durante los
enfrentamientos populares en la Partición del Subcontinente indio. En primer lugar, se pretende analizar
la posición y el rol que les fueron asignados a las mujeres. Para ello, se seguirán los principios teóricos de
bios y zoē formulados por Giorgio Agamben incluyendo una perspectiva de género. En segundo lugar, el
artículo se centra en un suceso en particular que tuvo lugar en el pueblo de Thoa Khalsa (distrito de
Rawalpindi, ahora en Pakistán) durante marzo de 1947 y en el que se suicidaron noventa mujeres con el
objetivo de evitar violaciones, secuestros y la conversión religiosa (sucesos que mancharían el honor de la
WOMEN AS MARTYRS
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- comunidad a la que pertenecían). El estudio de la novela de Bhisman Sahni, Tamas, que ilustra el evento
histórico con fragmentos semi-autobiográficos, servirá, junto el análisis de recortes de prensa de la época,
para investigar los conceptos de nación y honor religioso y (aspecto más importante) plantear la
interrogación sobre si estos suicidios fueron una decisión de gente activamente responsable por su propio
destino, o más bien de gente que sucumbía pasivamente a las expectativas patriarcales del estado y de su
comunidad.
PALABRAS CLAVE: Partición de India; violencia popular; suicidio; mujer en India; patriarcado;
honor; Thoa Khalsa; Bhisman Sahni
“The right of sovereignty was the right to take life or let live. And then this new right is
established: the right to make live and let die.”
- Michel Foucault in Society Must Be Defended (Foucault, 2003: 241)
In the context of the late 1940s Indian subcontinent, with new borders etched out with religious
violence, the above quotation from Michel Foucault may be be interpreted through several
lenses. One of the more obvious interpretations would be how the sovereign nations of India and
the newly-formed Pakistan decided to methodically divide the citizens on the basis of their
religion. The Partition was brought into effect by the sovereign (but one must note that it was the
people), who urged by fear and instinct of self-preservation coupled with hatred, made the
decision regarding who gets to live and who dies, and this decision was solely dependent on
whether one is rightfully geographically located as per one’s religious beliefs. The extent to
which the sovereign was responsible in advocating the communal massacres still remains a
matter of great debate and dispute among scholars, historians, sociologists and political analysts,
and it is beyond the scope of this paper to engage in the same. The attempt here is to investigate
the underlying gender politics; casting ‘man’ in the role of the sovereign, and with the same
implications, woman in the role of the people.
In mid-twentieth century India, women were circumscribed within the private borders of home.
Their lack of any political or economic engagement translated into an insulated existence from
the outside world vis-à-vis the government. The sovereign affected the man; the subsequent
effect on the woman took the form of what may be defined as a chain reaction. The household
for the woman, isolated from the outside world, becomes a microcosm of the nation where the
8
Indi@logs, Vol 3 2016, pp.7-17, ISSN 2339-8523
ARUNIMA DEY
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------man is the ruler/sovereign. The familial government of patriarchy which runs at home
fundamentally controls her life. The most widely used word for husband in Hindi, a language
overwhelmingly spoken in Northern India, is pati; the word etymologically signifies owner or
master. Another word, swami, equates the master-slave distinction between a husband and a wife
in yet more glaring clarity; swami implies a godlike lord.
Over time immemorial, it has been said that ‘man’ is a social animal; he is social because he is a
part of the political and economic system. The man purveys his religion, his caste and his class.
But, where does one situate the woman? The woman becomes an object for the purpose of
defining the man, rather than holding an identity of her own. Hence, at a (supposed) time of need
to assert one’s religious identity, for instance the Hindu-Muslim riots during the Partition of
India (1947) the woman-object became woman-object-signifier. Her status did not change,
however, her body, her gender and its control by the (active) subject-man emerged as a trope for
assertion of religious supremacy.
The societal construct with respect to gender roles permits certain comparisons with ancient
Greek society, which segregated its people into citizens and non-citizens. A citizen had rights to
participate in the polis and the juridical order while slaves and women were considered noncitizens. Giorgio Agamben, in the introduction to his book Homo Sacer, attempts to distinguish
between two forms of life: “zoē, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living
beings (animals, men, or gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an
individual or a group” (Agamben, 1998: 1). Agamben’s zoē is that which merely exists, as
opposed to bios which lives. To live is to be actively social (or socially active?), via the two
modes of participation in what may be defined as social activities and assertion of one’s social
identity through the means of one’s nationality, religion and other social pointers. In the 1940s
Indian subcontinent, these two modes find their fruition in the social conduct of men, and
therefore, they effectively represent the bios. The women, however, limited to the territorial
boundaries of home, are enhancers and markers of the social standings of the men to whom they
belong as wives, daughters or mothers. Isolated from the polis, they exist as zoē for the purpose
of enabling men to live as bios.
9
WOMEN AS MARTYRS
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In light of the aforementioned comments, the paper seeks to explore the gruesome episode of
mass suicide of women during the religious riots as narrated in Bhisham Sahni’s novel of
Partition Tamas.1 Sahni’s fictional retelling of the Partition was first published in Hindi in 1974,
and was subsequently translated into English by the author and published in that version in 2001.
The story draws from Sahni’s own experience of the Partition as well as other actual events of
the time, including the story of a small town in Rawalpindi district (now in Pakistan) called Thoa
Khalsa, where ninety women jumped into a well in order to protect their ‘honour’ when the
village got ambushed by a Muslim mob. For the women and the community, suicide was the
obvious alternative as opposed to abduction, religious conversion and rape by the Other; the case
is that of zoē sacrificed to safeguard the dignity of the bios. The incident took place in midMarch and an article on the event appeared on 12th April 1947 in an English-language
newspaper, The Statesman:
The story of 90 women of the little village of Thoa Khalsa, Rawalpindi district… who drowned
themselves by jumping into a well during the recent disturbances has stirred the imagination of
the people of the Punjab. They revived the Rajput tradition of self-immolation when their
menfolk were no longer able to defend them. They also followed Mr. Gandhi’s advice to Indian
women that in certain circumstances, even suicide was morally preferable to submission. (as
cited in Butalia, 1998: 196)
The tone of the article is at best, ambiguous. The incident has been said to have “stirred the
imagination of the people”. Does it imply a reaction satiated with grief and horror or mere
amazement and praise for the ‘martyrs’? It reflects strongly on the role imposed on women by
society; the article simply states that the reason for the suicide was that “their menfolk were no
longer able to defend them.” Not only does it blatantly imply that women are incapable of any
form of self-defence, further emphasizing their dependency on men: the act itself is taken to be
transpicuous, seen an easy corollary to the archaic and patriarchal Rajput customs (of the
westerly princely state of Rajasthan). Heroism for women therefore can find articulation only in
self-annihilation. The use of words such as “revived” and “tradition” indicates a sense of
patency, the patriarchal state lending a sense of legitimacy to the act.
1
‘The word ‘Tamas’ in Hindi has several negative meanings such as inertia, destruction, ignorance etc. In the
context of the novel, it is usually translated as ‘darkness’, signifying the corruption of humanist values evident in the
merciless killings and plunderings which occurred during the communal riots at the time of the Partition of India.
10
ARUNIMA DEY
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Apart from the newspaper article, many flyers appeared in the following months commemorating
the incident as a matter of immense pride for the Sikh community where the self-sacrifice of the
women was portrayed as a mark of Sikh courage and valour. Historian Gyanendra Pandey, in
Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India, reproduces the content of
one among many leaflets circulated among the Sikh community in the month of July 1947:
– THE DEATH-DEFYING SISTERS OF RAWALPINDI –THE PRIDE OF POTHOHAR –
THOSE BRAVE DAUGHTERS OF GURU ARJAN – WHO PREFERRED VOLUNTARY
DEATH – SELF-INFLICTED OR AT THE HANDS OF THEIR DEAR ONES TO AN
IGNOBLE LIFE. THEY ARE PHYSICALLY GONE. THEIR SPIRIT IS AN UNDYING
FORCE. (as cited in Pandey, 2001: 86)
Women who during their lives are methodically demarcated to the category of sub-human
creatures are now suddenly memorialized as “an undying force”. Oscillating between an object
and a role model imbued with noteworthy qualities, depending on the need of the hour, the
society assigns the relevant part to women as it sees befitting. The sentence that proudly states
that the women “preferred voluntary death” must be contested; to prefer may not necessarily
entail want and voluntary does not entail desirable. Furthermore, the insistence of the society to
view the deaths as preferred and voluntary takes us back to the comparison of women with zoë;
they are denied the power to make a choice and are hegemonized in order to demonstrate the
unsaid, yet nonetheless evident laws of the community as being their own decision. The deaths at
Thoa Khalsa cannot be seen as voluntary suicides, but rather, only as community-orchestrated
murder. The women’s active participation in their deaths does not denote their agreement based
upon an individual judgement, but is rather, a consequence of what they believed to be their duty
to society.
In the novel, with the onset of communal violence, Sahni traces the fate of a Sikh family; its
members located in different villages. At Khanpur, Haram Singh and his wife Banto, the only
Sikh family in an otherwise Muslim village, flee in order to save their lives while the Muslim
mob loots and burns down their house and tea-shop. Their son, Iqbal Singh, who lives in another
predominantly Muslim village, tries to escape but is caught by the marauders, humiliated and
forced to convert to Islam in order to live. Meanwhile, in the village of Sayedpur, which is said
to be home to equal numbers of Sikh and Muslim citizens, the battle rages on but with the arrival
11
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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- of more Muslim attackers, the daughter, Jasbir, along with several other Sikh women, jump to
their deaths into the town well.
Sahni’s third-person perceptive of the ‘well episode’ adopts a quality of detachment rather than
an emotional retelling of the incident. It appears to be sudden and unprecedented, and amidst the
communal hatred and violence, discomfitingly takes on the appearance of being logical. Sahni’s
use of this technique is deliberate to further bring out the macabre quality of the incident:
Just at that time a group of women, emerged in the row from the gurudwara.2 At their head was
Jasbir Kaur, her eyes half-open, her face flushed. Almost all women had taken their dupattas off
their heads and tied them round their waists. They were all bare-footed, their faces too flushed.
As though under a spell, they came out of the gurudwara. (Sahni, 2001: 292)
It is of interest to note that a dupatta is a long scarf worn by Indian women, regardless of their
religion. The scarf essentially means a ‘lajja vastra’, which translates to ‘cloth of modesty’. It is
used to cover the head and hangs around the shoulders covering the bosom. A covered head is a
sign of submission and reverence, and therefore most married women and adolescent girls are
obliged to cover their heads with a dupatta in the company of men and elders. A woman with an
uncovered head is considered shameless and a disgrace to her father’s and husband’s family. The
society does not permit the woman to exercise control over her own body, which can be seen as
another example of the bios regulating the zoë’s body. Sahni writes: “women had taken their
dupattas off their heads and tied them round their waists.” This is a very crucial gesture as the
purpose of the dupatta is transformed from a ‘cloth of modesty’ to a cummerbund, to signify
action or a stance of fight. In popular Indian culture, the gesture of tying the dupatta around the
waist is symbolic of a determined woman who is prepared for a task ahead or/and ready to
plunge into a difficult situation. However, in the novel, this gesture is neatly undercut by Sahni
when he writes that the women seemed to be “under a spell”. This spell is, to borrow a phrase
from Louis Althusser, the spell of the Ideological State Apparatus. Althusser explains:
Ideological State Apparatuses function massively and predominantly by ideology, but they also
function secondarily by repression, even if ultimately, but only ultimately, this is very
attenuated and concealed, even symbolic. (There is no such thing as a purely ideological
apparatus.) Thus Schools and Churches use suitable methods of punishment, expulsion,
selection, etc., to ‘discipline’ not only their shepherds, but also their flocks. The same is true of
2
Sikh place of worship, the word literally means ‘the doorway to God/guru’.
12
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------the Family.... The same is true of the cultural IS Apparatus (censorship, among other things),
etc. (Althusser, 1971: 98)
Henceforth, the unwavering assertion that the deaths were a supposedly collective decision of the
women is a thinly veiled attempt to mask the dominant ideology of the masculine state at its
effective worst. The state, therefore, not just simply controls the body but also the minds of the
women. The women, are clearly “under the spell” of the patriarchal state, which ensures that
their psyche and mindset are deeply ingrained with the idea that their community’s honour is
dependent on their sexual purity and social code of conduct. The patriarchal hegemony attained
through indoctrination of state-approved ideologies leads to the women adhering to selfannihilation, which gains the illusive quality of an act undertaken as entirely one’s own decision.
Sahni strategically narrates the entire episode within three pages. It happens all too suddenly but
one cannot overlook the dark shadow of the inevitable that accompanies it:
The throng of women headed towards the well located at the foot of the slope… They were
running fast towards it, as though under a spell. None knew why and wherefore they were
heading towards it. Under the translucent light of the moon it appeared as though fairies were
flying down to the well. (Sahni, 2001: 292; emphasis added)
Almost as a refrain, Sahni repeats that the women appeared to be “under a spell.” The dichotomy
of the situation is constantly reaffirmed: the women appear to be in control of what they are
doing and yet the suggesting undertone is that of being hypnotized, rendering their ‘voluntary’
act as mute. Sahni refers to them as “fairies”, reinforcing how, as noted earlier, the woman as a
person, ceases to exist; no longer a passive object, she has now metamorphosed into a fantastical
creature. But, one must keep in mind that in Indian folklore, fairies, though usually portrayed as
beautiful and with mystical powers, are subordinate to stronger masculine powers such as a
powerful sage or a druid-like figure. If we understand the folklore against the backdrop of
communal violence, the fairies may well be seen as a euphemism for the zoë, put under a spell to
do the bidding of the master-sage sovereign.
Partha Chatterjee, in his essay “Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonized Women: The Contest
in India” states: “The new patriarchy advocated by nationalism conferred upon women the honor
of a new social responsibility; and by associating the task of female emancipation with the
historical goal of sovereign nationhood, bound them to a new, and yet entirely legitimate,
subordination” (Chatterjee, 1989: 629). Chatterjee’s ‘new patriarchy’ is one which emerges with
13
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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- the creation of new borders, and female emancipation only finds its fruition in death, or to use
the state-preferred term, martyrdom. During a time marked with violence of ethnic cleansing,
war-cries became an essential element of initializing an attack against the religious Other, and
taking the respective gods’ names became a perverse way to legitimize the killings and lootings.
However, in the novel, Jasbir Kaur, the first woman to succumb to her fate, “raised no slogan,
nor did she call anyone’s name, she only uttered Wahe Guru and took the jump” (Sahni, 2001:
293). Wahe Guru in Sikhism is a term signifying the Supreme Lord: the phrase uttered is
therefore a call to God. Unlike the men, Jasbir does not jump into the well with the Sikh jaikara3
or a call to arms; she is denied that authority as her act of self-sacrifice is ironically the result of
passive succumbing to a state-sanctified ideology that calls for women’s unquestioned
acceptance of their community-validated emancipatory death.
Sahni closes the episode by marking clear demarcations, using a cacophony of voices: “The air
was filled with the heart-rending cries of women and children coming from inside the well and
were mingled with the loud shouts of ‘Allah-o-Akbar’4 and ‘Sat Sri Akal’5” (Sahni, 2001: 293294). As the war between the men rages on, both the Muslim and Sikh shouts of triumph are
undercut by the ghastly screams of the dying women. The men are awarded the right to valiant
speech while the metaphorical lack of voice which the women endure in their lives is reemphasized in a literal sense in their deaths. The physical location of the women and men is
crucial; the dying wails of the women come from within the earth, while the men fight above on
the ground. The nation in many cultures is referred to as the ‘motherland’; it becomes a feminine
entity that needs protection from invaders. The nation, therefore, is the metaphorical mother
while the women are the literal ones. Sahni ends the episode with the women being swallowed
up by the earth; they must sink into the soil of the motherland, in order to reap the harvest of
purity and honour. The well becomes a symbolic womb of the earth that brings death instead of
life. Ritu Menon, in her essay “Do Women Have a Country?” talks about the role of women “as
biological reproducers of religious and ethnic groups” (Menon, 2002: 57). Menon refers to Nira
Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias and elaborates how they
3
The Sikh slogan of victory.
‘Allah-o-Akbar’ is the Islamic Arabic phrase for ‘God is Greatest’
5
The Sikh Punjabi phrase, ‘Sat Sri Akal’, utilized as a battle cry in the novel is generally used as a form of greeting,
meaning ‘God is the eternal truth’. 4
14
ARUNIMA DEY
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------identify three other ways in which women's relationship to state and ethnicity can be seen as
different from men's: as reproducers of the boundaries of ethnic or national groups, as participating
in the ideological reproduction of the community, and as signifiers of ethnic national difference.
(Menon, 2002: 57).
These three identifiers, which during a time of crisis are deployed with stark affirmation, are
nonetheless operative in normal times as well; ‘normal’ precisely because these identifiers are at
work through what Althusser has defined as the Ideological State Apparatus. Going back to
Agamben, the identity of the woman-zoë is sketched out and highlighted through the demands of
the bios. The needs of the sub-human picayune are irrelevant and her job is strictly transcribed in
pertaining to the needs and orders of the bios. Zoë is nameless and voiceless, and the times when
she is permitted to speak she simply echoes and mimics the voices of the bios.
Ninety Sikh women committed suicide during the Rawalpindi riots of March 1947. They did so
not just out of the fear of abduction and sexual assault but more so to protect their country’s and
religion’s honour. Feminist sociologist Urvashi Butalia in her book The Other Side of Silence
writes about Basant Kaur, who was in her seventies when Butalia met her. She was a survivor of
the horrific incident and Butalia includes her testimony of the same. Kaur narrates:
Many girls were killed. Then Mata Lajjawanti, she had a well near her house, in a sort of
garden. Then all of us jumped into that.... I also went in, I took my two children, and then we
jumped in... the well filled up, and we could not drown…the children survived. Later, Nehru
went to see the well, and the English then closed it up, the well that was full of bodies. (Butalia,
1998: 200)
It is significant to note that Basant Kaur was not a survivor because she refused to jump. She was
not driven by the desire to seek an alternative solution for her protection; she survived because
the well was already too full with dead bodies to drown her. Butalia later interviews Kaur’s son,
Bir Bahadur Singh, who was a witness to the incident. In his recollections he describes the deaths
as a heroic act of the righteous Sikh community; he claims that if “those who jumped into the
well had not taken their own lives, the ones who were left alive would not have been alive today”
(Butalia, 1998: 210). Singh finds it crucial to point out that the women who escaped death were
only able to do so because others took their place. Both testimonies also give rise to certain
important questions: Were there any women who refused to kill themselves? What happened to
those who resisted? Were they made to jump by their fathers and husbands? Or were they left
alone, never to be spoken about or heard of again due to the disgrace they had brought upon their
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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- community in their selfish act of self preservation? Basant Kaur does not bear the shame of
escaping martyrdom, since she did not try to deny death. Similar to her attempt at suicide driven
by a sense of religious duty, her survival too was not of her own doing. She survived not because
she wanted to but because of the circumstances. Throughout the interview, Kaur never chooses
to call herself fortunate; she accepts her fate to live, which, yet again, does not differ from her
silent acceptance of death. On returning to Singh’s statement, one notices an insistence on the
necessity of the suicides. This cannot conceal, however, the uncomfortable question of whether
there was ever an alternative option that did not include rape, mutilation and murder by the
religious Other. Basant Kaur survived – what if the other women did too? Would they have
fallen prey to the wrath of the attackers? Singh’s morbid comment, therefore, mirrors succinctly
the position of women during the time of the communal violence.
For concluding remarks, I turn to Gloria Anzaldúa, one of the prominent writers of Chicana
feminism and cultural theory, who refers to the Mexican-American border as “una herida
abierta6 where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds” (Anzaldúa, 1987: 25). If one
attempts to read this statement in the context of South Asia, one can say that the Third World
Indian Subcontinent, in its struggle for independence, cracks to give rise to new borders that
open like dreary wells of death swallowing the woman for reproduction and reaffirmation of
communal boundaries through their ‘sacrificed’ bodies.
WORKS CITED
AGAMBEN, GIORGIO (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (trans. Daniel HellerRoazen), Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
ALTHUSSER, LOUIS (1971). Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (trans. Ben Brewster),
Delhi: Aakar Books, 2006.
ANZALDÚA, GLORIA (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, San Francisco: Aunt
Lute Books, 1999.
6
‘Una herida abierta’ is Spanish for ‘an open wound’.
16
ARUNIMA DEY
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------BUTALIA, URVASHI (1998). The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, Navi
Mumbai: Penguin Books India.
CHATTERJEE, PARTHA (1989). “Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonialized Women: The
Contest in India”, American Ethnologist, Vol. 16 Nº 4, November: 622-633.
< http://www.jstor.org/stable/645113?origin=JSTOR-pdf > accessed 4 March 2014. DOI:
10.1525/ae.1989.16.4.02a00020
FOUCAULT, MICHEL (2003). Society Must be defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 197576 (trans. David Macey), Mauro Bertani & Alessandro Fontana (eds), New York:
Picador.
MENON, RITU (2002). “Do women have a country?”, In: Rada Iveković and Julie Mostov (eds).
From Gender to Nation, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2004: 43-62.
PANDEY, GYANENDRA (2001). Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in
India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
SAHNI, BHISHAM (2001) Tamas, Navi Mumbai: Penguin Books India.
ARUNIMA DEY is a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Salamanca
17
Indi@logs
Vol 3 2016, pp. 19-35, ISSN: 2339-8523
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------REASONS FOR VIOLENCE: A STUDY OF R. K. NARAYAN’S “ANOTHER
COMMUNITY”
CRUZ BONILLA
Universidad de Granada
[email protected]
ABSTRACT
Notwithstanding its fictional character and its year of publication, 1956, “Another Community”
is a modern critique of communal violence. This short story shows Narayan’s concern with the
immediate consequences of a divided Indian society on religious grounds. His communal
subjects are shaped according to the ideological purpose of the group. Based on exclusion and
rivalry, this reflected identity stimulates communal antagonisms that revolve around ideas of
nationhood and otherness. The protagonist’s savage murder becomes the excuse for violence in
the hands of local politicians. The author’s intentionality avoids taking side with his protagonist
who does not escape the communal duality of the Self and the Other; the rational and the
irrational sides of a fake hero.
KEYWORDS: postcolonialism; Indian literature; R.K. Narayan; communal violence
RESUMEN Razones para la violencia: un estudio de "Another Community" de R.K. Narayan
A pesar de su carácter ficticio y del año de su publicación, 1956, “Another Community” es una
crítica vigente sobre la violencia sectaria. En este relato corto, Narayan muestra su inquietud
sobre las consecuencias inmediatas de tener una sociedad india dividida en espacios religiosos.
Los sujetos de estas comunidades están configurados de acuerdo al propósito ideológico del
grupo. Basada en exclusión y rivalidad, esta identidad remedada estimula los antagonismos
sectarios que se desarrollan alrededor de ideas sobre nacionalidad y otredad. El salvaje asesinato
del protagonista se convierte en la excusa para la violencia en manos de políticos locales. La
intencionalidad del autor evita tomar partido a favor de su protagonista, quién no escapa de la
dualidad comunal del Ser y del Otro; los aspectos racionales e irracionales de un héroe fallido.
PALABRAS CLAVE: postcolonialismo; literatura india; R.K. Narayan; violencia sectaria
The question of communalism is a specifically Indian issue intimately connected
to ethnic groups and political opportunism, which has a ripple effect and reverberates
throughout the world. “Another Community” is one of the very few stories in which
Narayan addresses an all-pervading, contemporary Indian conflict, communal violence.
REASONS FOR VIOLENCE
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------It appeared in the collection Lawley Road and Other Stories published in 1956.
Narratively speaking, Narayan seems to glide over the major crisis of the 1947 Partition
of India. However, a careful analysis of the short story reveals the trauma that the event
inflicted on the author’s intellect, and the critical attitude he takes towards violence. A
close examination of the short story and India’s modern historicity allows the reader to
associate Narayan’s narrative and his deep attachment to his country with clear
allusions to Gandhi, linguistically condensed in the narrator’s words when, for example,
he states that “a good action in a far off place did not find a corresponding echo, but an
evil one did possess that power” (Narayan, 1956: 150). This is relevant to an
understanding of Narayan’s text because it repackages Gandhi’s concept of passive
resistance as Dharma: the Gandhian translation of Dharma as the duty to exercise
nationalist opposition against colonialism and foreign influences, therefore, accentuated
the divide in “the body politic” (Guha, 1997: 36).
My purpose is to show how the holistic interpretation of Dharma, as duty or
moral virtue, differed from one social group to another, and this acted as a disintegrative
agent, enhancing caste and religious divisions, thus “ranging the rural gentry against the
peasantry, upper castes against Namasudras, and above all Hindus and Muslims against
each other” (Guha, 1997: 36). This sensitive issue that the Hindu Dharma specifically
presents forces a moral interrogation of the modern intellectual stance, which is
influenced by religious beliefs, and demands an ethical attitude from those who hold
responsibilities towards their community, as in Narayan’s case. Treading carefully on
contemporary politics, the author’s self-effacing voice resembles the Gandhian soulforce – Satyagraha – in a piece of writing that is inspired by communal riots. The text
also reproduces stereotyped indexes from colonial and postcolonial Gothic literature
that approximate communal violence to a western literary representation. The
protagonist conveys some ‘civilised’ characteristics that describe him as a suspicious
Other within his own group, as he carries the westernised alterity of the babu.
My study of this short story shows three essential aspects which cannot be
glossed over: firstly, it will be clear that the perception of communalism and communal
violence depends on the area or geographical region involved and its diachronic
development; secondly, that communalism affects the social conditions of people,
which manifest themselves differently in rural and urban societies; thirdly, that
20
CRUZ BONILLA
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------communalism presents a complex social fabric that cannot simply be rationalised from
the perspective of a religious community or as a modern social phenomenon.
I will focus on how Narayan manipulates contexts and words in such a way that
the reader’s perception is led to a linguistic domain where a cross-examination of
essential questions seems to be absent, and where the text thus avoids making a
conspicuous political judgment. Roger Fowler describes as “a practice” of language
(1996: 54) the situation present in this text, where language becomes the place for
debate and negotiation. This analysis reveals the “artificiality” of Narayan’s discourse
and the ideological encoding that lies beneath. I will then proceed with the scrutiny of
his text that uncovers Narayan’s role as a creative thinker acting as a critic who exposes
a problem with no easy solution. As the origin of communal violence derives from
mythic interpretations of social realities, its magnitude cannot be constrained within a
theoretical framework, nor can any temporary agreement be considered the definitive
solution. Neither can an essential aspect of communal violence be overlooked, that
which describes the particular relationship between the subject and the group influenced
by the moral principles of Dharma.
Thus, at the beginning of the story, Narayan’s narrator advances the following
information: “I am not going to mention caste or community in this story” (1956: 150)
and it is precisely in denying these conflictive categories that the author establishes the
scope and parameters of the thematic structure of his narrative. Fowler calls this process
one of “uncoding – disestablishing the received tie between a sign and a cultural unit”
(1996: 55). This sort of deconstructive process is relevant here because using the device
allows Narayan to set the tone of a deceptively apolitical short story, which is suitable
for a wide audience of the most diverse ideologies, without falling into an unreliable
thematic narrative. Likewise, this narrative artefact allows the author to handle, almost
incidentally, an Indian conflict of primary importance which remains unresolved and
which in actual fact seems to grow worse rather than better.
Considering the viewpoint of Partha Chatterjee’s The Nation and Its Fragments:
Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, the central argument of my analysis is that
Narayan’s choice of a nameless Indian town as the setting of the story must be
understood as a narrative strategy with universal implications: the place operates as
embodying a “coextensive” geography, which ultimately represents the “generic
sovereignty of the country” (1993: 95). Thus, this generic, nondescript town becomes
21
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------the representation of other towns and states with similar communal terms and specific
communal interests. Logically, this coextensive geography leads us to a conclusion that
throws light on part of Narayan’s plot: if the state-formation revolves around this
coextensive epicentre, any local crisis might provoke a sudden spread of violence
without any apparent reason that will lead to a centrifugal movement, causing a domino
effect throughout the entire region and, eventually, the whole country. This is precisely
what happens in Narayan’s short story.
The protagonist naturally bears the submissive condition of a willing servitude,
vātsalya, which is of the same filial hierarchy as a child’s towards its parents. “Another
Community” narrates the last days of a man’s ordinary, uneventful life, his thoughts and
feelings shaken by the communal violence that exploded in the aftermath of India’s
Independence and Partition. The omniscient narrator describes him as a propitious
sacrificial victim subdued both by his community and by his own fears that exercise a
petrifying effect on him. Unable to overcome his mechanic behaviour, this paralysis
signals him as a perfect recipient of the mob’s violence. Unwittingly, he lets himself be
killed, and his death ignites the town’s communal uprisings. Meanwhile, the history of
India is far from being paralysed. In fact, the narration serves to depict a backdrop to a
crucial moment in the country’s collective memory after Partition: India takes over the
princely states of Jammu and Kashmir in October 1947, which is an issue beyond this
paper’s scope.
In short, the Other represents the enemy’s community. Narayan makes use of
rhetorical tropes from horror literature to portray the people’s anguishes, fears and
oppression. The story shows how the masses are easily controlled and manoeuvred by
communal violence and opportunistic politicians who take advantage of a chaotic
situation to maximize their profits and occasionally instigate the riots, as the
hypermasculine uncle, commander-in-chief of the protagonist’s family and religious
community. The narrative structure leads to a multiplicity of interpretations according
to the communal reading. My conclusion is that evidences and testimonies are subject to
ideological translations that heavily rely on, and emanate from, the victorious party and
whose judgements can vary due to their relative and contradictory natures. According to
Amartia Sen, one of the social simulacra lies in the reduction of identity to a religious or
a political affiliation (Identity and Violence xv); the person’s social value is therefore
determined by religion or culture. The subject is then metonymically associated with the
22
CRUZ BONILLA
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------group that monopolises any individual value or personal choice and shapes the minds of
its members in tune with the collective ideology. Thus, the group steps into the place of
the individual, who in turn suffers holistic misrepresentation from rival affiliations.
Often, these ideological constructions of communal antagonism depart from the
politics of divide and rule that open up spaces for political and religious contestations,
which, in this particular case, strive for a nationalist supremacy. This is the expression
of a break-up of the “civilizational unity” that begins with a discourse of anticolonial
nationalism and ends up destroying the “civic ethos” that holds any plural community
together (Ahmad, 1992: 119). These phenomena give way to radical expressions of
nationalism and internal struggles among different social strata that, in India’s case,
have remained unresolved. They constitute one of the major problems faced by the
modern Indian state, as religious minorities deny the right of the government “to
interfere in their religious affairs”, arguing that it is against the “freedom of religion”
principle (Chatterjee, 1994: 1,772), guaranteed by India’s Constitution.
In modern politics, the syncretic origin of the idea of India is a relevant element
since it has been challenged by the power of religious electorates which, according to
Aparna B. Dharwadker, “have tended to deconstruct the nation back into its principal
ethnoreligious components, represented most strongly by Hindu, Muslim and Sikh
fundamentalism” (2005: 170). In my opinion, this situation implies that the politics of
discord continue steadily and systematically. It describes a nationalist determination
towards the implementation of a communal discourse upon the project of a secular
nation and secular politics under the auspices of Dharma.
Against this background, Narayan writes this short story from a temporal
detachment. The country has been partitioned and the notion of the “stranger” has been
bounced from the English colonialists to the Muslims, who now embody the Other.
They are the enemy subjects according to a racial divide. Narratively speaking, Narayan
constructs a syntagmatic duality that defamiliarises the reader from the historical
background of the Independence and the Partition periods. The public sphere is
controlled by the commanding leadership of the media as the narrator informs the
readers: “The newspapers of recent months have given us a tip which is handy – namely
the designation: ‘One Community’ and ‘Another Community’” (1956: 150). Narayan’s
hero has no name but the narrator invites the reader to participate in the reconstruction
of the experience of his last days. The omniscient narrator uses a literary strategy that
23
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------gives the reader an active role while he structures the “writing of Otherness” directly
addressing the reader: “I want you to find out, if you like, to what community or section
he belonged” (1956: 150); accordingly, he forces the reader to participate in an
unconscious dynamic of identifying the I with the rational, and the Other with the
irrational madness of communal violence.
In short, this typical postcolonial description of the Other as an alien subject that
brings anxiety to the group contrasts with Narayan’s hero, who presents certain Hindu
characteristics of the satvic type: his intimate self feels the need to follow his Dharma,
which is a profound sense of personal duty that exposes a docile public facade behind
which there is a tortured inner world. The protagonist then feels righteous in his own
way and holds onto “a peaceful, happy life” (1956: 150). However, a major
characteristic of Dharma is its representation of a socio-political order that, in the short
story’s context, is used by the communal leaders to relate to their subordinates “as
nonantagonistically as possible” (Guha, 1997: 34). Following this efficient way of
leadership, the subordinates willingly accept their position in the caste hierarchy as both
a moral obligation and a universal order. Indeed, the author has quietly affiliated his
hero with an ethnic group defined by Max Weber as the “chosen people”, implying that
there exist people who can compare themselves to him on equal terms according to an
established “differentiation translated into the plane of horizontal co-existence” (1968:
391).
Narayan’s hero possesses what Peter van der Veer calls a “hyphenated identity”,
which is also a composite made of tamasic characteristics: he carries within himself the
passive, neglected being of a communal member who is submitted to the dictates of his
group’s ideology. These dictates are consubstantial with the caste system and complete
the dual condition of Dharma: the protagonist’s subordination to the group’s authority is
rewarded with its protection, support and social promotion (Guha, 1997: 35). Dwelling
on the liminal space of abstraction, the group’s negotiation of its religious politics
widens a space for representation and jurisdiction that forces the removal of alien
elements that live nearby (Veer, 2004: 7). Under these circumstances, the narrator
informs us that “[n]ow when [the protagonist] heard his men talk menacingly, he
visualized his post office friend being hacked in the street” (Narayan, 1956: 151).
According to Kapileswar Parija, “Another Community” is “a moving story of a
martyr at the blood altar of communal blood-bath, one of the rare stories of Narayan
24
CRUZ BONILLA
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------with a topical theme” (2006: 12). Parija though fails to explain what, in his opinion, is
meant by a “topical theme”. Is it topical because communal violence happens with some
frequency in India and remains unresolved? Or is it because Partition and gang crimes
are historical and endemic Indian topics which Indian people have grown used to
suffering? May it also be a topical theme because of the super-abundance of literary and
artistic expressions on communal violence?
In my opinion, art has proved its influence as a healer in traumatic experiences:
in the first stages, there is a peremptory necessity to forget and release the social
memory from its burden. Then, as time acts with curative efficiency, there grows the
necessity to understand and question the reasons why it all happened. I maintain that
Narayan’s text is imbued with a modern literary perspective that creates contextual
structures that attend to a need to convey meanings for different cultural backgrounds.
However, it is also filled with techniques derived from the oral and storytelling
traditions that require some cultural translations before they are written down and these
transformations do not always succeed in breaching this specific cultural gap. In my
view, the “topical theme”, as Parija describes this story’s violence, responds to an
authorial ideology and its intentionality that lie within every short fictional narrative
whose translation differs – it may be differing or distinct – from English to Indian
readers. I contend therefore that Narayan’s writings are prejudiced, which does not
necessarily imply a negative assessment, but that they are marked by the author’s
cultural consciousness. Accordingly, Narayan’s hearsay style initially continues with a
story formula that is typically Indian, as confirmed by an opening that makes the
communal conflict conspicuous precisely because the narrator denies any allusion to
“caste or community” (1956: 150).
As the story develops, the main character is depicted as a white-collar worker, a
babu. The description corresponds to someone who in principle would not favour any
kind of revolt, change or act of violence, but who would take no action to prevent these
from happening either. This description of the character is compatible with a modern,
English-educated, middle-class Indian citizen who is, therefore, marked with the signs
of Otherness from an ultranationalist perspective. The text describes both the beginning
of the “collective persecutions” that made “the loss of social order” evident, and the
proliferation of chaos brought about “by the disappearance of the rules” (Girard, 1986:
25
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------12): “Our friend saw the tempers of his neighbours rising as they read the newspaper
each day”, writes the narrator early in the story (Narayan, 1956: 151).
Violence escalates fast as a means of securing the bonds of national belonging.
The abusive behaviour becomes a uniform reality or what René Girard calls a “negative
reciprocity”. The destructive (re)actions share the same patterns of aggression with the
opposite party (Girard, 1986: 13). I then deduce that there is a desire for violence and
pride in its exhibition, and whose discourses revolve around ideas of patriotism and
nationhood: ‘“We must smash them who are here–,’ he heard people say” (Narayan,
1956: 151). The educated middle class, therefore, reproduced the colonial perception of
an Indian dark side through expressions of race, caste and religion as Dharmic
traditions. This rise of political genuineness exacerbated the same national feelings that
caused the outsiders or non-participants to suffer violent exclusion from the group, an
exclusion imposed through sheer force. In Weber’s opinion, a “racial identity” with a
number of inherited features and a shared history is necessary to create a racial group
with any identifiable characteristic that is “subjectively perceived as a common trait”
(1968: 385). When this cultural identification happens, those perceived as “racially
different” and who share the same geographical space become the target “of joint
(mostly political) action”; likewise, when members of the same race suffer “common
experiences” that predispose them against the members of an antagonistic group, the
result is negative social action towards “those who are obviously different. [They] are
avoided and despised or, conversely, viewed with superstitious awe” (Weber, 1968:
385). I affirm that Narayan’s narrator uses a synecdochic device that attributes human
qualities to natural elements, highlighting the uncontrollable nature of the social
unconscious and the dangers that this carries within, while avoiding full revelation of
the terrible substance of communal violence. The portrayal reads as follows: “the air
was surcharged with fear and suspicion” (Narayan, 1956: 152).
“Another Community” describes the protagonist’s consciousness about the
mental artifice created by these opportunistic persecutors who have fabricated a “type of
illusion” triggered by violent actions where the commanding event is the persecution
itself (Girard, 1986: 11). Nevertheless, he fails to move beyond thought itself and take
action, which confirms his subaltern condition inside the group; he only manages to
express his emotions in a conventional way “by telling his fellowmen: You see… but
26
CRUZ BONILLA
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------such things will not happen here. But he knew it was wishful thinking. He knew his
men were collecting knives and sticks” (Narayan, 1956: 151).
In my opinion, the narrator succeeds in representing a conciliatory process of
thinking that reflects the hero’s Dharmic essentials. Yet, as the narrative advances, his
integrative desires acquire a greater sense of abstraction in such a way that they become
closer to the discourses of nationalism. Therefore, Narayan’s subtle irony constructs a
protagonist who belongs to the community; he receives support and security from the
communal group and in return for their favours, he must submit himself to the group’s
strategies while, simultaneously, he sacrifices his portion of individual subjectivity for
the group’s sake. According to this narrative strategy, Narayan thus creates two
subliminal worlds where the imagined politics of nationalism stand for the real – a
desired communal violence – and the particular foundations of the individual signify the
utopian – ahimsa, the Gandhian ideal of nonviolence.
For reasons mentioned above, the subverted scale of moral values becomes a
fertile soil for the rise of all kind of persecutors who find causes that barely need to be
imagined to justify their violence. These violent agents elevate themselves to the
category of judges who are in need of guilty victims. According to Girard, the
persecutors’ “certainty of being right encourages them to hide nothing of their
massacres” (1986: 6). The most brutal violence thus is unleashed on women who
become the site of struggle for nationalistic purposes. It is highly significant that women
are responsible for the family and the community’s honour, and therefore they receive,
together with the children, the worst treatment of all from both communities. This is
probably the most outrageous way of playing a significant part in the nationalist
equation. Because men and women are perceived as an indivisible whole, the Indian
woman is defined as a portion of the man and his family. Likewise, power relations of
dominance and exploitation will determine her status within the communal family as a
whole. This patriarchal organisation explains why men and women possess “different
already constituted categories of experience, cognition, and interests as groups” that
transmit “a simplistic dichotomy” of the whole population (Mohanty et al., 1991: 70).
Carrying the figurative value of the community’s honour in a male-dominant world, the
abuses suffered by women and girls during these violent periods imply not only the
trauma of their experiences but their social exclusion. They are marked as the Other, the
polluted soil, which then becomes the fertile ground for violent retaliations (Kumar,
27
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------2004: 77). The narrator describes this socio-political situation through the comments
overheard by the protagonist: “‘They don’t spare even women and children!’ he heard
them cry. ‘All right, we will teach those fellows a lesson. We will do the same thing for
them here – that is the language they will understand –’” (Narayan, 1956: 151).
Ideological constructions and the politics of an imagined community determine the
bases for agreements and conflicts under these exceptional situations or, as Mohanty et
al. argue, they constitute “the political links [that] we choose to make among and
between struggles” (1991: 4).
Sociologically speaking, virulence aims at producing a primitive fear that grants
power to those who wield it, and here, the protagonist develops a paranoid pattern of
thought, encouraged by his surroundings, that demonstrates his susceptibility to that
fear. The narrator notices that “[e]veryone seemed to him a potential assassin. People
looked at each other as cannibals would at their prey” (1956: 151-152). The notion of
danger is perceived first in the people’s language, and secondly in the individual mind,
now poisoned by frenzied rumours that transform the protagonist’s appeasing Dharma.
So, the narrator informs us that “now he saw them in a new light: they were of another
community” (1956: 151). Moreover, rites and sites for religious practices also grow into
emblematic possessions that must be defended and avenged in the local streets that have
become communal targets: whoever occupies the streets holds the power. “Someone or
other constantly reported: ‘You know what happened? A cyclist was stabbed in –––
street last evening” (1956: 152).
In fact, Narayan dwells on the general disgrace that is magnified by the absence
of “law and order” and the unreliability of the police forces who are supposed to protect
the citizens, as the short story portrays through the people’s gossip: “Of course the
police are hushing up the whole business’” (1956: 152). No longer were they the neutral
forces who could be counted on for protection. The division had also split them into
communal factions where separate contingents only felt safe if they were shielded by
their own community’s armies and in case of doubt they trusted no one. As a
consequence of this failure of the state to provide protection, political agitators pour out
of the patriarchal family as the only remedy against aggression. Family ties are very
demanding; they are prior to the subject’s insertion in community relationships. The
communal group puts first and foremost the Gandhian ideology inspired in the concept
28
CRUZ BONILLA
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------of Dharma, which has the effect of securing its communal/nationalist superiority (Guha,
1997: 38).
In the protagonist’s family, there exists a false sense of security that cancels out
any pretension of innocence and makes the protagonist’s wife exclaim when asked
about the mobs: “No one is afraid. As long as your uncle is near at hand, we have no
fear–” (1956: 153). In relation to communal violence, Sen defines all of the above
mental processes taken together as a “vicious mode of thinking” which “managed to
persuade many otherwise peaceable people of both communities to turn into dedicated
thugs” (Sen, 2006: 172). Indeed, the nature of communal violence obliterates noncommunal or secular ideologies, which are seen as part of the enemy’s polluted being
and as threats against the group’s ideological purity.
However, this story reflects Narayan’s particular conception of Otherness as a
secondary issue waiting to be assimilated by Indian society under the symbolic aesthetic
of the Gothic literary tradition (Khair, 2009: 4). The genre also lends the literary
symbols of a colonial past to a postcolonial reality, reproducing the power struggles,
excesses and political ambiguity of Gothic literature in the context of war between rival
communities. Consequently, Narayan simultaneously elicits a response to his rhetorical
questions without straying from his non-political stance and while essentially preserving
the text’s local colour and Indian character.
I contend that Narayan renders a postcolonial leitmotif which depicts the Other
as a usurper and potentially destructive towards the world that is known as democratic
India. This negative Other represents religious superstition and the irrational fear of
being contaminated by its forceful proximity, even if, ironically, the rejection of this
evil Other generates the same violent dialectic in every party involved.
Furthermore, socio-economic limitations strongly determine an almost
inevitable condition of victimhood: the poorest members of society lived in houses
described by Sen as “shelters that can be easily penetrated and ravaged by gangs”
(2006: 173). This reality is fictionalised in Narayan’s story. Taking the edge off the
analysis’ account and omitting the fact that there is nothing this family can effectively
do to defend themselves if they are assaulted, the narrator also suggests a feeble
defence, when in the following way, the protagonist “secretly resolve[s] that he’d fetch
the wood-chopper from the fuel room and keep it near at hand in case he had to defend
his home” (Narayan, 1956: 152). Narayan’s fictional world seems to comply with Sen’s
29
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------theory of an existing “tyranny of conformism that may make it difficult for members of
a community to opt for other styles of living” (2006: 117). This conformism affects the
whole community as well as the individual. It is important to notice that Narayan
portrays, through a subtle irony tinged with sadness, how the primary character’s
viewpoint mirrors the other community’s posture, since both adopt the same discourses
of victimhood versus retaliation.
It is not enough that the Others integrate in the surroundings of the community;
their “irreducible presence of otherness” must be removed because their alterity is
recognised as an independent agency which is “potentially, terrifying” (Khair, 2009:
173). Thus the uncle and his men decide to “clean up th[e] town” from “those [who]
hold secret assemblies almost every night” (Narayan, 1956: 153). This communal stance
attributes the “cause of terror” to the Others who organise themselves, in the same way
they do, and yet are beyond their control; hence, they seek the physical elimination of
these Others, thus fulfilling the typical characteristic of a “colonial Gothic/ised text”
(Khair, 2009: 173) of fear of the unknown that is in every narrative space.
The narrative devices that spread the violent infection are precisely those that
belong to oral tradition: rumours, gossip, half-veiled hints, hearsay, vague assumptions,
suggestions and remarks taken at face value. “He often wondered amidst the general
misery of all this speculation how will they set off the spark”, informs the narrator
(Narayan, 1956: 153). Narayan chooses a historical moment of general crisis – from
East to West – to portray, as Bhabha writes, “the subject’s lack of priority (castration)”
(1984: 131), which the writer considers a genuine and active menace to individual and
social freedom. Thus, Narayan causes his narration to deviate “from the expected
cultural context” (Fowler, 1996: 115) – represented by the communal violence which
spread as a side effect of the first Indo-Pakistani war – not so much in order to question
the subject or the system’s responsibility in general, as to recreate a closer illustration of
Indian sociology in particular: the helplessness and fallibility of individuals connected
by a cultural historicity that reproduces the “[c]ommon language and the ritual
regulation of life” associated with an “ethnic affinity” (Weber, 1968: 390).
In Narayan’s text, the protagonist and his uncle embody two political stances
that are shaded with the colours of Dharma: the moderate democratic discourse of
secularism, on the one hand, and the exalted populist discourse of orthodox Hindu
nationalism on the other. The protagonist talks about “the idiocy of the whole
30
CRUZ BONILLA
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------relationship”, while his uncle’s preferred course of action is to “cut each other’s throats”
(1956: 155).
On the announced day, October 29th, the protagonist goes to work against his
wife’s wishes. The hidden reason is that he finds “at the office” a place where he will
not “waste” his time as his colleagues do, “discussing the frightful possibilities of the
day” (1956: 154). He needs the “deadening effect [of figures] on his mind” to escape
from hatred and the sound of it that comes from his communal surroundings. As I have
previously mentioned, he lives the Gandhian ideal of nonviolence and “fe[els] all right
as long as it last[s]”, but as soon as he sets foot on the street, the peaceful mirage
vanishes from sight and “a feverish anxiety about reaching home” (1956: 154) preys on
his mind. Suddenly, he feels that the limits between his positive Self and the negative
Other have disappeared and the theoretical menace has grown into a dreadful certainty.
Derrida’s argument in Demeure: Fiction and Testimony posits that literature
allows the writer to fabricate a testimony that seems to be real but in fact contains some
elements of “fiction, simulation or simulacra” that confer a testimonial condition on the
character that is similar to that of an authentic witness (1996: 29). As the plot
reproduces Gothic indexes as well as the panicked unconscious of the Indian subjects
threatened by this communal frenzy, the protagonist’s “fevered mind” thinks of hardly
any place but the one where he feels secure, that is no other than the realm of his joint
family, near his uncle.
Since his single desire is “to reach home in the shortest time possible” (Narayan,
1956: 154), he blindly chooses a route that goes across the Others’ communal ground.
The hero thus symbolically enters the forbidden limit of the evil Other. The menacing
Gothic elements invade the narration now that “it [is] past seven thirty” and he imagines
his family “feel[ing] anxious” because of his delay (1956: 154). As if conducted by an
invisible bloodthirsty hand, the protagonist comes across a cyclist in the dark path, the
two passers-by misjudging “each other’s moves”. He loses his nerve when the cyclist
accidentally runs “his wheel between our friend’s legs and [falls] off the saddle, and
both [find] themselves on the road-dust” (1956: 154) and at this moment, he stops being
simply a witness to become the crucial agent of a fictionalised history: he is now a
testimonial piece of the exposure to violence, and the two men resort to a fight where
they hit and kick at each other, blindly possessed by Goddess Kali’s desire of blood.
31
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Inevitably, a gathering crowd surrounds the fighters, among which are some of
these professional instigators, shouting: “He dares to attack us in our own place! Must
teach these fellows a lesson. Do you think we are afraid?” (1956: 155). These words
mark the protagonist’s physical end. He then transmutes into a hero through his
martyrdom, reflected in the Gandhian echoes of his conciliatory thoughts: “What is it all
worth? There is no such thing as your community or mine. We are all of this country”
(1956: 155).
According to Derrida, a pure testimony is that which remains secret inside the
experiencer. The hero’s is a secret testimony whereby “no one can, in [his] place testify
what [he] do[es]” because he is attesting to his own and the Other’s pain from his
unique point of view. In Derrida’s opinion, the testimony “remains reserved for [him].
[He] must be able to keep secret precisely what [he] testif[ies] to” (1996: 30). At the
moment that the character’s experience is voiced “within a couple of hours all over the
city” (Narayan, 1956: 155), he stops providing testimony and becomes a certainty, a
piece of physical evidence confirmed by an “empirical proof”, his corpse abandoned in
a gutter. He is the “sacrificeable” victim that triggers the communal desire for blood and
racial cleansing.
However, Narayan places an ambiguous semiotic element in the hero’s breast
pocket, as he is a dubious, “impure” hero with a paradigmatic translation. To his
community, he is the excuse for retaliation and an unquestionable martyr, savagely
murdered by the community of the Others. Nevertheless, for the Others’ community,
the “kerosene ration coupon” in his pocket lays the suspicion on the victim himself
because of the reciprocal phenomenon of distrust; consequently, they view him as “a
potential assassin” (1956: 150). The text omits that, after Partition, gasoline was short
and strictly rationed by India and Pakistan’s governments, though it was plentifully
supplied to the raiders who used it to burn people and properties.
Although the omniscient narrator ironically adds that “[h]ad he been able to
speak again, our friend would have spoken a lie and saved the city, but unfortunately
this saving lie was not uttered” (1956: 155), it seems that not even the author can save
the failed hero; indeed, he treats him as a fake hero. His narrative explains the
protagonist’s last mental process, which definitively places him within the idiom of
Hindu Dharma: if he had opposed violence and favoured people’s equality and a
peaceful country, he would have acted accordingly when he was given a chance. Then,
32
CRUZ BONILLA
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------why did he remain passive and communalist? If he knew the lies that could have saved
the city, why did he remain silent? It appears that Narayan’s critique is also directed
against this character, both a victim and an anti-hero whose example should not be
followed, as it supports exclusive aspects of Hindu Dharma from a nationalist elite that
has succeeded in dividing the nation into communal compartments.
The answer to the questions is that the narrator, in fact, avoids dwelling upon the
depiction of the appalling cruelty of the slaughter and instead of choosing it for the
climax of the story, he moves into a discursive reflection on the futility of an ordinary
man’s death. His belated clairvoyance, which will be of no avail, transfigures the
protagonist into a useless martyr for no good cause and simultaneously converts the
story into a parable on the absurdity of violence. He becomes another mute victim, a
voiceless testimony, a corpse adding to the numbers of human casualties; his body will
become the empty sign which each of the communities will fill in with a different
political message, either a sacrificial victim whose death must be avenged or another
war trophy of an endless rivalry.
To conclude, the nature of the short story “Another Community” reduces the
perception of alterity in communal societies. It diverts the attention of the reader away
from Indian civil society and directs it towards sporadic outbursts of ferocious violence,
while overlooking individual relationships between the members of the community,
tiptoeing around the tightly hierarchized social system that begins in the joint family
and extends to take in the traditional caste system, economic class groups and ethnic
differentiations that constitute the basics of Dharma. Nevertheless, the protagonist
wishes to bridge the limits of Otherness in order to reduce its menacing effects, while he
would like to integrate, or at least try to minimise, the irreducible alterity that separates
the two communities. He fails to understand, however, the nature of communal violence
and the artifices that sustain it, which are essentially the struggles against the
assimilation of the Other into one single national body and the experience of a unique
communion through a hierarchized relationship of power. Ironically though, Narayan’s
artistic approach to communal violence reproduces the simplistic political discourses on
the present phenomenon of religious violence that keep appearing in the daily news.
33
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------WORKS CITED
AHMAD, AIJAZ (1992). In Theory. Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso, 1994.
BHABHA, HOMI K. (1984). “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial
Discourse”, October 28, Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis.
Spring: 125-133. DOI: 10.2307/778467.
CHATTERJEE, PARTHA (1993). The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial
Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
CHATTERJEE, PARTHA (1994). “Secularism and Toleration.” Economic and Political
Weekly 29.28: 1768-1777.
DERRIDA, JACQUES (1996). “Demeure: Fiction and Testimony.” Blanchot, Maurice. The
Instant of My Death. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2000: 15-103.
DHARWADKER, APARNA BHARGAVA (2005). Theatres of Independence: Drama, Theory,
and Urban Performance in India since 1947. Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press.
FOWLER, ROGER (1996). Linguistic Criticism. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009.
GIRARD, RENÉ (1986.) The Scapegoat. Trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore, MD, USA:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
GUHA, RANAJIT (1997). Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial
India. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
KHAIR, TABISH (2009). The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness: Ghosts from
Elsewhere. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
KUMAR, SUKRITA PAUL (2004). Narrating Partition. Texts, Interpretations, Ideas. New
Delhi: Indialog Publications.
MOHANTY, CHANDRA et al. eds. (1991). Third World Women and the Politics of
Feminism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
NARAYAN, R. K. (1956). “Another Community”. Lawley Road and Other Stories. New
Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 1967.
PARIJA, KAPILESWAR (2006). “Short Stories of R.K. Narayan: An Evaluation”, in
Khatri, Chhote Lal. Narayan: Reflections and Re-evaluation. New Delhi: Sarup
& Sons.
SEN, AMARTIA (2006). Identity and Violence. London: Penguin Books, 2007.
34
CRUZ BONILLA
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------VEER, PETER VAN DER (2004). “Transnational Religion; Hindu and Muslim
Movements.” Journal for the Studies of Religions and Ideologies 3.7. DOI:
10.1111/1471-0374.00030.
WEBER, MAX (1968). Economy and Society. An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Ed.
Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Trans. E. Fishcoff, et al. Vol. I-II. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1978.
CRUZ BONILLA is Doctor Cum Laude (2015), MA in English Literature and Linguistics
(2011) from the Universidad de Granada and she holds a degree in English Philology
from the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (Open University). Her main
research interests are focused on Indian postcolonial literature, in particular, the HinduAnglian literature of R. K. Narayan. Her studies are concerned with the representation
of Indian literature in the western world.
35
Indi@logs
Vol 3 2016, pp. 37-55, ISSN: 2339-8523
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BLOOD FOR THE GODDESS. SELF-MUTILATION RITUALS AT VAJREŚVARĪ
MANDIR, KAN
̄ GṚĀ
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
[email protected]
ABSTRACT
Several 17th century sources (European travel literature and Mughal historiography) record
the practice of self-mutilation, and possibly ritual suicide, at the Hindu temple of Vajreśvarī
(Kāngṛā, HP), an important place of pilgrimage related to the Śakti cult. Blood-spilling,
symbolizing fertility, played a central role in these sacrifices, which were discontinued in the
18th century as they became discordant with the non-violent representation of Hinduism
supported by urban elites.
KEYWORDS: blood sacrifice; Hinduism; self-mutilation; goddess; Shakti; Kangra; Himachal
Pradesh
RESUMEN Sangre para la diosa: rituales de automutilación en Vajreśvarī Mandir, Kāngṛā
Diversas fuentes literarias del siglo XVII (viajeros europeos e historiógrafos mogoles)
registran la práctica de automutilaciones, y posiblemente suicidios rituales, en el templo
hindú de Vajreśvarī (Kāngṛā, HP), un importante centro de peregrinación asociado al culto
de Śakti. El derramamiento de sangre, símbolo de fertilidad, constituía la parte central de
estos sacrificios, los cuales dejaron de realizarse en el siglo XVIII al entrar en conflicto con
la visión no violenta del hinduismo promovida por las elites urbanas.
PALABRAS CLAVE: sacrificio sangriento; hinduismo; automutilación; diosa; Shakti; Kangra;
Himachal Pradesh
The Abode of the Goddesses
Kāngṛā district, in the past an independent rājpūt state, belongs nowadays to the
territory of Himachal Pradesh,1 in Northwest India. The modern state of Himachal
contains within its borders most of the land that once formed the cluster of petty
1
In this article, I have chosen to transliterate Indian words using ISO 15919 according to modern
pronunciation, not Sanskrit pronunciation; i.e., िशव appears as Śiv, not Śiva, or शि पीठ as śaktipīṭh, not
śaktipīṭha. Certain well-known toponyms, though, are written in their standardized Hunterian
transliteration; i.e., िहमाचल देश appears as Himachal Pradesh, not Himācal Pradeś.
BLOOD FOR THE GODDESS
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------kingdoms that Victorian geographers used to name Panjab Hill States (Hutchinson and
Vogel, 1933). Crouching in between the lush Panjābī plains and the desolate TransHimalayan highlands, these states —and Kāngṛā among them— lie in the margins of
Indian geography; and let us advance that margins and periphery are concepts which
will recur in this article. Indeed, these remote territories have always been conditioned
by their geographical location: although not really far, in a straight line, from first-order
cultural and political centres such as Delhi or Lahore, historically speaking the contact
with them has tended to be somewhat loose due to their inconvenient position in the
Śivāliks and the steep Himalayan foothills. This has allowed these rājpūt states to
preserve a strong local flavour, as well as their own idiosyncrasy in political, cultural,
and religious terms.
In addition to this, Himachal enjoys a widespread reputation as a place of
pilgrimage; Hindus call the area dev bhūmi, “the abode of the gods” (Sharma, 2007: 11),
in line with the ancestral Indian belief of divinities dwelling at the summit of the
mountains. Significantly, there are plenty of Mother Goddess cult centres in the area,
the most renowned being those of Cāmuṇḍā near Dharamsala, Nainā Devī in Bilāspur
district, Baglāmukhī at Bankhaṇḍī, Cintpūrṇī in Ūnā district, Jvālāmukhī, and
Vajreśvarī2 at Kāngṛā (Jerath, 2006: 11-40; Thakur, 1997: 56). Although apparently
different goddesses —or goddesses differently named— are worshipped in these
sanctuaries, somehow they can all be regarded as manifestations of the same Mother
Goddess (Mātā Devī), or of the same “female principle”: Śakti in the jargon of
mainstream Hinduism. The concept of Śakti comprehends all the diverse forms of the
Goddess, as conflicting as they might seem: Durgā the demon slayer and Pārvatī the
perfect wife, the gentle Gaurī and the blood-thirsty Kālī (Thakur, 1997: 55-56).
Some of the most revered shrines of Śakti in the Western Himalayas are related
to the myth of Satī, Śiv’s first wife, who was credited with having immolated herself by
the procedure that bears her name —the infamous suttee that outraged both the British
colonial authorities and public opinion overseas. As the story goes, Satī’s charred body
2
As usually happens with Indian toponyms and theonyms unlinked to literary tradition, there are many
alternative spellings for the shrine’s name: Bajreśvarī, Brajeśvarī… and, in transliteration, their Hunterian
counterparts. We have chosen Vajreśvarī as it is more consistent with its Sanskrit etymology, as a
compound of vajra (“thunderbolt”, and specifically Indra’s thunderbolt) and aiśvara (“majesty”, or
“related to Śiv”). The feminine -ī ending suggests a reading of Vajreśvarī as a name of Śiv’s consort.
38
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------was dismembered and scattered all over India: a variant of the Osiriac myth that has
proven successful in so many religious systems as the foundation for relic cults. Every
spot where a piece of Satī touched the ground became a holy site, a śaktipīṭh (“seat of
Śakti”). No less than four parts of the Goddess are said to have landed within the
borders of modern Himachal Pradesh (Sharma, 2007: 102): her feet at Cintpūrṇī, her
eyes at Naina Devī, her tongue at Jvālāmukhī and her breasts3 (or just her left breast; see
Jerath, 2006: 26)4 at Vajreśvarī. If we trust the classic research of Sir James Frazer, who
identified all Osiris-type cults as fertility cults (Frazer, 1922: 362 ff.), the place where
the Goddess’ breasts are worshipped should perforce be a major centre for Śakti cult;
and, as we shall presently see, it certainly is.
The geographical setting of Kāngṛā town, capital of its homonymous district and
home to the Vajreśvarī shrine, has always been a source of confusion based on the
sources alone. Let me clarify this: there are actually two Kāngṛās, some four kilometres
away from each other. One is Old Kāngṛā, which is the settlement beneath the fortress
of Nagarkot, the former seat of political power; the other is New Kāngṛā, built around
the hill where Vajreśvarī temple rises,5 surrounded today by a maze of stalls selling
religious memorabilia. In the past, travellers used to refer to both Kāngṛās with the
name of Nagarkot. The actual Vajreśvarī mandir was completely rebuilt after the 1905
earthquake, which entirely devastated the complex.6 It must be noted that Vajreśvarī is
often linked —and repeatedly confused— with the nearby śaktipīṭh Jvālāmukhī, 7 which
lies 40 kilometres south of New Kāngṛā.
Nowadays ritual and devotional activity at Vajreśvarī revolves around a quite
standardized Durgā cult, but literary sources reveal that some 300 years ago things were
different, and the hilltop shrine at Kāngṛā was renowned as the scene for a most unusual
type of sacrifice. For this very reason, despite being located off the main commercial
3
Sometimes it is hard to realize that the part of Satī worshipped in Kāngṛā is actually her bust, due to the
many euphemisms used both by Indian and Western authors: “the upper part of her body”, “the body”…
(Vigne, 1842: 140)
4
Jerath’s main informant during his research at Vajreśvarī was the main priest of the temple, Rām Prasad.
5
Sources written centuries ago call this sacred hill Malekra or Bhavān (Vigne, 1842: 140), although these
names are unknown to our local informants.
6
The building, which was destroyed in the earthquake, dated from 1440, according to the Imperial
Gazetteer of India (vol. 14, p. 386). After 1905, the Ārya Samaj helped with massive donations to the
rebuilding of the shrine.
7
Jva̅la̅mukhı̅ (“fiery countenance”, or “fiery mouth”) is the official name, but is not widely used; the
locals usually call it Jva̅la̅jı̅.
39
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------routes of the Mughal Empire, we have many accounts of 17th century travellers and
geographers, both Muslim and Western, who were attracted to Kāngṛā, eager to witness
the prodigy that was supposed to take place at the Goddess’ temple. It roughly consisted
of a ritual where devotees put themselves into an ordeal involving self-mutilation (or
even self-immolation!) and miraculous healing (or even resurrection!). To know more
about it, we must turn to our primary sources, where we find once and again the
elements that constitute the grammar of this particular cult —but the different versions
do not completely accord, so a reconstruction of actual facts is more than difficult.
The Accounts
Probably the first notice about Vajreśvarī that can be traced in Western sources
appears in Samuel Purchas’ compilation of travel accounts, published in 1614 as
Purchas his Pilgrimage. It refers to an earlier source (but there is no way to know how
much earlier), the work of an obscure author called by Purchas Ioannes Oranus. His
description of the ongoing practices at Kāngṛā goes as follows:
Not farre from the Citie Lahor [Lahore] is an Idoll, resembling a woman, which
they call Nazar Coto [Nagarkot], framed with two heads, and six or seven armes,
and twelve or fourteene hands, one of which brandisheth a Speare, another a Club.
Hereunto resort many Pilgrims to worship, and hereof they tell many miracles; as
that many cut off their tongues, which are againe restored whole vnto them, but
remaine mute. (Purchas, 1614: 478)
In 1611, the English merchant William Finch wrote a more detailed account —
clearly biased by his own moral judgement on the basis of Protestant ethics:
[…] In which city [Nagarkot, or Negercoat in Finch’s spelling] is a famous pagod
called Je [Jai] or Durga, unto which worlds of people resort out of all parts of India.
It is a small short idoll of stone, cut in forme of a man; much is consumed in
offerings to him, in which some also are reported to cut off a piece of their tongue
and, throwing it at the idols feet, have found it whole the next day (able to lye, I am
afraid; to serve the father of lyes and lyers, how ever); yea, some out of impious
piety heere sacrifice themselves, cutting their throats and presently recovering. The
holyer the man, the sooner forsooth he is healed; some (more grievous sinners)
remaining halfe a day in paine before the divell will attend their cure. Hither they
resort to crave children, to enquire of money hidden by their parents or lost by
themselves; which, having made their offerings, by dreames in the night receive
answere, not one departing discontented. They report this pagan deity to have
beene a woman (if a holy virgin may have that name); yea, that shee still lives (the
divell shee doth) but will not shew her selfe. Divers Moores also resort to this peer
[Pers. pīr, a saint]. (Foster, 1921: 179-180)
40
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------It is worth noting that, according to Finch’s report, not only Hindus but also
Muslims (“divers Moores”) were attracted to the rituals at Vajreśvarī —and let us point
out that Muslim onlookers would have been travelling from afar, considering that, even
during the golden age of the Mughals, this part of India remained almost untouched by
the Islamification process. It was obviously the alleged miracle itself, and not the
elements of Hindu religiosity, that struck non-Hindus and Hindus alike. Most famous is
the case of Emperor Akbar himself, who heard about Vajreśvarī and wanted to attend
the ceremonies personally. Nevertheless, when he was on his way, Akbar was prevented
from doing so by a prophetic dream, as recorded by historian Abu’l-Fazl in his
Akbarnāme (written 1590-96):
One of the occurrences was that H.M. [Akbar] turned his thoughts towards
Nagarkot. When he heard of the wonders of that ancient place of pilgrimage, and
especially of the restoration there of tongues that had been cut off, his truth-seeking
heart was attracted towards that place. At this time, when he was near that spot, the
wondrous tale again occurred to him, and on the 15th (Farwardīn) he went thither
with a few special intimates to see the marvel. […] The difficulties of the way and
the rugged defiles had somewhat fatigued the companions of dominion, but from
awe of the Divine majesty —which is a powerful closer of the tongue— no one
ventured to say anything. During that night a spiritual form —which had wondrous
powers— appeared in the secret place of dreams. It recited the lofty rank of the
world's lord and restrained him from his intention. In the morning he mentioned the
vision and returned. A great delight took possession of every one. (Beveridge,
1939: vol. 3, 348)
After William Finch, the next Western account mentioning the wonder is
Edward Terry’s (1590-1660); based on the text of his A Voyage to East India (first
published 1655, although his travels date back to the decade of 1610),8 it is unclear if
Terry visited Kāngṛā himself or if he just put into writing things described by the
famous adventurer Thomas Coryat (1577-1617), whom he quotes as eye-witness:
Nagracot [Nagarkot], the chief city so called, in which there is a Chapel most richly
set forth, being ceiled and paved with plate of pure silver, most curiously imbossed
over head in several figures, which they keep exceeding bright, by often rubbing
and burnishing it; and all this cost those poor seduced Indians are at, to do honour
to an idol they keep in that chapel […]. The idol thus kept in that so richly adorned
chapel, they called Matta [Mātā Devī], and it is continually visited by those poor
blinded Infidels, who, out of the oficiousness of their devotion, cut off some part of
their tongues to offer unto it as sacrifice; which (they say) grow out again as
before: But in this I shall leave my reader to a belief, as much suspensive as is my
8
Hutchinson and Vogel (1986: 8) date Terry’s visit in 1615.
41
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------own in this particular. […] These places were seen and strictly observed by Mr.
Coryate. (Terry, 1777: 82-83)
The testimony of French traveller Jean de Thévenot (1633-1667)9 keeps in line
with the one quoted above; in its early English translation (1687) it reads like this:
There are two Pagods of great reputation in Ayoud, the one at Nagarcut [Nagarkot],
and the other at Calamac [Jvālāmukhī]; but that of Nagarcut is far more famous
than the other, because of the Idol Matta [Mātā Devī], to which it is Dedicated; and
they say that there are some Gentiles, that come not out of that Pagod without
Sacrificing part of their Body. (Thévenot, 1687: vol. 3, 62)
Travel literature and ethnographical research written in the early 19th century
(Hugel, 1845; Moorcroft and Trebeck, 1841; Vigne, 1842) cease to mention the selfmutilation ritual that constantly recurs, as shown above, in 17th-century sources. This
absence is significant, as authors such as William Moorcroft spent long periods of time
in Kāngṛā and recorded minutely historical and ethnographical facts about the region.
So we can conclude from this evidence that whatever bloody ritual was performed in the
Vajreśvarī shrine was discontinued around the mid-18th century.
Turning now to the descriptions of the ritual according to the aforementioned
sources, we find in them a group of common elements along with some contradictions.
We can summarize what we know by postulating that the 17th-century literary sources
provide evidence of an ongoing sacred activity at Vajreśvarī which featured certain acts
of self-mutilation as part of the cult of a certain goddess. But the different records do
not match regarding two crucial questions: a) what kind of mutilation? b) which
goddess? Let us try to find some answers.
Mother of Tongues
Some of the quotes above illustrate how, “out of the oficiousness of their
devotion”, some individuals would cut out their own tongue, or a significant part of it,
as an offering to the Goddess. And, what is more, the accounts of Ioannes Oranus,
Abu’l-Fazl, Finch and Terry record that, according to local belief, the severed tongues
of devotees would grow back in an extraordinarily short period of time; Terry is the
only one among them that, reasonably enough, expresses scepticism on this miraculous
9
Hutchinson and Vogel (1986: 9) consider uncertain whether Thévenot ever visited Nagarkot.
42
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------healing. It must be realized that, in William Finch’s 17th-century mindset, such a feat
might have been possible due to the supernatural powers of the “divell”, and we must
concede that, out of fanaticism, it is perfectly plausible that the devotees were actually
gashing and even cutting out their tongues; but no matter how strong their faith was, it
is clinically impossible to have a severed tongue regrown overnight. Should we think,
then, that the self-sacrificers were performing a fake mutilation, a display of visual
trickery akin to the famous Indian rope trick, which likewise featured explicit
mutilations and a happy end?10 The answer is no. It is not possible because the rope
trick, gruesome and gory as it may seem, was in essence an act of entertainment, while
self-mutilation rituals in Kāngṛā were religious practices performed within a sacred
space. Sacrality implies the observance of a protocol that, although not necessarily
excluding trickery and deceit, would not accept deceptive effects that can be looked
upon as gimmicks for their own sake, as those staged by prestidigitators or illusionists
in a secular performance. Nevertheless, ritual substitution, as a symbolic device of
make-believe, could have been perfectly admissible in a religious context: that is to say,
mimicking the act of cutting one’s own tongue11 —and perhaps gashing it so that blood
spurts out— and offering the divinity a substitute accepted by tradition, i.e. an animal’s
tongue or any other token.
It is possible as well that the report of full tongues being severed is simply an
exaggeration of some practices that involved self-mortification —including tongue
gashing and piercing— just as we find nowadays in South India, related to the cult of
Kālī (Obeyesekere, 1981: 158), or in the well-known Thaipusam festival celebrated by
Hindu communities of Southeast Asia and on the islands of Mauritius and Réunion.
Field research made by Colleen Ward (1984) on self-torturing participants of
Thaipusam has shed some light on psychic and physiological processes experienced by
10
In its classic form, the rope trick was performed by a sorcerer and his assistant, a boy. First the
magician hurled a rope end up to the sky, so the rope remained up straight, hanging from an invisible
point in the dark (so we have to assume that the trick was practiced by night). Then the sorcerer had his
assistant climb the rope, so he disappeared too. When the boy failed to come back at his master’s calling,
the angry sorcerer would climb the rope himself with a knife. The bewildered spectators watched how the
boy’s limbs fell to the ground one by one, his head last. Then the magician descended, with bloodsplattered clothes, and at the request of the audience he put back together the boy’s limbs and restored
him to life. (Eliade, 1960: 682-684)
11
As witnessed by anthropologist David Pocock in a Kālī ritual in Gujarat:
The most dramatic appearance was reserved for the end when the bhuvo snatched up a
rusty and blunt old sword from the shrine and, pressing its edge on to his tongue with both
hands sucked vigorously at the blood which was supposed to be flowing. (cit. in
Obeyesekere, 1981: 154)
43
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------people undergoing such an ordeal, and to a certain extent it can help us to understand
and reconstruct the practices performed at Vajreśvarī some three hundred years ago. Dr.
Ward concludes that someone who puts himself into an altered state of consciousness
—by means of what Mircea Eliade, in his classic work about shamanism, called
“techniques of ecstasy”— can actually endure large amounts of pain; also, an individual
can minimize bleeding, or even withhold it completely, in mortification practices that
may include piercing the tongue with skewers and hooks.12 But, as I shall point out later
in this article, it is not likely that bloodshed was to be avoided: on the contrary, blood,
as a fecundatory principle, constituted the very essence of the sacrifice.
But why should tongue-cutting be part of a Goddess cult? To begin with, an act
of self-mutilation seems perfectly fit, by analogy, for worship at a śaktipīṭh: a shrine
built in memory of a divine being that was torn apart, as the myth goes. Besides, we
must remember that one of the most prominent features of the Goddess in her fierce
aspect (i.e. Kālī) is her lolling red tongue.13 But let us pose a third speculation:
according to Molu Rām Thakur (1997: 63), the Goddess at Kāngṛā is also worshipped
under the advocation of Devī Bakbani, goddess of eloquence. It goes without saying
that the organ of eloquence par excellence is the tongue. So, following a bhakti-tinted
devotional logic, sacrificing one’s own tongue to the divinity would be the best way to
improve eloquence, as exemplified by a folk legend about the poet and playwright
Kālidās, the literary father of Śakuntalā:
Kalidasa was a simpleton whose wife could not tolerate him. Determined to win
her affection he invoked Kali by offering her his own head (or tongue) as sacrifice.
The goddess was so pleased that she restored Kalidasa to life. She then swallowed
him and vomited him out. By entering the body of the goddess, Kalidasa was
cleansed of all stupidity. He emerged as a talented poet. No sooner was he reborn
from the mouth of Kali than he began composing a hymn in praise of the goddess.
(Mohanty, 2004: 58)
The whole story was probably born as a pun on the poet’s name: most suitably,
Sanskrit Kālī + dāsa means “servant of Kālī”; but the ritual element of voluntarily
12
“Most devotees appear to control both pain and bleeding, aided by the sharpness of the hooks and the
administration of holy ash to the points of insertion, as well as by the trance state itself.” (Ward, 1984:
321)
13
This is the explanation given by a practitioner of self-mutilation rituals in South India to anthropologist
Gananath Obeyesekere: “But why the tongue, I persisted? ‘Because Mother Kali’s own tongue protrudes,
and so she placed the knife on my tongue [during possession trance].’” (Obeyesekere, 1981: 158)
44
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------offering a part of oneself to the Goddess is there: one’s tongue, or head, as we shall
presently see.
Ritual Self-Beheading: Off With My Head!
Bhakti, traditionally associated with folk Hinduism, puts a stress on blind faith
as the most meritorious quality of a devotee; and certainly an exceedingly large amount
of faith is needed in order to believe that someone can have his head chopped off and
live to tell the tale. But self-beheading, and a subsequent restoration to life, happens to
be a recurrent topic in the mythic contents of śakti cults, particularly in connection with
the fiercest manifestations of the Goddess (Kālī, Cāmuṇḍā, and the like). In an image
that blurs the oppositions between victim, sacrificer, and oblation-receiving divinity, the
goddess Chinnamastā is typically pictured right after her act of self-beheading, holding
her own freshly severed head, her tongue sticking out to drink the blood that squirts out
of her neck. (Kooij, 1999: 249 ff.; Kinsley, 1987: 172 ff.)
Besides William Finch’s account, already quoted in this article, there is a folk
legend worth mentioning in relation to the mandir at Vajreśvarī: that of the holy man
Dhyānu Bhagat, contemporary to Akbar, who allegedly cut off his own head as a
sacrifice to Durgā; some say this happened at Vajreśvarī, others at its sister shrine
Jvālāmukhī (Doniger, 2009: 561), both of them being important seats of Durgā worship.
At the Vajreśvarī complex, there is a slab of stone —smeared with a thick orange layer
of turmeric, vermillion and ghee paste— depicting Dhyānu Bhagat’s ghastly offering
(Jerath, 2006: 27). The story became so popular that they made it into a film, a
devotional movie directed and protagonized by Panjābī film star/singer/wrestler Dārā
Singh14. The film reaches its climax when a standing Dhyānu Bhagat stretches out his
arms, holding his freshly cut head in his hands and presenting it to the cult image of
Durgā at the shrine; at once, the Goddess materializes as a smiling young lady wrapped
in a shiny spangled sari and restores Dhyānu’s life and physical integrity. 15
14
Dhyānu Bhagat (1978); originally in Panjābī, it was dubbed in Hindī in 1979 and released under the
title Bhakti mẽ Śakti.
15
There are many different variants of Dhyānu Bhagat’s story. Aśok Jerath records a version in which
Dhyānu, “a staunch disciple of the goddess”, put himself into a trance, severed his own head and offered
it to Durgā no less than six times; but then “the goddess warned his disciple in dream that she would not
bless him for the seventh time”. Nevertheless, Dhyānu beheaded himself one last time and died in a state
of bliss. So this version actually ends in ritual suicide. (Jerath, 2006: 27)
45
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------At the end, the tale of Dhyānu Bhagat provides an etiological myth for sacrificial
substitution in the Durgā pūjā, as narrated in a recent devotional pamphlet:
If he [Dhyānu Bhagat] wished any other item, he should tell her [the Goddess].
Dhyanu fell at her feet. […] He only wished that the devotees need not be put to
such a severe test. He had offered his head. But all could not do that. He requested
that ordinary gifts of the devotees, should be taken as her offerings. She agreed to
that and told that in future only a coconut would be accepted, as an offering.
(Chaturvedi, 2001: 47)
Dry coconuts are, in fact, customary pūjā offerings in present-day pan-Indian
Durgā cult, but we must keep in mind, as Dhyānu Bhagat’s story exemplifies, that they
are substitutes of human heads that were offered to the Goddess back in the past
(Doniger, 2009: 561). Further evidence for this substitutional operation can be found
today in the nearby śaktipīṭha complex of Jvālāmukhī, where an act of mock beheading
is performed as the central part of a darśan ritual16 of goddess Durgā. Pilgrims wait in
line and walk through an initiatory circuit inside the sanctuary (including a narrow
passage between two massive rocks, the Mother Goddess’ thighs: a ritual performance
of rebirth) before eventually reaching the mūrti, the cult image itself. One by one,
pilgrims ceremonially bow their heads and an assistant hits them gently with a cane on
the back of their necks. So, at least symbolically, heads still keep rolling at the Goddess’
feet in Kāngṛā district.17
Reconstructing the Ritual
Leaving the details aside, we can therefore agree that what used to happen in
Vajreśvarī and seized the attention of Europeans and Mughals alike was some sort of
visually shocking self-mutilation ritual dedicated to a local Mother Goddess —the
literal translation of Mātā Devī, as Terry and Thévenot explicitly call her. Modern
16
In Hinduism, the rite of darśan (Sanskrit darśana, “gaze”) is a two-directional means of
communication (divinity-devotee) based on eye contact between the pilgrim and the cult image (mūrti). It
is said to be bidirectional because the devotee sees the divinity and, at the same time, the divinity sees the
devotee.
17
This was not an isolated phenomenon; as specialist David Kinsley wrote, “Iconography and literature
contain many examples of people who sacrifice their own blood and pieces of their flesh to goddesses;
ritual suicide, usually self-decapitation, is also well documented as an act of devotion to goddesses. […]In
Kṣemendra’s Bṛḥatkathāmañjarī a washerman and his brother-in-law cut off their heads in a fit of
devotional fervour to the goddess Gaurī. In an inscription dated A. D. 991 from the Kannada area we hear
of a loyal subject named Katega who offered his head to the goddess Guṇḍadabbe to fulfill a vow when
the king succeeded in fathering a son. Four similar scenes from Pallava and early Chola sculpture depict
kneeling male devotees offering their heads to a four-armed goddess.” (Kinsley, 1987: 145)
46
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Hinduism, in its tendency towards monism, has been working on strengthening the
bonds between the manifold folk goddesses, considering them all as manifestations of
one and the same Śakti. But we have to keep in mind that this is a modern construction,
so the unique nature of the cult and identity of every local Mother Goddess is not to be
neglected. Today the brāhmaṇ priests at the temple prefer to call her Vajreśvarī Devī
(just “The Goddess of Vajreśvarī”), in order not to raise any doubt regarding her
individuality (Sharma, 2007: 103).
Something remains to be said about the nature of the cult image that received the
sacrifice. In this respect, the 17th-century sources previously quoted must not be
followed to the letter, as they are strongly biased: outsider views on Indian cults and
beliefs were projected on their versions of whatever happened at Vajreśvarī. For that
reason, most of them insist on the fact that the ceremonies were performed in front of an
anthropomorphic statue of the Goddess (“cut in forme of a man”) —an “idoll”, or a
mūrti, to use the Hindu term for it. Both Christians and Muslims typically used to regard
Hindu belief as a religion of idolaters, therefore tending to project their preconceptions
on to their descriptions of the ritual. In an early display of Orientalistic prejudice, what
they expected to find there was an impressive, many-limbed, anthropomorphic idol
(“framed with two heads, and six or seven armes, and twelve or fourteene hands”)
receiving its gory tributes: a stereotype fitting to the blood-thirsty Moloch of the Old
Testament. But, although there are —and certainly there were— several striking, and
artful, images of many-limbed goddesses lining the courtyard walls of Vajreśvarī, none
of them is the cult image that, according to the believers, endows the shrine with a
unique sacredness. The real cult object does not resemble a woman at all: it is a piṇḍī, a
shapeless lump of rock covered in orange paste on which a pair of eyes have been
roughly painted (Jerath, 2006: 23). Local tradition says that it is Satī’s left breast, torn
off by Viṣṇu and petrified as it touched the ground. This is undoubtedly the object onto
which the most relevant rituals converge at the shrine, nowadays as well as three
hundred years ago and probably longer before: Persian historian Ferishta (1560-1620)
records that this object, which he calls Sheokot Pindi, was already worshipped near
Nagarkot prior to the time of Mohammed (Briggs, 1829: lxxviii). It is, then, most
probable that Western visitors to Kāngṛā were more impressed by the colourful
sculptures —made by man, not by God— scattered all about the temple complex than
47
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------by the uncomely and modest piṇḍī lying in the inner sanctum, failing to realize that the
petrified breast —made by God, not by man— was the real cult image.
By comparison with other similar practices still running today in peripheric
Hindu communities (e.g. those performed at the Thaipusam festival in Malaysia), it is
possible to reconstruct the process of the ritual to some extent. It has to be emphasized
that what follows is based on my own conjectures, on the grounds of a comparative
study of ritual forms, without any textual basis to support it. However, taking into
consideration the available data, I regard the presence of analogy between the extinct
practices at Vajreśvarī and present-day Thaipusam as a valuable working hypothesis.
Thus, the participants would prepare themselves for the sacrifice through a previous
period of fasting and penance that would help them achieve the state of consciousness
necessary for the act of self-mutilation. As it was a practice wherein, as I have
discussed, the spilling of blood was mandatory, being associated with the fertility myth
of the dismemberment of Satī and with the worship of the Goddess’ breasts, all selfsacrificing participants must have been male. 18 Women’s blood is related to menstrual
blood, hence considered as an impure substance either in folk or high-brow Hinduism,
with the exception, of course, of left-hand Tantra rituals, provocatively focused on
“forbidden” fluids. So the very essence of the ritual was blood, and it was smeared on
sacred objects. The ubiquitous vermillion, turmeric and ghee paste that covers cult
images nowadays is an obvious substitute for the layer of clotted blood that once
dripped down their surface. 19
However, besides the display of sheer faith, devotion, and self-control, did the
participants expect any personal benefit from the ritual? As Colleen Ward summarizes:
Hindus have historically placed great value on ecstatic trance and development of
supernatural powers through austerity. In addition, there has been a traditional
predisposition to compel the gods to fulfill requests through extreme practices of
self-discipline and self-mortification. (Ward, 1984: 326)
18
In his study of the rituals prescribed by the Tārā-tantraṃ, A. K. Maitra writes: “The offering of blood
from the body of the devotee is held to be an offering of real efficacy as distinguished from the offering
of blood of animals. […] But female devotees have been distinctly forbidden to offer blood” (Maitra,
1913: 20). The interdiction of female participation in blood-related rituals of the Goddess is a fact
neglected by the wave of new age Western feminists that claim Durgā and the śakti goddesses as role
models for an empowered and free modern woman. (Amazzone, 2012)
19
As observed by Diana L. Eck. (cit. in Kinsley, 1987: 240)
48
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Finch recorded some of the requests that Vajreśvarī devotees used to make:
wealth and offspring, obviously the latter being the typical boon a goddess of fertility is
expected to grant. These are the same type of petitions requested from the divinity by
many participants in the self-torture practices of Thaipusam in Malaysia; others put
themselves into the ordeal in fulfillment of a vow (Ward, 1984: 318).
Scholars have hypothesized that Mother Goddess cults in the Indian
subcontinent have a pre-Indoeuropean origin; in the Vedic tradition female deities play
minor roles. The inclusion of Śakti goddesses as major members of the Hindu pantheon
seems to be a later development of the brahminical religion, the result of a process of
syncretism of Indo-Aryan texts and local beliefs. That is why the places where Mother
Goddess cults have remained more powerful are usually to be found in peripheral
contexts, far from the centers of “official” brahminical culture and religion: either in the
social periphery —lower castes20— or in the geographical periphery —South India,
Bengal, the mountain regions, Southeast Asia. As I have pointed out before, the hill
state of Kāngṛā lies at the margins of the Indian world; due to this, it became a perfect
milieu for the preservation of an ancient system of rituals and beliefs centered in a local
Goddess. It remains for us to evaluate the causes that led to the discontinuity of selfmutilation rituals in Vajreśvarī.
Sanitizing the Cult
Over the last two hundred years, Hinduism has experienced a major
transformation. On the one hand, local beliefs all over India have become more
centralized and subject to attempts of systematization, difficult though it may be, taking
into account the overwhelming heterogeneity of cults within the subcontinent. On the
other hand, from the early 19th century on, “Renaissance” Hindus21 — adherents to the
reform movements such as Ārya Samāj, Brāhmo Samāj, Vedānta Society and Hindu
urban elites in general— have been most reluctant to allow a continuity of those aspects
of folk Hinduism that clashed with their cosmopolitan, Western-friendly conception of
the Hindu creed. The foremost of these uncomfortable aspects was the violence
20
Like the Kālī-worshipping Śabaras, a tribe of primitive hunters, as described in Bāṇabhaṭṭa’s
Kādambarī and Vākpati’s Gauḍavaho. (Kinsley, 1987: 117)
21
I use the term coined by Austrian anthropologist Aghenanda Bharati: “Renaissance Hinduism [is]
associated with modern, urbanized, reformed, and to a certain extent Westernized spirituality associated
with such teachers as Ramakrishna and Vivekananda.” (Newell, 2011: 33)
49
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------embedded in many traditional religious practices, namely self-torture and animal
sacrifice (Caldwell, 2003: 262). Activities such as these stand in straightforward
contradiction with the “harmlessness” principle of ahiṃsā: during the struggle for
independence, Hinduism wanted to publicize itself in a globalizing world by projecting
an image of pacifism and nonviolence. Cleansing folk Hinduism of its “R-rated” sides is
a slow process that still goes on nowadays. Animal sacrifice has been officially banned
in Himachal Pradesh as recently as 2014,22 and controversy still rages on over this
decision of the High Court.
Self-mutilation practices, like those once observed at Vajreśvarī, stand in a more
ambiguous relation to the ahiṃsā principle, as they deal with self-inflicted violence,
which is basically a manner of self-mortification; and self-mortification is deeply linked
to asceticism, so dear to Hindu religious life. The apparently pointless violence —
suffering for its own sake— of self-mutilation and self-immolation practices in India
have been haunting the Western imaginary since the early descriptions by European
travellers of ritual suicide in Orissa, where devotees threw themselves under the wheels
of the cart of Jagannāth:23 a word that got standardized in English as juggernaut,
standing for a ruthless advancing force that crushes everything in its path. Ruthless and
diabolical: such is precisely the colonial image of Hindu gods and goddesses as
divinities rejoicing in destruction, widow-burning and bloody rituals —a stereotype
perpetuated in 20th century popular culture through films like Gunga Din (directed by
George Stevens, 1939) and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (directed by Steven
Spielberg, 1984) (Kotwal, 2005; Caldwell, 2003: 250-251). The colonial sensationalist
construction of a blood-stained Hinduism of thugees and juggernauts is exactly what
Indian urban elites wanted to exorcize, sanitizing every element of folk rituals and
beliefs that could misleadingly point in that direction.
22
23
“Indian court bans animal sacrifice”, The Guardian (UK), 2 September 2014.
Its most famous description is that of Mandeville’s Travels:
And they set this idol upon a car with great reverence […] and they lead him about the
city with great solemnity. […] And some of them [the pilgrims] fall down under the wheels
of the car, and let the car go over them, so that they be dead anon. And some have their
arms or their limbs all to-broken, and some the sides. And all this do they for love of their
god, in great devotion. And them thinketh that the more pain, and the more tribulation that
they suffer for love of their god, the more joy they shall have in another world.
(Mandeville, c.1375: 117).
50
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Further proof of this is the fact that in Malaysia, a Muslim country where Hindu
communities stay preeminently in a rural background and the influence of Hindu urban
elites on them is not as strong as in India, bloody self-mortification rituals have
remained at the core of certain festivals, like Thaipusam (Ward, 1984: 317). There, after
undergoing an initiation and entering into a trance, devotees pierce their bodies with
hooks and skewers and endure various forms of penance and self-torture. The Indian
advocates of an aseptic sanātan dharm have tried their best to avoid any linkage of such
type of rituals, clearly akin to those happening in Vajreśvarī around the year 1600, to
their own view of a politically correct Hinduism, suitable for all audiences.
Some scholars have proposed that this transformation of Hindu religion was
triggered by its encounter with Protestant morals and British public opinion, so
“sanitized” modern Hinduism would be a by-product of colonialism (Pennington,
2005). But, despite the undeniable influence of Western exposure in the development of
Hinduism over the last two hundred years, our case exemplifies that the cleansing
process that aimed to supress bloody rituals in peripheral cults is an inside conflict
which started much before the colonial era. My diachronic study of literary sources
concerning ritual activity at the Vajreśvarī mandir (see above) has shown that it was
widely reported during the first half of the 17th century, but we can infer from the
analysis of later documents that self-mutilation rites had been permanently discontinued
somewhere in the 18th century. Lacking textual evidence about any activity in the
temple for a period spanning more than a hundred years, we are struck by a complete
disappearance of descriptions of the ritual in Kāngṛā-related travel literature dating from
late 18th century onwards. Detailed and valuable eye-witness accounts like those of
George Forster (published in 1798), William Moorcroft (1841), Godfrey Vigne (1842)
or Charles von Hügel (1845) do not say a single word concerning such a noticeable
issue; a significant omission, which offers a stern contrast with its status as a wellknown local attraction in the aforementioned 17th century sources. The sudden
cessation of centuries-old rituals within a relatively short period of around a hundred
years strikes us as puzzling, and forces us to reconsider the generalizations that we have
just discussed about the reasons that made this type of acts of devotion sink into
oblivion. The fact is that, prior to the arrival of the reform movements of the 19th
century, the local cult at Kāngṛā had already suppressed its most controversial features.
51
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Such a development, pointing towards a sanitized Hinduism much before this became
the official trend, can be explained by two rival hypotheses: a) the changes came from
outside, which means that the conflict between local cults (featuring violent practices
from time immemorial) and urban elites (supporting ahiṃsā and the textual tradition)
already existed long before the foundation of Ārya Samaj and the like; b) the
suppression of violent elements in Vajreśvarī could perfectly be part of an internal line
of development, regardless of external influences or pressures. Neither of these
explanations is wholly satisfactory. Our best chance to understand the decline and fall
of the blood rituals at Vajreśvarī lies in a combination of both viewpoints. Keeping this
in mind, further research on the subject would be needed in order to shed some light on
the circumstances and particular reasons behind it.
As we have seen, the strategy for reducing ritual violence has focused on a
policy of substitutions: 24 coconuts for heads, vermillion paste for blood, and so on. This
way, ritual violence apparently disappears; but, as physical laws say about matter,
violence can be considered an energy that cannot be destroyed, but just displaced —or
transformed. René Girard theorized that the violent elements in religion are an
institutionalized resource needed by human groups in order to get rid of their aggressive
instincts, which otherwise would still need to be discharged somewhere else (Girard,
1972: 12 ff.). Thus, the violence of sacrifice is a way of harnessing and controlling the
outbursts of violence that are inherent to the human species. It is tempting to think that
Girard was not wrong at all when we think of modern Hinduism: bloody ceremonies —
like those at Vajreśvarī— have been sanitized in the name of ahiṃsā, while at the same
time religious violence has increased dramatically, as shown in the ongoing tensions
between Hindus and Muslims in contemporary India.
24
About patterns of substitution in Hindu ritual, see Das, 2013: 19-20.
52
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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PURCHAS, SAMUEL (1614). Purchas his Pilgrimage, or Relations of the World and the
Religions Observed in All Ages and Places Discovered, from the Creation unto
This Present, London: William Stansby.
SHARMA, B. R. (2007). Gods of Himachal Pradesh, Delhi: Indus Publishing Company /
Institute of Integrated Himalayan Studies.
54
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------TERRY, EDWARD (1777). A Voyage to East-India, London: J. Wilkie.
THAKUR, MOLU RAM (1997). Myths, Rituals and Beliefs in Himachal Pradesh, Delhi:
Indus Publishing Company.
THÉVENOT, JEAN (1687). The Travels of Monsieur de Thevenot into the Levant, London:
H. Clark.
VIGNE, GODFREY (1842). Travels in Kashmir, Ladak, Iskardo, the Countries Adjoining
the Mountain-course of the Indus, and the Himalaya, North of the Panjab, vol.
1, London: Henry Colburn.
WARD, COLLEEN (1984). “Thaipusam in Malaysia: A Psycho-Anthropological Analysis
of Ritual Trance, Ceremonial Possession and Self-Mortification Practices”,
Ethos, Vol. 12, Nº 4: 307-334.
ALEJANDRO JIMÉNEZ CID is a PhD Student in the Departament of Ancient History,
Faculty of Geography and History at the Complutense University of Madrid.
55
Indi@logs
Vol 3 2016, pp. 57-79, ISSN: 2339-8523
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------REFLEJOS DE VIOLENCIA Y POLÍTICA INTERNACIONAL EN LA PINTURA
ABSTRACTA CONTEMPORÁNEA DE NEPAL: UNA CUESTIÓN SIN RESOLVER
ANDREA DE LA RUBIA
[email protected]
Recibido: 13-09-2015
Aceptado: 23-02-2016
RESUMEN
Desde que las nuevas ideologías libertarias y democráticas propias de occidente llegaron a
Nepal a través de India, la sociedad nepalí sufrió una serie de cambios que se vieron
inevitablemente reflejados en una nueva oleada artística. Los pintores nepalíes adoptaron los
estilos occidentales -en particular el realismo y, a partir de los cincuenta, la abstracción- como
medios innovadores para representar el ambiente de violencia, en un siglo caracterizado por
revuelta, la subversión, y el malestar en el país.
PALABRAS CLAVE: Arte Nepalí, Democracia, Abstracción, Globalización, Híbrido, Censura,
Modernidad
ABSTRACT Reflections of Violence and International Policy in Modern Abstract Painting of
Nepal: an Unsolved Question
Since the new libertarian and democratic ideologies typical of the West arrived in Nepal through
India, the Nepalese society experienced a series of changes that were unavoidably reflected in a
new artistic wave. The Nepalese painters adopted the Western styles -particularly realism and,
from the fifties, abstraction- as innovative mediums to represent the environment of violence, in
a century characterized by the revolution, subversion and general discomfort in the country.
KEYWORDS: Nepali Art, Democracy, Abstraction, Globalization, Hybrid, Censorship,
Modernism
La cordillera del Himalaya -residencia de dioses- ha sido considerada desde
antaño un lugar caracterizado por su espiritualidad y pacíficas gentes. Debido a su
situación geográfica, Nepal es el país que más territorio de dicha cordillera abarca; por
lo que tanto sus costumbres diarias, como la manera en que su sociedad se construye en
REFLEJOS
DE VIOLENCIA Y POLÍTICA INTERNACIONAL EN LA PINTURA ABSTRACTA
CONTEMPORÁNEA DE NEPAL
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------comunidad, se basan en las creencias religiosas características de la zona. Creencias a
través de las que el arte es comprendido (y empleado) como una herramienta para
trascender al mundo de la divinidad. Consecuentemente, podría decirse que los límites
entre arte y religión están tan interconectados con la vida diaria del país que a veces
resulta difícil marcar la diferencia.
A lo largo de los tiempos, la cultura nepalí se ha ido desarrollando a partir de las
influencias hinduistas y budistas provenientes del norte de India y, aunque el proceso de
asimilación ha sido distinto en cada una de sus etnias (Vaidya, 1993: 10), el paralelismo
en cuanto a la evolución de las culturas de India y Nepal es algo que debe ser tenido en
cuenta, a la hora comprender la historia y estética del país. Tanto en el hinduismo como
en el budismo se aboga por la no-violencia, el amor y el respeto a todo ser vivo; por lo
que los países de la zona han vivido bajo estas premisas, firmemente establecidas, hasta
el desarrollo de la contemporaneidad. En efecto, tras la llegada de los británicos al sur
de Asia una nueva forma de pensar, revolucionaria y reivindicativa, comenzó a
fraguarse en la mente de los asiáticos; hasta que llegó un momento en que el Reino de
Nepal se vio flaqueado por dos grandes potencias en desarrollo: la región tibetana de la
República Popular China y la India poscolonial. El rápido desarrollo de las vías de
comunicación por tierra y aire entre dichos países vecinos, así como la llegada de las
nuevas tecnologías, facilitaron el fenómeno de la contemporaneidad en Nepal;
significando todo ello un antes y un después para la cultura tradicional del país de los
dioses (Waldschmidt, 1969: 10).
Al verse inmiscuidos en tal proceso de transición, los artistas nepalíes no
dudaron en aprovechar la oportunidad para romper con las “normas del arte”, por tantos
siglos establecidas, comenzando a experimentar con las nuevas técnicas y pensamientos.
De esta manera apareció en los cincuenta el arte abstracto como marca característica de
un “nuevo Nepal”. Y es que, aunque es cierto que la abstracción simbólica ya existía
desde antaño como forma de veneración divina y espiritual (Harper, 2011: 59-60), la
pintura contemporánea se caracterizó por la ruptura con dicha simbología en favor de la
libertad de expresión política e individual del artista.
La llegada de la modernidad y el arte realista “occidental”
El modernismo en Nepal comenzó en el siglo XVIII, cuando el rey de la etnia de
los Gorkha, Prithvi Narayan Shah (1722-1775), emprendió una campaña de conquista
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ANDREA DE LA RUBIA
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------por las diferentes zonas del terreno y, unificándolas, creó el Reino de Nepalarajya
(Vaidya, 1993: 126-135). Paralelamente, la Compañía Británica de las Indias Orientales
ya había comenzado a ejercer su influencia en India, la cual también se encontraba
dividida en pequeños reinos. Aprovechándose de la situación, la Compañía estableció
afinidades y pactos con los distintos rajás, ganando cada vez más poder en el territorio
general (Fernández del Campo, 2013: 367-369).1 Poco a poco, los británicos
expandieron su imperio hasta que llegaron a Nepal, donde sufrieron un encontronazo
con el valeroso ejército de los Gorkha. Esta situación culminaría con la guerra AngloNepalí (1814-1816) y la firma del Tratado de Sigauli, a través del cual, a cambio de su
independencia, el Reino de Nepal perdió una considerable cantidad de territorio
fronterizo -como el preciado Darjeeling- y la Embajada Británica acabó por ser
establecida en la capital de Katmandú (Kramer, 2010: 43-45).
Dicho evento marcó un antes y un después en las relaciones internacionales de
Nepal, que si bien continuaba manteniendo la precaución y el recelo ante la invasión
británica, comenzó a ejercer una nueva política de amistad y favoritismo por la cultura
característica de occidente, especialmente a partir de 1850 bajo el mandato de los Rana.
Asimismo, a través de la Embajada Británica comenzaron a llegar científicos y
antropólogos europeos que deseaban descubrir los “misterios” del país de los dioses.
Mr. Brian Houghton Hodgson fue uno de los más relevantes para la historia del arte
nepalí puesto que, al contratar a Raj Man Singh Chitrakar como dibujante para sus
estudios sobre flora y fauna del Himalaya, introdujo el innovador concepto del “arte
realista” en Nepal (Joshi, 2005: 3-19) (Imagen 1).2
1
La Compañía Británica de las Indias Orientales fue fundada en 1599 con propósitos comerciales entre
Europa y el sur de Asia.
2
Pero a pesar de que Raj Man Singh empleaba la técnica de la acuarela y la perspectiva tridimensional
característica de occidente, la meticulosidad y el colorido característico en su obra refleja la carrera de este
pintor, entrenado en la pintura Pahuba tradicional nepalí.
59
REFLEJOS
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Imagen 1) Raj Man Singh Chitrakar. Principios del S. XIX.
Mientras tanto, en India comenzaban a sembrarse las semillas de la discordia. En
1857 se produjo la Rebelión de los Cipayos, 3 lo cual llevó a la Reina Victoria a abolir la
Compañía de las Indias Orientales y tomar el control del Imperio por sí misma. A partir
de entonces comenzaron a construirse enormes palacios al estilo occidental en la ciudad
de Calcuta, fundada en el siglo XVII como centro de comercio. Pronto, la emergente
moda europea fue adoptada por la élite india, quien comenzó a comisionar la
producción de paisajes y retratos realistas al óleo que simbolizaban su poder (Fernández
del Campo, 2013: 369-74).4 Esta tendencia artística no tardaría en imponerse también
entre los círculos elitistas de Nepal que, desde la destitución del poder de los Shah en la
Masacre de Kot de 1846, se encontraba bajo el mandato del General Jung Bahadur Rana
(1806-1877) (Kansakar & Shreshtra, 1974: 21, 22).5
Al contrario que los Shah, los Rana de Nepal mantuvieron una relación de
cooperación y cordialidad hacia los británicos de India durante su mandato, lo cual
limitó las relaciones de Nepal con el resto de la comunidad internacional. Esta política
de aislamiento resultaba beneficiosa tanto para los Rana como para los británicos ya
que, de esta forma, los primeros salvaguardaban su gobierno autocrático al evitar la
entrada de ideas revolucionarias al país, mientras que los segundos impedían la
intromisión de otros países en Nepal, como lugar estratégico (Amatya, 2004: 12-35).
3
Los "Cipayos" eran los soldados indios al servicio del ejército británico en el país. La rebelión estalló
cuando los soldados indios se percataron de que los cartuchos que utilizaban estaban engrasados con
grasa de cerdo y de vaca, animales sagrados para ellos.
4
Esto trajo importantes cambios en el estatus de los artistas, ya que por tradición siempre habían
pertenecido a los rangos más bajos de la escala social.
5
La Masacre de Kot fue un golpe de estado en el cual Jung Bahadur Rana destituyó a los Shah y tomó el
poder por la fuerza. El control de los Rana se establecería, desde entonces, durante los siguientes cien
años.
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ANDREA DE LA RUBIA
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------La poca cultura occidental que podía llegar a Nepal por aquellos tiempos estaba
limitada a la Corte en Palacio, por lo que el tradicional marco social nepalí permaneció
casi inalterado durante los cien años de gobierno Rana en el país. A través de la
construcción de palacios, grandes retratos y escenas de caza, los Rana utilizaron la
simbología de poder que les otorgaba el estilo occidental para reforzar su estatus, no
sólo entre la población nepalí, sino también de cara al Raj británico en India (Bangdel,
2011: 47-59). La moda elitista en Nepal comenzó especialmente cuando el General Jung
Bahadur Rana viajó a Londres y París, justo al inicio de su mandato en 1850, llevando
consigo a un grupo de artistas Citrakar (pintores) para que aprendiesen las técnicas del
retrato realista (Rana,1980: 118-143). Entre los elegidos para acompañar al Maharajá en
este histórico viaje destacó Bhaju Man Chitrakar (1817-1874) quien jugó un importante
papel en el desarrollo artístico nepalí, ya que no sólo asimiló las nuevas técnicas sino
que además las adaptó a la pintura tradicional, expandiendo las posibilidades hacia
confines hasta entonces insospechados (Bhaukajee, 1988: 3). La siguiente imagen
muestra una de las pocas obras de Bhaju Man que conocemos a día de hoy (Imagen 2).
En ella se advierte la fusión entre el arte mogol, característico de la miniatura
tradicional India, con el estilo realista; especialmente en lo que respecta al rostro del
Maharajá que se encuentra de lado, no de perfil.
(Imagen 2) Bhaju Man Chitrakar. Siglo XIX. Cortesía de Sudarshan Bikram Rana
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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chandra Man Singh Maskey (1900-1984) y Tej Bahadur Chitrakar (1898-1971)
son otros dos artistas a tener en cuenta en el transcurso de esta historia.
Económicamente apoyados por el gobierno de los Rana, ambos se especializaron en el
arte del retrato a través de la Government School of Arts de Calcuta en 1927,6 siendo por
tanto los primeros pintores de Nepal en recibir una educación artística formal fuera del
país. En los años cuarenta, el Primer Ministro Juddha Sumsheree Rana (1875-1952)
estableció la primera escuela de Bellas Artes en Katmandú, la Juddha Kala Pathsala, en
la parte posterior del Gahrelu Adda -empresa diseñada para promover la industria del
algodón a nivel internacional-. Unos años más tarde, Tej Bahadur Chitrakar sería
nombrado director de esta misma escuela. Por su parte, Chandra Man Singh Maskey
enseñaba arte en la Dubar High School desde los años treinta, donde solamente podían
estudiar unos pocos privilegiados (Chitrakar, 2004: 43).
Por tanto, podría decirse que el desarrollo del arte contemporáneo estuvo
claramente marcado por las pautas que establecía el gobierno nepalí y los intereses
políticos del momento, a través de unos pocos elegidos. Sin embargo, a partir de los
nuevos conocimientos adquiridos los artistas también comenzaron a tomar caminos más
libres e individuales y, tanto Tej Bahadur Chitrakar como Chandra Man Singh Maskey,
introdujeron la representación de la sociedad nepalí y el paisaje urbano como una
revelación de sus experiencias separadas de la vida en la Corte (Bangdel, 2011: 47-59)
(Imagen 3).
6
Esta institución fue construida por el Raj Británico durante la era colonial, ya que después de entender el
poder que el arte podía inspirar en las creencias sociales decidió fomentar el estilo occidental en India a
fin de asegurar el control del país.
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ANDREA DE LA RUBIA
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Imagen 3) Tej Bahadur Chitrakar. It´s raining. Acuarela. 42 x 72 cm. S/f
Cortesía de Madan Chitrakar.
El uso de la metáfora por la democracia y la libertad
La rebelión del sur de Asia comenzó a despertar tras los acontecimientos de la
Primera Guerra Mundial a través de la figura de Gandhi. Asimismo, la Revolución Rusa
de 1917 fue otra de las inspiraciones que hicieron tambalear los cimientos del imperio
británico. Precisamente fue el desenlace del movimiento indio por la independencia
(1945) lo que provocó el Jana Andolan (revolución del pueblo) en Nepal, finalizando
con ello la autarquía de los Rana en 1950.
A pesar de que los Rana siempre habían mantenido bajo control el sistema
educativo nepalí a fin de evitar levantamientos populares y conservar su poder, los
nuevos ideales revolucionarios que emergían desde India acabaron contagiándose a
Nepal debido a diversos factores. Uno de los primeros fue el hecho de que, tanto en la
Primera como en la Segunda Guerra Mundial, los Rana habían enviado a los valerosos
soldados Gorkhas a luchar junto al ejército británico, probablemente en su afán por
complacer a la poderosa Corona del Reino Unido, así como parte del acuerdo
establecido en el Tratado de Sigauli años atrás. A menudo los solados supervivientes
que retornaban al país volvían con la mente llena de nuevas ideas modernizadoras,
independentistas y democráticas (Amatya, 2004: 13-50). En segundo lugar, el limitado
sistema educativo de Nepal provocó un exilio masivo a India de intelectuales que
deseaban cursar estudios superiores. Estos grupos desarrollaron una nueva conciencia
63
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------política motivada por los movimientos independentistas, comenzando así a utilizar la
literatura y poesía como armas para la resistencia. Consecuentemente, en 1926 se creó
la primera organización literaria nepalí desde el exilio 7. Asimismo, y en tercer lugar,
también en Nepal se creaba un movimiento conspirador en contra del régimen Rana
puesto que, a pesar de que solo una pequeña parte de la población era capaz de leer o
escribir, la poesía de los exiliados floreció y se extendió por el país al ser transmitida de
boca en boca (Bangdel & Meesserschmidt, 2004: 132).
Por tanto, podría decirse que la fuerza principal que acabó por derrotar la
autarquía de los Rana fue este pequeño grupo literario que trabajaba bajo los ideales
contemporáneos y se servía de la metáfora que le brindaba la poesía para manifestar su
descontento de forma clandestina, sin temor a la censura o posibles represalias. En el
siguiente poema, escrito por el famoso autor Siddhicharan Shrestha en 1946, el poeta
nepalí pregunta al cuervo (mensajero del destino) sobre la caída del oscuro régimen de
los Rana. Todo ello, eso sí, de manera metafórica:
Cuervo, ¿qué noticias traes?
por favor cuéntame tus buenas nuevas.
Sentado en la pared al otro lado del patio,
dime, por favor, qué has traído.
Hoy está tan mal.
Dime sobre mañana.
Oh, ¡inteligente pájaro en el cielo!
Siddhicharan Shrestha. Kag (El cuervo), 1946 (Acharya, 2002: 159-172)
Al mismo tiempo las artes visuales también comenzaron a jugar un papel
relevante como herramienta para incentivar la rebelión popular y, en 1940, Chandra
Man Singh Maskey fue encarcelado por dibujar la caricatura del Primer Ministro Juddha
Shumsheree Rana como si fuese un ogro devorando seres humanos (Chitrakar, 2004:
42). Sin embargo, Santosh Man Maskey, hijo de Chandra Man Singh Maskey,
7
La mayoría de estos jóvenes participaron en los movimientos independentistas y se enrolaron en los
partidos indios revolucionarios democráticos y comunistas.
64
ANDREA DE LA RUBIA
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------desmiente ésta acusación y apunta que Maskey fue enviado a prisión por fomentar la
educación del pueblo de Nepal a través de escuelas clandestinas, al margen del sistema
represivo de los Rana. La caricatura, al parecer, fue solo una excusa para “atrapar” a
Maskey, el cual también se codeaba con los miembros del primer partido político
revolucionario de Nepal, el Praja Pharishad, creado en 1935.8 Sin embargo el Praja
Pharishad no duraría mucho tiempo ya que los Rana, viéndolo como una clara
amenaza, decidieron ejecutar públicamente a sus miembros como castigo a su
insubordinación, convirtiéndose estos en los primeros mártires de Nepal en la larga
lucha por la democracia (Hutt, 2010: 18). La reacción no se hizo esperar y, pronto,
comenzaron a crearse nuevos partidos desde el exilio, como el democrático Nepalí
Congress Party (CPN) bajo el mando del poeta y futuro Primer Ministro B.P. Koirala
(1914-1982)9 o el maoísta Communist Party. El proceso revolucionario finalizó con el
Jana Andolan de 1950, el cual fue dirigido por el rey Tribhuvan Bir Bikram Shah
(1906-1955) junto a los intelectuales exiliados. El movimiento ocurrió de forma
violenta en la ciudad de Katmandú, bajo promesas democráticas y un futuro mejor para
el pueblo. Promesas que, más adelante, no se cumplirían tan fácilmente (Kramer, 2010:
43-45).
En efecto, tras el fallecimiento del rey Tribhuvan por tuberculosis en 1955 en
Suiza, donde había acudido a recibir tratamiento, la Corona fue otorgada a su hijo
Mahendra Bir Bikram Shah (1920-1972), quien, a pesar de haber convocado las
primeras elecciones para el Parlamento en 1959, no tardó en amoldar el sistema
democrático hacia su propio beneficio y poder. En estas elecciones resultó elegido por
mayoría absoluta el Nepalí Congress Party (CPN), siendo B.P. Koirala nombrado
Primer Ministro de Nepal. Pero un año después el rey, que consideraba que Koirala
podía arrebatarle su mandato, eliminó el Parlamento y encerró al Primer Ministro en
prisión. Acto seguido, inauguró un nuevo sistema político democrático basado en la
“verdadera tradición nepalí”: el sistema Panchayat. Mediante esta forma de gobierno,
Mahendra consiguió mantener el poder centralizado en la Corona, mientras cumplía con
8
Santosh Man Maskey. Entrevista realizada por la autora, 5 de Mayo del 2015.
B.P Koirala fue el líder principal del movimiento anti-Rana desde el exilio. Estaba profundamente
influenciado por los pensamientos de Gandhi y estudiaba en la Banaras Hindu University (BHU), punto
de encuentro de socialistas exiliados.
9
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------los mínimos exigidos en lo que respecta a un sistema democrático. Es decir, había un
Parlamento, pero era el Rey quien lo elegía y no el pueblo. En 1952, Siddicharan
Shrestha (1912-1992) escribió este bello poema en el cual se ven reflejados los
sentimientos de la comunidad nepalí ante las promesas incumplidas:
Los tiempos han cambiado
Los Rana han caído.
Dicen que nuestras cadenas están rotas,
Pero la libertad, el progreso, la democracia
Ninguno de ellos ha llegado.
Madre llora desconsolada
“Padre no ha venido a casa”
Siddicharan Shrestha, Ba Aaunubhaeko Chhaina
(Padre no ha venido a casa), 1952 (Acharya, 2002)
Nepal y las Becas de Arte Liberal: la apertura internacional
Mientras se intentaba establecer la democracia en el país de los dioses, el
Gobierno de India firmó con Nepal el Tratado de Paz y Amistad (1950) a través del cual
se aseguraba la cooperación de este país, especialmente en cuanto a la creciente
amenaza China. Como parte del Plan Colombo para la mejora en la educación, India
ofreció a Nepal las Becas de Arte Liberal y, a través de estas ayudas, muchos
estudiantes de arte pudieron cursar sus estudios en las modernas instituciones del país
vecino. Las universidades más populares entre los artistas nepalíes de los años sesenta y
setenta fueron la J.J School of Arts (en Mumbai) y la Banaras Hindu University (BHU)
(en Benarés).10
Por su parte, la India posrevolucionaria sufría un período de inflexión en cuanto
a la política y el arte. La técnica de la abstracción al estilo Avant-garde europeo ya
había hecho mella a principios de siglo en la pintura del país, aunque manteniendo la
tradición hindú, como bien promovió Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) desde la
escuela de Ṥantiniketan (Mitter, 2007: 65). Tras la figura de Tagore surgieron una serie
10
También estas dos escuelas fueron concebidas por el Raj Británico, por lo que el enfoque de su sistema
educativo era básicamente occidental.
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ANDREA DE LA RUBIA
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------de artistas e intelectuales quienes, agrupados bajo el nombre de Escuela de Bengala,
deseaban acabar con la influencia británica y recuperar la tradición. Sin embargo, una
vez alcanzada la independencia, los indios ya no sentían la necesidad de demostrar
ningún “nacionalismo” en su arte, por lo que las mentes se abrieron sin prejuicio y
comenzó la experimentación. La libertad creativa dio paso a trayectorias individuales,
alejándose del trabajo colectivo que había impulsado a los artistas en los años previos y,
muy pronto, el entusiasmo y optimismo popular por el nuevo proyecto político de
Jawaharlal Nehru comenzaría a verse reflejado en la pintura subjetivista de los nuevos
artistas contemporáneos de India (Fernández del Campo, 2013: 382).11
(Imagen 4) Rama Nanda Joshi, 1963. Couple (Pareja). Óleo sobre lienzo.
R.N. Joshi Art Museum Collection
La explosión de nuevas ideas procedentes del país vecino actuó como una
bomba para la cultura nepalí, la cual inició un proceso de redefinición de su identidad al
adoptar una visión mucho más internacional. Los pintores de Nepal, influenciados por
el tipo de educación recibida en India y afectados por los acontecimientos políticos que
se sucedían en su propio país, comenzaron a tender hacia la abstracción como reflejo del
nuevo Nepal. Sin embargo, también se preocuparon de reflejar de alguna manera el
Nepal tradicional en sus obras, como signo de lo que se denominó la “Nepalidad” de la
pintura contemporánea. Esto último fue lo que siempre mantuvo el arte abstracto nepalí,
11
Este entusiasmo duró hasta los años 70, cuando el fallecimiento de Nehru amenazó la estabilidad del
país y muchas de las libertades democráticas alcanzadas hubieron de ser abolidas.
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------a caballo entre lo irreconocible y la representación realista de sus paisajes y gentes. De
este modo, más que arte “abstracto”, el arte contemporáneo de Nepal era más bien
“semiabstracto”.
Uno de los primeros estudiantes de la J.J School of Arts en India fue Rama
Nanda Joshi (1938–1988), quien en 1971 abrió una de las primeras galerías de arte en
Katmandú: la Park Gallery. En las obras creadas durante su etapa estudiantil, Joshi
adoptó el expresionismo abstracto como forma idónea para la representación del
sufrimiento (Shrestha, 2006: 11-17) (Imagen 4). Según declara el hijo del artista, Nabin
Joshi, tras volver de India en 1964 Joshi expuso públicamente sus pinturas modernas en
el Centro Cultural Indo-Nepalí de Katmandú. Sin embargo, al ver que el público de
Nepal no estaba aún preparado para comprender el arte contemporáneo, Joshi comenzó
a compaginar la práctica de la pintura abstracta con la acuarela realista. Es a través de
sus acuarelas donde podemos apreciar la faceta más activista del artista ya que, a través
de la representación realista del Patrimonio Cultural nepalí en declive, Joshi pretendía
concienciar sobre la urgente necesidad de salvaguardar la importante cultura de Nepal
(Imagen 5).12
(Imagen 5) Rama Nanda Joshi. Pashupati Arya Ghat. Óleo sobre lienzo. 1981
Colección de Mrs. Rita Thapa.
12
Nabin Joshi. Entrevista realizada por la autora, 11 de Marzo 2015.
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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Abstracción, control y censura Panchayat
Por otro lado, la recién adquirida libertad de los artistas estaba siendo
nuevamente coaccionada a través de un tipo de censura sutil impuesta por el sistema
Panchayat. De hecho, es importante subrayar que, a pesar de que ningún artista nepalí
ha admitido haberse sentido coaccionado durante este período, está claro que todos ellos
buscaban constantemente la aprobación de la monarquía. Por lo tanto podría decirse
que, una vez más, el arte de Nepal se desarrollaba según los intereses que marcaba el
régimen. Cualquier artista que quisiese formar parte del núcleo del arte contemporáneo
nepalí y ser reconocido en los libros de historia, debía seguir fielmente el sistema e,
incluso, formar parte del mismo.
Mientras que la censura afectó al arte de manera sutil, fue implacable con otros
medios, como por ejemplo es el caso de la prensa, que se vio limitada por la Ley de
Delito Público y Castigo (Aditya, 1996), así como la radio y la televisión, que pasaron a
ser propiedad del estado (Sharma, 2001: 36-40). Muchos volvieron a adoptar la poesía y
literatura como vías de escape, manteniéndose independientes de la censura por medio
de un código irónico y metafórico 13. En cuanto a las artes visuales, es posible que el arte
abstracto también hubiese sido utilizado como forma de manifestación individual contra
el sistema, a través de la metáfora. Y es que el arte abstracto se caracteriza por el hecho
de no desvelar nunca del todo lo que sucede en el cuadro. Por tanto, puede que el
verdadero motivo de las obras creadas hubiese sido otro, más allá de la simple
“complacencia” del rey y el régimen. Aunque debido a la falta de estudios sobre el tema
en cuestión esto no pueda ser más que una suposición, solo con observar las obras
producidas en la época se hacen evidentes la metáfora e ironía. Por ejemplo, si nos
fijamos en la flor de loto representada en la siguiente obra veremos que sus pétalos se
coronan simbólicamente de rostros humanos en descomposición (Imagen 6).
13
Por desgracia, su escritura libertina era comprendida por pocos, pues el porcentaje de gente educada y
culta en la población seguía siendo considerablemente bajo.
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REFLEJOS
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Imagen 6) Shashi Bikram Shah. Sin título, 1978.
Bolígrafo y tinta sobre papel. Catálogo de exposición SKIB-71, 1981
Por otro lado, el gobierno Panchayat fue un gran promotor del desarrollo de las
artes modernas como símbolo internacional del nuevo Nepal. En 1965 el príncipe
Birendra Bikram Shah fundó la National Association of Fine Arts (NAFA) con el fin de
“proteger y desarrollar las artes visuales del país”.14 De hecho, el mismo Birendra es
hoy día conocido y respetado en Nepal como un gran pintor abstracto. En cuanto a la
literatura, en 1957 su padre el rey Mahendra había fundado la Royal Nepal Academy
(RNA), con el objetivo de preservar y evolucionar el ámbito cultural (Bangdel &
Meesserschmidt, 2004: 94). Por aquel entonces todos aquellos considerados “artistas”
en Nepal tenían que formar parte de una de las dos academias. La selección de los
mismos la llevaba a cabo la misma Casa Real, por lo que los pintores y escritores
comenzaron a pugnar por el favoritismo del monarca a través de la producción de obras,
cuanto más modernas y (aparentemente) favorecedoras del sistema Panchayat, mejor.
También comenzaron a inaugurarse un significativo número de galerías y exposiciones
de arte en la ciudad de Katmandú. Estos eventos estaban normalmente apoyados no solo
por la Familia Real, sino también por políticos, extranjeros y embajadores de diversos
países.15
Por tanto, debido a la inminente presencia de los monarcas en el mundo del arte
nepalí, así como al firme respaldo por parte de India y los extranjeros que poco a poco
14
< http://nafa.org.np/ > accedido el 12 de octubre 2016.
Por tanto, y contrariamente a lo que la tradición establecía al considerar a los Citrakar (casta de
pintores) entre los núcleos más bajos de la escala social, el hecho de estar involucrado en el escenario del
arte contemporáneo nepalí se convirtió en algo propio de las altas esferas de la sociedad.
15
70
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------iban llegando a Katmandú, la historia del arte moderno del país se fue desarrollando en
base a los designios de la élite. Esto contribuyó a señalar a ciertos favoritos del rey
como representantes del modernismo, abandonando a su suerte y echando en el olvido a
aquellos contemporáneos que por aquel entonces también se encontraban trabajando en
el campo de la abstracción.
“The First Modern Artist of Nepal”
Hoy en día, uno de los problemas que origina más preguntas sobre el diálogo
entre Nepal y el arte contemporáneo es la cuestión del “The First Modern Artist of
Nepal” (El primer artista contemporáneo de Nepal). Se trata de una cuestión que ocupa
y preocupa a la mayoría de críticos y estudiosos sobre el tema y que gira en torno a dos
artistas en concreto: Lain Singh Bangdel y Gehendra Man Amatya.
En la época en que Nepal reabría sus fronteras al exterior e India se adaptaba a
su nueva condición de país independiente, muchos artistas del sur de Asia comenzaron a
emigrar a Europa para cursar sus estudios en tiempos en los que el vanguardismo
predominaba en occidente. Lain Singh Bangdel (1919–2002) era un famoso escritor,
poeta y pintor proveniente de Darjeeling. Este estado siempre había formado parte del
territorio nepalí, sin embargo, desde el Tratado de Sigauli (1816) los británicos se
apoderaron de él, pasando este a formar parte del territorio de India hasta hoy. Esto creó
una gran controversia entre los ciudadanos de la zona, quienes, a pesar de ser indios en
el sentido político, se sienten profundamente nepalíes. Así pues -aunque este detalle aún
genera confusión- podría decirse que Lain Singh Bangdel fue el primer “nepalí” en
estudiar arte en Europa, concretamente en Londres y París.
Bangdel nació en el seno de una sociedad expatriada y pobre, ya que sus padres
habían emigrado de Nepal a Darjeeling en 1887, como tantos otros que escapaban del
despotismo de los Rana. Ávido de conocimiento, en 1939 se mudó a Calcuta, donde
entró en contacto con el arte occidental por primera vez. Allí vivió muchas experiencias
que luego se reflejarían en su obra contemporánea, como por ejemplo la traumática
Hambruna de Bengala, resultante de las austeridades impuestas por los británicos a fin
de paliar los efectos de la Segunda Guerra Mundial (Imagen 7).
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REFLEJOS
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Imagen 7) Lain Singh Bangdel. Famine in Bengal, óleo sobre lienzo, 1950.
A pesar de que Bangdel declara continuamente estar al margen de cuestiones
políticas, los políticos de Nepal parecían estar enormemente interesados en su figura.
Especialmente, su relación con el Primer Ministro B.P. Koirala siempre fue cercana
(Dina and Meesserschmid, 2004: 168). En 1957, Koirala visitó a Bangdel en Londres
con la idea de poner en sus manos el desarrollo del arte en Nepal. Tras ello, el gobierno
nepalí envió a Bangdel una beca de 5000 dólares para que se encargase de comprar las
reproducciones de obras de artistas occidentales, requeridas para mostrarlas al público
del país e incentivar la creatividad (Prasai, 2003: 217-18).16
Cuando el gobierno de Koirala fue anulado por el rey Mahendra, este último
cogió las riendas del desarrollo artístico en Nepal, interesándose también sobremanera
por la figura de Bangdel. A petición expresa del rey mismo, el artista se trasladó a
Katmandú en 1960 con la misión de impulsar la creación contemporánea del país.
Bangdel, que ya había colaborado previamente en varias exhibiciones en Europa,
organizó su primera retrospectiva en Nepal en 1962. En ella se mostró por vez primera
en la historia escrita del arte nepalí un nuevo tipo de pintura abstracta “nunca antes
vista” (Subedi, 1995: 124). Dina Bangdel, historiadora del arte e hija legítima de Lain
Singh Bangdel, afirma que los lienzos de Bangdel fueron de gran ayuda para los artistas
locales en términos de entender el arte como una herramienta para la libertad de
16
Hoy en día esta colección se encuentra en el almacén del Art Council, en Katmandú.
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ANDREA DE LA RUBIA
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------expresión. Debido a ello, la gran mayoría considera a Bangdel como “The First Modern
Artist of Nepal” (Bangdel & Meesserschmidt, 2004: 162-63).17
En efecto, su Majestad el rey Mahendra no tardó en otorgar a Bangdel todo el
poder necesario para cumplir su misión. En primer lugar le nombró miembro de la
Royal Nepal Academy (RNA), y más tarde (en 1968) le ascendió a vicecanciller de la
institución. Asimismo, cuando en 1977 la National Association of Fine Arts (NAFA)
fue transferida a la RNA, Lain Singh Bangdel fue puesto al mando de la sección de artes
visuales, obteniendo de esa manera un completo control sobre el desarrollo del arte
nepalí. Sin embargo, a pesar de las apariencias, tras la caída del sistema Panchayat en
1991 Bangdel publicó un par de retratos en honor a su viejo amigo B.P. Koirala. Lo cual
levanta sospechas sobre los verdaderos sentimientos de Bangdel hacia el sistema y la
monarquía de los Shah (Dina and Meesserschmid, 2004: 168) (Imagen 8).
(Imagen 8) Lain Singh Bangdel. Retrato de B.P. Koirala, 1991.
(Dina and Meesserschmid, 2004)
17
Pero, a pesar de la importancia histórica del evento, en un primer momento la exhibición fue recibida
con escepticismo e incomprensión. Algunos incluso opinaron que sus figuras abstractas se debían a que
no sabía dibujar la forma humana.
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REFLEJOS
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------El favoritismo proyectado hacia la figura de Bangdel fue fuente de envidias y
celos, según las declaraciones de sus allegados,18 por lo que un incontable número de
mitos y leyendas sobre su figura comenzaron a circular por la ciudad de Katmandú. Y es
que, si bien es cierto que Lain Singh Bangdel fue un artista excepcional en la historia,
hasta el día de hoy el artista Gehendra Man Amatya (1937) clama con insistencia que
fue él, y no Bangdel, el primer pintor nepalí en mostrar sus cuadros abstractos en el
país. Amatya señala que su primera exposición de obra contemporánea tuvo lugar en el
año 1956, es decir, seis años antes de la famosa exposición de Bangdel (Amatya, 2005:
1).
Este artista cuenta cómo a principios de los años cincuenta solía asistir a clases
de pintura con el veterano Chandra Man Singh Maskey, el cual le enseñó a dibujar y
combinar los colores al estilo realista. Sin embargo, su curiosidad por el arte abstracto
comenzó cuando vio por casualidad reproducciones de las obras de diversos artistas
actuales en una revista de la Biblioteca Americana en Katmandú. Así fue como Amatya
conoció al pintor franco-ruso Nicolai Michoutouchkine, que por aquel entonces exhibía
su obra abstracta en el Centro Cultural Indo-Nepalí, habiendo sido dicha exposición
inaugurada por el mismo rey Mahendra. Durante sus seis meses de estancia en Bahadur
Bhawan -uno de los palacios al estilo occidental construidos por los RanaMichoutouchkine accedió a dar clases de arte abstracto al joven Amatya, organizando la
primera exposición del pintor nepalí en el Centro Cultural Indo-Nepalí el 2 de febrero
de 1956. Curiosamente, esta exposición fue inaugurada por el embajador de India en
Nepal, Mr. Bhagawan Sahaya (Amatya, 2014: 1-3) (Imagen 9).19
18
Dina Bangdel. Entrevista realizada por la autora, 23 de mayo del 2015.
Nicolai se quedó con todas las obras y las vendió en Europa, enviando a Gehendra un set de pinturas al
óleo como recompensa.
19
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ANDREA DE LA RUBIA
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Imagen 9) Pintura moderna mostrada en la primera exhibición de
Gehendra Man Amatya, 1956.
¿Por qué tanto los políticos como los monarcas de Nepal optaron por Lain Singh
Bangdel como representante del arte contemporáneo en el país? La mayoría de nepalíes
comentan que, en comparación con la calidad de la obra de Bangdel, Gehendra Man
Amatya no puede ser considerado como el primer artista contemporáneo de Nepal.
Según declara Dina Bangdel, lo relevante no es quién fue el primero, sino quién causó
mayor impacto en la historia del arte moderno del país (Bangdel & Meesserschmidt,
2004: 213). Por otro lado, debemos considerar el hecho de que Bangdel –influenciado
por el período azul de Picasso- realizaba una pintura mucho más suave y políticamente
adecuada que la violenta y crítica obra de Gehendra Man Amatya (Imagen 10). Aunque
también es cierto que el mismo Amatya, en muchas ocasiones, trataba de complacer a la
Familia Real invitándoles a sus exposiciones y eventos. Sin embargo, la doble fachada
de este artista se hizo evidente en los ochenta, cuando fue encarcelado por dibujar una
caricatura en la cual se representaba al rey Birendra saludándose a sí mismo a modo
militar frente a un espejo.20 Según declara Amatya en el Naya Nepal Post, sirvió
fielmente al sistema Panchayat hasta que su propio hijo fue acusado y encarcelado por
20
Gehendra Man Amatya. Entrevista realizada por la autora, 13 de marzo del 2015.
75
REFLEJOS
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------estar involucrado en un ataque de bomba contra la Familia Real en 1981. Por desgracia
para nosotros, el provocador dibujo de Amatya fue destruido por el gobierno nepalí.
(Amatya, 2005: 11-12).
(Imagen 10) Gehendra Man Amatya. Maoísta, 1996-2006
Cortesía del artista.
Conclusión
Tras esto podemos concluir que el arte contemporáneo de Nepal es un arte
originado a consecuencia de los acontecimientos que, por aquel entonces, marcaron un
antes y un después en la política del país y, consiguientemente, en la manera de pensar
de la sociedad; relacionado todo ello con los términos revolución, democracia, libertad y
censura. El ambiente de violencia en el país de los dioses había de ser expresado de
alguna manera, siendo el arte abstracto el medio ideal que permitía la proyección de los
sentimientos de manera individual. Este individualismo provocó también un nuevo
entendimiento del arte nepalí en sí, ya que, hasta el momento, había sido considerado
como una práctica popular restringida a una serie de normas que imposibilitaban el
desarrollo creativo del artista y la libre autoexpresión. Sin embargo, podría decirse que
la pintura subjetivista y el auge de la experimentación surgieron también debido a la
influencia del pensamiento occidental ya desde la época de los Rana. El problema sobre
quién fue “The First Modern Artist of Nepal” apunta claramente a esta nueva
concepción del artista como un “yo”; y a pesar de que los temas tratados en su pintura
son temas sociales, son siempre vistos desde la subjetividad del pintor. Es más, la
76
ANDREA DE LA RUBIA
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------posición del artista en Nepal asciende con el modernismo hasta a la altura de la misma
élite, lo cual tradicionalmente era prácticamente impensable, al pertenecer los artistas a
los sustratos más bajos de la población.
Esta introducción también nos da indicios del importante papel que juega India
en la evolución del arte contemporáneo en Nepal. Aunque nunca han negado la
influencia del país vecino, los artistas locales siempre han luchado por mantener su
propia identidad diferenciada a través de la existencia de lo que ellos denominan la
“Nepalidad” de su pintura. Asimismo, las influencias occidentales no pudieron evitarse,
siendo por tanto el arte contemporáneo un producto resultado de una nueva comunidad
híbrida y cambiante, que no olvida el pasado pero se adapta al presente. De hecho, a
pesar de que este arte estuvo claramente fomentado por la monarquía, la sed de los
artistas por experimentar con las nuevas técnicas y conocimientos traídos de países
lejanos no puede ser obviada. Por tanto, podemos afirmar que la abstracción en Nepal es
el fruto creativo resultado de una sociedad cambiante. Es un arte intencionalmente
adoptado como el mejor medio para representar el país de cara al mundo internacional,
así como una forma segura de comunicar el sentimiento del pueblo a nivel local, en un
momento en que la censura limitaba, sutilmente, la libertad de expresión.
Como conclusión final, este artículo subraya que la idea de “cultura global” debe
ser, por tanto, utilizada con precaución, puesto que la contemporaneidad no puede ser
definida de la misma manera en todas partes en el mundo. Como dice Abhi Subedi, la
denominada “occidentalización” del arte nepalí no significa la pérdida o rechazo
completo de su tradición: es más bien un punto de partida (Subedi, 1995: 123). Por lo
tanto, salir de la “perspectiva global” para adentrarnos en la “perspectiva local” es una
asignatura pendiente en Nepal, así como el del mundo en general, para comprender los
esquemas que rigen la contemporaneidad a día de hoy.
OBRAS CITADAS
ACHARYA, JAYARAJ (2002) “Siddicharan Shreshtra (1913-1992)”. En Nepalese
Perspective. Contributions to Nepalese Studies (CNAS) Journal, Vol.29, Nº1,
Kirtirpur: Tribhuvan University: 159-172. Traducido del inglés por la autora.
http://www.thlib.org/static/reprints/contributions/CNAS_29_01_07.pdf accedido
el 30 de Octubre 2016.
77
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ADITYA, ANAND (1996). Mass media and Democratization. A Country Study on Nepal,
Katmandú: Institute for Integrated Development Studies.
AMATYA, GEHENDRA MAN (2014). “Nicolai and My First Modern Solo Exhibition”, Art
Perspective, Nº 7. Katmandú. Resumen traducido por Dr. Tara Lal Shrestha.
AMATYA, GEHENDRA MAN (2005). Modern Art, Katmandú: Amatya Publications.
Resumen traducido por Dr. Tara Lal Shrestha.
AMATYA, GEHENDRA MAN (2005). “I had no clue about my first art exhibition.” Naya
(Nepal Post), Nº 32. Katmandú.
AMATYA, PHALAYA (2004). Rana Rule in Nepal. Nueva Delhi: Nirala Series.
BANGDEL, DINA (2011). “Contemporary Nepali Art. Narratives of Modernity and
Visuality”. En Deepak Shimkhada. Nepal. Nostalgia and Modernity, Bombay:
The Marg Foundation: 47-59.
BANGDEL, DINA & MESSERSCHMIDT, DON (2004). Against the Current. The life of Lain
Singh Bangdel. Writer, Painter and Art Historian of Nepal. Bangkok: Orchid
Press.
BANGDEL, LAIN SINGH (2010). Muluk Bahira Ma (When Outside the Country).
Katmandú: Ratna Pustak Bhandar. Resumen traducido por Dr. Tara Lal
Shrestha.
BHAUKAJEE, RAM KUMAR (1988). Непальская живопись нового и новейшего века
(Contemporary Paintings of Nepal). Moscú: State Art Institute. Resumen
traducido por Tatiana Voronina.
CHITRAKAR, MADAN (2004). Tej Bahadur Chitrakar. Icon of a Transition, Katmandú:
Teba-Chi Studies Centre.
DEEPAK, SHIMKHADA (2011). Nepal. Nostalgia and Modernity. Bombay: The Marg
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(2013). El arte de India. Historia e historias, Madrid:
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En Deepak, Shimkhada, Nepal. Nostalgia and Modernity, Bombay: The Marg
Foundation: 59-70.
HUTT, MICHAEL (2010). The Life of Bhupi Sherchan. Poetry and Politics in Post-Rana
Nepal. Nueva Delhi: Oxford University Press.
JOSHI, HARIHAT RAJ (2005). Raj Man Singh Chitrakar. The First Nepali Pioneer Artist.
Londres: Origin of Himalayan Studies.
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------KANSAKAR, CHANDRA BIR & SHRESHTRA, DURGA BAHADUR (1974). The History of
Modern Nepal. In a Nutshell with some Comparative Traces of Foreign History.
Book II. Katmandú: Amar Press.
KRAMER, KARL-HEINZ (2010) “Political evolution of Modern Nepal”. En Devkota,
Surendra R., Nepal in the XXI Century, Nueva York: Nova Science Publishers:
43-83.
MITTER, PARTHA (2007). The Triumph of Modernism. India´s Artists and the AvantGarde, 1922-1947. London: Reaction Books.
PRASAI, NARENDRA RAJ (2003). The Glory of Nepal. A Biography of Bangdel.
Katmandú: Ekta Prakashan.
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Vol. 22, Nº 2, Katmandú: Tribhuvan University Central Department of English:
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accedido el 13 de octubre 2016.
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ANDREA DE LA RUBIA es miembro del Grupo de Investigación I+D TRAMA de la
79
Indi@logs
Vol 3 2016, pp. 81-97, ISSN: 2339-8523
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------TEXT, REPRESENTATION AND REVISION: RE-VISIONING PARTITION VIOLENCE IN
KHUSHWANT SINGH’S TRAIN TO PAKISTAN AND BHISHAM SAHNI’S TAMAS
AFRINUL HAQUE KHAN
Nirmala College, Ranchi University, India
[email protected]
ABSTRACT
Partition is a complex historical reality that continues to puzzle the minds of scholars, historians and
imaginative writers. Ever since its occurrence, they have endeavored to comprehend the subtle nuances of
the complex strands that shaped the making of this seminal event. Through a comparative analysis of
Singh’s Train to Pakistan and Sahni’s Tamas, the present study attempts to examine, how the profoundly
sensitive and deeply perceptive imagination of both Singh and Sahni create texts which re-enact, with
sheer clarity and force, the violent happenings of partition. Thus they enable the readers to re-vision the
complexities involved, create awareness/consciousness in them regarding those historical blunders, the
consequences of which are still borne by the people, and also urge them to revise/reform their beliefs,
thinking and practices so that their present as well as future is safeguarded against such catastrophic
events.
KEYWORDS : Partition; Violence; Text; Representation; Re-vision; Revision; Train to Pakistan; Tamas;
Khushwant Singh; Bhisham Sahni
RESUMEN Texto, representación y revisión: estudio sobre la violencia en el período de la partición en
Tren a Pakistán de Khushwant Singh y Tamas de Bhisham Sahni
La Partición es una realidad histórica compleja que continúa siendo un enigma para las mentes de
eruditos, historiadores y escritores creativos, quienes desde su aparición se han empeñado en comprender
a través de sus numerosos artículos y textos los ligeros matices dentro de los enfoques complejos que
dieron lugar a este acontecimiento. Este estudio procura examinar, a través de la comparación de las
novelas Tren a Pakistán de Singh y Tamas de Sahmi, de qué manera la imaginación altamente sensible y
extremadamente perceptible de ambos autores da lugar a textos que promulgan, con plena claridad e
ímpetu, los acontecimientos que dieron lugar a la Partición, haciendo posible a los lectores la revisión de
las complejidades inherentes a los hechos, y creando en ellos un sentido de conciencia sobre los errores
históricos, cuyas consecuencias todavía perviven, y urgen a reformar sus actitudes, pensamientos y
prácticas, de forma que tanto su presente como su futuro queden a salvo de tan catastróficos eventos.
PALABRAS CLAVE: Partición; violencia; texto; representación; revisión; Train to Pakistan; Tamas;
Khushwant Singh; Bhisham Sahni
RE-VISIONING PARTITION VIOLENCE
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------“…Arise, O friend of the distressed!
See the plight of your Punjab. Corpses lie strewn in the pastures and the Chenab has turned
crimson.
Someone has poured poison into the waters of the five rivers and these waters are now irrigating
the land with poison.” (Pritam, 1992: 946)
The sheer quantity of violence heaped by the twentieth century upon itself is enough to make even
the most cheerful philosopher pessimistic. (Keane, 1996: 7)
In his book, Remembering Partition Gyanendra Pandey describes Partition as “a moment of
rupture and genocidal violence, marking the termination of one regime and the inauguration of
two new ones” (1). Indeed, no other event in Indian history has exerted a more pervasive and
profound influence on the politics, policies and ideologies of the nation as well as the social,
cultural and affective life of its people than the Partition of India, which accompanied
independence in August 1947, driving millions to “painful and perilous migrations, and made
hundreds of thousands suffer unspeakable agony and death” (Seervai, 2014: v). While the
experience of Partition persists as an integral part of the Indian experience, the memories of
Partition lie deep-rooted in the Indian consciousness, compelling historians and creative writers
to produce texts which, armoured with their insightful observations and critical acumen, have
added a new dimension to the seminal event, even though its full comprehension has remained
both illusive and elusive till now. While several historians from across the world have attempted
to document the causes and the continuing after- effects of this seminal event through their
works, ‘it has been better conveyed’, say Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, “by the more sensitive
creative writers and artists… than by historians” (2004:164). In fact, it would not be an
exaggeration to say that ever since its occurrence, Indian writers, especially from the region of
the Punjab, have repeatedly gone back to what Meenakshi Mukherjee calls “rupture [i.e.
Partition] to understand our present”. (2004: 180)
It is important to note here that for the Punjabis, Partition was “a tragedy beyond the power of
words to describe” (Nanda, 2003: 90). The bifurcation of the province of Punjab, necessitated by
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------the British decision to divide India in 1947, during the transfer of power, into Sikh and Hindu
dominated East Punjab and Muslim majority West Punjab, unleashed unprecedented sectarian
violence, communal frenzy and a brutal uprooting of the entire Hindu, Muslim and Sikh
populations on both sides of the newly- created national borders. In his memoir, the eminent
historian, B. R. Nanda, puts the figures, especially in the Punjab, at “an estimated loss of one and
a half million lives and migration of nearly five million Hindus and Sikhs from West Punjab to
East Punjab and about the same number of Muslims from East Punjab to West Punjab across the
newly-created border between India and Pakistan” (1). On the other hand, Ian Talbot notes that
“huge caravans of refugees … traversed this route as part of the mass exodus of 4.6 million
Muslims from East Punjab and reverse migrations of West Punjab Hindus and Sikhs to India”
(2006: xxxii). Needless to say then, the catastrophic experience of the autumn of 1947 deeply
shattered the beliefs of intellectuals like Khushwant Singh and Bhisham Sahni, who felt
distressed and disillusioned at the bestiality and savagery. Singh remarks in a guest talk in 1964:
The beliefs that I had cherished all my life were shattered… I had believed that we Indians were
peace-loving and non- violent, that we were more concerned with the matters of the spirit. After
the experience of the autumn of 1947, I could no longer subscribe to these views. I became an
angry middle-aged man, who wanted to shout his disenchantment with the world. (Guest of
Honour Talk)
Such were the memories and impressions of Partition in the canvas of his mind that even fifty
one years after the event had occurred, Singh could not alter his stance and denounced it
vehemently:
We must not forget the partition because it is relevant today. We must remember that it did in
fact happen and can happen again. That is why I keep reminding people who clamour for an
independent Kashmir, Khalistan or Nagaland to remember what happened to Muslims when
some of them asked for a separate Muslim state… Reminding ourselves of what happened in
1947 and realizing the possibilities of its recurring, we should resolve that we will never let it
happen again. (My italics) (The Hindustan Times 9)
The depression that thus plagued the writers who had witnessed the calamity from the epicenter
could best be overcome by writing texts which spoke their minds, their perspectives. These texts,
authored by writers with profoundly sensitive insights and a powerful comprehension of people,
society and region, had the authenticity of the authors’ experiences, which were inextricably
wedded to their vision. My contention is that, through the representation of the truth and trauma
of Partition, these texts create sites/spaces, wherein the reader, transformed into observer–
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------participant, witnesses the entire drama, and even though unable to effect any change in the
course of the drama, perceives it with a fresh vision, comprehends the ambiguities involved in
and/or leading to its occurrence, and eventually effects a change in his/her pre-conceived
notions, beliefs, attitude and understanding of the historical truths. In other words, through a
representation of the violent happenings of 1947, these texts endeavor to sensitize readers to
those historical blunders, the consequences of which are still borne by the people.
Here, through a comparative analysis of Singh’s Train to Pakistan and Sahni’s Tamas, I shall
attempt to explore, how the narratives of partition enable readers to re-vision the subtleties
involved in its occurrence, create awareness/consciousness in them regarding the horrendous
deeds committed and ask them to revise their attitudes, thinking and practices so that their
present as well as their future is safeguarded against such catastrophic events. What causes
change in the pattern of communal relations? What leads to frenzy or associated states of
temporary aberration or derangement during such a change in communal relations? Why do
people in similar circumstances or under the same pressures behave differently? What were/are
the implications of Partition for a multi-religious, pluralistic society like India, which after 1947,
became more vulnerable to the conflicts and violence generated by the divisive forces? I shall
examine these texts in relation to these and other questions.
Text and Representation
“The work of art”, says Henry James, “is not required to be an exact representation of life as
seen through a lens: the novelist, or any other artist, is not like the man of science… The truth
required lies in the fullness and perfection and the vivid sense of reality with which the artist
transmits his personal views of life.” (in Baker, 1924: 44)
With deliberate care both Singh and Sahni select incidents that would best aid them in
communicating with “fullness and perfection” the truth of Partition and also compel the people
to think and reflect about the grievous errors committed. Written at a time when the wounds
inflicted by Partition were still raw, Train to Pakistan captured, defined and established, for
Indians, the true image of the traumatic event. In fact, the very opening of Singh’s text provides a
key to our understanding of the catastrophe:
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------The summer of 1947 was not like other Indian summers…Hundreds of thousands of Hindus and
Sikhs who had lived for centuries on the Northwest Frontier…fled towards the protection of the
predominantly Sikh and Hindu communities in the east… Along the way… they collided with
panicky swarms of Muslims fleeing to safety in the west. The riots had become a rout… almost a
million of them were dead, and all of northern India was in arms, in terror, or in hiding. (Singh,
2009: 1-2)
The forthrightness and honesty of the author’s description become evident as one turns the pages
of history to see how the ‘two nation theory’1 proposed by Jinnah from the platform of the All
India Muslim League in Lahore in 1940 and his announcement of ‘Direct Action Day’ 2 later, in
August 1946, to force the implementation of his demand, triggered the wave of violence that
spread from Calcutta to Noakhali, Bihar, Garmukteshwar and ultimately reached Punjab.
According to Ramchandra Guha, “At the end of 1946 one province that had escaped the rioting
was the Punjab…Starting in January, episodic bouts of violence broke out in the cities of
Punjab…From March to August, every month was hotter and bloodier than the last” (2008: 1113).
Having given the readers necessary information to reflect over the excesses committed in the
past, he then goes on to say how the rustic, innocent people of Mano Majra were not even aware
that their country had been partitioned. Peace still prevailed in their tiny village, which had only
seventy families, of which Lala Ram Lal’s was the only Hindu family; the rest were Sikhs and
Muslims, almost equal in number. The most remarkable feature of this ‘oasis of peace’ was the
‘three foot slab of sandstone’ that “all Mano Majrans venerated” (Singh, 2009: 2). The text
reveals: “It is the local deity, the deo to which all villagers – Hindu, Sikh, Muslim or pseudoChristian – repair secretly whenever they are in a special need of blessing” (3). The ‘three foot
slab’ of sandstone, thus, becomes a symbol and also a source of existing peace in the village.
The opening of Tamas, set in Lahore, in the pre-Partition period is in sharp contrast to the picture
of peace presented in the opening section of Train to Pakistan. Right at the beginning, Sahni
makes it clear that the people of Lahore were not only aware of the impending Partition but their
1
In 1940, at the annual session of the All-India Muslim League held in Lahore, Jinnah, the then president of the
Muslim League formally proposed the division of India along religious lines. In his famous presidential address, he
made clear the need to form a separate and independent state of Muslims named Pakistan. See Ramchandra Guha.
India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy, (New Delhi: Picador India, 2008), p.9 Also see
Sumit Sarkar, Modern India: 1885-1947 (New Delhi: Macmillan India Ltd., 1983), pp. 378-9.
2
In support of his ‘Two Nation Theory’ Jinnah announced August 16, 1946 as ‘Direct Action Day’ across India. See
Jeff Hay, The Partition of British India (New York: Chelsea House, 2006), p.64.
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------minds had also already been corrupted by the separatist tendencies and had indulged in
machinations to trigger communal violence. It seems relevant to remark here that Sahni was
familiar with the workings of the people’s minds, understood their motives and attitudes, which
he portrays with remarkable ease and precision in his text. The opening scene where Nathu, a
sweeper, is trying to kill a pig is both horrifying and pathetic in its depiction. Bribed and
deceived into killing the pig by Murad Ali, a local contractor, who uses the carcass of the pig to
spread communal riots, Nathu is represented as the victim of both the capitalist and political
forces. The whole scene engages us profoundly as we see plight of Nathu, who struggles to kill
the pig yet his mind is pre-occupied by the thought of the five rupee note given to him by Murad
Ali for completing the job:
Why of all the creatures, Nathu thought, had this despicable brute… fallen to his lot to
tackle…Nathu had tried all the devices but not one had worked. Instead his shins and ankles were
badly bruised… The rustling five rupee note that had gone into his pocket had made it impossible
for him to open his mouth. (Sahni, 2014: 2-4)
Sahni was fully aware that people like Murad Ali used the power of economics to trap their
victims, to use them as tools, to materialize their devilish plans. The fact that people like Nathu
remained unaware of the intentions of these manipulators, made their plight even more terrible. It
is important to note here that the pre-Partition Indian society that Sahni constructs in Tamas is
evocative of a dark world (tamas means darkness) where every action reflects and even further
expedites the impending violence and the socio-political upheaval. Divisive/negative forces are
at work and peaceful coexistence seems to be a matter of the past. In fact, even between those
who share friendships or business relationships, there exists, in their sub-conscious mind, hatred
or suspicion of each other. Sahni shows how Shah Nawaz, an influential Muslim business man of
the locality, has made friends with some Hindu families. He even rescues them and ensures their
safety in times of crisis. He is described as a dependable “friend and a sociable, cheerful fellow.
Loyalty to friends was an article of faith with him” (165). However, even this dependable friend
turns into a ruthless killer when communal violence breaks out in the city, and he kills Milkhi,
his friend Raghu Nath’s servant. To quote from the novel:
How and why this happened cannot be easily explained – whether it was the chutia of Milkhi’s
head or the grieving crowd of people he had seen in the mosque or the funeral procession…Shah
Nawaz gave a sharp kick to Milkhi on his back… his forehead split and his spine broke… Milkhi’s
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------eyes were open and set on Shah Nawaz’s face as though wanting to know for which fault of his
Khan ji had done him to death (77).
Spine-chilling descriptions like the one mentioned above, abound in the text, and they disclose
an important preoccupation of the novelist: the animosity that existed beneath the veneer of
harmony, which takes the form of fanaticism during the times of communal discord. Then there
is the old Sikh couple, Harnam Singh and his wife, who live in Nurpur and run a tea shop. When
the communal riots begin, Harnam Singh is convinced that his family would never be harmed.
Thus, he says to his wife who had been insisting on leaving the village:
Karim Khan has assured me no less than ten times that…no one would dare cast an evil eye on
us… we are the only family of Sikhs living in the village. Will they not feel ashamed of
attacking two defenseless old people? (215)
Harnam’s questions raise the issues of security that confront the nation even today, and which
came into existence with the arbitrary drawing of borders. B. R. Nanda poignantly sums up the
situation:
Sudden and overwhelming violence descended upon the minority communities at different places
on both sides of the border… The declaration of the Boundary Commission Award shook the
confidence of the minority which found itself in the ‘others’ homeland; physical violence only
completed the process of demoralization… Like a lightening flash it came to them that the game
was up; everything seemed alien to them… even their house frightened them as a potential prison
or a slaughter house… The definition of a secular state and the charters of minority rights were
just dangerous nonsense to those who felt themselves in deadly peril. (Nanda 90)
Such has been the impact of Partition on the lives of the people that with the passage of time it
has come to be viewed, as Ranabir Sammadar says, as “a concentrated metaphor for violence,
fear, domination, difference, separation, and the unsatisfactory resolution of problems; a
metaphor, in one word, for the past, one that goes on making the present inadequate” (Samaddar,
2001: 22) It is worth noting here that when Karim Khan asks Harnam to leave the village in
anticipation of an attack by the ‘marauders’, Harnam feels “disenchanted rather than angry and
frightened” (Sahni, 2014: 216). Though he is grateful to Karim Khan for his timely warning, his
faith is badly shaken, and he leaves the village with his wife, taking with him nothing except his
gun and a few currency notes. Harnam’s anguish over the forced eviction from his own home is
at once intense and heart- rending:
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------No sooner had they stepped out of the house that the entire place became alien to them ... They
had lived at that place for twenty long years, yet within the twinkling of an eye, had been turned
into homeless outsiders. (221-5)
Harnam’s condition exemplifies the condition of millions of people whom Partition had rendered
homeless and turned into exiles within their homeland, a poignant and unsettling truth, the
trauma which both Khushwant Singh and Bhisham Sahni had experienced, and which was also
largely responsible for the sense of anguish and disillusionment which they wished to express to
the world. In order to do this they chose fiction for they firmly believed in the potential of art to
provide a space for creative artists to re-enact significant moments of history and imbue them
with immortality. They also wished to enable readers to re-vision those moments and discern the
subtleties involved in their occurrence.
Revision as Re-vision
Re-visioning, as far as readers are concerned, is not a simple act of reading but a conscious review of the violent happenings of Partition, envisaging it not merely as yet another horrendous
event of history, but rather as a violent and lasting process, initiated by a confluence of several
interdependent factors –political, religious, economic and social. Such re-visioning also needs
considering to understand the profundity of the two authors’ vision and imagination as regards
Partition, which could perceive and recapture even the minutest detail leading to/constituting the
event and create such meaningful and convincing narratives, that could alter the most
fundamental beliefs and attitudes of, at least, some readers. Acknowledging the power of
fictional texts to have an effect on our behavior and personality, T.S. Eliot says: “The fiction that
we read affects directly our behavior towards our fellowmen, affects our patterns of
ourselves…affects directly…the whole of what we are…” (1932: 393-4)
Fully aware of the potential of the novel to “disseminate positive social values and progressive
political messages” (Daiya, 2008:14) and alter their behavior towards their fellowmen, both
Singh and Sahni used their rich imagination to reconstruct that dark phase of Indian history when
violence had become a way of life, humanity was brutalized and hatred and suspicion reigned
supreme. And since “it is language which speaks in literature… not the author himself”
(Eagleton 1996: 120), they employed a language that could activate the sensibility and
imagination of readers and enable them to see the missing dimensions of the partition experience
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------and unravel the web surrounding its occurrence. Singh’s language in Train to Pakistan
commands influence by virtue of its rich and graphic imagery, which he uses to show the
contamination of a remote Punjab village by the barbarism that possessed the nation during
Partition. The most dominant image in the text is that of a train which recurs throughout the text
and becomes the pivot around which the entire action of the novel revolves. It needs to be
stressed here that in any discourse on Partition -literary or historical- tremendous significance
has been accorded to trains. “An image of overloaded trains with people pasted on to every
possible part of its body – clinging on to the windows, perched precariously on footboards,
hanging between the buffers, crowding on the roofs”, says Rituparna Roy, “is what immediately
comes to mind while thinking of the Partition. It is an image that has been permanently imprinted
on the nation’s collective imagination…to refer to the Partition” (2010: 35). Even textbooks of
history contain references to trains to denote the horrific tales of violence that were perpetrated
on the people travelling on them. “Among the grimmest episodes of violence”, says Jeff Hay,
“were those on the trains that traversed the region, especially those that traveled the short
distance between Lahore and Amritsar…It was common for trains full of corpses to reach the
stations in Lahore and Amritsar, as well as those of smaller towns” (2006: 94).
It is evident that Singh was well aware of the fact that the very mention of the word ‘train’ would
ignite the memories of Partition and transport readers’ minds to those turbulent times. That is
why he uses it in his text but, rather than conceiving the image merely to symbolize the horrors
of Partition, he enlarges its role and range considerably, envisioning it as a signifier of change
and transition – change from motion to stillness, from order to disorder, from life to death. It is in
view of the changing connotations of the term, from being an object which had hitherto
functioned as a positive force, a governing principle of life in pre-Independence/ Partition times,
to become a site facilitating the endless cycle of retributive violence, rendering its protégé
helpless and vulnerable to bestialities in post- Partition time that the author’s use of the image of
the train needs to be examined in detail. At the very outset, laying emphasis on the significance
of trains in the lives of the Mano Majrans, the author makes it clear that, as Mano Majra was
located near a railway station, the pattern of Mano Majrans’ everyday life was set and regulated
according to the timing of different passing trains. The Mullah at the mosque, the priest at the
Sikh temple, the people, the children, in fact, the entire village scheduled its day during peaceful
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------times according to the whistling of the passing trains. However, as times changed, the same
trains turn into ghost trains, which bring a load of corpses and fill the village with a deathly
silence on their arrival. It is, in fact, the arrival of one such train in Mano Majra that changes the
lives of its people forever. Here is an instance from the text which reflects the author’s vision of
the Partition violence associated with trains:
There were women and children huddled in a corner, their eyes were dilated with horror, their
mouths still open as if their shrieks had just become voiceless… There were bodies crammed
against the far end wall of the compartment, looking in terror at the empty windows through
which must have come shots, spears and spikes. These were lavatories, jammed with corpses of
young men who had muscled their way to comparative safety… The most vivid picture was that
of an old peasant with a long white bread; he did not look dead at all. He sat jammed between
rolls of bedding on the upper rack meant for luggage, looking pensively at the scene below him.
(Singh, 2009: 89-90)
In one single stroke, Singh establishes the undeniable historical fact that trains arrived on both
sides of the border with the dead bodies of thousands of refugees. Needless to say, the author had
observed too closely the colossal damage caused to humanity on the trains by deliberate human
acts of manipulated frenzy and bestiality. What is even more striking is the fact that his intense
imagination recaptures, with vividness and perfection; those images which force their way into
the consciousness of readers to make them see with clarity the sheer helplessness of the people
who had been the victims of the endless cycle of retributive violence facilitated by the movement
of trains across the borders. As Jisha Menon argues, “Partition transformed its image into a
foreboding emissary, an uncanny reminder of the ‘gifts’ of slaughtered bodies sent across in
trains by Muslims in Pakistan and Hindus and Sikhs in India”. (2013: 93)
In contrast, Sahni’s novel does not mention the word train, instead images associated with the
dark and captive world of violence dominate the text. Night emerges as the most important
recurring symbol of darkness, and all the major episodes of plunder and arson occur under the
cover of darkness. The darkness of the author’s vision, emanating from his perception of the
sinister reality of Partition, seems to have extended to his work and finds expression through the
constant evocation of darkness, which engulfs the beings of all of those who were caught in the
whirlwind of emotions, passions, disruptions and destructions. The image of flames of fire is also
reiterated in the text, symbolizing the fire of communal violence that raged throughout the
nation: “Flames of fire still rose from the building of the Khalsa School. All the houses
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------belonging to the Sikhs on the slope overlooking the stream had been gutted, besides all three
shops of the butchers, and the houses of three or four Muslims in Teli Mohalla, had been set on
fire” (Sahni: 284). Not surprisingly, the image of the flames of fire, like the image of the train,
has come to be inscribed in the collective memory of people as a horrific symbol of Partition
violence, and is reflected in several texts of literature and history. Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-CandyMan, for instance, also shows the city of Lahore going up in flames. The words of a British
officer in the Punjab at the time of Independence are also worth quoting here: “The Punjab is an
absolute inferno and it is still going strong... It will take generations of work to put things
straight” (Hay, 2006: 93).3
Partition caused immense grief and loss to the people, and has been depicted as such by writers
through a series of images and events exposing the naked reality of dehumanized violence. Sahni
delves deep into the causes of its occurrence, analyses it with penetrating insight, ascribing its
root cause to the age old enmity between the Sikh and the Muslim communities, as is revealed by
the text:
The atmosphere in the gurudwara was as solemn as water-laden clouds… the minds imbued with
the past…the presence of the Muslim foe, the Guru’s ‘prasad’, the paraphernalia of past battles…
and the bond that united them into one unbreakable entity… if anything did exist it was the Turk,
the traditional enemy of the Khalsa… the imminent combat which was to them like the great
ritual into which they would plunge, ready to lay down their lives. (Sahni: 231-32)
What is striking in the previous quotation, is the identification by the author of the root cause of
the communal problem, namely, the regressive tendency of the people, that binds their minds to
the past, that forces them to look back to the painful and traumatic moments of the past and, that
past, when experienced through the mind, is made real by associations with present experiences.
As Sahni argues in the following passage:
The Turks too mentally viewed their attack as an assault on the citadel of their age-old enemy, the
Sikhs. In the minds of the Sikhs too they were the Turks of the bygone medieval times whom the
Khalsa used to confront in battle…The ‘warriors’ had their feet in the twentieth century while
their minds were in medieval times. (282)
3
See Royle Trevor, The Last Days of the Raj, (London: Michael Joseph, 1989), p .196. qtd. in Jeff Hay,
The Partition of British India (New York: Chelsea House, 2006), p.93.
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------Acknowledging the history of violence and confrontations, Sahni puts the blame on the people’s
tendency to cling to the past, to the unsettling, disquieting moments of the past that make those
moments a vital part of the present. This is reflected in the text through the reference to the “war
song which used to be sung by the Khalsa” (228) three hundred years earlier, and also to the
royal court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, whose very name evokes the glorious moments of Sikh
history. Their minds transported to those past times, imbue them with the spirit of sacrifice and
prompt them to act in the present. This, however, does not mean that Sahni suggests a clean
break from the past, instead, he seems to advocate an acceptance of the fact that the blunders of
the past have to be recognized and that the present has to be safeguarded against those. This is
made amply clear in the epigraph from John Buchan to the celluloid version of Tamas, which
reinforces the need to take lessons from the grievous errors committed in the past: “The hasty
reformer who does not remember the past, will find himself condemned to repeat it” (Nihlani:
Episode1). Emphasis is put on the need to learn from the mistakes of the past, for history, Sahni
seems to say, tends to repeat itself in the most distressing way. The past has to be continuously
monitored, it has to be regularly weeded out for, the past, if allowed to grow un-checked, would
choke the present. This is manifested in the text through the depiction of the futility of the battle
that lasted for two days, the dead bodies that lay scattered here and there throughout the village,
the death of the Sikh women who jumped into the well, and the houses reduced to dust. What is
even more shocking and agonizing is the fact that, after the bloodshed and violence have ceased
and harmony is restored, when the members of different communities get together, they think of
having maximum monetary gains from such situations – property to be purchased, deals to be
finalized, bargains to be made – especially in those places where property prices had fallen
because of the riots. The fact that financial gain/profit was also one of the driving forces of the
communal violence in Lahore has been supported by much documentary evidence, according to
which the “tide of violence expedited the anticipatory migration of wealthy and politically astute
Hindus and Sikhs out of Lahore. In the midst of chaos, selling of properties, shifting assets…
climbed up” (Chattha: 207).
Sahni’s depiction of pre-Partition violence remains rooted in the city of Lahore and in the life of
its people. However, what is remarkable in his treatment of the situation prevailing in Lahore is
his imaginative insight into the psychology and behavior of the different people inhabiting his
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------fictional universe. Nobody escapes his penetrating glance – not even shrewd British officers like
Richard, who held eminent positions towards the end of British rule in India. Richard represents
the fears, apprehensions, hypocrisies and strategies of the British rulers during the last days of
the empire in India. Nothing perturbs Richard, not even the worsening communal situation in
Lahore, and so he says to Liza, his wife: “What can I do if there is tension between the Hindus
and Muslims?” (Sahni: 53). One can easily make sense of what Sahni wishes to express here: the
insensitive and ruthless attitude of the British, who could have prevented the riots, had they
nipped them in their initial stage. Richard’s character is in sharp contrast to the character of
Hukum Chand, the Deputy Commissioner in Train to Pakistan. The physical description of
Hukum Chand is anything but attractive, yet his intentions, unlike Richard’s, are noble. He wants
the safe evacuation of the Muslims of Mano Majra and succeeds in his mission. He uses his tact
and resourcefulness to save the lives of many people. Richard, on the other hand, fails to impress
readers on account of his irresponsible and deliberate act of letting violence continue for some
time before he takes suitable action to control it.
The growing communalism in Lahore in the pre-Partition days is viewed and analyzed by Sahni
in different ways. How rumors contributed to accelerating violence, the plight of the people in
the refugee camps, what congressmen and communist workers did or failed to do to restore
peace, and the role played by the members of different religious organizations when making
passionate speeches, storing ammunitions, and devising strategies of self defense or attack –
everything finds expression in Sahni’s novel in great detail. In sharp contrast to this, Singh’s text
briefly mentions the different issues emanating from Partition. There is a brief reference to the
refugee camps where the Muslims of Mano Majra are taken after evacuation. Descriptions of the
activities of various religious congregations do not occupy much of the text’s space although
towards the end, the text shows a group of unknown armed Sikhs arriving in the village, and
assembling in the Gurudwara to incite the men and women present there to indulge in retributive
violence and make plans with the gangsters of the village to send a train load of dead Muslims to
Pakistan. It is remarkable that all of these actions of the Sikhs are performed with the religious
fervor and sanctity of a sacred act. The Sikhs, Khushwant Singh makes it clear, believe that what
they are doing, “is in the service of the Guru” (Singh: 161).
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------The violence thus performed is regarded by them as a religious act. This dramatic reversal in the
role of religion, from being a source of sustenance in peaceful time to a source of violence in
turbulent times, is treated by the author with utmost care and sensitivity. Bhai Meet Singh, the
priest of the Gurudwara, the custodian of religion, refuses to take part in this religious ceremony,
which is then performed by the Sikh youth and other village people. Singh makes it absolutely
clear that it is not religion, but a misinterpretation of religion and its ideals, that causes
fanaticism, a belief also shared by Sahini, who also denounces this with equal intensity and force
through the scenes of the Gurudwara and through the activities of different congregations. Both
writers perceived this reality, but it is Khushwant Singh who may be credited with what readers
may find missing in Sahni’s text, life-saving spiritual acts of sacrifice. Violence perpetrated in
the name of religion needs to be effaced by religious acts. Therefore, in order to rectify the
wrong and excesses committed in the name of religion, Khushwant Singh offers the concluding
episode of his novel, as the grand finale to his scheme of things – Jugga’s supreme act of
sacrificing his life to save the train load of Muslims going to Pakistan, which clearly echoes
Bataille’s ideas in Theory of Religion: “Sacrifice at last displays its idealizing potential in action,
its symbolic power to efface the lethal destruction that lies at its core” (Bataille, 1992: 67).
Presented as an expiation ritual, and coming at the end of the novel, Jugga’s sacrifice is meant to
cleanse the community/society/nation of all its past sins and compensate for all the violence that
lies at the heart of the novel. The fact, that he succeeds in saving the lives of the Muslims of
Mano Majra is symbolic of his victory over the evil forces of destruction. It is also suggestive of
the redeeming vision of the author, his unwavering faith in humanity, which leads him to make
his hero, the dreaded and notorious Jugga, sacrifice his life for a noble cause. His sacrifice,
though, also motivated by his personal desire (to save Nooran’s life, who was also travelling on a
train to Pakistan). However, the way it is performed (he seeks the guidance and blessings of Bhai
Meet Singh, the priest of the Gurudwara) turns Jugga into a saint, a ‘mahatma’. It is clear that
Singh wanted to show that anyone, even a ruffian like Jugga, is capable of performing acts of
virtue and moral goodness, and that it is not necessary to be a saint to do good, to be virtuous. In
fact, it only takes a moment for change of heart to be effected. He places the responsibility of
moral goodness on him, as the novel ends with him sacrificing his life so that the lives of others
are saved. Jugga’s death results in the continuity of numerous other lives because, in his case,
94
AFRINUL HAQUE KHAN
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------“death is the great affirmer, the wonder struck cry of life” (Bataille: 46).
Jugga’s death safeguards the lives of the Muslims of Mano Majra. It is important to note here the
religious dimension of Jugga’s sacrifice, which disclosed Singh’s attitude towards Partition. He
saw it as a curse brought about by the sins of the people, who indulged in insane acts of violence,
turning the pious land into a wasteland, and hence puts the emphasis on the need for some
sacrifice to free the land from this curse. Sahni, on the other hand, by setting his novel in the
colonial period and emphasizing the continuity of violence, wishes to show how Partition is a
continuous/ongoing process and so he ends his novel with a disinterested Richard speaking to
Liza about his transfer to a new place; a scheming Murad Ali who raises slogans of HinduMuslim unity and the Congress Party workers once again engaged in their usual bickering
(despite Jarnail’s death), thus making it clear that Partition violence will go on if people do not
change their attitude. What comes to the surface in the final analysis of the two texts is a clear
picture of the mindset of the two authors: that of Sahni as a psychologist, a great clinical
observer, who possessed a keen understanding of the psychology, behavior and motives of the
people; who knew what motivated people in performing acts of violence and that of Singh as a
sage, a seer, who knew what was needed to end this violence and make fresh starts, and gave his
interpretation of the true spirit of religion and its implementation through sacrificial acts. What is
even more important, though, is the common purpose both authors shared. Through the textual
representation of the traumatic events, the two writers enable readers to re-vision the past with
sheer clarity, make them aware of the disastrous consequences of unjust desires and hasty
judgments, and urge them to take lessons from the past and revise their attitudes, thinking and
practices so that the mistakes of the past are never again repeated.
Conclusion
There are layers and layers of opacity surrounding Partition. Both Train to Pakistan and Tamas
unravel those layers and make us re-view with sheer clarity and force those complex yet decisive
moments in Indian history, when “unspeakable atrocities and indescribable inhumanities were
perpetrated in the name of religion and patriotism” (Khosla, 1989: 3) and enable us to understand
how the communal and fundamentalist instincts “derange[d] our understanding of moral
rightness” (Bhalla, 1994: vii). Tolstoy claimed, “art is an organ of human life, transmitting man’s
95
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------reasonable perception into feeling…Art should cause violence to be set aside” (797). Both Train
to Pakistan and Tamas compel us to re-think, re-consider and revise our preconceived notions,
beliefs and assumptions, thus corroborating Terry Eagleton’s belief that, “as we read on we shed
assumptions, revise beliefs” (67) for “the valuable work of literature …teaches us new codes for
understanding… our conventional assumptions are ‘defamiliarized’, objectified to the point
where we can criticize and so revise them” (68).
WORKS CITED
BAKER, ERNEST ALBERT (1924). The History of the English Novel Volume 1. Lanham: Rowman
& Littlefield.
BATAILLE, GEORGES (1992). Theory of Religion (trans. Robert Hurley). New York: Zone Books.
BHALLA, ALOK (1994). “Introduction” in Alok Bhalla (ed.) Stories about the Partition of India,
Volume 1. New Delhi: Indus: vii-xxxiii.
BOSE, SUGATA & AYESHA JALAL (2004). Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political
Economy. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
BUCHAN, JOHN (1987). Quoted in “Episode 1” Tamas. (prod. Govind Nihlani). Doordarshan.
CHATTHA, ILYAS (2012). “Economic Change and Community Relations in Lahore Before
Partition.” Journal of Punjab Studies, 19 (2): 193-213.
DAIYA, KAVITA (2008). Violent Belonging: Partition, Gender, and National Culture in
Postcolonial India. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
EAGLETON, TERRY (1996). Literary Theory: An Introduction. Malden: Blackwell Publishing.
ELIOT, T. S. (1932). Selected Essays. London: Faber and Faber Limited.
GUHA, RAMCHANDRA (2008). India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest
Democracy. New Delhi: Picador India.
HAY, JEFF (2006). The Partition of British India. New York: Chelsea House.
KEANE, JOHN (1996). Reflections on Violence. London: Verso.
KHOSLA, G. D. (1989). Stern Reckoning, A Survey of the Events Leading Up To and Following
the Partition of India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
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AFRINUL HAQUE KHAN
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------MENON, JISHA (2013) The Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan and the Memory of
Partition. New York: Cambridge University Press.
MUKHERJEE, MEENAKSHI. (2004). The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English.
New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
NANDA, B. R. (2003). Witness to Partition: A Memoir. New Delhi: Rupa & Co.
PANDEY, GYANENDRA (2004). Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in
India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
PRITAM, AMRITA (1994). “I Say unto Waris Shah” in K. M. George (ed.) Modern Indian
Literature: an Anthology: Surveys and Poems. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi: 946-947.
ROY, RITUPARNA (2010). South Asian Partition Fiction in India: From Khushwant Singh to
Amitav Ghosh. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
SAHNI, BHISHAM (2014). Tamas. New Delhi: Penguin Books India. [2001]
SAMADDAR, R. (2001) A Biography of the Indian Nation 1947–1997. New Delhi: Sage.
SEERVAI, H. M. (2014). Partition of India: Legend and Reality. New Delhi: Universal Law
Publishing Company.
SINGH, KHUSHWANT (1998). “‘A Forgetful Nation’ in With Malice Towards One and All”. The
Hindustan Times, January 31, 1998: 9.
SINGH, KHUSHWANT (1964). “Guest of Honour Talk.” The Australian Broadcasting Comission’s
Guest of Honour Programme, broadcast on 5th April.
SINGH, KHUSHWANT (2009). Train to Pakistan. New Delhi: Penguin India. [1956]
TALBOT, IAN (2006). Divided Cities: Partition and Its Aftermath in Lahore and Amritsar, 19471957. Karachi: Oxford University Press.
TOLSTOY, L. (1897). “The Moral Responsibilities of Art” (trans. A. Maude) in D. Gioia and R. S.
Gwynn (eds.). (2006). The Art of the Short Story. New York: Pearson: 797.
AFRINUL HAQUE KHAN is Assistant Professor and Head of the Department of English at
Nirmala College, Ranchi University, India.
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Indi@logs
Vol 3 2016, pp. 99-113, ISSN: 2339-8523
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------CONFLICTS DURING THE PLANNING OF INDIAN INDEPENDENCE AND ITS
PARTITION IN POUR L’AMOUR DE L’INDE BY CATHERINE CLÉMENT AND
INDIAN SUMMER BY ALEX VON TUNZELMANN. AN EMBODIMENT
APPROACH TO VIOLENCE
Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha
[email protected]
ABSTRACT
The end of the Raj and the British Empire had multiple consequences on Indian history,
geography and society. While India was joyfully declared an independent nation, its partition
caused innumerable violent episodes, the exodus of religious groups, Hindu-Muslim riots and
conflicts with its new-born neighbour Pakistan. In such a tumultuous scenario, Gandhi’s
proclaimed message of ahimsa (non-violence) opposed the will of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the
founder of Pakistan, and the, until then, Viceroy Lord Louis Mountbatten who managed British
Government policy. Pour l’amour de l’Inde (1993) by Catherine Clément, and Indian Summer.
The Secret History of the End of an Empire (2007) by Alex von Tunzelmann both explore the
last days of colonized India in detail and with a sharp eye on the events and personalities that
shaped this new India. The literary reconstruction of historic events gives a new insight into the
decisions which led to Indian independence and division. In both novels, the body plays an
important role. With physical and metaphorical references, from the maternal body of India
being tainted, to Gandhi’s fasts and refusal of medication, the body is charged with political and
symbolic meanings.
KEYWORDS: Indian independence, Partition, India-Pakistan, Historic novels, Mountbatten,
Lady Edwina, Nehru, Body.
RESUMEN Conflictos durante la planificación de la independencia de la India y su partición en
Pour l’amour de l’Inde de Catherine Clément e Indian Summer de Alex von Tunzelmann. Un
acercamiento corpóreo a la violencia
El final del Raj y el Imperio británico tuvo múltiples consecuencias en la historia, geografía y
sociedad india. Mientras que la India fue declarada nación independiente de forma pletórica, su
partición provocó innumerables episodios violentos, éxodo de grupos religiosos, revueltas entre
hindúes y musulmanes y conflictos con su recién nacido vecino Pakistán. En este clima
inhóspito, el proclamado mensaje de ahimsa (no violencia) de Gandhi se oponía a la voluntad
de Muhammad Ali Jinnah, fundador de Pakistán, y el hasta entonces virrey Lord Louis
Mountbatten entablaba relaciones políticas con el gobierno británico. Pour l’amour de l’Inde
(1993) de Catherine Clément, e Indian Summer. The Secret History of the End of an Empire
CONFLICTS DURING THE PLANNING OF INDIAN INDEPENDENCE
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------(2007) de Alex von Tunzelmann exploran los últimos días de la India colonizada, con
minucioso detalle sobre los sucesos y personalidades que dieron forma a la nueva India. La
reconstrucción literaria de los hechos históricos ofrece una nueva mirada hacia las decisiones
que llevaron a India a su independencia y su división. En ambas obras, el cuerpo tiene un valor
primordial. Con referencias físicas y metafóricas, desde la India como un cuerpo maternal
mancillado a los ayunos de Gandhi y su rechazo a la medicación, el cuerpo está cargado de
significados políticos y simbólicos.
PALABRAS CLAVE: Independencia de la India, Partición, India-Pakistán, novela histórica,
Mountbatten, Lady Edwina, Nehru, cuerpo.
Violence in any form (cultural, psychological, structural, etc.) is associated with
degrading changes and destruction. When violence is presented at a physical level, it
becomes more visible or evident than when it happens at a psychological level. In all
societies, violence has been present. World history from the twentieth century has been
witness to two world wars, innumerable armed conflicts, terrorism, genocides, religious
riots and gender violence.
Violence and the body are strongly connected. Lauren B. Wilcox in her research on
Bodies of Violence (2015) exposes the dehumanization of people during wars and armed
conflicts, where human beings become injured or simply are transformed into dead
bodies, deprived of any personal identity:
States or groups make war and, in doing so, kill and injure people that other
states are charged with protecting. The strategic deployment of force in the
language of rational control and risk management that dominates security
studies presents a disembodied view of subjects as reasoning actors. However,
as objects of security studies, the people who are protected from violence or are
killed are understood as only bodies: they are ahistorical, biopolitical
aggregations whose individual members breathe, suffer, and die. In both cases,
the politics and sociality of bodies are erased (Wilcox, 2015: 2).
The deployment of violence thus disembodies humanity or objectifies people in the
interests of a country, a religion or any other cause. At a geopolitical level, while
colonial empires were coming to an end, the rise of independent movements provoked
both the creation of new nations and physical and cultural destruction 1 in the form of
human damage and death, the destruction of heritages, population exodus and religious
hatred. Such is the case with India’s struggle for independence: “From the ashes of a
worldwide war, a new world was rising” (Von Tunzelmann, 2007: 136). Paradoxically,
1
For a wider notion of “cultural violence”, see Galtung 1990.
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------its much awaited freedom from British power in 1947, would bring pain, hate and
chaos, especially due to India’s partition and the consequent rise of communalism and
religious hatred.
The story of Partition has been told from different perspectives. Historiographically, the
‘official’ version of modern India, India’s Struggle for Independence (1989), is the
‘nationalist narrative’, which opposes British rule and elaborates on the different civil
rebellions, peasant movements and Gandhi’s activism for self-rule, while dedicating
only one chapter to the contradictory nature of “Freedom and Partition” (Chandra et al.,
1989: 487-504). The reasons for the transition to independence are described as a
combination of British weakness due to their involvement in the Second World War, the
role of Jinnah as a possible collaborator of the Raj, and the Indian National Congress’
failure to maintain Hindu-Muslim unity. Rather differently, Pakistani scholar Ayesha
Jalal questions the surgical division between the Indian Congress’ secularism and
Jinnah and his Muslim League’s communalism, and this author highlights the difficult
task of transcending the limiting constraints of one’s nation or religion, and being
impartial while narrating such a painful historical event. She explains that “the
psychological legacy of partition has left a much deeper impact on people’s minds than
the social, economic and political dynamics that led to the division” (Jalal, 1996: 681).
Thus, the violent consequences and trauma of Independence and Partition at a personal
level are more difficult to measure or narrate. This is where literature comes in. A
literary approach to the historical events will, without eluding the facts, actors, numbers
and dates, get to the core of the emotions and the psychological impact on society and
the individual. For example, the work of Rituparna Roy, South Asian Partition Fiction
in English from Khushwant Singh to Amitav Ghosh (2010) attempts to analyse
narratives concerning Partition in Indian fiction from the mid- 1950s to the late 1980s:
Train to Pakistan (1956) by Khushwant Sigh, A Bend in the Ganges (1964) by Manohar
Malgonkar, Ice-Candy Man (1989) by Bapsi Sidhwa, Clear Light of Day (1980) by
Anita Desai, Midnight’s Children (1980) by Salman Rushdie, and The Shadow Lines
(1988) by Amitav Ghosh.
To offer another point of view, in this paper a literary analysis is presented on the
historical events of Indian independence and its partition as narrated by two European
women authors in their novels Pour l’amour de l’Inde (1993) by Catherine Clément and
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire (2007) by Alex von
Tunzelmann. The interaction both authors establish between literature and history offers
an interdisciplinary approach and creates a better understanding of the convoluted
process towards Indian independence. Considering the intrinsic relation between
violence and body as presented by Wilcox, I will focus on three aspects to develop this
paper. Firstly, I will contemplate India as a geographical and political body whose parts
are being altered. The embodiment of India as a mother who is being desecrated will
contain cruel episodes of anonymous victims of all religions and social backgrounds, as
well as references to the violence of climate and nature. Secondly, I will consider the
relation of violence and body in male figures, mainly in the three main characters in the
plot of both novels: Lord Louis Mountbatten, Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi.
Mountbatten stands as a political figure, a highly-decorated naval hero, proud of his
achievements. Nehru’s periods of imprisonment are a test of the body, where the latter
is confined to a small space and deprived of freedom. Regarding Gandhi, his voluntary
fasts as a sign of protest and his experiments of brahmacharya (literally “going after
Brahman”, a spiritual practice of control of the senses and chastity) will make him a
controversial figure. The third part is dedicated to female bodies, often the main
protagonists in violent episodes — abducted, raped, abused, mutilated — and the least
talked about. The role of Lady Edwina and female politicians in India will be crucial in
understanding women as both victims and as agents for peace.
Pour l’amour de l’Inde by Catherine Clément and Indian Summer by Alex von
Tunzelmann focus their narration on a tumultuous period of Indian history. Clément
presents the facts of the planning of Indian independence in the form of a diary with an
‘omnipresent look’ from 1922 to 1948. Von Tunzelmann offers a wider scope of the
events by narrating Indian history from 1577, where she compares the splendour of
Mughal emperors to that of England which was an undeveloped nation at that time.
Certainly, the physical conception of India is one that has witnessed change as an entity;
its geography has expanded or divided according to its rulers and the manner in which
they have drawn up borders. Indian independence in 1947 was followed by its partition
with the creation of Pakistan. Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a London barrister, chosen by the
British with the approval of Jinnah, was assigned the onerous and vulnerable job of
drawing the lines of the partition (Clément, 1993: 197, Von Tunzelmann, 2007: 205).
But ironically none of the leaders, Nehru in India and Jinnah in Pakistan, knew the real
102
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------territories of their nations since “the boundaries between the two new states were not
officially known until two days after they had formally become independent. And,
astonishingly, few had foreseen that this division of territories and power would be
accompanied by anything like the bloodbath that actually eventuated” (Pandey, 2011:
2). What was meant to be a peaceful process of farewell to British rule became a series
of violent episodes in an apocalyptic atmosphere. In both novels emerges the image of a
tainted and sacrificed India, a dishonoured mother whose body is being split and altered.
Such imagery is strengthened with a series of metaphors or embodiments, which make
India a feminine, living, suffering entity.
During their stay in India as Viceroy and Vicereine Louis, and Edwina Mountbatten
would travel through different states. At one moment, their itinerary is described as “the
royal tour ground on, zigzagging up through the belly of India and stopping in
Bangalore, Mysore, Hyderabad, and Indore” (Von Tunzelmann, 2007: 66). This “belly”
would engender two sons or “quarrelling siblings” (Chakrabarti, 2012), India and
Pakistan, due to the painful process of “the partition of the subcontinent, the split which
had ripped two wings off the body of India” (Von Tunzelmann, 2007: 2).
If India appears as a suffering mother on, what was supposed to be, its glorious day of
freedom, England stands as a proud father who sees its educated child “open her
wings”:
the end of Empire was presented as the purpose of Empire — India was as a
well-nurtured and fattened chick, raised to fly from the imperial nest while
Britain, the indulgent parent, looked on with pride. And so the British were able
to celebrate their loss alongside the Indians who celebrated their victory (Von
Tunzelmann, 2007: 6).
Not only do these two countries play a familial role, but in the new geopolitical
scenario, the United States comes on board as a helpful uncle to aid England to recover
from post-war damages: “Britain was beginning to find out what it was like to be the
humbled dependency of a much more powerful state […] It looks like a pat on the back
to us from a rich uncle who sees us turning over a new leaf” (Von Tunzelmann, 2007:
150).
It is clear that powerful nations are associated with paternal or male figures. Jinnah is
also compared to the father of a new nation, and from Britain, Churchill supports him:
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------“If Jinnah is regarded as the father of Pakistan, Churchill must qualify as its uncle; and,
therefore, as a pivotal figure in the resurgence of political Islam.” (Von Tunzelmann,
2007: 148). On the contrary, maternal or feminine metaphors are associated with the
weak, in this case, India. Catherine Clément in Pour l’Amour de l’Inde entitles Chapter
Six as “Inde, ma mère au toit de neige”,2 evoking fragility or using a metaphor for “up
is good”, as up on the North was snowy Shimla, the favourite British settlement in
India. Even ‘Vande mataram’ (Hail motherland), inherited from myths in the
Ramayanas, the Mahabharata and the Puranas, is part of the Indian cultural
imagination, which considers nation as motherland (Tripathy, 2014: 81). Such a
tradition of nationalist iconography represents woman or mother as a metaphor of the
bountiful and yet suffering land. It appears in Katherine Mayo’s Mother India (1927),
and is alluded to in Pour l’amour de l’Inde where Edwina is reading it:
— Un livre sur les Indes, j’imagine? dit Lord Louis affectueusement. Voyons…
C’est bien cela. Mother India. Un classique.
— Très mauvais livre, fit Nehru vivement. Cette dame Mayo mériterait un
procès en diffamation. Nous y sommes décrits comme des singes souillés en
permanence, des sauvages sans âme et sans cœur… Ouvrage raciste!3
(Clément, 1993: 117).
Jawaharlal Nehru’s frustration is common in both novels as he sees the plans for
independence not matching the wishes of Congress for a united India. He also differs
from the Mahatma in approaching problems and rejects Gandhi’s mingling spirituality
with politics. Nehru would describe Gandhi as “going round with ointment trying to
heal one sore spot after another on the body of India, instead of diagnosing the cause of
this eruption of sores and participating in the treatment of the body as a whole” (Von
Tunzelmann, 2007: 174). At the turning point of the transfer of power from Britain to
India, it is inconceivable to “treat” the whole body of India and the magnitude of the
conflicts. We can also approach the body or the land partially through metaphors: Jaipur
is described as “a pink metropolis set in the heart of princely Rajputana” (Von
2
India, my mother with a snow roof. All quotations in French are translated to English by the author of
this paper.
3
— A book about India, I suppose? said Lord Louis affectionately. Let’s see… Yes that’s right. Mother
India. A classic.
— A very bad book, said Nehru vividly. This lady Mayo deserves a trial for defamation. We are
constantly described as dirty monkeys, soulless and heartless savages... Racist work!
104
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Tunzelmann, 2007: 301), the situation of Kashmir, between Pakistan and India, is
described as “the eye of the storm” (Chakrabarti, 2012: 15) and Lord Louis
Mountbatten is also worried, foreseeing the turmoil if Partition is agreed upon by both
sides. Being responsible for the transfer of power from Britain to India, he is afraid “to
put the responsibility for any of these mad decisions fairly and squarely on the Indian
shoulders in the eyes of the world, for one day they will bitterly regret the decision they
are about to make” (Von Tunzelmann, 2007: 185).
Effectively, the decisions for Indian independence and its partition took place and the
future was uncertain and not peaceful as expected, but rather violent. Partition between
India and Pakistan caused uncountable episodes and adversities from both sides of the
new borders: “Nous avons des émeutes au Bihar, à Calcutta, Bombay aussi s’est
enflammée. Calcutta surtout!4” (Clément, 1993: 53). Riots were mainly religious and
communal in nature: Hindus were slaughtered by Muslims, Muslims by Hindus in an
unstoppable vicious circle. They attacked each other killing pigs in front of mosques
and cows in front of temples. India’s body, which hosted all religious manifestations,
was desecrated: “Aux haines religieuses entre hindous et musulmans s’ajoutait le péril
sikh; depuis qu’ils avaient compris que leur Penjab serait partagé par le milieu, les sikhs
avaient retrouvé leurs traditions guerrières5” (Clément, 1993: 203). The Punjab became
a refugee camp, where thousands (or more) Hindus moved to India, thousands (or more)
of Muslims moved to Pakistan, and “à travers le Penjab […] l’immense masse des
hommes et des femmes fuyaient d’un pays à l’autre, sans vraiment savoir pourquoi” 6
(Clément, 1993: 291).
A strong recurring image amongst Partition’s violent episodes is that of trains whose
passengers have been massacred: “An image of overloaded trains, with people pasted on
to every possible part of its body… has been permanently imprinted on the nation’s
collective imagination” (Roy, 2010: 35). Alex von Tunzelmann and Catherine Clément
both refer to these cruel episodes, but to dignify the anonymity of the victims, to make
them more than just a piece of flesh, more than just a dead body, Catherine Clément
4
We have riots in Bihar, Calcutta, Bombay is also on fire. Especially Calcutta!
To religious hatred between Hindus and Muslim was added the Sikh risk; since they understood that
their Punjab would be divided in two, Sikhs found again their warrior traditions.
6
Through the Punjab ... the immense mass of men and women fled from one country to another, without
really knowing why.
5
105
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------gives them a name. By narrating short episodes with proper names instead of a mass
number of victims, she offers a closer look at the impact of the inhuman events. She
introduces to the reader the story of Khushwant, a Sikh humiliated by Muslims
(Clément, 1993: 282-285) and the experience of Keshav, a Jain survivor of a slaughter
while he travelled in a train full of Muslims (Clément, 285-287). The writer had
personally met Keshav while she was in India doing her research for the novel. By
interviewing him and making his story known, she recovers the memory of Partition
through a personal story and thus brings forth the human element within these
anonymous victims.
Unfortunately, uncountable stories remain untold about the massacres that female
bodies suffered in a besmirched motherland: “La femme à l’œil sorti de son orbite, et
qui tenait un nourrisson ensanglanté, le ventre ouvert. La vieille hébétée aux mains
coupées, et les fumées noires des bûchers pour les morts… 7” (Clément, 1993: 170).
Apart from the cruelty of human actions towards other fellow countrymen and women,
we could wonder about the violence of nature. India’s climate is extreme, the heat can
be unbearable for foreigners and when the expected rains come, monsoons can
devastate the land with floods. Natural disasters also provoke human death and material
damages. Von Tunzelmann makes reference to an earthquake that hit Bihar on 15
January 1934 and caused (an estimated) 20,000 deaths: “Gandhi visited Bihar in March,
and spoke to the bereaved, destitute and homeless people. The earthquake, he told them,
“is a chastisement for your sins”. And the particular sin that he had in mind was the
enforcement of Untouchability” (Von Tunzelmann, 2007: 95). Untouchability, which
had been banned by the British continue(d) to exist. This is also a form of violence
towards the body and thus against human dignity, yet Gandhi’explanation for natural
disaster would be that of divine punishment. Opposed to this idea, Sarojini Naidu, who
rarely appears in Indian Summer, but becomes an active character in Pour l’amour de
l’Inde, speaks about the nature of violence and the violence of nature: “Tout est d’une
incroyable pureté, les cimes, les arbres, les ombres mauves à l’horizon, le silence… On
7
The woman with the eye out of its socket, and holding a bloody infant, belly open. The old dazed with
severed hands and black smoke pyres for the dead.
106
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------dirait que rien ne s’est passé en Inde; la nature ne se soucie ni des massacres ni de la
mort de notre Mahatma; elle oublie 8” (Clément, 1993: 27).
After considering India as a suffering female body, it is also important to observe the
male roles in both the novels. Within the multitude of anonymous victims there are men
standing out of the crowd with names, identities and decisive ideas and actions that
would change the course of history. It actually seems that the Independence and
Partition of India were “in their hands”, that is: Lord Louis Mountbatten, Jawaharlal
Nehru, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. All of them were
confronted by violence, by personal suffering and general pain due to the diverse cruel
episodes and civil war ambience in the new India and Pakistan. Jinnah in both novels is
often described as the self-proclaimed first man of his new nation Pakistan, not
emotional, or reluctant to show his feelings, nor willing to dialogue. Journalist Mildred
Talbot described Jinnah as a man who “looked like a walking, talking corpse” (Von
Tunzelmann, 2007: 238). His physical aspect suggests death and frigidity. From the
British side, there is Lord Louis, “Viscount Mountbatten of Burma, the new ViceroyDesignate, forty-six years old, handsome and gleaming in his full dress uniform, with
rows of medals stretching from breastbone to armpit” (Von Tunzelmann, 2007: 161).
He also appears as a cold figure, proud of his insignias and his genealogy. However, he
has a pivotal role in British-Indian relations by being the last Viceroy of colonial India
and by trespassing political etiquette to become close friends with Nehru and Gandhi
and be appreciated by the Indian population. This respect is also achieved by his wife
Lady Edwina, due to her commitment for civil and humanitarian causes during the war
in Europe and during the massacres in a divided India. Jawaharlal Nehru would soon
admire this couple and develop bonds of friendship with both, and more intimately with
Edwina, a fact that Lord Louis accepted and respected. Nehru had experienced prison
several times, a lack of freedom for the body that meant for him a time for learning and
freeing the mind. A reduced space would be enough for him to practice yoga: “Dans la
cellule numéro huit, la tête en bas et les pieds en l’air, Jawaharlal Nehru faisait son yoga
matinal9” (Clément, 1993: 30). Prison was the place where he read Verlaine and felt
Everything is incredibly pure, the summits, the trees, the mauve shadows on the horizon, the silence...
It seems that nothing has happened in India; Nature does not care about massacres nor about the death of
our Mahatma; she forgets.
9
In cell number eight, head down and feet in the air, Jawaharlal Nehru practiced his morning yoga.
8
107
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------motivated to learn French. A reduced space which confines the body, inflicting the
violence of lack of freedom, meant for Nehru a space for meditation and creation.
Imprisoned at Dehra Dun at the foot of the Himalayas he spun what would be the
wedding dress of Indira: “He spent his time planting an English country garden of sweet
peas and nasturtiums, and over the course of nine months spun 112,500 yards of yarn —
some of which Indira would wear as her wedding sari, in place of the usual silk” (Von
Tunzelmann, 2007: 110). Apart from Nehru’s role as hero, father and the first Prime
Minister of Independent India, he also represents in both novels sensuality. His
relationship with Edwina is narrated in a more platonic way in Indian Summer, whereas
in Pour l’amour de l’Inde, several erotic references give a clue of the nature of their
rapport, described also as physical and passionate. After Edwina visited a small village
near Delhi by herself, she explained to Nehru what she had seen, and he works as the
agent who would introduce her to the mysteries of India:
— Et dans l’intérieur du temple se trouve le lingam.
— Le lingam… murmura Edwina, songeuse. Je ne l’ai pas vu.
— Mais vous en connaissez l’existence, je vois.
Edwina le regarda en face.
— Je connais la nature de ce fétiche, en effet, dit-elle en rosissant légèrement.
— Ce que vous appelez fétiche est le symbole même de la vie, madame,
répliqua Nehru. On l’arrose de lait et de miel, et d’ailleurs il n’existe pas sans
son complément, le…
— Je sais, coupa Edwina. Donc, dans le temple, si j’y retourne…
— Vous n’y retournerez pas seule! J’irai avec vous. Je vous montrerai le
lingam10 (Clément, 1993: 118).
That conversation contains sexual connotations which suggest the attraction and desires
to each other. During the violent climate of the new India, they promised to prioritize
work over their personal relationship, but in the coming years, after the Mountbattens
left for England, Edwina and Nehru continued in touch by exchanging letters and they
managed to meet both in England and in India. During those meetings they could enjoy
10
And in the temple there’s the lingam. /The lingam ... Edwina murmured thoughtfully. I did not see it./
But you know about its existence, I see. / Edwina looked at him in the face. - I know the nature of this
fetish, in fact, she said, blushing slightly. / What you call fetish is the symbol of life, madame, replied
Nehru. It is sprinkled with milk and honey, and besides it does not exist without its complement, the .../ I
know, Edwina stopped. So in the temple, if I go again .../ You will not go alone! I'll go with you. I will
show you the lingam.
108
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------the freedom of their bodies: “the two of them, alone at last in the privacy of her estate,
were able to talk, laugh and cry together, to embrace, and to press each other’s hands on
walks by the river.” (Von Tunzelmann, 2007: 337) and “il lui ferma la bouche d’un
baiser11” (Clément, 1993: 441).
Gandhi’s relation to the body is also interesting. Here we will consider his experiments
with fasting and his ideas of brahmacharya. Firstly, the image most of the world has of
Gandhi is that of a smiling old man dressed in a white piece of cloth, which is the
‘khadi’, “ce khâdi dont le Mahatma avait fait l’emblème de la résistance à l’occupant
anglais 12” (Clément, 1993: 36). His body becomes the bearer of a symbol, that handmade fabric, against British rule. This would provoke anger in Churchill, and both
Catherine Clément (1993: 87) and Alex von Tunzelmann recall his harsh words to
Indians in general and particularly to Gandhi: “In London, Churchill launched into an
outraged condemnation of the spectacle of ‘a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now
posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of
the Vice-regal palace” (Von Tunzelmann, 2007: 87). Although Gandhi had studied in
England and adopted European manners for a while, he eventually opposed the British
and modernity, proclaiming Hind swaraj or self-rule. He refused to have his dying wife
Kasturba injected with penicillin: “Je suis tout à fait hostile aux traitements par
injection; ils ne sont pas naturels. Et ce qui n’est pas naturel n’est pas bon pour
l’humanité13” (Clément, 1993: 33). As a sign of protest he would fast for days, only
nurturing his body with sips of water. Such exercise would be a mental challenge but a
form of violence to the self, by depriving the body of “well-being needs” (Galtung,
1990: 292). His rigid opinions and opposition to foreign rule, his movements of passive
resistance, civil disobedience and non-violence had all been influenced by Kasturba’s
character. These words are attributed to him: “I learned the lesson of non-violence from
my wife” (Von Tunzelmann, 2007: 23). From one perspective, apparently, he seems a
strong defender of feminism, but from the other, he is still a controversial figure,
especially regarding his ‘brahmacharya experiments’ during 1946 and 1947: “the aged
Mahatma had been ‘testing’ his vow of celibacy by sleeping at night in bed with a
11
He shut her mouth with a kiss.
This khadi became, due to the Mahatma, the emblem of the resistance against the English.
13
I am quite hostile to injection treatments; they are not natural. And what is not natural is not good for
mankind.
12
109
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------naked or partially clothed woman. The object of the experiments was to transcend
physical arousal” (Von Tunzelmann, 2007: 144). By experimenting against the nature of
his body, he was using women’s bodies with the aim of attaining sainthood and
spreading or imposing the message of chastity in his ashram.
However contentious the figure of Gandhi might be, it is attributed to Gandhism that
women were distinguished in Indian politics: “Non-violence, passive resistance and
boycotts were all tactics which could be practiced by women without breaking social
conventions” (Von Tunzelmann, 207: 170). By 1937, Nehru had insisted that the
Congress manifesto pledge to remove all social, economic and political discrimination
against women. However, behind this image of feminist progress lay a shadow of
female distress.
At Calcutta in 1946, and subsequently, the vengeance of the rioters had been
wreaked deliberately on women. As the great migration and great slaughters
following partition got underway, so too did a sustained and brutal campaign of
sexual persecution. The use of rape as a weapon of war was conscious and
emphatic. On every side, proud tales were told of the degradation of enemy
women. Thousands of women were abducted, forcibly married to their
assailants, and bundled away to the other side of the border. Many never saw
their families again. Thousands more were simply used and then thrown back
into their villages. There were accounts of women who had been held down
while their breasts and arms were cut, tattooed or branded with their rapists’
names and the dates of their attacks (Von Tunzelmann, 2007: 260).
Pour l’amour de l’Inde and Indian Summer gives an account of the love triangle of the
Mountbattens and Nehru during the troubled period of Indian process towards
independence. Yet both novels explode with monstrous images of victims (Clément,
1993: 254, 257; Von Tunzelmann, 2007: 251), the anonymous protagonists of the
human and moral tragedies that took place in India and Pakistan: “Sexual violence
reduces the victims to the status of objects” (Khanna, 2014: 19). Khanna defends the
narration of traumatic memory as an effective means to dignity, to return to personhood.
The suffering of women is rooted in Indian national culture and gendered nationalism,
thus linked to the myths that motherhood is best realized when dedicated to the cause of
the nation; while wifehood is obtained if used as the source of strength for the heroic
husband (Tripathy, 2014: 80). Wifehood is also bravely shown when women
aresacrified in honour of the dead husband as satis, “celles qui ont décidé de se jeter
vivantes dans le bûcher funèbre de leurs époux, et qui, douze jours plus tard, ont été
110
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------consacrées déesses14” (Clément, 1993: 351). This practice of “burning of live Hindu
widows on the funeral pyres of their dead husbands was banned in 1829” (Von
Tunzelmann, 2007: 16). This self-inflicted act of violence by committing suicide would
paradoxically elevate women to the divine.
Amongst the anonymous female bodies in both novels stands Lady Edwina who also
experiences violence at both personal and external levels and becomes an agent for
peace and solace by involving herself in humanitarian actions and staying “face to face”
with refugee women and thus establishing an informality that was a departure from the
style of previous vicereines” (Von Tunzelmann, 2007: 183). She would not find
happiness in her married life, but despite her adventures with lovers, Lord Louis
Mountbatten would be her life companion: “Edwina trompait son mari, elle trompait
son amant, elle trompait le monde entier, c’était la guerre, y aurait-il un jour une vie
sans mensonges?15” (Clément, 1993: 29). She suffered from tedium, but her encounter
with death and cruelty during the slaughter episodes of Partition made her commit to
humanitarian causes to fight against violence by providing the victims with medicine,
food and clothes. She was involved in macabre situations and coped with them by
offering her helping hand: “She stopped her car when she saw injured or dead people,
got out, dodged bullets, and retrieved their bodies to take them to hospitals or morgues”
(Von Tunzelmann, 2007: 269). In both novels, she is described as a brave woman,
compared to Racine’s Berenice in Pour l’amour de l’Inde. In her last days, she only
seemed to be intimately at ease with Nehru’s epistolary exchange: “Edwina sat down
and poured her heart out in a letter to Jawahar” (Von Tunzelmann, 2007: 314).
As we have observed in this paper, by focusing on India as a body and on the male and
female bodies represented in both novels, the embodiment approach to violence makes
it clear that the aggressions and cruelty towards the human being minimize the
individual characters to objectification; violence degrades and dehumanizes, it demeans
the person to a number or a piece of flesh. As quoted by the author of Indian Summer,
“in Stalin’s famous words, one death is a tragedy; one million deaths is a statistic” (Von
Tunzelmann, 2007: 266). Whereas the death of Gandhi, Edwina, Nehru and Lord Louis
14
Those (widows) who have decided to throw themselves alive in the burning pyres of their husbands,
and who, after twelve days, are consecrated goddesses.
15
Edwina cheated on her husband, she cheated on her lover, she deceived the whole world, it was the
war, would there be one day a life without lies?
111
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------were ritually celebrated as a homage to their honour and memory, statistically there is
no objective data of the number and identities of the anonymous victims during IndiaPakistan conflicts: “It has proven much more difficult to arrive at a consensus figure on
the numbers of persons who died as a consequence of the violence that occurred during
the impending partition, the partition itself, and after it in the misery of the refugee
camps” (Brass, 2003: 75).
‘One million dead’: This is the most convenient number to have come out of the
wildly varying estimates of how many people may have been killed following
partition. Mountbatten preferred the lowest available estimate, which was
200,000, and has been widely condemned for it: the denial of holocaust is
always a sticky business, and yet more so when one may be implicated
personally. Indian estimates have ranged as high as 2 million. Many historians
have settled for a figure of somewhere between half a million and 1 million
(Von Tunzelmann, 2007: 265).
Statistics do not depict the psychological impact and pain that such conflicts produce in
a personal and collective imagination. The role of historical novels such as Pour
l’amour de l’Inde and Indian Summer help complete an emptiness that history has not
reached. The literary or novelized reconstruction of events keeps memories alive, and
the narration of disasters offers dignity to the victims, sometimes a name.
Regarding the male and female body representations, India is still attached to its cultural
roots. Its land appears as a suffering mother upset by its wretched children, India and
Pakistan. It is also the land for prototypical male figures: a hero, Nehru as Prime
Minister, Gandhi as a spiritual leader, whereas it seems to offer also space for women’s
rights. Nevertheless, both novels offer horrible images of tortured and objectified
women and its narration might help de-membered women to be re-membered.
WORKS CITED
BRASS, PAUL R (2003). “The Partition of India and retributive genocide in the Punjab,
1946-47: means, methods, and purposes”, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 5,
Nº 1, 71-101. DOI: <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14623520305657> accessed 12
January 2016.
CHAKRABARTI, SHANTANU (2012). “Quarreling Siblings or Friendly Neighbours?
Turbulent Nature of Indo-Pakistan Relationship since 1947”, UNISCI Discussion
Papers, Nº 29, 9-33.
DOI: <http://dx.doi.org/10.5209/rev_UNIS.2012.n29.40656> accessed 12
January 2016.
112
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------CHANDRA, BIPAN, MUKHERJEE, MRIDULA, MUKHERJEE, ADITYA, MAHAJAN, SUCHETA,
PANIKKAR, K.N. (1989). India’s Struggle for Independence, New Delhi: Penguin
Books.
CLÉMENT, CATHERINE (1993). Pour l’amour de l’Inde, Paris: Flammarion.
GALTUNG, JOHAN (1990). “Cultural Violence”, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 27, No.
3, 291-305. DOI: <http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0022343390027003005> accessed
12 January 2016.
JALAL, AYESHA (1996). “Secularists, Subalterns and the Stigma of ‘Communalism’:
Partition Historiography Revisited”, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 30, Nº 3, 681737. DOI: <http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X00016644> accessed 12
January 2016.
KHANNA, TANVI (2014). “Silence, Survival and Recuperation: Reading Women’s
Experiences in Partition Literature”, Research Journal of English Language and
Literature (RJELAL), Vol. 2, Issue. 3, 19-25.
PANDEY, GYANENDRA (2011). Remembering Partition. Violence, Nationalism and
History of India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
ROY, RITUPARNA (2010). South Asian Partition Fiction in English from Khushwant
Singh to Amitav Ghosh, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
TRIPATHY, ANJALY (2014). “History is a Woman’s Body: A Study of Some Partition
Narratives”, Odisha Review, 80-84.
VON TUNZELMANN, ALEX (2007). Indian Summer. The Secret History of the End of an
Empire, London: Pocket Books.
WILCOX, LAUREN B. (2015). Bodies of Violence. Theorizing Embodied Subjects in
International Relations, Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI:
<http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199384488.001.0001> accessed 12
January 2016.
TAGIREM GALLEGO GARCÍA is PhD candidate at the University of Castilla-La Mancha
(Spain). Her research is on the image of India in Western literature, women travellers in
colonial and independent India. Her work is being supported with a predoctoral contract
of UCLM, financed by the European Social Fund (ESF) [2014/10340].
ORCID iD http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2309-4065
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Indi@logs
Vol 3 2016, pp. 115-135, ISSN: 2339-8523
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- REGRESANDO A SRI AUROBINDO: SOBRE EL ENIGMÁTICO DRAGÓN DE LA
VIOLENCIA
A l'E.G. i al J.B. mestres d'expressió, i al M.M., mestre del silenci
EDGAR TELLO GARCÍA
Investigador no adscrito
[email protected]
Por tanto, descendiente de Bhārata,
emprende la batalla.
(Bhagavad Gītā, II, 18)
RESUMEN
El trabajo expone un recorrido por las ideas de Sri Aurobindo, apuntando a las consideraciones
de este autor sobre la necesidad de actuación y sobre la violencia. Partimos de su inicial
alineamiento como líder del independentismo hindú hasta su retiro yóguico en el Ashram de
Pondicherry. Estudiamos el cambio espiritual utilizando el símbolo del dragón, animal
aparecido frecuentemente en la literatura de este autor, en el hinduismo y en otras fuentes
orientales. El dragón es símbolo de renacimiento y de muerte, así como imagen de la fuerza
espiritual cambiante. Analizamos, finalmente, la cuestión ya planteada en la Bhagavad Gītā
sobre la necesidad de actuar o no, y la lectura que de ella hace Sri Aurobindo; lectura que
tratamos de proyectar sobre otros momentos históricos de convulsión.
PALABRAS CLAVE: Sri Aurobindo, hinduismo, meditación, violencia, dragón.
ABSTRACT Returning to Sri Aurobindo: On the Enigmatic Dragon of Violence
This paper deals with Sri Aurobindo’s considerations on acts and violence. We start from his
initial alignment with the revolutionary movements in India, to his spiritual retirement to
Pondicherry. We study how this change takes place using the symbolism of the dragon, an
animal we encounter frequently in Aurobindo’s literature, in Hinduism and in other oriental
sources. The dragon is a symbol of regeneration and death, as much as an image of spiritual
power. Finally, we analyze whether the action is necessary or not, in the light of the Bhagavad
Gītā, and Aurobindo’s Essays on the Gītā –a reading we try to project over different historical
moments.
KEY WORDS: Sri Aurobindo, Hinduism, Meditation, Violence, Dragon.
REGRESANDO A SRI AUROBINDO
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Afirmación, batalla y diálogo
La arena teológica no ignora que la violencia no se neutraliza con el arraigo religioso; sí
que existe, en cambio, un diálogo de supervivencia en el que, de entre todas las voces,
prevalece la más poderosa.1 Cuando, misteriosamente, esta voz coincide con la del sabio
retirado, podríamos pensar que estas palabras poseen una inspiración divina.
La biografía de Sri Aurobindo (Calcuta 1872-Pondicherry 1950) es un ejemplo
paradigmático de una supervivencia intelectual y espiritual, tras los rigores de la
reivindicación independentista. Después de haber sido un estudiante más que excelente,
y renunciando a un puesto de becario en lenguas clásicas en Cambridge, defendió
activamente la lucha contra la dominación del Imperio Británico, en afilados artículos
desde el diario Indu Prakash, que le valieron serias advertencias para que moderara su
tono. Cuando se retiró definitivamente de la lucha política, combatió desde el silencio
de su mente serena en Pondicherry, siguiendo las enseñanzas de la Bhagavad Gītā,
según las cuales –y según explicaremos más adelante–, la particular actuación en un
combate sería consecuencia de vivir según “la armonía contemplada” (Consuelo Martín
2009: 31). Su cualidad de líder en el retiro conllevaría que Aurobindo fuese vigilado
férreamente por espías británicos, y protegido por sus discípulos ante las amenazas de
muerte. Su biógrafo Van Vrekhem recuerda las declaraciones de Lord Minto, en las que
este afirmaba que no descansaría hasta aplastar a Aurobindo Ghose, acusándole del
asesinato indirecto de Mr. Ashe (Van Vrekhem 2003: 24, 51).2 Otros reputados
indianistas, como André Padoux, se refieren al primer Aurobindo con el apelativo de
“terrorista,” por su afán revolucionario y su culto a la diosa Kâlî (Padoux 2011: 255).3
1
Me refiero en esta frase a la idea de René Girard (1983) de que la religión es un antídoto contra la
violencia, y la opongo a la de Jan Assmann (2014: 13), quien demuestra todo lo contrario.
2
Robert Ashe fue un recaudador de impuestos británico asesinado en 1911. Aurobindo escribió cartas a
los diarios Hindu y Madras Times, negando toda implicación. Así sucedió el hecho: “Mr. Ashe, Collector
of Tinnevelly District, was shot at Maniyachi, a railway junction in the district, about midday on June
17th, 1911, and died within half an hour. His assassin Vanchi alias Sankara Aiyar of Shencotta in
Travancore State committed suicide a few minutes after; he was accompanied by a youth named Sankara
Krishna Aiyar who ran away, but was afterwards caught and convicted”. Apud.
http://www.sriaurobindoashram.org/research/show.php?set=doclife&id=25
3
André Padoux incluye en una nómina oscura a otros religiosos reputados como Mircea Eliade o
Heinrich Zimmer, junto a otros más reaccionarios como Julius Evola, o Aum Shirinkyo (Padoux 2011:
252-264).
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EDGAR TELLO GARCÍA
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Nos interesa aquí el cambio llamativo, desde una lucha intelectual que repercutía en la
exposición pública de Aurobindo, al retiro como líder político, tras una estancia en la
cárcel en 1908, que supone la fecha de inicio de lo que el sabio denominaría “la vida
divina”, marcada por la práctica excesiva del pranayama, y las visiones y directrices de
otros sabios del hinduismo.4 Una ruptura que no es tal si observamos la integración de
libros como The Human Cycle o The Ideal of Human Unity en el corpus de su obra. No
obstante, tal y como remarca Nirodbaran en sus Conversaciones con Sri Aurobindo, la
insinuación del creador del yoga integral a propósito de su intervención en la victoria de
los aliados durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial –enviando una niebla poco frecuente en
Dunkerque para esas fechas–, nos dan una perspectiva panorámica del esfuerzo
sostenido de Aurobindo por mantener el pulso a la barbarie (Nirodbaran IV, 117). Quizá
no sea una mera casualidad que 1950, el año del mahasamadhi de Sri Aurobindo,
consistente en el abandono de su cuerpo físico, sea uno de los períodos más violentos
del nacionalismo indio contra el imperio colonizador británico (Merlo 2013: 116).5
Cabe advertir que, en el programa de Aurobindo, la ”victoria”, el “conocimiento”, la
“ignorancia”, la “voluntad” o el “poder”, entre otros, no son más que producto de una
“debilidad del receptor” o de una “perversa reacción de la Conciencia” que producirá
inevitablemente actos violentos (Aurobindo, La vida divina, 190). Desafortunadamente,
el fortalecimiento del pensamiento no dual no puede conseguirse sin una disciplina o
lucha interior.
En el fondo, señalar la violencia de un discurso consiste en subrayar cualquier
afirmación contenida en este, deshaciendo la dualidad posible. El Ser Divino, en su
silencio, también es susceptible de ser violento, pues contiene la posibilidad de la
4
Es en la cárcel donde Vivekananda y Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, ya fallecidos, visitan a Aurobindo
para guiarle en el inicio del cambio (Van Vrekhem, 2003: 32). Cabe subrayar que las normas básicas de
conducta moral de la vida contemplativa prohíben la violencia, y predican evitar la aversión, entre otros
Impedimentos (Gunaratana 2013: 47 y ss.)
5
Para la etimologia de samadha y la explicación global de los conceptos que engloban la serenidad
mental y la meditación, véase Gunaratana (2013: 33 y ss.). Para otras intervenciones históricas de Sri
Aurobindo, véase la nota 7.
117
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- autoafirmación (“Soy el que soy”); del mismo modo, la Ignorancia surge a partir del
Conocimiento.6
No creo que sea una ilusión percibir con patetismo la historia del Siglo XX. Conocida
es la alineación de Subhas Chandra Bose, presidente del Congreso Nacional Indio, con
el Partido Nazi, hecho que no era sino reflejo de la pasividad a la hora de enjuiciar unas
medidas que llevarían al mundo al desastre iniciado bastante antes de 1933. A la hora de
relatar la vida de su tío, el escritor Vikram Seth explica cómo aquél no tuvo más
remedio que colaborar con algunos billetes, entregados a los nazis, durante su época de
estudiante de odontología en Berlín, demostrando, “de manera indirecta […] que no
estaba contra ellos” (Dos vidas; 2006: 116).7 Aunque la sociología no ha obviado “la
violencia divina”, encarnada por el pueblo de Dios judío como agente del Juicio,
siempre subyace un resentimiento, contra las injusticias, que no acaba de sanarse y que
se presenta como “un rechazo a comprometerse, una insistencia contra todo pronóstico”
que acaba por producir la cólera motriz de Occidente (Žižec 2013: 225). Hay un error en
la concepción de esta violencia, dirigida por un Dios o hacia un Dios que, si existiera, la
misma Mirra Alfassa, en su Agenda (II: 220), no dudaría en calificar de dios “canalla”.
En La vida divina, Aurobindo no dejará de insistir en que “en la medida en que la mente
se desarrolla, también desarrolla una individualidad mental”; los errores en la
percepción devienen cuando en esta formación se instala una cierta complacencia,
“magnífico semillero para el crecimiento de la falsedad, o una puerta o muchas puertas
a través de las cuales aquella puede entrar a hurtadillas o mediante una usurpadora pero
aceptable violencia” (Sri Aurobindo, La vida divina, 1981: 302-303). Es así como
muestra la violencia: no como una afirmación enfática e impensada, sino como una
expresión de falsa “individualidad” hacia una verdad de muy difícil acceso y poco
común. El sacrificio individual puede olvidarse y objetivarse de manera vanidosa. El
papel que cobra la violencia en la religión hindú puede ayudarnos a entender la anterior
6
“Lo subliminal es aún un movimiento del Conocimiento-Ignorancia; tiene en él un conocimiento mayor,
pero también la posibilidad de una Ignorancia mayor porque es auto-afirmativo” (La vida divina 225). La
relación con la idea de Walter Benjamin que equipara civilización y barbarie la desarrollamos abajo.
7
Este hecho no escapa a Aurobindo, quien afirma que “Hitler persigue la dominación mundial y su
siguiente movimiento será hacia la India” (Nirodbaran III: 237).
118
EDGAR TELLO GARCÍA
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ aserción, pues tal y como C. J. Fuller ha estudiado en The Camphor Flame, la violencia
está integrada en algunos sacrificios dedicados a la diosa Kâlî, “a murderous goddess
who has left the gods powerless and dead”, pese a que la violencia y los sacrificios
animales degradan a los brahmanes que los realizan, pues “killing pollutes the
perpetrator” (Fuller 1992: 87-88).
Hay que inscribir el pensamiento de Sri Aurobindo dentro de una ética ancestral india,
donde la santidad del sendero de la guerra es tan importante como la noble no violencia
(ahimsa). La celebración de la “paz estable” (ksema) conllevaba cantos de victoria a la
victoria cósmica sobre Vritra, “el dragón del caos, que había apresado las aguas de la
vida en montaña primigenia” (Armstrong 2015: 57). Los mismos sacerdotes encargados
del yoga primaveral eran los encargados de enardecer a los guerreros que luchaban
contra los enviados de Indra, los dragones de ganado. Es por ello que Sri Aurobindo, en
un texto de 1920, se replantea con una acuidad que puede ser mal leída la necesidad de
la paz y la posibilidad de la guerra. El cinismo queda lejos de sus palabras cuando
afirma que los gobernantes, los reyes, y la democracia que defienden “are still the
movers of war”. Si todos y todas, en todas las regiones, queremos la paz, el autor sigue
preguntándose por qué vemos “militarism and commercialism united in a loving clasp”
(Sri Aurobindo, War and self-determination, 1962: 814). La respuesta parece estar en
una ética nietzscheana de determinación pacifista, común, espiritual, que necesita de
una fortaleza sobrehumana para liberar a la humanidad del error de la transitoriedad,
que ha creado un vacío espectacular (Sri Aurobindo 1962: 823). Se trata de alcanzar una
compleja libertad, verdadera, interior, que en la prosa de Aurobindo no parece tener los
peligros de la ingenuidad de otros regímenes, pues la ideal determinación, reconoce,
está más allá de la contingencia humana, sometida al poder de los Estados, quien tiende
a regular y a equiparar determinación y satisfacción (Aurobindo 1962: 836). En fin, la
única manera de evitar la violencia sería el mutuo reconocimiento, en vez del famoso
altruismo, y en el camino hacia esta reciprocidad podemos encontrar todos los
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- obstáculos imaginables, ante los cuales, en ocasiones, también el sacrificio, y por tanto
el dolor, entran en acción (íbid: 841).
Ante el dilema de atreverse a saber y elegir el camino verdadero, “cada uno de nosotros
está obligado a responder a su manera” a la trascendencia (in)comprensible, si no quiere
pasar a formar parte de la gran bestia (Marcel 2001: 34). Este es el modo en que
tomamos conciencia y evitamos un silencio que podría resultar irrespetuoso con la
memoria a la que la historia debe rendir cuentas (íbid: 42). Sin embargo, llegamos así a
la paradoja de que cualquier respuesta implica un diálogo, un choque de voces, o una
ruptura del monólogo del otro. Cuando los intelectuales se decantan por una paz
perpetua, no se olvida tampoco la necesidad del “pacificador”, aquel que advierte al otro
de su error y que, por tanto, promueve una situación de conflicto. Tal y como le
recuerdan a Shanti, en la novela de Vikram Seth, “nuestro deber es […] la Paz Creativa,
y […] el texto de los Evangelios no dice ‘Bienaventurados los pacíficos’, sino
‘Bienaventurados los pacificadores…’” (Seth 2005: 202). El diálogo de Aurobindo, que
se efectuaba fundamentalmente por carta (sólo veía a sus discípulos tres veces al año)
podría considerarse un diálogo entre ausentes. A pesar de ello, su voz en este diálogo es
escuchada y su meditación no es pasiva, sino que consiste en una “acción directa
decisiva” sobre los acontecimientos del Siglo XX. Madre nota unas declaraciones de
Aurobindo, que copio de Van Vrekhem (2003: 179), en las que este afirma que “los
movimientos revolucionarios los he conocido y dirigido siempre, incluso antes de haber
oído hablar de ellos”, aunque el éxito desigual de su empresa también sea evidente en la
Historia.8
Lo que encontramos en La vida divina es la concepción de que el error es compañía
inevitable, al lado de la verdad, el bien y la belleza. Más allá de esta idea, se aventura
Sri Aurobindo hacia el final de su ensayo, el mal parecería tender también hacia un
absoluto semejante al del impulso divino. Sin embargo, el mal siempre es relativo,
porque depende de su contrario para sobrevivir. Aquí se extiende la idea de que
8
A modo de curiosidad, en sus Evening Talks con Purani, Aurobindo explica en 1938 que ha luchado
desde su mente por el triunfo de la Revolución Rusa, y que está trabajando por el triunfo de los
republicanos en la Guerra Civil española, con éxito desigual. También lucha en Turquía, Irlanda y Egipto
(Van Vrekhem 2003: 178, 233).
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ “siempre que hay afirmación su negación se torna concebible,” por lo que cualquier
aserción implica una forma de violencia en potencia (La vida divina 289).
En la obra de Sri Aurobindo, el conflicto violento es visto en ocasiones como fruto de
un fracaso personal, producto de la dificultad de la venida de la Supermente, y su
extensión al resto de discípulos, primero, y al resto de la humanidad y del universo,
después.9 Incluso tras 1926, cuando ya algunos discípulos identificaron erróneamente
esta venida (Van Vrekhem 152) y Madre trabajaba para hacer bajar la Supermente en
beneficio de sus discípulos, Narayan Prasad dejó constancia de cómo algunos se volvían
violentos, y otros enloquecían (Life in Sri Aurobindo Ashram 64).
El dragón cambiante y la interrupción malvada del Uroboros
El dragón posee una forma sinuosa, y es semejante a un signo de interrogación que
formula una pregunta a la que no es fácil responder. Por un lado es un símbolo
constante en el decorado de la estancia de Sri Aurobindo. Tanto en cortinas del Ashram
como en su obra la referencia a ellos va ligada a una gnosis enmascarada, imagen del
sueño y lo supraconsciente. Cuando se ponen en funcionamiento estos elementos por
medio de la meditación, tanto el Yoga intenso como las ofrendas del Yajna intentan ser
detenidos por fuerzas hostiles que pueden atacar el cuerpo físico y el psíquico (Van
Vrekhem 169).
Cabe preguntarse aquí por el origen del mal, ya anunciado en las Upanisads en las que
se inspira Sri Aurobindo: por ejemplo, en el Svetāsvatara Upanisad (3, 10) se nos narra
el doble camino de Siva; uno dirigido a la inmortalidad, y el otro al dolor, como cuando
redujo a cenizas a Kāma por haber interrumpido su meditación (De Palma 2011: 147).
9
Aurobindo (1999: 120) no ha dejado de apuntar la paradoja que vamos relatando en estas páginas:
“Idealistic philosophy has been equally at the service of the powers of good and evil and provided an
intellectual conviction both for reaction and for progress. Organised religion itself has often enough in the
past hounded men to crime and massacre and justified obscurantism and oppression”.
121
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- El dragón, serpenteante y eléctrico, aúna las ideas de aprisionamiento, fuerza y
dirección cambiante en los procesos de circulación de la energía divina: no es otra cosa
el mal, según hemos visto, sino un error especular para quien emprende el camino de la
perfección.
Así, el mal queda definido como la interrupción posible que acecha en el momento de la
búsqueda de la verdad y del bien. La atención plena budista incluye la interrupción
como uno de sus caballos de batalla, con los que la mente serena debe aprender a
convivir. Por ejemplo, el gran bodhisattva Dza Patrul Rinpoche sugería un “tremendo
¡PAT! Aniquilador mental, fiero, fuerte y abrupto”, en su texto Dar en la diana de la
esencia con tres palabras, para la preparación de la mente transparente y serena,
relacionada con el rostro de rigpa (Dalai Lama 2004: 63). Una interrupción forzosa
ocupa el lugar en el que, como hemos visto en el capítulo final de La vida divina,
acechan las fuerzas que pretenden interrumpir el camino hacia la calma esencial lograda
en la meditación. Si la “sabiduría e inteligencia” de los practicantes no aumenta
equitativamente, observando el proceso de la identificación, el resultado puede ser la
depresión o la enfermedad (Dalai Lama 2004: 174-5). La interrupción no es violenta en
sí misma pero puede aguzarse hasta el punto de que produzca efectos nefastos, si llega a
desearse como una traducción hacia el estado gozoso. De hecho, es una traición
inesperada la que puede forzar de nuevo la dualidad, y es el dragón, serpenteante,
esquivo, espiritual y cambiante el que representa mejor esta unión sutil. Según escribe
Jan Assmann en Violencia y monoteísmo a propósito de la relación politeísta ancestral,
“la expresión misma de dragomán (‘intérprete’) conserva, ahora y siempre, el recuerdo
de la expresión acadia ragamou (‘llamar, hablar vehementemente’), así como del
término arameo targoum, derivado de ella y que no expresa otra cosa que la
‘traducción’” (2014: 23). En algún momento, la llamada irrumpe e interrumpe, antes de
ser apartada en el proceso de la concentración meditativa. Así, el diálogo, con voces
demasiado chillonas (ragamou), acaba siendo impracticable, en vez de una traducción
fluida (targoum), resultando verdaderamente esencial la respuesta a esta llamada.
Así, encontramos una interrupción violenta de la meditación en la historia del rey
Bhârata, en la Bhagavad Gītā, donde la inquietud por un ciervo, en primer lugar, y la
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EDGAR TELLO GARCÍA
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ obligación de cargar con el palanquín de un rey, en una vida posterior, obligan a este
personaje a parar su meditación abruptamente, cambiando el curso de su destino, según
explica uno de los maestros de los que se nutrió Aurobindo (Vivekananda 2012: 61). Si
a consecuencia de la primera interrupción meditativa su siguiente encarnación se
produce en el cuerpo de ciervo, gracias al recuerdo de sus anteriores vidas (Jâtismara)
Bhârata puede reencontrar su camino ascético y emanciparse de la rueda de los
nacimientos.10
Desde otro ángulo, un equipo de la Universidad de Virginia ha demostrado que las
posibles experiencias de niños que recuerdan vidas anteriores suelen ir asociadas a
muertes traumáticas anteriores, en muchos casos relacionadas incluso con asesinatos
violentos. Las marcas en sus cuerpos recuerdan las heridas (viales, cicatrices, disparos)
de sus pretendidas personalidades anteriores (Tucker 2005: 82). Que la violencia deja
una marca en el alma es una idea compartida por la filosofía occidental, asociada
normalmente al trauma o a una crisis profunda del espíritu, de los que puede derivarse
una represión latente que, una vez descubierta, conlleva un sacrificio de contención
(Assmann 2014: 55). Asimismo, la cicatriz es una marca de herida sanada, una
ambigüedad simbolizada por el dragón negro, pues este también “simboliza el espíritu
de los muertos” (Huxley 1989: 8).
Es justamente en el Canto VIII del segundo capítulo de Savitri (“El mundo de la
falsedad, la madre del mal y los hijos de la oscuridad”), donde Sri Aurobindo ahonda en
la descripción de la violencia, fruto del silencio, descrita como poseedora de un rostro
con unos enormes ojos ciegos, habitante de la ignorancia de la memoria, creadora, por
tanto, de sueños monstruosos, al haber sido apartada de la Madre divina:
10
Por otra parte, ser convertido en ciervo era un castigo conocido cuando se observaba el baño del dragón
alado, algo que también le ocurrió a Acteón al ver a Artemisa desnuda (Huxley 1989: 13).
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Its large blind eyes looked out on demon acts […]
Accustomed to the unnatural dark, they saw
Unreality made real and conscious Night.
A violent, fierce and formidable world,
An ancient womb of huge calamitous dreams
(Savitri 2, VIII: 220)11
La descripción del rostro del mal continúa bastante después, en el noveno capítulo,
cuando la mirada ciega se identifica con el rostro de una serpiente, utilizando el
paralelismo con los protagonistas de la historia, la hermosa Savitri y el malhadado
Satyavan, hijo del rey ciego Dyumatsena. La anulación de la dualidad entre ambos es
representada por la figura de una serpiente que posee los mismos ojos ciegos y que nace
en el Canto titulado “Hacia el vacío negro”:
His shape was nothingness made real, his limbs
Were monuments of transience and beneath
Brows of unwearying calm large godlike lids
Silent beheld the writhing serpent, life […]
The two opposed each other with their eyes,
Woman and universal god.
(Savitri 9, I: 574)12
La relación de los protagonistas de Savitri con otros personajes mitológicos como
Tiresias u Orfeo, no debe hacernos olvidar que el poema de Sri Aurobindo está
compuesto como una serie infinita de mantras que deben ayudar a sus discípulos a
seguir los mismos pasos que aquellos que han penetrado de manera más profunda en los
secretos de la meditación y han conseguido vencer los posibles errores: “planting her
11
‘Sus grandes ojos ciegos rastreaban actos demoníacos / acostumbrados a la oscuridad que no es natural
vieron / la Irrealidad hecha una Noche consciente y real / Un mundo fiero, formidables y violento / un
antiguo gusano de potentes y calamitosos sueños’. Traducción mía.
12
‘Su forma era la nada hecha real, sus miembros / eran monumentos a la fugacidad y debajo / de sus
cejas de calmados, divinos e insoportables párpados / el silencio miraba la serpiente retorcida / Los dos se
enfrentaron con la mirada / la mujer y el dios universal’. Traducción mía.
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EDGAR TELLO GARCÍA
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ human feet where his has trod / into the perilous silences beyond” (Savitri 577).13 Una
especulación equivocada a la hora de lograr la concentración es luchar por la anulación
de pensamientos y sensaciones. Según recomienda a su discípulo Pavitra, “aquello que
se rechaza violentamente vuelve con una fuerza todavía mayor,” por ello, le recomienda
permanecer como un espectador de excepción: “ne luttez jamais” (Conversations avec
Pavitra 23). Sin embargo, la verdad divina exige un trabajo y un impulso irrefrenables
(“une impulsion qui fait que l’on ne s’arrête jamais”, íbid 41). Aunque los consejos que
el discípulo pide a su maestro no deben extenderse a imperativos categóricos, sí es
cierto que la ceguera necesaria y la retracción de los sentidos obligada para penetrar en
el reino bello de Savitri pueden provocar una tensión similar a la que origina el ser
rechazado en un mundo desconocido. El distanciamiento de la personalidad buscado en
la meditación no puede lograrse sin un trabajo que no deja de ser perseverante y, una
vez lograda la técnica, el sistema demasiado aprendido, sigue recomendando a Pavitra
(Conversations 31), debe ser susceptible de ser rechazado asimismo con la violencia
necesaria, cuando se muestre ante uno la realidad de que la serpiente y el dragón que
conocen una verdad majestuosa pueden no ser más que “el antiguo gusano de los sueños
calamitosos”, según leíamos en Savitri.
En los diarios de otros investigadores de las técnicas de meditación, como pudo ser
Antonio Blay, también aparece esta idea (que, por otra parte, también puede encontrarse
en las filosofías occidentales) de que el mal y la violencia no son sino fruto de un error
en la percepción ante el hecho de que “cada cosa en su sitio es un bien, pero cuando lo
comparamos desde otro nivel aparece como mal, y funcionalmente lo es, porque desde
el punto de vista del desarrollo humano se tiende al bien mayor que la humanidad está
alcanzando” (Blay 2010: 241).
13
La relación entre serpientes y dragones es evidente. Francis Huxley (1989: 7) explica en su estudio este
hecho, así como la relación de estos animales con Tiresias: “En la tradición inglesa esta costumbre tiene
connotaciones urobóricas, ya que se cree que cuando una serpiente se come a otra se convierte en un
dragón. La naturaleza de esta acción podremos entenderla si nos fijamos en la historia de Tiresias, que se
convirtió en una mujer porque vio a una pareja de serpientes copulando y mató a la hembra”.
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- En el diagrama de kâmakalâ, donde se observa la unión de Shiva y Shakti, el ascenso de
la kundalinî viene representado con la letra Î o el bîjamantra ÎM, con una forma
serpentina conocida (que recuerda al símbolo tradicional de los farmacéuticos, con la
serpiente enroscada alrededor de la copa). Sexo y muerte, farmacia y veneno,
reencarnación y fantasmagoría, son símbolos inseparables en las tradiciones orientales y
occidentales; aquello que puede desdoblarse puede a su vez anularse bajo circunstancias
inadecuadas (Padoux 2011: 145-146). El dragón es un símbolo totalizador, circular,
imagen de lo Absoluto. Francis Huxley lo define como una representación del espíritu
“la fuerza que anima todos los lugares, el genius loci de los árboles y las rocas, de los
lagos, los ríos, las montañas y los mares, de los puentes y los edificios, de los hombres,
las mujeres y los niños” (Huxley 1989: 5). Además, este animal representa la unión y el
distanciamiento, ocurridos durante los procesos meditativos. El dragón, nos sigue
contando este investigador, surge a partir del caos inicial, cuando aparece un “espíritu
que mira hambriento a su alrededor; esta acción da al dragón su nombre (en griego
derkesthai, echar miradas fugaces)” (Huxley 1989: 6). Prestemos atención a la
mitología de este ser, donde, de nuevo, dos opuestos, en esta ocasión la clarividencia y
una envidia ciega y demoniaca, vuelven a unirse en una figura que en las Upanisads se
identifica con el Señor Progenitor o Prajapati:
Cuando todavía no hay nada creado, lo único que el ojo ardiente puede ver es el abismo
en su propio reflejo. Se dice que el dragón, al ver este reflejo, lleno de envidia, desea
tragárselo; y así lo hace, uniéndose a él por completo y devorándolo sexualmente. Por
eso se afirma que el Primer Dragón es un ser que tiene dos géneros […] que se
persiguen con tal voracidad incestuosa que sólo consiguen mantener separadas sus
naturalezas cambiando de identidad. (Huxley 1989: 6)
Este es el ciclo de la vida, conocido con el nombre de Uroboros (‘el que se come la
cola’) en las tradiciones esotéricas14. Este Gran Ser se perpetúa a expensas del Otro y de
él provienen todas las criaturas que conocen la vida, son conocidas por la muerte y, en
algún momento, se convierten a sí mismas en progenitoras. Si para Sri Aurobindo la
14
Dice Abrams (1992: 159): “En la alquimia cristiana la Piedra Filosofal se suponía que correspondía a
Cristo, el Mesías de la Naturaleza, que tiene la función apocalíptica de restaurar a la vez al hombre caído
y dividido y al universo caído y fragmentado en la perfección de su unidad original. Desde el período
temprano de la filosofía hermética, el diseño cósmico de separación y retorno a una fuente se representaba
a veces como el Ouraboros, la serpiente circular que se muerde la cola”.
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EDGAR TELLO GARCÍA
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ propia vida es “a constant dying and being reborn,” el cuerpo físico que la sostiene debe
soportar la violencia igual que “a city attacked by assailing” (Essays on the Gītā 40).
Así, el dragón sería una imagen que englobaría el movimiento brusco del espíritu que se
revuelve por luchar, vencer, vivir, morir y renacer. En otras culturas, tanto el dragón
como la Serpiente del Mundo, relacionados en el estudio de Huxley en ocasiones de
forma indistinguible, expresan la muerte y la re-creación en el mejor de los mundos: así,
los tupinamba de Brasil asesinaban a golpes a una víctima atada con el mussurana, una
representación de la serpiente caníbal que “reconfortaba a la víctima” pensando en el
premio del renacimiento (Huxley 1989: 88). El espíritu como dragón furioso que debe
ser dominado, o como cuerda que domeña al atman, tratando de aprisionarlo, aparece en
los comentarios de Sankara a la Bhagavad Gīta, quien comenta que “la mente es
obstinada y tan difícil de doblegar como la serpiente Tantu” (VI, 34). Esta serpiente
también es conocida como Varuna-paza, siendo Varuna, dios de las aguas celestiales y
del espacio, la griega Ouranos, y “paza” la cuerda con la que el dios ata a los obstinados
en el error y la maldad (Consuelo Martín 2009: 149).
El bien prevalece por encima de la ambigüedad que conforma a los seres humanos
(Pikaza 2005). Pese a ello, la ambivalencia del símbolo del dragón se resuelve también
como imagen de un espíritu acuciado, dudoso, en numerosos textos budistas, que
recogen la idea de las Upanisads, donde el dragón es “el aspecto exterior de un
conocimiento interior”, que aúna deseo, hambre y muerte y, por tanto, debe controlarse
(Huxley 1989: 7). En El Sutra del Loto, por ejemplo, se nombra en sucesivas ocasiones
la fórmula trimembre de “dioses, dragones, espíritus” (Masià Clavel 2009: 77 y ss.), y
lo hace para expresar la duda que sienten los seres que aspiran a convertirse en Budas y
desconocen el camino por recorrer, “el Camino sin par”. Como el resto de los
aspirantes, pueden recibir la enseñanza de un modo correcto, o equivocarse y elegir el
sendero erróneo. La acción es fundamental (pueden pintar figuras de Buda, recitar
Upanisads, poemas salvíficos, comprender las parábolas), pero el camino de la
petulancia y la avidez violenta pueden equivocarles en sus recorridos. No debe olvidarse
127
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- que el dragón también es un símbolo especular en la tradición veterotestamentaria,
donde el falso reflejo del yo satánico es utilizado como tentación de Eva bajo el aspecto
de la serpiente.15
Podemos ahondar en este símbolo que aúna la salvación y la perdición en sí mismo. En
1916, el año del inicio de la transformación de Aurobindo Ghose en Sri Aurobindo, éste
comienza a publicar sus Essays on the Gītā en la revista Arya. Por primera vez
encontramos una reflexión directa de Aurobindo sobre la necesidad de la violencia
física y su correlación con la espiritual, tan terrible o más que la primera, y lo hace a
propósito del análisis de la clásica batalla de Kurukshetra. Su pensamiento es
verdaderamente penetrante, por lo que copiamos sus palabras:
We will use only soul-force and never destroy by war or any even defensive
employment of physical violence? […] But even soul-force, when it is effective,
destroys. Only those who have used it with eyes open, know how much terrible and
destructive it is than the sword and the cannon; and only those who do not limit their
view to the act and its immediate results, can see how tremendous are its after-effects
[…] Evil cannot perish without the destruction of much that lives by the evil, and it is
no less destruction even if we personally are saved the pain of a sensational act of
violence (Essays on the Gītā 42).16
15
También en el I Ching el dragón es imagen de renacimiento, después de ascender a través de seis
etapas. El Yin y el Yang conformaban un dragón que tenía por cabeza los Ocho Trigramas. El dragón es
“aquel cuyas transformaciones no están limitadas por los días y cuyos ascensos y descensos no están
limitados por el tiempo. Es considerado un dios” (Huxley 1989: 9 y 17). Siguiendo todas estas
mutaciones que atraviesan diferentes tradiciones, este investigador también relaciona el mito mencionado
de la tentación de Eva con otras apariciones de Osiris y Quetzalcoatl; así como a los Tiamat, Kingu y
Marduk babilónicos con el dragón (Huxley 1989: 23). No debe olvidarse que el ciervo, enemigo de la
serpiente, es imagen de Adán en los bestiarios medievales (Huxley 1989: 11 y 19). Para otras
asociaciones de la serpiente y el dragón con la luna o con Deméter, que pueden rastrearse hasta 30.000
años a.C., véase el magno estudio de Baring y Cashford (2014: 41, 145), para quienes, en esa fecha tan
temprana, ya simbolizaban “renacimiento y transformación”. E. Ingersoll, hablando del dragón de la
puerta de Ishtar (S. VI a.C.), explica la relación del dragón con la Diosa Madre y la Diosa del Agua, hasta
que se confundieron con su avatar maligno, Sekhet, en Egipto, o Tiamat en Babilonia, representantes de
la destrucción y el caos: “Esto significa que estos dioses primigenios eran de naturaleza a la vez buena y
mala, tanto podían ser santos como demonios; y ciertamente desempeñaban papeles contradictorios de
una manera asombrosa: eran dragón, matador del dragón y el arma empleada, todo en el mismo personaje
(Ingersoll 2007: 24).
16
‘¿Solo usaremos la fuerza espiritual y nunca destruiremos por medio de la guerra o por algún modo de
violencia defensiva? Incluso la fuerza espiritual, cuando es efectiva, destruye. Sólo aquellos que la han
usado con los ojos abiertos, saben cuánto más destructiva y terrible es que la espada y el cañón; y solo
aquellos que no limitan su visión al acto y sus resultados inmediatos, pueden ver cuán tremendos son sus
resultados a posteriori. El mal no puede perecer sin la destrucción de todo aquello que se alimenta de este,
y no hay menor destrucción aunque personalmente estemos a salvo del daño de la violencia sensible’.
Traducción mía.
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EDGAR TELLO GARCÍA
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Si atendemos a las teorías románticas del genio malvado que habita en nosotros,
encarnado en forma de deseos, pasiones o logros, resulta un difícil equilibrio el apartar
definitivamente al daimon del cuerpo habitado por él, sin que este último cobre ningún
mal. Como decía S. Pétrement a propósito de su biografiada Simone Weil, “el santo es
alguien que sabe resistir a sí mismo y a su imaginación” (Tamayo 2013: 106). La
contención del poder individual frente al dolor colectivo, la histeria, el temor social y su
memoria, son soluciones que no resultan posibles, ni comprensibles, para los que no son
“santos”. La lectura que ha realizado Colm Tóibín del Testamento de María demuestra
cómo ni siquiera la propia madre de Jesús era capaz de reconocer a su hijo en el camino
de salvación que había tomado (Tóibín 2014: 37 y ss). El dolor ante lo que ella entendía
como el rechazo de Jesús hacia ella, y por tanto hacia su humanidad, es una buena
prueba del mal que persiste pese a una retracción ante la violencia. El dragón quizá sea
la mejor expresión de la filosofía no dual advaita.
Sacrificios: ¿La ausencia del deseo de matar o la barbarie?
No debe entenderse de manera equivocada el esfuerzo heroico, pues para un guerrero
como puede serlo Arjuna, escribe Sri Aurobindo en los tiempos de la Gran Guerra, “his
virtue and his duty lie in battle and not in abstention from battle; it is not slaughter, but
non-slaying which would here be the sin” (Essays on the Gītā 65).17 Así, en su caso, la
acción resulta superior a la inacción, y el dolor y el llanto por el sufrimiento de la guerra
pueden ser paliados por un sentimiento de nobleza guerrera. La batalla interior siempre
está presente en la hora cero de cada individuo, cuando se exige una respuesta
responsable, en la búsqueda de la armonía perfecta del espíritu. El “sacrificio mental”,
también conocido como la “oblación de los alientos”, no lo practica un “habitante del
bosque”, sino que debe ser realizado por un cabeza de familia, alguien encargado de
salvaguardar a sus consanguíneos, y que no ha renunciado, todavía, al derramamiento
17
‘Su virtud y su deber están en la batallla y no en la abstención de ella; no es la carnicería, sino el
abstenerse de matar, lo que aquí sería calificado de error’.
129
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- de sangre (Biardeau 2005: 46). De este modo, existe un momento en que la distinción
entre el retiro, el sacrificio, y la acción se vuelve sumamente sutil y la diferencia entre
“sacrificar” y “matar” se desdibuja en un espacio rastreable en la noche de los tiempos.
Para entender este camino, la enseñanza de la Bhagavad Gītā, según Sri Aurobindo, nos
conmina a la aceptación de una lucha doble, que comienza en el interior de uno mismo,
y que debe despegarse de la contingencia inevitable de deseo e ignorancia, asociados a
la vanidad de una posible victoria, o al temor al olvido de una derrota. La batalla, en
este caso, sigue escribiendo Aurobindo en su análisis de esta obra tradicional, debe ser
la culminación de un objetivo coherente, indispensable, imperativo, “the aims of his
self-discipline”. Es una batalla doble porque uno se preguntará “how can I fight and yet
in my soul not think or feel that I the individual am fighting, not desire victory nor be
inwardly touched by defeat?” (Essays on the Gītā 106).18 No es la inacción, por tanto,
aquello que es superior, como podría suceder en otras filosofías, sino la búsqueda del
equilibrio con lo Divino que consiste en la respuesta dependiente a un mundo acorde a
esta divinidad; una respuesta “perfecta” pues relaciona el autoconocimiento con un
sacrificio perpetuo entregado a lo Infinito y a Dios (Essays on the Gītā 126).
A pesar de los pesares, la respuesta puede ser malinterpretada, o por seguir con la
imagen que nos ocupa, envenenada por la picadura de la sierpe que “libera” al cisne,
representación del canto y del discurso, y por extensión, de la vida. Según dice, el
clásico chino, Xie Ling-yun (385-433), a quien cito por la traducción inglesa de Stephen
Owen (1996: 321): “A dragon, submerged, enhances sequestered charms, the swan in
flight sends his voice echoing far”. La literatura parece coincidir en la necesidad de
gobernar al dragón, sea por medio de oblaciones o sacrificios para que, “siendo libre de
sus ataduras” permita el comportamiento recto en nuestra vida y aumente el recto
entendimiento de nuestra voz (Owen: 454).
La equiparación benjaminiana entre civilización y barbarie queda expresada por Sri
Aurobindo en The Human Cycle, publicado entre 1916 y 1918. La expresión de
Aurobindo no puede ser más lúcida, a la par que inquietante: “knowledge must be
18
‘¿Cómo puedo luchar y no sentir en mi alma que yo, el individuo, estoy luchando, ni desear la victoria,
ni estar afectado por la posibilidad de la derrota?’ Traducción mía.
130
EDGAR TELLO GARCÍA
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ aggressive, if it wishes to survive and perpetuate itself; to leave an extensive ignorance
either below or around it, is to expose humanity to the perpetual danger of a barbaric
relapse” (Sri Aurobindo 1999: 77). No obstante, la barbarie educada por el tiempo ha
cambiado su forma de expresión, advierte Aurobindo en este texto, y su rostro se
muestra cultivado por esa enseñanza que pugna por sobrevivir, en nombre del instinto
de posesión: “another kind of barbarism –for it can be called by no other name– that of
the industrial, the commercial, the economic age which is now progressing to its
culmination and its close” (The Human Cycle: 79).19 Satisfacción, producción,
acumulación, posesión, confort, son los pilares de una sociedad refinada que expresa su
barbarie de este modo más sofisticado, antes de caer ante el peso titánico que la debe
acabar colapsando. “Barbarism [define Aurobindo, más tajantemente incluso] is the
state of society in which man is almost entirely preoccupied with his life and body, his
economical and physical existence” (The Human Cycle 87).20 La definición de barbarie,
según Sri Aurobindo, está aplicada a aquellos que no poseen un buen conductor para el
carro que guiará sus acciones, imagen expresada en The Human Cycle (84) y que
recuerda a la de Krishna en la batalla de Kurukshetra, guiando a Arjuna en la Bhagavad
Gītā. Tal y como apuntamos en el epígrafe de este trabajo, la batalla no debe ser
anhelada, ni rehuida, porque no importa el ideal de belleza, ni la conducta ilustrada, ni
siquiera la paz perpetua kantiana, sino una ética propia, armonizada con la estética,
camino de la auto-perfección, por medio de la auto-disciplina. No es fácil deslindar la
conjunción expresada por Aurobindo, puesto que, como un dragón que suaviza y ama y,
a la vez, controla su furia y su aridez, “we can combine them; we can enlarge the sense
of ethics by the sense of beauty and delight and introduce into it to correct its tendency
of hardness and austerity the element of gentleness, love, amenity” (The Human Cycle
19
‘Otro tipo de barbarie, porque no puede llamarse otro modo, la de lo industrial, lo comercial, en una
época económica que ahora llega progresivamente a su culminación y cierre’. Traducción mía.
20
‘La barbarie es una estado de la sociedad en la que el hombre está excusivamente preocupado por su
cuerpo y su mente, de su existencia física y económica’. Traducción mía.
131
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 101).21 Si consideramos que el bien y el mal, lo hermoso y lo horrendo, son algo más
que elementos inarmónicos del mismo Ser, podremos esperar una disonancia que traiga
consecuencias.
Acercándonos algo más al lugar desde el que escribimos estas líneas, fue María
Zambrano, en La tumba de Antígona (2013: 151), un texto de 1967 sobre la guerra, el
exilio y la violabilidad de la ley, quien descubrió la imagen que relaciona el símbolo
que utilizamos como hilo conductor, el dragón, con la guerra entre hermanos,
(“laberinto de unas entrañas como sierpes”). El ser que se devora a sí mismo para volver
a renacer tal vez sea la mejor imagen para definir la idiotez ignorante, implícita en el
mal y el desconocimiento. La aportación de Sri Aurobindo, entre otras muchas, fue la de
construir una fortificación mental segura y amable sobre la que observar atentamente y
actuar, creando el consuelo para los ciudadanos del mundo de saberse vencedores en
cualquier país, y ante cualquier derrota, si se es coherente con la Ley. Las Upanisads
nos legaron la idea de la profunda unidad de todos los seres, “de modo que el presunto
enemigo no era otro nefasto, sino una entidad inseparable de uno mismo” (Armstrong
2015: 73). La victoria y la derrota, el mal perpetrado por nosotros, como la estela dejada
por el dragón, también pasan y perduran. Todavía regresamos a Aurobindo para
contemplar atónitos “las bombas que explotan en Barcelona” (Aurobindo, Collected
Poems 120).
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21
‘Podemos combinarlas; podemos aumentar el sentido ético por medio de la belleza y el placer e
introducirlos para corregir la tendencia austera y áspera de la ética por medio de la gentileza, el amor y la
comodidad’. Traducción mía.
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAMA, DALAI (2004). Dzogchen. El camino de la Gran Perfección. Trad. María José
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TAMAYO, JUAN J. (2013). Cincuenta intelectuales para una conciencia crítica.
Barcelona: Fragmenta.
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anteriores. Trad. Alejandro Pareja. Madrid: Arkano Books.
VAN VREKHEM, GEORGES (2003). Más allá del hombre. La vida y la obra de Sri
Aurobindo. Trad. F. Javier Parrilla. Barcelona: Fundación Aurobindo.
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ VIVEKANANDA, SWAMI (2012). El Ramayana, el Mahâbhârata y el Bhagavad Gītā.
Madrid: ELA.
ZAMBRANO, MARÍA (2013). La tumba de Antígona. Madrid: Cátedra.
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* Agradezco a Isabel Alonso Breto la ayuda prestada, una vez más. Los errores son míos.
EDGAR TELLO GARCÍA nació en Barcelona, en 1981. Estudió Filología e hizo un máster
en Teoría de la literatura en la Autónoma de Barcelona. Se doctoró en 2010 en la
Universidad de Barcelona con una tesis titulada El Otro en la obra de J.M. Coetzee: la
lectura inconsolable, dirigida por Kathleen Firth. Junto con la ficción y la lectura,
algunos de sus intereses actuales son la Filosofía Perenne, y la Psicología
Transpersonal.
135
Indi@logs
Vol 3 2016, pp. 137-150, ISSN: 2339-8523
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------THE INDIAN DIASPORA IN THE UK: ACCOMMODATING “BRITISHNESS”
MAURICE O’CONNOR
Universidad de Cádiz
[email protected]
ABSTRACT
This paper sets out to explore the growth of the Indian diaspora within the UK. First of all, we
shall evidence how, despite the humble beginnings of this diasporic community, their strong
sense of community and tenacity has helped them gain visibility within British society. From
there, we shall look at the complexities of this heterogeneous community and how they have
negotiated new spaces within a society that, initially, was hostile to their presence. Despite a
prevailing multicultural ethos, we shall then evidence how a system of ‘adjacent cultures’ has
been installed within the UK. To further our understanding on this mutual isolation within
diversity we shall apply Homi Bhabha’s theories on cultural difference. Then we shall look at a
number of biographies and life writings, penned by South Asian authors, so as to elucidate upon
this theoretical background.
KEYWORDS: Indian community UK; multiculturalism; adjacent cultures; cultural difference
RESUMEN La diáspora india del Reino Unido: amoldarse a lo británico
El presente artículo explora el crecimiento de la diáspora india dentro del contexto británico. En
primer lugar, demostraremos que a pesar de los orígenes humildes de esta comunidad
diaspórica, su fuerte sentido de comunidad y su tenacidad les ha ayudado a hacerse visibles
dentro de la sociedad británica. En segundo lugar, y partiendo de este hecho, analizaremos las
complejidades de esta comunidad heterogénea y cómo han sabido negociar espacios nuevos
dentro de una sociedad que, en principio, era hostil a su presencia. Pasaremos, después, a
discutir cómo se ha instalado en el Reino Unido un sistema de “culturas adjacentes” por encima
de un carácter multicultural imperante. Para profundizar en el tema del aislamiento mutuo
dentro de la diversidad aplicaremos las teorías de Homi Bhabha sobre las diferencias culturales.
Por último, nos detendremos en una serie de biografías y memorias escritas por autores asiáticos
para aportar más luz a esta base teórica
PALABRAS CLAVE: comunidad india del Reino Unido; multiculturalismo; convivencia cultural;
diferencia cultural
THE INDIAN DIASPORA IN THE UK
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1
In this paper we shall explore the question of British Indian identity and how this
diasporic group has negotiated and met the challenges of living in a multicultural nation
in the making. Within a post-independence context, the UK has been one of the
territories on to which peoples from the Indian subcontinent have projected their
migratory aspirations. Residual linguistic and cultural affinities culled during the
colonial epoch fomented Britain as a “natural choice” for immigration, and many of the
educated class felt that they already knew England and its ways. Compared to other
destinations, England was not conceived as “foreign” and Indians felt they were well
equipped to adapt to Britain’s social and cultural mores. Jawaharlal Nerhu, for example,
was a confessed anglophile and his affiliation with England mirrored a generalised
anglophied Indian identity prevalent within a particular Indian social class that
perceived itself as mobile. 1
India has the second largest diasporic population after China and there is
an increasing consensus that this global diasporic group is becoming evermore
influential in the day-to-day running affairs of the Indian state. While the Asian British
diasporic group is still influential, it is the diasporic group in the United States that
wields most power and directly intervenes in Indian economic questions. This state of
affairs mirrors perceptions within the subcontinent where the upwardly mobile no
longer perceive Britain as being capable of fulfilling their ambitions while destinations
such as Canada, Australia, and the US are deemed more suitable. Strong family ties,
nonetheless, mean that the UK is still a destination for many Asians and their
experiences as diasporans range from the self-contained community where engagement
at a profound level with the autochthonous population is absent to those who have fully
assimilated to their surroundings. While the common perception is that South Asians
became a part of the British social landscape after the Second World War, they have
been a presence within the UK since the late 1800s. Frederick Akbar Mahomed, in
1879, published in The Lancet a ground-breaking work on the cause and development
1
If we look to the prime movers within the independence movement in India, most of those who studied
abroad did so in the UK (a salient exception being B.R. Ambedkar, the Dalit political leader, who first
studied at Columbia University before moving to the London School of Economics). This meant that
many of the politicians of the new nation state had been intellectually formed in a culturally specific way
and these ideologies would enter into a complex syncretism with other ideas such as a communal form of
social spiritualism epitomised by the thoughts and actions of Gandhi.
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MAURICE O’CONNOR
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------of hypertension. In 1887, Abdul Karim became a part of the royal household as Queen
Victoria's servant, went on to teach the Queen Hindustani and subsequently became one
of her closest advisers. As early as 1889, Britain’s first purpose-built mosque (the Shah
Jahan Mosque) was established in Woking by Dr As Gottlieb Leitne. By 1892, South
Asians had their first Member of Parliament in the person of Dadabhai Naoroji (former
professor of Gujarati at University College, London and founder of the London
Zoroastrian Association), who was elected Liberal MP for Central Finsbury.
The first group of Indians to arrive to the UK during the early 1950s was the
Sikh community, many of whom were qualified doctors who had come to take up posts
within the fledgling NHS. The first waves of post-war South Asian immigrants to
Britain in general were motivated by the fact that the British workforce had been
decimated as a result of the Second World War. This lack of manpower was
compounded by an increasing attitude amongst local workers to shun many kinds of
“menial jobs”, and it was predominantly the Hindu immigrant population that would
first fill this yawning gap within a late capitalist labour market. Subsequently to this
influx of Hindus to the UK came the Pakistani Muslims, whilst the latest immigrant
group from the subcontinent is comprised of Bangladeshi Muslims. Despite their
humble beginnings, Asian émigrés were particularly driven by their belief in and respect
for the power of education as a way to prosper and climb social ladders. The arrival of
an educated business class of Indians from the former British African colonies of
Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya and Malawi during the 1970s furthermore helped infuse the
Asian diasporic community with new optimism. 2 This East African Asian community,
however, met with much local hostility, notably in Leicester where a large influx of
Asian expelled from Idi Amin’s Uganda came to settle. (On the 7 th of August 1972,
Amin announced that all non-Ugandan Asians had ninety days to quit the country; some
30,000 British passport holders came to the UK.)
The current number of successful business people, multimillionaires and thriving
middle-class professionals residing in the UK is testimony to how far Asians have come
since the mid-1950s, but ambition alone is not the only factor in this diasporic “success
story”. As Asaf Hussain (2005) assures, “The reason why the Indian diaspora
progressed was because it had a diaspora philosophy, which had two aspects. First, the
2
Asaf Hussain (2005) gives a full account of the importance of this second wave of immigration in his
“The Indian Diaspora in Britain: Political Interventionism and Diaspora Activism”.
139
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Indians were proud of their culture and were ready to spread it anywhere. Second, the
Indians had a strong identity as Indians” (201). Hussain identifies the development of an
Indian food market and Indian fashion industry, the “open-door” policy to Hindu
temples and festivals, the prestige value of Indian classical music and the development
of a Bollywood-style film industry based in Leicester as being among some of the
factors that have elevated Asian status within Britain (194-5). This recent crossover of
Asian culture into mainstream British culture can be perceived within the popular arts.
Film directors such as Gurinder Chadha, Mira Nair and Ashuntosh Gowariker, or the
screening on primetime TV of shows such as The Kumars at No. 42 or Goodness
Gracious Me, all testify to the visibility of Asians within the UK.
This recent fomenting of Indian culture within the diaspora and its crossover into
mainstream British culture has been backed up by a strong economic position that
Asians had secured within the UK. Hussain indicates that in 2003 the British-Indian
collective sent 10 billion pounds sterling to India (197), a sum that gives a strong
indication of the economic clout of this community. Through their ingrained tenacity
and aspiration towards higher education, diasporan Indians have penetrated the middle
classes and this means that the cultural spaces that have been created within a closed
British society can be bolstered and maintained (Hussain 196). A manifestation of this
new-found wealth is the setting up of ostentatious “halls” whose construction are
promoted by a financially buoyant community seeking a place of reunion. As Sanjay
Suri (2006) confirms, “Every hall is a fortress resisting that modern march towards a
mix of people where only individuals may matter, not where those individuals come
from” (83). The hall, thus, is not solely a means of keeping diasporic culture alive, but
also has the added function of monitoring caste and making sure that as many marriages
are maintained within the caste system as possible. So, while Asians in general maintain
a strong filiation to their country of origin, caste has played a strong role in dividing the
homogeneous nature of the Asian diaspora. These subdivisions have been fomented in
part by the sheer number of Asians and British Asians residing within the UK, where
each caste-defined group has sufficient members to be self-sufficient.
The current percentage of Asians residing in urban areas of the UK is testimony
to both the strength of this community and to its divided nature. If we look at the city of
Leicester alone, we find that a quarter of its population is Indian (this figure does not
include other Asian populations such as Pakistani or Bangladeshi), while in the Greater
140
MAURICE O’CONNOR
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------London area boroughs such as Harrow, Brent or Hounslow are closely following suit.
Suri defines the heart of “Indian Leicester” as feeling like “a touchdown in India” (4),
and describes Leicester as “the first big town in the West were whites are steadily
declining into minority status” (3). Many of these mid-size British towns have
succumbed their traditional Anglo-Saxon feel and have been instead transformed into
high streets lined with Gujarati vegetarian cafes, sari shops and Rajasthani jewellers,
where a distinct waft of frying ghee and spices “colonises in reverse” (to quote Louise
Bennet, the late Jamaican poet) the northern air. Many Indians who come to live in the
UK tend to gravitate towards these urban centres where they know they will be
understood and taken care of. Despite the intimate knowledge that many Indians possess
of Britain through their colonial education, the fact remains that there are many
elements of English and Indian culture that remain reciprocally incommensurable.
When confronted by this cultural “strangeness”, many Asians take refuge in these
“ghettoised” communities where they do not constantly have to “explain” their
differences to white interlocutors or face down latent racism that still prevails in parts of
British society. This sense of difference is also felt by more mobile Asians who, as
Yasmin Hai testifies, still feel a certain “angst” despite being constantly told that they
live in a racially tolerant environment: “Our anger was also the dynamic that helped
feed our creative passions, but sometimes it just felt all-consuming …They [British
Asians] were all suffering with problems of ethnic conflict and integration” (267).
2
The day-to-day existence of multiracial Britain is often still one of mutual
ignorance, which prompts Suri to define cities such as “Multicultural Leicester” as more
being cities of “adjacent cultures” (14). Suri laments that, while space-sharing is
accepted, the colour line is still not being crossed where meaningful social interaction is
concerned. To reduce the complexities of a “multicultural” society to a mere
confrontation of pigmentation as does Suri is, nonetheless, to simplify a much more
complex issue. Colour difference is, no doubt, the most superficial yet most visible
marker of difference, and it is one that many émigrés and second generation British
Asians are sensitive to when living in a white-dominated UK (in the 2001 census, 87%
of the British population still defined themselves as “White British”). So, while skin
colour is an external marker and one which Asians themselves can become obsessed
141
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------with (Indian marriage columns both on the subcontinent and in the diaspora testify to a
grading of aspirant’s skin colouring where closer to white means more success at
securing a desirable partner), we must turn to the idea of cultural difference to
understand the disjunctive nature of multicultural Britain.
Within the last twenty years in Britain, there has been a pronounced move away
from the exclusionary and racialized politics of the Thatcher era to an ethos of
multiculturalism as fomented by New Labour. However, as Rehana Ahmed (2009)
indicates, this apparent accommodating of cultural difference is more superficial than
profound and, whilst token gestures to culture difference are used for public display by
the establishment, underneath we find that the class stratification of society is still
firmly in place. Viewed from a minority perspective, making the crossover into
mainstream white society whilst holding on to cultural values that are alien to western
liberalism is problematized to say the least. Cultural difference, it would seem, is a
motivating factor that can lead to being materially disadvantaged.
The limits of liberal multiculturalism are exposed when members of a minority group
enact, or seek to enact, cultural practices (e.g. arranged marriages; the wearing of the
Hijab; protests against ‘offensive’ creative works) which threaten the liberal ideology of
autonomous individual ‘choice’ or ‘freedom’, thereby positioning themselves beyond
liberal ‘tolerance’ (Ahmed 28).
It is useful, therefore, to introduce the term “incommensurable” in relation to
this concept of cultural difference; these tensions which Homi K. Bhabha defines in The
Location of Culture (1994) as being peculiar to borderline existences. This metaphorical
border is what delimits urban spaces in multicultural societies yet, like all borders, they
can become porous, can be crossed or shifted. Cultural difference is incommensurable
in that, rather than being a simplistic recognition of multiculturalism, it represents both
the singularity and the complexity of identity at the boundary of cultures. This
incommensurable or untranslatable moment of cultural difference is, thus, the most
effective way of understanding why a phenomena of adjacent cultures can become
installed in “multicultural societies” if no real effort is made by both parties to at least
address and try come to terms with those untranslatable elements encoded within
discrete cultures.
Bhabha is particularly interested in Benjamin’s (1970) understanding of
liminality, the element of resistance entailed within the process of translation: “…that
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------element in a translation that does not lend itself to translation” (75). Bhabha (1994)
looks at these border spaces from the perspective of their untranslatability, “a difference
within”, where the cultural difference of the hybrid escapes binary constructions (1314). Hybridity is thus understood as the crossover that occurs principally within second
generation diasporans or educated first-generation émigrés who have become sensitive
to the constructed nature of national identity. It is not just some exotic mix where
identity becomes diffused into sameness but, rather, it is the moment of cultural
singularity that is in itself constructed across the bar of difference. This contrasts with
the North American “melting pot” model, which ultimately wishes to water down all
cultural difference to a sameness that is essentially Anglo-Saxon culture dressed up in
exotic clothing. Hanif Kuresihi’s The Buddha of Suburbia lampoons this weak notion of
multiculturalism by highlighting the hypocrisy of a white society that holds
preconceived ideas on how Asians should think and behave. As with the mechanisms of
the fetish, certain sectors of British society tend to isolate exotic elements from Indian
culture and project them on to an “Asian other” whilst simultaneously demanding
weakened versions of cultural difference. In this light, Hussain assures that “British
culture was confused and did not know how to accommodate the South Asians, it was
contradictory” (193). Policymakers saw that the prevalent colonial syndrome was
thwarting attempts at assimilation so they abandoned a “melting pot” approach for a
“salad bowl” one. Yet, from an establishment point of view, each ethnic group
maintaining its own identity within the “big mix” is now perceived as a failure, as it is
seen as undermining the national loyalty of these migrant British groups. From the
migrant perspective, many still feel that while they enjoy full citizenship, they are
excluded from the essentially white-dominated sense of nationality. One of the impacts
of the “colonial syndrome” discussed is that, “It disillusioned the younger generation
who were British-born and those searching for new identities. Their identities changed
from being migrant to becoming diaspora” (Hussain 193).
Sanjay Suri’s informants evince how the anxieties that can arise from being
confronted by two opposing worlds can lead to a radicalising of thought. Tina, a
second-generation Gujarati adolescent from Leicester, speaks of the difficult transition
from her Asian-dominated environment to the “alien” white one. Up until tertiary
education, Tina’s classmates had been 96% Indian, but at Leicester University she is
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------confronted by her own cultural difference, and an incident at an English literature
seminar3 brings home this difference and leads her to conclude that:
It suddenly occurred to me at that point that my thinking and theirs was so
different. I felt stupid because of that. Also, my tutor didn’t explain that you can
have different interpretations based on culture and life experiences … What I found was
that all the rest of them had a white perspective rather than an Asian cultural
perspective. So, my thinking in a lot of areas is different. (40)
For diasporans, a hypersensitivity to the image of the self can occur when they are
isolated from their ethnic group in a white-dominated society. This hypersensitivity can
sometimes lead to the kind of interpretations we have seen expressed by Tina which
produces entrenched positions. So, while Suri does not fully agree with Tina’s
interpretation of the situation which is informed by a distinct cultural interpretation, the
important conclusion is that, “finally it mattered only that Tina had read it differently
from the others. And that she believed that this was because she was Indian, and they
were white British” (44).
Rather than a retreat into the ethnic “comfort zone”, other diasporic Asians
prefer integration at any cost. Nonetheless, there comes a point where, despite attempts
at neutralising ethnicity, difference is unveiled. One could thus view this impasse as
being constructed along the modes of cultural mimicry on the one hand, and the fraught
nature of incommensurable cultural difference on the other. In light of Bhabha (1994) it
must be remembered that “mimicry conceals no presence of identity behind its mask”
(88), which indicates that there is no “essential identity” to which the subject can recur.
Despite efforts to mask ethnic or linguistic difference, memories, attitudes and beliefs
pertaining to the autochthonous culture cannot be contained within a reductive model of
social and cultural adaptation and these differences will always emerge from behind the
mask of mimicry. Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist (2002), for example, is illustrative in
the manner it explores questions of mimicry and the sense of inadequacy that comes
about when one attempts to mask one identity with another. Kunzru employs allegory to
flag up the hypocrisy of a multicultural England that will not accept the other’s
3
The incident is centred around a seminar on Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”. The class consensus
is that the poem essentially deals with loss of virginity while Tina prefers to interpret it in a non-sexual
way, focusing more on loss of innocence in a non-sexual way. Her white class mates refuse to accept this
interpretation and even laugh in her face as they find her reading ethnically biased. Suri, in his own
reading of Rossetti’s poem, sides with the white classroom, although he assures that interpreting the poem
as a loss of innocence could include the loss of virginity, but much more.
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------difference and, through a reducing of difference to racial stereotype, fails to recognise
the complexities of Asian hybrid identities.
Forging this hybrid identity is thus fraught with certain difficulties. Ahmed
(2007), for example, despite his encounters with a lack of accommodating his difference
or outright racism, soldiers on to create an Islamic identity for himself whilst
simultaneously praising Britain and the West’s commitment to “personal freedom,
social equality, human rights, justice” (276). Ironically, as Robert Young (2008) sets out
in The Idea of English Ethnicity, nineteenth-century notions of Englishness were never
really about England per se. Instead they were fabrications of ethnic traits, a type of
template for those who either did not reside in England but who wished to affiliate with
the idea of it, or for those of other nationalities who were provided with a stereotype to
reproduce:
Englishness was created for the diaspora ― an ethnic identity designed for those
who were precisely not English, but rather of English descent … Americans,
Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans…. Englishness was
constructed as a translatable identity that could be adopted or appropriated
anywhere by anyone who cultivated the right language, looks, and culture (1-2).
The writer V.S. Naipaul is an example of how a subject assimilates this artificial
English identity. As Sandhu (2003) observes, Naipaul employs darkness in his early
work as a metaphor for his own sense of colonial inferiority, while the move to the
metropolis cures “the psychological deformations that a colonial upbringing can wreak,
to switch from ignorance to enlightenment” (196). Yasmin Hai similarly reflects on her
own father’s insecurity when faced with a white British society, despite his total
assimilation to British culture. When flicking through a family photo album Hai finds a
picture of her father, newly arrived from Pakistan, posing in front of Buckingham
Palace: “He looks the picture of a model English gentleman. Or is it more like the
picture of a foreigner playing at being English ― dressing more English that the
English?” (11). What Hai effectively visualises is her father’s mimicry of the
constructed notion of an Englishman and the inherent irony that her father will never be
accepted as such. This is the hard reality many Asian men had to face up to (traditional
gender roles meant that men were the breadwinners and were thus under more pressure
to climb social ladders) and for this reason many second-generation diasporans, on
having witnessed their parents’ frustration regarding integration, reject this
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------masquerading behind “Englishness” and opt for new identity models. We must also take
into consideration that many of these first generation émigrés had made the journey to
Britain alone and never felt that it would be their permanent home. Adapting to British
ways was thus a strategy for these (in their majority) males to make their “sojourn” as
plain sailing as possible. As return was always unquestionable, they didn’t see this
temporary assimilation as problematic. However, when they began to accept that Britain
was “home”, people like the Sikh men who had cut their hair and stopped wearing their
turban began to reappropriate their identities of origin.
The forging of a hybrid identity is thus not always readily available to everyone.
Sanjay Suri’s informant, Tina, for example, finds that as a sole Asian amongst 200
whites on the English literature module at Leicester, she has to always “explain” things
or apologise for certain attitudes to her white companions. Her college experience is a
lonely one and she concludes that she prefers being “on the Indian than on the white
side of things” (41). So while Tina and other second generation Asians like her are often
linguistically and culturally bilingual (and can sometimes serve as interpreters for their
parents), they can still feel uncomfortable in exclusively white environments where they
sense that those core values and many other small yet important details of their culture
are rejected or simply not understood. Therefore, while second generation Asians are
generally more confident about articulating their hybrid identity, first generation
émigrés tend to make self-conscious efforts at adapting to British ways and will
sometimes discard certain ethnic traits in an attempt to blend. However, when these
attempts are perceived as being quirky or they come up against the glass ceilings
installed within British society, then this initial impetus sours and a radical return to
autochthonous culture can take place.
Yasmin Hai explores the difficulties and paradoxes of cultural assimilation
through the autobiographical figure of her father and of his determinacy to “adapt” to
British ways. Hai narrates Mr Hai’s “radical project to make his wife English!” by
burning her burqa and headscarves; what Hai defines as a “symbolic version of bra
burning” (25). But these outward gestures at integration are never sufficient, a point Hai
emphasises when she says that “while becoming British, vis-à-vis a passport, had been
relatively easy, becoming English was proving to be much harder” (15). The distinction
Hai makes here is between citizenship (holding a British passport) and ethnicity (the
notion of Englishness). Sanjay Suri, however, observes that certain Asians understand
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------“Britishness” as referring to a type of caste system where skin colour and other more
subtle identity markers exclude Asians. This discrimination can come as a shock to
many professional Asians who migrate to the UK to find that their qualifications are not
recognised and society does not afford them those privileged career positions they are
accustomed to. When Suri questions an informant on this issue of belonging he replies:
“Discrimination is here [in the UK] just like there is in the caste system. You will
always be portrayed under this Asian banner. But when I am Ravidassia, I am not just
Asian. At least I know who I am” (215).
These conflicting stances on the exclusive or inclusive nature of “Britishness”
are revealing. Whilst Suri’s informant does not expect him or his children to be
accepted as being British, a more informed generation of South Asians feel comfortable
with their inclusion within a new sense of Britishness. A salient attitude amongst second
generation group of Asians who, while recognising their ethnic origins, do not wear
them as a badge. This is also true of people of Caribbean origin (both AfricanCaribbean and Asian-Caribbean) who, similarly, have had to navigate through the
complexities of adapting to a nation that, in many ways, remains monocultural in its
ethos. The idea of multiculturalism was an attempt to break out of that mould. However,
one must not see this urban phenomenon as being paradigmatic of the diasporic
experience in Britain and, as Caryl Phillips (2006) indicates, “Britain is a deeply classbound society, with a codified and hierarchical structure which locates the monarchy at
the top, with a roster of increasingly ‘marginal’ people as one filters down to the
bottom” (5).
The fundamental difference, therefore, between first and second generation
Asian diasporic groups is that most first-generation émigrés continue to feel as if they
are living between the East and the West. On the contrary, second-generation Asians
have limited primary links with the homeland, which are mostly formed through short
visits there with their parents. So while there does exist a strong affiliation with this
“other” nation, it is a “homeland” constructed through passed-on memories and
romanticised imagery. Hai speaks of a re-evaluation through a coming to terms with her
own identity once she rejects viewing the world through a white perspective. Having
gone through a similar sense of estrangement with her parents’ homeland, contact with
other second-generation diasporans in the UK reveals to her “just how British we
actually were. […] we were forging our own history in this country” (216). The
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------establishment label-switching of “Asians living in England” to “British Asian” has
helped people such as Hai to accept their hyphenated status despite her principal
reaction of “fraudulently laying claim to this country [the UK]” (161).
The much-cited opening lines of The Buddha of Suburbia best contextualise
these complexities: “My name is Karim Amir and I am an Englishman born and bred,
almost” (3). In an interview with Colin MacCabe (1999) Kureishi reveals:
Whereas when you were called a ‘Paki’, you were really scum. And seeing
England from the bottom, from below, in that way ― as a victim ― was very
interesting to me, and also very affecting, I could see, from my father’s point of view.
Because he came to England and saw England as the great Rome, you know ― as a
great cultural centre. (45)
Kureishi, however, has always felt he forms a part of British culture, albeit one that has
in the past rejected people like him. This sense of belonging is evident in his writing,
above all in his continual references to pop culture,4 which comes to represent to the
author a freedom from the restrictive norms of conventional British society. What is
clear is that for many second-generation Indian diasporans identity is performative in
nature5 and British Indians tend to affiliate with their heritage and explore their
backgrounds. This practice contrasts with many first generation diaporans who saw any
form of multiculturalism or ethnic pride as only serving “to perpetuate the ghetto
mentality and hold minorities back” (Hai 175). As we have already discussed, the
discrepancy between first and second generation Asians is thus often grounded on an
“assimilation at all costs” ethos which some of the second-generation population reject.
The alternative to this “all or nothing” model is a new kind of Britishness inscribed
within the sign of hybridity, no longer understood in exclusively racial terms. The
conception of nationhood within the UK is also being reconceptionalized within this
frame. British society, nonetheless, is still divided between those who accept that
multiculturalism and hybridity as a reality, and those who uphold an exclusive sense of
national belonging. It is within this disjunctive that British Indians must negotiate their
identities.
4
Kureishi co-edited the Faber Book of Pop (1995) which examined both underground and mainstream
pop music through the discourses of fashion, art, reportage and fiction.
5
See Stuart Hall (1991) “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities” and “The Local and the
Global. Globalization and Ethnicity.” Both in: Anthony D. King (ed.) Culture, Globalization and the
World System. London: Macmillan (1991).
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WORKS CITED
AHMAD, IMRAN (2007). Unimagined: A Muslim Boy Meets the West. London: Aurum
Press.
AHMED, REHANA (2009). “Occluding Race in Selected Short Fiction by Hanif
Kureishi”. Wasafiri Vol. 24, Number 2 (June): 27-34. DOI:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02690050902771613
BENJAMIN, WALTER (1970). Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn. London: Jonathan Cape.
BHABHA, HOMI K (1996). “Culture’s In-Between”. In Stuart Hall & Paul duGay (eds.)
Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage Publications, 2002.
BHABHA, HOMI K (1994). The Location of Culture. London & New York: Routledge,
2002.
HAI, YASMIN (2008). The Making of Mr Hai’s Daughter: Becoming British. London:
Virago Press.
HUSSAIN, ASAF (2005). “The Indian diaspora in Britain: Political Interventionism and
Diaspora Activism”. Asian Affairs: An American Review Vol. 32, Issue 3 (Fall):
189-208. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3200/AAFS.32.3.189-208
KUNZRU, HARI (2002). The Impressionist. Plume: New York.
KUREISHI, HANIF (1990). The Buddha of Suburbia. London: Faber and Faber.
MACCABE, COLIN (1999). “Hanif Kureishi on London.” Critical Quarterly Vol. 41,
Issue
3
(Autumn:
37-56.
DOI:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.00111562.1999.00248.x
PHILIPS, CARYL (2006). “Necessary Journeys”. Wasafiri Vol. 21, Number 2 (July): 3-6.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02690050600694679
RUTHERFORD, JONATHAN (1990). “The Third Space. An Interview with Homi Bhabha”.
In Jonathan Ruthford (ed.) Identity: Community, Culture and Difference.
London: Lawrence & Wishart.
SANDHU, SUKHDEV (2003). London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a
City. Harper Perennial: London.
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SURI, SANJAY (2006). Brideless in Wembley. Penguin Books, India: New Delhi.
YOUNG, ROBERT J.C. (2008). The Idea of English Ethnicity. Blackwell Publishing:
Oxford.
MAURICE O’CONNOR is a full-time lecturer at the University of Cádiz where he read his
Ph.D. on Ben Okri. His research interests are centred on African and Indian diasporic
writing, and he has published in journals such as Wasafiri. His book entitled The
Writings of Ben Okri: Transcending the Local and the National was published by
Prestige Books, New Delhi and his latest article entitled ‘The Narcotic Memes of
Bombay: Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis’ was published in the 2015 autumn edition of
Wasafiri: International Writing. He is currently treasurer of the Spanish Association for
Interdisciplinary Studies on India.
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Indi@logs
Vol 3 2016, pp. 151-167, ISSN: 2339-8523
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------LA INDIA: TURISMO, EXPERIENCIA PERSONAL E IMAGEN EN LA OBRA RODA
EL MÓN I TORNA AL BORN, DE OLEGUER JUNYENT
Universidad de Zaragoza
[email protected]
RESUMEN
El escenógrafo catalán Oleguer Junyent, acompañado por su amigo Mariano Recolons,
emprendió en 1908 un viaje alrededor del mundo que le llevaría a visitar Egipto, la India,
Australia, China, Japón, Canadá y Estados Unidos a lo largo de once meses. Tras este viaje,
Junyent publicó un libro, titulado Roda el món i torna al Born, que fue editado por la revista
Ilustració Catalana, en el que relata su periplo. Dentro de esta obra, la India posee un peso
importante, evidenciando que fue uno de los países visitados que causó más honda huella en
Junyent. En la narración, tienen cabida desde anécdotas personales hasta lecciones de historia,
pasando por descripciones de lugares y de experiencias estéticas. En la relación de lugares
visitados y mencionados, puede verse cómo el turismo de comienzos del siglo XX en la India
difiere poco del actual, en lo que a monumentos considerados visita obligada se refiere.
Además, es un libro profusamente ilustrado. La India es el país que recoge más ilustraciones de
todos los visitados, tanto fotografías como dibujos, en los que se muestran vistas, edificios y
gentes con imágenes escogidas con una fuerte intencionalidad.
PALABRAS CLAVE: Oleguer Junyent, Roda el món i torna al Born, Cachemira, Benarés,
Calcuta, Bombay, fotografía, libro de viajes.
ABSTRACT India: tourism, personal experience and image in the work Roda el món i torna al
Born, by Oleguer Junyent
In 1908 the Catalan stage designer Oleguer Junyent and his friend Mariano Recolons set off on
a trip around the world. They spent eleven months visiting Egypt, India, Australia, China,
Japan, Canada and the United States. On his return home Junyent published a book on the
journey entitled Roda el món i torna al Born (Around the World and Back to the Born) edited
by the magazine Ilustració Catalana. India is one of the countries that features largely in this
book, proof of the enormous impression it caused on Junyent. The text is a mixture of personal
anecdotes, history lessons, descriptions of places and aesthetic experiences. Judging by the list
of places he mentions, it is clear that present-day tourism in India has changed little since the
early 20th century, especially as regards the monuments that must be seen. The book is very
well illustrated and Junyent has included more pictures of India than any other country.
Photographs and drawings depicting landscapes, buildings and people have all been carefully
and deliberately chosen.
KEYWORDS: Oleguer Junyent, Roda el món i torna al Born, Kashmir, Varanasi, Kolkata,
Mumbay, photography, travel literature.
INDIA: TURISMO, EXPERIENCIA PERSONAL E IMAGEN
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
El viaje ha sido, desde tiempos inmemoriales, forma de conocimiento de tierras lejanas,
herramienta de apropiación territorial (real o metafórica), espejo en el que contemplar la
propia cultura y vehículo de crecimiento personal. Relatarlo, por lo tanto, ha sido la
forma de compartir todo este vasto conjunto de experiencias, reflexionar sobre ellas
para una mejor asimilación y convertirlas en una contribución cultural autónoma.
Durante el siglo XIX, el viaje se convirtió en esencia y articuló buena parte del
desarrollo occidental. Las naciones viajaron, expandiendo sus fronteras mediante los
movimientos coloniales que configuraron los mapas de muchas regiones del planeta
dejando un rastro que todavía perdura, y viajaron las personas, que tuvieron ocasión de
conocer de primera mano nuevos lugares exóticos, cuyos relatos nutrirían buena parte
del acervo cultural del viaje sedentario, posibilitado gracias a la proliferación de estas
publicaciones y, paralelamente, del desarrollo de formas de expresión como la
fotografía. Combinados o por separado, ambos tipos de productos culturales permitirían
un mayor y más profundo conocimiento de lugares remotos, lo que a su vez se tradujo
en un cambio sustancial en la percepción (tanto conceptual como visual) del lugar que el
ser humano en general (y el individuo occidental en particular) ocupa en el mundo.
Nuevos horizontes se abrieron para Occidente: África, inexplorada y concebida como
un primitivo erial de belleza natural; y Asia, percibida con un mayor desarrollo cultural
(gracias a las milenarias culturas china y japonesa) pero vista siempre desde el
paternalismo eurocentrista que caracterizó el colonialismo. La relación con la India se
manifestó desde un punto intermedio: era ineludible la presencia británica como
territorio colonizado, al tiempo que existía una curiosidad y un cierto respeto por la
cultura india que entroncaba con la interacción cultural entre Occidente y el Extremo
Oriente. Muchos serían los que, durante el siglo XIX (y especialmente en su segunda
mitad), escribieran y dejasen constancia de sus viajes y estancias en los territorios del
subcontinente indio. Si bien, al pensar en escritores y viajeros de esta época, el nombre
que indudablemente viene a la mente en primer lugar es Rudyard Kipling, 1 el número de
hombres y mujeres que dejaron testimonio de su paso por la India da lugar a una
extensa nómina. 2 Entre ellos, por sus paralelismos con el personaje que nos ocupará más
1
Aunque el caso de Kipling no es estrictamente el de un viajero occidental que se desplaza hasta la India
y deja un testimonio en primera persona de su experiencia, sino que se trata de un descendiente de
británicos nacido en territorio colonial cuyos escritos son mayoritariamente ficciones ambientadas en la
cultura híbrida en la que se había criado; evocar su figura resulta obligatorio por la trascendencia que sus
cuentos y novelas han tenido para la literatura y la cultura occidental.
2
Aunque no podemos extendernos aquí a analizar en profundidad dicho listado, hay otras obras en las
que se ha prestado atención a algunos aspectos. Sin ánimo de realizar aquí una exhaustiva recopilación
bibliográfica, puesto que no es el tema que nos ocupa, sí cabría citar algunos títulos, por ejemplo, el
artículo de Pilar Tejera “Pasajeras a la India” (Tejera, 2012), que constituye la principal aportación en
castellano a una tendencia de reivindicación de las mujeres que visitaron la India durante el siglo XIX.
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adelante, queremos destacar la figura del guatemalteco Enrique Gómez Carrillo (1873–
1927), el cual también tuvo ocasión de recorrer Asia Oriental (en su caso, por motivos
profesionales), y reflejó sus viajes en varios libros, de los cuales De Marsella a Tokio
sería aquel con el que pueden trazarse más puntos en común con Roda el món i torna al
Born, al ser ambos crónicas de largos viajes en los que la India es tan solo una parte del
conjunto.3
En la línea de esta corriente literaria y de experiencias se enmarca el personaje que nos
ocupa en el presente texto, el artista catalán Oleguer Junyent. A pesar de que su
cronología es más tardía que los ejemplos mencionados (realizó su gran viaje y publicó
sus vivencias a finales de la primera década del siglo XX), puede considerarse como
continuador del espíritu anteriormente expuesto, en tanto que su relato y su experiencia
comparten una serie de características comunes con los escritores y viajeros
decimonónicos: una clase social acomodada que les permite el desplazamiento, sea por
motivos de ocio o profesionales, y un bagaje cultural amplio, que estimula el afán de
conocimiento y marca el tono a medio camino entre la curiosidad anecdótica y el
conocimiento académico.
Oleguer Junyent, el artista y el viajero
Pese a la fama de su nombre, la figura de Oleguer Junyent (1876-1956) es apenas
conocida, 4 algo que resulta extraño a la par que sorprendente si se tiene en cuenta que
estamos ante un personaje de una trayectoria muy destacada como escenógrafo (la que
fue su ocupación principal) y de notable éxito como pintor (en su madurez, con
influencias impresionistas y postimpresionistas), además de numerosas incursiones de
juventud como ilustrador gráfico (de revistas como la satírica L’Esquella de la
Torratxa), sin olvidar sus trabajos como decorador y diseñador de festejos y
decoraciones efímeras. A todo ello, debe sumársele una vida intelectual y social muy
activa, que hicieron de Junyent una de las personalidades clave de la cultura
barcelonesa, especialmente, de las primeras décadas del siglo XX. 5
Junyent comenzó su formación en la última década del siglo XIX, de la mano de un
reputado escenógrafo de la denominada Escuela Catalana de Escenografía, Fèlix
3
Sobre Enrique Gómez Carrillo puede consultarse la fuente original, De Marsella a Tokio (Carrillo,
1912), así como varios estudios al respecto, entre los que destaca la tesis doctoral que le dedicó Karima
Hajjaj Ben Ahmed (Hajjaj Ben Ahmed, 2001), o la comunicación de Abdelmouneim Boubou (Boubou,
2012) en el II Congreso Internacional Reencuentro con Enrique Gómez Carrillo.
4
Aunque se ha intentado recuperar su figura en tiempos recientes, estos amagos han quedado tan solo en
experiencias bibliográficas aisladas (Fàbregas, 1981; Miralles, 1994).
5
Tras la Guerra Civil, la figura de Junyent quedó relegada a un discreto segundo plano: siguió pintando y
exponiendo, pero con un papel menos activo en la vida social y cultural de la ciudad.
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Urgellès. De allí pasó por varios talleres, entre ellos el de Soler i Rovirosa, uno de los
máximos representantes de la citada Escuela, lo cual supuso un notable impulso para su
carrera, que llegaría a situarle como uno de los escenógrafos habituales en los
principales escenarios barceloneses, como puede ser el Teatro del Liceu, para el que
realizó numerosos proyectos.
La pasión viajera de Oleguer Junyent fue una constante en su vida. Iniciada en fecha
temprana,6 alcanzó su punto álgido con la vuelta al mundo llevada a cabo entre 1908 y
1909 junto a su amigo Mariano Recolons, 7 un periplo que les llevaría a través de
muchos de los enclaves que durante el siglo XIX y principios del XX tuvieron un
especial protagonismo para el incipiente turismo moderno. Mas si Junyent sentía gran
inquietud por viajar y conocer el mundo, sentimiento parecido experimentaba, a su
vuelta, por dar a conocer lo que en sus desplazamientos había conocido, de manera que
llevó a cabo varias publicaciones: Roda el món i torna al Born (que nos ocupa en el
presente trabajo, 1910), Viaje de un escenógrafo a Egipto (1919) y Mallorca,
fotografías de la “Illa Daurada” (circa 1920).8
Roda el món i torna al Born. Crónica de un viaje que pasa por la India
“Roda el món i torna al Born” es una expresión catalana que, aunque en la actualidad
resulta un tanto demodé, ha sido muy popular en el lenguaje cotidiano del siglo XX.
Esta expresión, que invita a vivir aventuras siempre y cuando uno no se olvide del hogar
y siempre vuelva a su tierra, proviene del título que Junyent dio al libro en el que
recopilaba su vuelta al mundo.9
6
Al cobrar su primer proyecto importante, la escenografía de Blancaflor para el Teatro Íntimo de Adrià
Gual, invirtió las ganancias en un tour de tres meses por España (Miralles, 1994: 12).
7
A quien únicamente se menciona de manera puntual en la bibliografía al respecto, en parte porque jugó
un papel muy secundario e incluso en el propio Roda el món. Junyent tan solo aludía a Recolons en
momentos puntuales en los que éste era relevante para el desarrollo del relato y de sus impresiones,
generalmente por su conocimiento del inglés, idioma que Junyent desconocía, de modo que la presencia
de Recolons se tornaba indispensable para conocer la exposición de un guía turístico en Egipto o para
entablar relación con el banquero R. C. Whitenack y con sus anfitriones en Cachemira (Junyent, 1910: 16;
Junyent, 1910: 173).
8
Estas publicaciones son las que se recogen en la Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana (voz disponible online
en<http://www.enciclopedia.cat/EC-GEC-0035131.xml> [última visita 02/10/2015]). No obstante,
algunas fuentes dan a entender un corpus de publicaciones de viajes mucho más vasto, sin especificar
títulos ni fechas; y en correspondencia dirigida a Junyent se puede intuir la pretensión de éste de realizar
alguna otra publicación, que seguramente no llegase a buen término (Miralles, 1994: 43).
9
No queríamos dejar de incluir esta expresión, ya que su uso de manera popular evidencia la paradoja del
desconocimiento en torno a la figura de Junyent, al tiempo que explica de manera muy ilustrativa la
importancia que llegó a tener su vida y obra para la cultura catalana.
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Tal como puede verse en la publicación original (Junyent, 1910), el artista quiso que la
obra reflejase sus impresiones particulares sobre el viaje. En algunas ocasiones (cuando
resultaba especialmente llamativo, o cuando le resultaba necesario para equilibrar algún
pasaje que le causaba menor interés), Junyent introducía también datos ilustrativos de
los lugares que visitaba; sin embargo, su intención última no era crear una enciclopedia
a través de la cual conocer de manera objetiva los diferentes destinos, sino transmitir a
sus congéneres las sensaciones y conocimientos adquiridos a lo largo del viaje.
La ruta que siguieron Junyent y Recolons no destaca por su originalidad (ya que se
centra en las escalas habituales y en la visita de los puertos y ciudades más importantes
de la época), si bien sí que pueden destacarse algunos rasgos que evidencian la
inquietud curiosa de los viajeros que la emprenden. Es inevitable, al hablar de viajes
alrededor del mundo llevados a cabo hace más de una centuria, tener en mente la
famosa novela de Julio Verne, La vuelta al mundo en ochenta días, y la traeremos aquí
a colación por ser una referencia ágil. El legendario Phileas Fogg, acuciado por la
urgencia de su apuesta, embarcaba desde Marsella a Puerto Said, y de allí hacia India
(con escala en Adén); Junyent, con menos prisa, incluyó un recorrido por Egipto,
llegando hasta Asuán y de vuelta por el Nilo, cumpliendo así uno de sus principales
intereses, el conocimiento directo de la tierra de los faraones, estimulado por el revival
egipcio que tuvo lugar en la cultura europea desde finales del XIX. 10 Al igual que Fogg,
Junyent recorrió el subcontinente indio por tierra, de Bombay a Calcuta, aunque de
nuevo de una forma mucho menos precipitada. Al abandonar la India se produce el
primer cambio significativo, ya que Junyent, por razones que se tratarán más adelante,
puso rumbo al sur, haciendo escala en Ceilán (actual Sri Lanka), dirigiéndose hacia
Australia y bordeándola en barco para de nuevo dirigirse al continente euroasiático,
retomando el recorrido por los principales puertos de China (Hong Kong, Shanghái y
Pekín). Antes de embarcarse en la travesía transpacífica recaló en Japón, donde su
estancia incluyó desplazamientos y excursiones para cubrir los principales destinos
turísticos del país durante el periodo Meiji (1868-1912). Atravesando el continente
americano surge de nuevo una diferencia más que notable con la ficción de Verne:
Junyent, consciente de la importancia y magnitud de los Estados Unidos, decide
reservar el país para una futura visita en detalle, de modo que buena parte de esta etapa
del viaje la realizan por territorio canadiense, permitiéndose incursiones en Chicago y
las cataratas del Niágara, y recalando de manera obligada en Nueva York. Allí
embarcaron a bordo del Lusitania, célebre trasatlántico que les condujo de regreso a
10
Revival cuyo máximo exponente fue la ópera de Verdi, Aída, estrenada en Barcelona en 1876 con
escenografía de Soler i Rovirosa, uno de los maestros de Junyent. El artista también vio estimulado su
gusto por lo egipcio gracias a la relación de amistad que le unía con Eduard Toda i Güell, diplomático,
reconocido viajero y uno de los primeros y más destacados expertos catalanes en los campos de la
egiptología y la sinología (Garcia, María Dolors et al., 2005; Plou, 2015).
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Europa, en una ruta (Londres – París – Barcelona) realizada de manera apresurada, sin
mayor interés que regresar a casa tras once meses de viaje.
Dentro de este gran viaje, la India11 jugó un papel importante para Junyent, hasta tal
punto que se convirtió, junto con Egipto y Japón, uno de los pilares que sustentaron
tanto el viaje, en primer lugar, como posteriormente el peso narrativo de Roda el món i
torna al Born.
Monumentos e impresiones: la experiencia turística
«El paso del Mar Rojo – Lo he recorrido entero y a pie seco, como los israelitas,
pero confortablemente apoyado en las barandas del vapor inglés que nos lleva a
Bombay.»12
Junyent dedica un capítulo completo a relatar su estancia en India. Establece como
punto de partida la despedida de Egipto, la travesía marítima a través del Mar Rojo y la
escala en Adén, en cierto modo considerando esta fase como un preámbulo o un prólogo
necesario, una suerte de preparación o transición: con este viaje no solo deja atrás
Egipto, sino que también se cierra una primera etapa, otorgando al canal de Suez el
verdadero papel de «puerta de Oriente». 13 Sin embargo, estas inclusiones son, como
decimos, una licencia que Junyent se toma a modo de transición para introducir al lector
11
Entendiendo el concepto de India de una manera amplia, basada en lo cultural, y no limitada
estrictamente a lo geopolítico, de manera que tienen cabida territorios de su periferia cultural, tanto hacia
el norte (Cachemira, cuya situación actual es de fragmentación y disputa, pero que en 1908 era un
protectorado británico con regencia local) como hacia el sur (la isla de Ceilán, actual Sri Lanka, que en el
momento del viaje todavía era una colonia inglesa).
12
Traducción de la autora (Junyent, 1910: 97).
13
Aunque en su libro Junyent atribuye este calificativo a la ciudad y al puerto de Marsella (Junyent, 1910:
9), simbólicamente es el paso por el canal de Suez el que establece una clara división entre un Occidente
exótico pero relativamente cercano y conocido y un Oriente de claro potencial evocador. Así, si bien
Junyent se deja llevar por el entusiasmo de comenzar el viaje al hablar de Marsella, reconoce que la
primera etapa pertenece a una cultura cercana, conocida y, en cierto modo, familiar; y por ende, el salto,
el paso que convierte su viaje en una auténtica aventura burguesa, se encuentra al cruzar el canal de Suez
y adentrarse en el Mar Rojo con rumbo a destinos (todavía más) lejanos.
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en el ambiente indio a través de una contextualización concebida para acentuar el
contraste.14
Su primera valoración del territorio indio se centra en la ciudad de Bombay, puerto de
recepción. Allí, describe la ciudad como un lugar cuyo exotismo queda eclipsado por el
progreso (entendido como occidentalización), haciendo especial hincapié en aquellos
edificios oficiales que, levantados por el gobierno inglés, suponen imposiciones de
arquitectura occidental que impide el brillo propio de la arquitectura local. No toda la
influencia colonial es negativa, puesto que ya desde el comienzo de su visita a la India
Junyent destaca la limpieza impuesta en algunos lugares, así como las infraestructuras
para el uso cotidiano, tales como hospitales o escuelas.
No obstante, lo que causa una mayor impresión a Junyent es la parte más tradicional,
que se muestra a los viajeros a través de pintorescos mercados y callejuelas y, sobre
todo, los enclaves monumentales, que ya comienzan a adquirir la categoría de
«turísticos». En este sentido, el más evidente, sin duda alguna, es el Taj Mahal, que
Junyent describe como «la maravilla no solamente de Agra, sino de toda la India»
(Junyent, 1910: 185). Si bien esta descripción nada tiene de sorprendente, en tanto que
el monumento había recibido ya notables elogios, resultan más significativas las frases
que la acompañan, en las que Junyent alude al intensísimo calor (la estancia en India
tiene lugar en los meses cálidos) y describe cómo, a pesar de una climatología adversa,
los viajeros abandonan entusiasmados el hotel para conocer el que ya en 1908 era una
visita obligada para aquellos que se encontrasen de paso en India. Tal impacto le causa
el complejo funerario que, en las páginas de Roda el món, incluye un pasaje
verdaderamente interesante, en el que combina sus experiencias personales en el
monumento (rasgo que sigue la tónica habitual de toda la obra; en este caso haciendo
referencia a un cortejo fúnebre que les sorprendió poco antes de llegar al edificio) con
una relativamente detallada explicación en la que se alude a la legendaria historia de su
origen, pero también se ofrecen algunos datos técnicos e histórico-artísticos sobre su
construcción. De este modo, Junyent construía un discurso didáctico que trascendía la
experiencia, poniendo en valor el que ya comenzaba a configurarse como símbolo de
identidad nacional india en la modernidad.
14
Para subrayar este contraste, Junyent alude al monumento conmemorativo de Ferdinand de Lesseps en
Puerto Said. Más allá de una referencia casi anecdótica sobre un lugar de interés, se esconde la intención
de crear un vínculo más estrecho con el lector (presumiblemente, barcelonés), ya que la figura de Lesseps
fue también relevante para la ciudad de Barcelona, donde éste ejerció como diplomático entre 1842 y
1848, y donde recibió, a su muerte, la dedicación de una plaza a su nombre; plaza ubicada en el mismo
barrio de Gràcia en el que Junyent tuvo instalado su taller, en la calle Bonavista, número 22 (Plou, 2015).
De este modo, con la mención al monumento se enlazaba la despedida de Egipto con un elemento cultural
cercano y sentido como propio por el público potencial del libro, estableciéndose así una ruptura mayor al
proseguir con la ruta y dirigirse a India.
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Esto no significa que el Taj Mahal fuese el único sitio del que Junyent aportaba una
información más allá de la obtenida a través del conocimiento in situ, pero sí adquiría
una relevancia especial, tanto por la extensión como por la concreción de los datos. En
otros casos, Junyent explicaba algunas cuestiones de manera más anecdótica, próxima a
la curiosidad. En estas ocasiones, mayoritarias, Junyent otorgaba al lector un marco
contextual en el que ubicar el hecho turístico, permitiéndole desarrollar mentalmente la
escena con coherencia, pero sin pretensión mayor de que la información perdurase.
Dentro de este tipo de episodios puede incluirse, por ejemplo, el referido a las Torres
del Silencio de Bombay, de las cuales comenta su función, justificando el carácter
monumental en el que se escuda la visita, pero desmaterializando su verdadera esencia
cuando las reduce a una experiencia estética y sensorial agradable (Junyent, 1910:
107).15
El recorrido por el centro del subcontinente comparte esta tendencia, en la que los datos
ofrecidos se aproximan más al ámbito de lo anecdótico que al de lo didáctico y son
puestos al servicio de la transmisión de impresiones y sensaciones. Prueba de ello son
los elogios que dedica a Jaipur y a Amber, ciudades que considera (especialmente la
última) «centros de enorme cultura» (Junyent, 1910: 135), si bien aporta sobre ellas
relativamente pocos datos, y se limita, mayoritariamente, a realizar pasajes descriptivos
superficiales, en los que trasluce su fascinación por los lugares visitados:
«Mas no quiero extenderme en su descripción, ya que la mayor maravilla consiste
en estar inhabitada toda la gran ciudad. Las impresiones de las ciudades muertas
encantadas que describen los cuentos bastardeados de Las Mil y una Noches no
son tan extraordinarios como este conjunto de palacios, de templos, de calles, […]
como se encuentran en este triste Amber, abandonado por sus antiguos habitantes
[…]»16
En el caso de las Cuevas de Ajanta, Junyent pone buen cuidado en dar indicaciones para
llegar (desde luego, mucho de forma mucho más precisa en comparación con otros
lugares relevantes que menciona), síntoma de que las percibe como un enclave de
importancia con el impedimento de encontrarse al margen de las rutas más habituales o
frecuentadas. En el momento en que Junyent tuvo ocasión de visitarlas, llevaban
descubiertas noventa años, no obstante, este comentario pone en evidencia que se
trataba de un lugar que todavía no había adquirido la relevancia (especialmente, a nivel
15
Estas torres constituyen un elemento dentro del proceso funerario de la religión zoroástrica (parsi en
India), mediante el cual el cadáver, considerado impuro, debe reposar en estos edificios, habilitados para
ello, hasta su completa descomposición. Una vez limpios los huesos, son depositados en un osario dentro
del complejo.
16
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turístico, no tanto a nivel cultural) que posee hoy día, presente en toda guía de viajes
que se precie (Singh, 2003: 812). El propio Junyent reconocía que se ubicaban en una
zona de escaso interés para el viajero que se desplazase con rapidez, dando a entender
que un desplazamiento realizado ex profeso podría no resultar satisfactorio (y, leyendo
entre líneas, quitaría tiempo para conocer otros puntos más llamativos).
Paradójicamente, y a pesar de que él mismo considera esta excursión «un inciso»
(Junyent, 1910: 143) y por ello les dedica un apartado muy breve, la mera inclusión de
las cuevas en el texto, y la forma de referirse a ellas, supone en sí misma una
reivindicación de su trascendencia monumental. Nuevamente, puede decirse que
Junyent se queda en la superficie, describiendo el deleite estético que le producen, pero
esta mención constituye un paso importante en el conocimiento de la identidad cultural
india.
Prosiguiendo el relato, el correspondiente a Delhi es otro de los pasajes en los que
Junyent se decanta por aportar detallada información histórica, haciendo alusión a
episodios como el esplendor del Gran Mogol (1526–1857) o la Rebelión de los Cipayos
(1857), alternándolos con la descripción de los principales monumentos, que coinciden
con los que en la actualidad reciben esa consideración: el Fuerte rojo de Delhi (de
manera especial, la Puerta de Lahore y la Sala de Audiencias o Diwan), la mezquita
Jama Masjid y el complejo de Qutb con el Minarete de Qutar.17
No obstante, aunque esta es la tónica general que se manifiesta a lo largo de las páginas
dedicadas a la India, hay dos pasajes que obtienen un tratamiento ligeramente diferente.
El primero de ellos es el dedicado a Cachemira, en el que abundan las impresiones y
experiencias personales por encima de los datos y de las sensaciones vinculadas a la
experiencia estrictamente turística. El segundo es la etapa final del viaje por India,
desde Benarés hasta Calcuta, y el abandono definitivo del ámbito cultural de la periferia
india, con una breve visita a Ceilán, que por exótica y apresurada es tratada con
concisión, pero poniendo en evidencia una notable curiosidad, evidenciada en el hecho
de que, en lugar de esperar en el puerto de Colombo al vapor Macedonia, que les llevará
a Australia, deciden adentrarse en la isla y hacer una excursión a Kandy, donde tienen
tiempo de mencionar templos como el Lankatilaka o el de Sri Dalada Maligawa, con la
reliquia del diente de Buda:
«La gran curiosidad de Kandy es el Diente sagrado, que se conserva en el templo
de Maligawa, dentro de una flor de loto de oro puro y rodeada de toda clase de
tesoros, joyas, marfiles y… ¡de una bombilla eléctrica con una pantalla de bazar
17
Además de figurar como monumentos notables en las principales guías turísticas (Singh 2003: 127,
129, 131), su trascendencia a nivel popular queda en evidencia por ser los primeros monumentos que
aparecen en cualquier página web generalista, tanto de viajes, como la divulgativa Wikipedia. Este dato,
que parece trivial, confirma que, con un siglo de diferencia, los enclaves más importantes del área de
Delhi se han mantenido estables en la percepción, tanto local como extranjera.
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europeo! […] Llegamos de Kandy cuando el Macedonia, el vapor de la Peninsular
& Oriental en el que tenemos que ir a Autralia, hace sonar la sirena llamando a los
pasajeros retrasados […]»18
Anecdotario de Junyent en India. La experiencia personal
La importancia que la India cobró para Junyent no fue exclusivamente cultural, sino que
también, debido a diversas circunstancias que recoge en el libro, le causó un
considerable impacto personal. En primer lugar, ya que fue el primer (y prácticamente
único) lugar en el que tanto él como su compañero Recolons llamaron la atención, en su
calidad de extranjeros, hasta el punto de que nobles y personalidades locales se
interesaron por ellos y quisieron conocerles y trabar contacto con ellos por este único
motivo, todo lo cual despertó en Junyent una serie de reflexiones sobre el conocimiento
de la otredad a través del viaje, que vertió en el libro de una manera muy coloquial,
incluso prosaica, aunque sus palabras escondiesen un contenido mayor del que
aparentemente se les podía atribuir:
«Acaba con la petición por parte del único empleado que habla bien inglés,
pidiendo a Mariano Recolons […] si tendríamos inconveniente en recibir la visita
de unos notables de la población; como no teníamos ningún conocido,
preguntamos qué deseaban los visitantes, y con gran sorpresa por nuestra parte,
nos contestaron que nada más que tener el gusto de vernos, y después de un
momento de duda, añadió el intérprete: ¡ya que ustedes son de unas tierras tan
lejanas! Es decir, que España […] es una tierra lejana para aquella buena gente,
que sin duda mide las distancias moralmente.»19
Más allá de estos episodios, dos fueron las anécdotas que vivió Junyent en India y que
podemos calificar como experiencias personales más allá del viaje. La primera de ellas
fue su encuentro en Cachemira con el también artista Federico Madrazo, unido
indirectamente a través de lazos muy próximos que hicieron que en un primer momento
se le anunciase a Junyent como su propio maestro.20 Durante su estancia, compartieron
18
20
En el desplazamiento a Cachemira, Junyent y Recolons habían entablado amistad con una personalidad
local que volvía de formarse en Londres, y a través de este personaje tuvieron noticia de que en la ciudad
se encontraban otros extranjeros de la misma procedencia. En lo que Junyent achaca a deficiencias
idiomáticas, se llegó a la conclusión de que «Madrazo» era maestro de «Junyent», cuando la realidad era,
como bien aclaraba el autor, que Federico Madrazo era hijo de Raimundo Madrazo, quien había sido
maestro de pintura de Sebastià Junyent, hermano del escenógrafo y fallecido poco antes del comienzo del
viaje (Junyent, 1910:173).
19
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excursiones turísticas (entre ellas, una al Himalaya) y veladas sociales, que fraguaron
entre ambos una estrecha amistad.
La segunda anécdota personal de Junyent en India tuvo lugar en Benarés, e influyó
estrechamente en su opinión sobre la ciudad y en el transcurso del viaje. Aunque no
había causado una buena primera impresión, la ciudad, bañada por el Ganges, resultó un
seductor motivo artístico para Junyent, quien, haciendo caso omiso al creciente calor,
quiso aprovechar su estancia pintando y tomando apuntes del natural tanto como le
fuese posible, lo cual le llevó a caer enfermo de unas fiebres que él, en cierto modo,
achacaba a la falta de higiene de la ciudad que tanto le desagradaba: buena parte del
pasaje dedicado a Benarés consiste en la descripción de la suciedad de las calles y el
mal olor procedente del río, donde los cadáveres de hindúes que habían peregrinado
hasta allí para morir 21 se mezclaban con los devotos que realizaban abluciones. A
consecuencia de esta enfermedad, el doctor Arnold, que atiende a Junyent desde
Benarés, aconseja la estancia en climas más fríos,22 de modo que, finalmente, es este
episodio el que pone a Junyent y Recolons rumbo a Australia tras un paso fugaz por
Calcuta (cuya rapidez trasciende al relato, ya que apenas es mencionada como lugar de
tránsito y salida de la India).
Estos pasajes de Roda el món i torna al Born permiten ahondar en la cuestión del viaje
como una herramienta de conocimiento y construcción personal, a través de sucesos que
reafirman la identidad del viajero, le alcanzan más allá de su faceta de viajero y le
permiten la evolución de sus objetivos, en este caso concreto con la inclusión de nuevos
horizontes que originalmente no se habían planteado. Además, su presencia en la obra
hace que esta trascienda, más allá de una guía de viajes subjetiva, para convertir esta
vuelta al mundo en una experiencia compartida entre Junyent y sus contemporáneos:
más allá del componente didáctico (cuya presencia es innegable, pese a que su
intencionalidad sea irregular), la presencia de estos pasajes permite establecer una
conexión y una reafirmación social entre Junyent y el lector.
Imágenes de la India en la publicación
Roda el món i torna al Born es una publicación promovida por la revista Ilustració
Catalana, y no puede negarse que se trata de una obra que encaja a la perfección dentro
de su línea editorial, ya que cuenta con un potentísimo apartado gráfico, que resulta
sorprendente dentro de la tónica habitual de los libros de viajes de la época.
21
Si bien la costumbre indica que los cadáveres deben ser incinerados antes de ser depositados en el agua,
Junyent hace hincapié en que esta práctica solo se lleva a cabo correctamente en aquellas familias más
pudientes, mientras que en las que poseen menos recursos este proceso presenta, en el mejor de los casos,
deficiencias (Junyent, 1910: 198).
22
Una primera sugerencia fue Cachemira, más cercana, pero dado que procedían ya de allí, y viajaban en
la dirección contraria a la que les suponía el retorno a Cachemira, rechazaron esta primera opción
(Junyent, 1910: 200).
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Entre las numerosísimas ilustraciones (que ascienden a un total de 498), tienen
presencia una amplia variedad de tipologías, que responden a la perfección al espíritu
del viaje y suponen un componente fundamental para la obra en tanto que entroncan con
el objetivo último de Junyent de compartir sus experiencias con los lectores.
Cabe destacar, a la hora de hacer un análisis del apartado gráfico de Roda el món i torna
al Born, que es frecuente que las ilustraciones y el texto aparezcan desacompasados, y
no en estrecha relación. Esto se debe a la autonomía del aparato ilustrativo, que discurre
independiente, configurando su propio discurso, lógicamente vinculado con el texto
pero no supeditado al mismo. Este desfase es especialmente evidente en los pasajes que
corresponden al final del recorrido por China, el paso por Corea y la llegada a Japón,
momento en el que el texto alusivo a Corea se ilustra en su totalidad por imágenes
pertenecientes a Pekín, que se prolongan (incluso a través de varias páginas únicamente
de fotografías) hasta bien entrado el capítulo dedicado al País del Sol Naciente, con el
consiguiente solapamiento, dentro de este mismo capítulo, de las fotografías de Corea y
las de Japón. En el capítulo sobre la India ocurre algo parecido, aunque el desfase es
menor, puesto que solo afecta a algunos episodios, si bien es cierto que las últimas
fotografías de Ceilán comparten página con la referencia a las costas australianas, lo que
este caso se debe a un problema de maquetación más que de espacio. 23
El corpus de imágenes presentes en Roda el món i torna al Born está formado por,
fundamentalmente, dos categorías: fotografías y dibujos/pinturas que el artista realiza.
Junyent alude en numerosas ocasiones a su gusto por la toma de apuntes del natural, en
bocetos o esbozos que, lejos de considerar preparatorios, no tiene reparos en incluir
dentro de la publicación, contribuyendo al tono fresco, casual, de primera mano, que
ofrece el texto. En el caso de las pinturas, su presencia es menor, frente a los dibujos,
pero tiene unos usos muy claros y definidos: la reproducción de óleos de Junyent se
reserva principalmente para ilustrar paisajes (generalmente naturales) especialmente
bellos. Son pinturas de una marcada influencia impresionista y postimpresionista, de
manera que el estilo pictórico va en consonancia con aquello que se busca mostrar.24
23
Puesto que, distribuidas estas imágenes en su correcta posición, hubieran cabido a modo de colofón del
capítulo, si bien, presumiblemente, se optó por colocarlas de la manera que ha resultado definitiva para
evitar así la posible acumulación de una o varias páginas solo con texto.
24
Pese a que se trata de una publicación en blanco y negro, y por lo tanto dichas reproducciones pierden
en gran medida los matices lumínicos a los que se ha hecho referencia, no debe perderse de vista el hecho
de que, al terminar el viaje y previamente a la publicación del libro, Junyent había realizado también una
exposición en la que se exhibieron, precisamente, estas obras realizadas durante el viaje, de forma que, en
muchos casos, estos óleos en blanco y negro constituían recordatorios de las obras originales, que
posiblemente el lector había tenido ocasión de contemplar en todo su esplendor.
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Respecto a las fotografías, aunque pudiera darse el caso de que alguna de ellas fuese una
recreación en estudio, tan popular en las décadas finales del XIX y en las iniciales del
XX, nos ha sido imposible, hasta la fecha, encontrar el estudio al que pertenecerían. Del
mismo modo, en su texto Junyent alude en numerosas ocasiones a la realización de
tomas fotográficas (del mismo modo que habla de sus dibujos y pinturas); si bien no
aparece en ningún momento mención alguna a que adquiriese este tipo de souvenirs, ni
en la India ni en otros enclaves del viaje, por lo que, mientras las evidencias no
demuestren lo contrario, podemos atribuir la autoría a Junyent, y sospechar que esa
apariencia de estudio que presentan algunas de las fotografías responde a la asimilación
de los códigos visuales por parte del artista, que en ocasiones opta por reproducir con su
cámara particular los usos y costumbres de la fotografía comercial de su época.
El capítulo dedicado a la India es el que recibe un mayor apoyo gráfico, con
144imágenes, las cuales se reparten entre 131 fotografías y 31 dibujos, no habiendo
pinturas en este apartado. También a partir de las imágenes puede verse, por lo tanto, el
peso y la importancia que la India tuvo para Junyent en este viaje, dado que supera
ampliamente la cantidad de ilustraciones recogidas en comparación con el resto de
lugares que visita, incluidos aquellos que tuvieron una importancia personal
semejante.25
Dentro de la fotografía, el mayor peso recae en la representación monumental. Las
vistas de edificios son el tema más frecuente, junto con los detalles arquitectónicos y de
escultura integrada, que aparecen también en numerosas ocasiones (cosa, por otra parte,
lógica, dada la importancia de este tipo de ornamentaciones en diversas corrientes de la
arquitectura india).
En algunos casos, se trata de fotografías a doble página (tal es el caso del templo de
Swami Narain en Ahmedabad, del Observatorio del Rajah Jai Singh en Jaipur, del
Albert Museum de Jaipur, de un estanque sagrado a las afueras de Amber, del interior
de la cueva número 9 de Ajanta, del retrato colectivo en la House-boat de Srinagar, del
Taj Mahal y de la escalera para el baño sagrado en el Ganges, en Benarés), siendo la
India el lugar que más imágenes presenta en este formato.26 Además de éstas, también
25
Los casos de Egipto, con 95 imágenes, y de Japón con 67, dejan constancia de la considerable
diferencia que se presenta en el apartado gráfico, especialmente teniendo en cuenta que estos dos
ejemplos citados se encuentran parejos en importancia con la India dentro de la configuración del viaje,
las sensaciones recibidas y la opinión formada de los mismos. Otros lugares, como China (representada
con 60), Estados Unidos (con 45), Canadá (con 34), Australia (con 22), Corea (con 17), el Mar Rojo (con
6) y el buque Lusitania (con 6) poseen una presencia bastante menor en lo que a ilustraciones se refiere.
Finalmente, completan el cómputo las dos imágenes del barrio del Born, que sirven de inicio y cierre del
libro, constituyendo de manera poética el inicio y el final de un viaje, de una etapa y de un relato vital.
26
Excluyendo el mapa inicial con el recorrido y las ya citadas, en todo el libro tan solo se encuentran seis
fotografías a doble página correspondientes a Egipto y tres a Japón, además de varias páginas dobles con
mosaicos de diversas fotografías.
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presenta una considerable cantidad de imágenes de una página, especialmente si las
ponemos en relación con el resto del libro.
Sin embargo, aunque la arquitectura tiene un peso incontestable, también se encuentran
algunas fotografías dedicadas al tema de los tipos sociales, son estas las que adoptan
una considerable similitud con las escenas construidas en estudio, tal como
mencionábamos anteriormente. Algunas de estas fotografías constituyen imágenes muy
poderosas, retratos de gran impacto visual (procedente en cada caso de un rasgo
diferente, no incurren en repeticiones de recursos o estilísticas) que atrapan al lector en
un exotismo que, por otro lado, Junyent no alcanza a transmitir a través de sus palabras.
Destacamos, por citar varios ejemplos, la Bayadera (Junyent, 1910: 100) y el
Encantador de serpientes de Bombay (Junyent, 1910: 101), dos fotografías que causan
un gran impacto. La primera, por la mirada directa de la bailarina a la cámara, que
establece un contacto visual con quien la contempla; la segunda, por la captación de un
instante, congelando la acción en el tiempo, un efecto que se percibe a través de
matices, como la mejilla tensa del encantador al soplar el aire; las Cargadoras de
carbón de Bombay (Junyent, 1910: 104), en la que aparecen dos mujeres, la primera de
tres cuartos y la segunda, protagonista absoluta de la escena, dando la espalda, en una
composición natural, espontánea, en la que se combinan exotismo y erotismo a través de
los saris; o el Fakir que vive y camina encadenado, de Benarés (Junyent, 1910: 200), en
el que la serenidad de su rostro contrasta con las pesadas cadenas que arrastra. También
muy poderosa es la fotografía de la Escalinata del baño sagrado en el Ganges (Junyent,
1910: 196-197), que citábamos anteriormente en el listado de imágenes a doble página,
una escena que consigue una gran belleza a través de su naturalismo. Finalmente,
también merecen una mención destacada el conjunto de imágenes pertenecientes a
Ceilán, en las cuales, al contrario que en el resto de India, predominan los tipos sociales
y las escenas cotidianas, también con imágenes tomadas con mucho acierto, como las
protagonizadas por elefantes (Junyent, 1910: 204-205) o el hombre que trepa por una
palmera (Junyent, 1910: 207).
A modo de contraste, las imágenes relacionadas con la estancia en Cachemira
responden a dos tipos completamente distintos de los anteriormente expuestos: aparecen
varias fotografías de corte personal en las que aparecen bien Junyent, bien Mariano
Recolons, o ambos, acompañados por algunos de los amigos con los que compartieron
dicha estancia, combinadas con alguna vista general, minoritarias. Si aislamos las
fotografías de Cachemira del resto del libro, aparece una colección muy próxima a la
fotografía doméstica vinculada al turismo que concebimos en la actualidad: los
protagonistas del viaje en los lugares visitados, atestiguando ese «yo estuve allí» que es,
en cierto modo, el motor del viaje turístico, alternadas con localizaciones que llaman la
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atención al turista, invitándole a hacer una fotografía por la vivencia experimentada y no
por lo potencialmente icónico del lugar.
Por otro lado, es también en relación a Cachemira cuando aparecen la gran mayoría de
pinturas y dibujos de Junyent (26 de las 31 ilustraciones de este tipo), lo que de nuevo
subraya esta idea latente de la trascendencia personal de Cachemira dentro del conjunto
del viaje, tanto por la India como alrededor del mundo.
Conclusiones
Oleguer Junyent, artista multidisciplinar y figura de importancia dentro de la sociedad
burguesa catalana, emprendió en 1908 un viaje en torno al globo para dar rienda suelta a
su pasión viajera, acompañado por su amigo Mariano Recolons, en un periplo en el que
fueron siguiendo un trazado marcado por las principales rutas marítimas y terrestres
vigentes en el momento.
Fruto de ese viaje, además de una exposición en la que exhibió numerosas obras de arte
directamente relacionadas con el mismo, vio la luz una publicación, editada bajo el
amparo de la revista Ilustració Catalana, en la que Junyent recogía sus experiencias, un
libro de viajes profusamente ilustrado cuyo título, Roda el món i torna el Born, sirvió
para acuñar una célebre expresión en lengua catalana.
En esta obra, Junyent ofreció una imagen sesgada de la India, centrada únicamente en
sus intereses como turista (cuestión lógica, por otra parte), si bien procuró que esta
imagen fuese ilustrativa, en tanto que se dirigía a sus congéneres con una mezcla de
objetivos que iban desde la familiaridad social hasta la didáctica acerca de los lugares
conocidos. Por encima de estos intereses, los lugares a los que hace referencia
configuran un mapa turístico de la India en el que ya se pueden atisbar los principales
monumentos que hoy en día reciben la máxima consideración y reconocimiento.
Paralelamente, el relato del viaje ofrece la visión una experiencia personal, acompañada
de pasajes cargados de subjetividad y anécdotas sociales, que más allá del
entretenimiento burgués que buscaban generar entre el público potencial, constituyen el
planteamiento, de manera muy elocuente, de una reflexión sobre la naturaleza misma
del viaje.
El peso del apartado gráfico es innegable, tanto en la obra en general como en lo que
respecta a la India, bloque que reúne el mayor número de ilustraciones. Las imágenes
pueden clasificarse en dos tipologías: fotografías y dibujos y pinturas, teniendo cada una
de ellas una función determinada y no respondiendo a criterios arbitrarios. En la
representación visual de la India, por temas, son las obras monumentales las que tienen
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una mayor presencia, aunque aparecen varias imágenes visualmente muy poderosas de
distintos tipos sociales. Por otro lado, centrándonos en la tipología, destaca
considerablemente la fotografía, aunque el uso de pinturas y dibujos posee una finalidad
muy clara, la de subrayar aquella parte del viaje en la que la experiencia personal ha
sido más intensa, la región de Cachemira.
OBRAS CITADAS
ANÓNIMO. “Oleguer Junyent i Sants”, Gran Enciclopedia Catalana.
<http://www.enciclopedia.cat/EC-GEC-0035131.xml> acceso 29 noviembre
2015.
BOUBOU, ABDELMOUNEIM (2012). “El orientalismo en la obra de Enrique Gómez
Carrillo: de la periferie a la centralidad”. Ponencias del II Congreso
Internacional Reencuentro con Enrique Gómez Carrillo. Guatemala: Universidad
Rafael Landívar. <http://biblio3.url.edu.gt/Gomez/Ponencias.php> acceso 29
noviembre 2015.
FÀBREGAS, XAVIER Y PEYPOCH, IRENE (1981). “Prólogo”, en Oleguer Junyent, Roda el
món i torna al Born, Barcelona: Edicions de la Magrana.
GARCIA, MARIA DOLORS, LUNA, ANTONI, RIUDOR, LLUÍS Y ZUSMAN, PERLA (2005).
“‘Roda el món i torna al Born’: geografies imaginàries dels viatgers catalans al
Caire (1889-1934)”. Treballs de la Societat Catalana de Geografia, nº 60.
GÓMEZ CARRILLO, ENRIQUE (1912). De Marsella a Tokio. París: Casa Editorial Garnier
Hermanos.
JUNYENT, OLEGUER (1910). Roda el món i torna al Born, Barcelona: Ilustració
Catalana.
HAJJAJ BEN AHMED, KARIMA (2001). Oriente en la crónica de viajes. El modernismo de
Enrique
Gómez
Carrillo.
Madrid:
Universidad
Complutense.
<http://biblioteca.ucm.es/tesis/19911996/H/3/AH3047101.pdf>
acceso
29
noviembre 2015.
MIRALLES, FRANCESC (1994). Oleguer Junyent, Barcelona: Cetir Centre Mèdic.
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PLOU ANADÓN, CAROLINA (2015). “Roda el món i torna al Born. Aproximación al viaje
y a la obra de Oleguer Junyent”, en III Congreso Virtual sobre Historia de Vías
de Comunicación. Jaén, 15 al 30 de septiembre de 2015, Jaén, Revista
Códice.<http://www.revistacodice.es/publi_virtuales/III_C_H_CAMINERIA/co
municaciones/12_Roda_l_mon_i_torna_al_Born.pdf> acceso 29 noviembre
2015.
SINGH, SARINA (ed.) (2003). India. Melbourne: Lonely Planet Publications.
TEJERA, PILAR (2012). “Pasajeras a la India”. Boletín de la Sociedad Geográfica
Española, nº 43, pp. 24-39.
CAROLINA PLOU ANADÓN es Licenciada en Historia del Arte y Máster en Estudios
Avanzados en Historia del Arte por la Universidad de Zaragoza, donde actualmente
realiza su tesis doctoral sobre el coleccionismo de fotografía japonesa en España.
Compagina dicha labor con la publicación de artículos, la participación en congresos
especializados y la codirección de la revista divulgativa Ecos de Asia.
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Indi@logs
Vol 3 2016, pp. 169-188, ISSN: 2339-8523
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------S. PATWARDHAN & J. KRISHNAMURTI: LA MUJER HINDÚ Y LA
RELACIÓN GURU-SHISHYA
RAFAEL QUIRÓS
Universidad de Cádiz
[email protected]
RESUMEN
Las mujeres hindúes vienen protagonizando en estos primeros años del s. XXI cambios
decisivos que están haciendo de la India un país renovado. Las huellas de este empeño pueden
ser rastreadas en la escritura personal (memorias, diarios, epistolarios, etc.) que han dejado tras
sí sus protagonistas. Entre las que se hacen eco de las vicisitudes vividas son escasas las
referidas al ámbito religioso. Las memorias de Sunanda Patwardhan (1926-99) constituyen una
excepción que nos permite indagar sobre los problemas de la relación guru-shishya (maestrodiscípulo): una peculiar relación cuyo análisis permite percibir el trasfondo de la discriminación
religiosa soportada por las mujeres. Con una reverencia y devoción difíciles de comprender y
aceptar desde la mentalidad occidental, la autora desvela los pormenores de su acercamiento a
las enseñanzas de J. Krishnamurti («el gurú que era no-gurú» [sic]): la crítica teórico-práctica
del guruismo, el establecimiento de una nueva relación superadora de tan ancestral
discriminación y los desafíos de una investigación en libertad, sin ninguna autoridad espiritual
supervisora que guíe hacia lo sagrado. Los resultados del análisis cobran un interés especial para
afrontar los problemas de la transmisión de enseñanzas místicas en la sociedad actual.
PALABRAS CLAVE: mujer,
poscolonialismo, espiritualidad
ABSTRACT
Relationship
hinduismo,
guru-shishya,
S. Patwardhan & J. Krishnamurti:
Krishnamurti,
S.Patwardhan,
Hindu Women and the Guru-Shishya
Hindu women have been creating decisive change in these first few years of the 21st century
which is renewing India. The traces of this effort can be tracked in the personal writings
(memoirs, diaries, letters, etc.) that these protagonists have left behind. Among the works that
eco the vicissitudes experienced there are few that refer to the religious sphere. The memoirs of
Sunanda Patwardhan (1926-99) are an exception that allows us to delve into the problems in the
guru-shishya (master-disciple) relationship: a peculiar relationship whose analysis allows one to
perceive the background of the religious discrimination that women put up with. With a
reverence and devotion that are difficult for a Western mind to understand and accept, she
reveals the details of her approach to the teachings of J.Krishnamurti (“the guru who wasn´t a
guru” [sic]): the theoretical-practical critique of guruism, the establishment of a new, superior
relationship of such ancestral discrimination and the challenges of independent research, lacking
any supervising spiritual authority which guides one toward the sacred. The results of the
analysis hold a special interest for facing the problem of transmitting mystic teachings in
today´s society.
KEYWORDS: women, Hinduism,
postcolonialism, spirituality
guru-shishya,
Krishnamurti,
S.
Patwardhan,
S. PATWARDHAN & J. KRISHNAMURTI: LA MUJER HINDÚ Y LA RELACIÓN GURU-SHISHYA
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Las mujeres hindúes vienen protagonizando en estos primeros años del s. XXI uno de
esos cambios radicales y definitivos que están haciendo de la India un país renovado.
En las modernizadas sociedades occidentales, el anonimato y el silencio de la mujer fue
roto en el s. XIX por un sector de mujeres privilegiadas que halló acceso a la cultura
atravesando las puertas de las universidades. Un proceso similar tuvo lugar en la
segunda mitad del s. XX dentro de aquellas sociedades tradicionales que supieron
incorporarse tempranamente al imparable proceso de la modernización, como ha sido el
caso de la India poscolonial. Las huellas de este empeño se reflejan en los testimonios
dejados por los grandes prohombres, pero también pueden ser rastreadas en la escritura
personal de las mujeres hindúes, tanto de aquellas que tras haber alcanzado posiciones
de fama y poder encontraron distribución editorial, como de aquellas otras que fueron
obliteradas o permanecen inéditas.
Sunanda Patwardhan & J. Krishnamurti
Precisamente en el tránsito de un espacio al otro pueden ser situadas las memorias
que Sunanda Patwardhan, 1926-99, testigo privilegiado de las postrimerías de su siglo
dejó como legado. En palabras de R. Venkataraman (8º Presidente de la India), S.
Patwardhan fue “una intelectual con alma” (Patwardhan 1999 : nota de contracubierta).
Perteneció a una generación de mujeres luchadoras que en la emergente India
poscolonial consiguieron abrir espacios de libertad. Nació en el sur de la India (Poona)
en el seno de una familia perteneciente a la casta de los brahmanes que se habían
comprometido con la teosofía. Estudió en la Universidad de Madrás, se doctoró en
Sociología, enseñó en la Universidad de Pune y en 1968 publicó su primer libro:
Change Among India´s Harijans: Maharashtra, a Case Study. Aunque había sido
preparada para contraer matrimonio, ejercer derecho y ocupar un puesto de
responsabilidad como funcionaria del nuevo Estado Indio independiente, albergaba
inquietudes religiosas que no tardarían en aflorar: recién graduada a los 21 años, su vida
cambió por completo de sentido cuando en 1947 conoció al acreditado y original
filósofo y educador J. Krishnamurti:
Mi primer encuentro con Krishnaji fue inolvidable. Recuperar y recordar lo que
sucedió hace medio siglo es bastante difícil, pero desde la primera conversación y
en las muchas que siguieron, tuve la sensación de que Krishnaji vio en mí un
170
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RAFAEL QUIRÓS
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------‘algo’ religioso. [...] Me habló con dulzura abriéndome nuevos horizontes
(Patwardhan, 1999: 23).
Parecía tratarse de una persona que viviera entre dos mundos, Oriente y Occidente, por
encima de las fronteras del espacio y del tiempo:
Tal vez necesitaba ambos estilos de vida, el occidental y el de la India, dos
patrones y dos culturas, dos lenguajes vitales diferentes. Una parte de él era india
y otra occidental. Yo había observado a menudo que tras una estancia
suficientemente prolongada de dos o tres meses en la India, ansiaba volver a
Ojai o Brockwood Park, del mismo modo que procuraría regresar aquí tras
pasar algún tiempo en Occidente. ¿A dónde pertenecía? ¿A los dos? ¿A ninguno?
J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986), nacido también en una familia de brahmanes, pero
educado en Inglaterra bajo tutela de la Sociedad Teosófica, residente en EEUU y
c o n una larga vida viajando alrededor del mundo entero, había roto por completo con
la teosofía en 1929. En su célebre Discurso de Disolución de la Orden de la Estrella,
pronunciado en Holanda, había dejado clara su posición: “Sostengo que la verdad es una
tierra sin caminos, y no es posible acercarse a ella por ningún sendero, por ninguna
religión, por ninguna secta. Ese es mi punto de vista y me adhiero a él absoluta e
incondicionalmente” (Lutyens, 1975: 356). No dirigió su atención hacia los textos
sagrados y sus dogmas, sino hacia los datos de la realidad y la experiencia como
punto de partida para investigar la verdad. Afirmaba que hay algo más allá de la
existencia común y de las fronteras de la conciencia condicionada, que más allá del
mundo fenoménico se halla lo sagrado y que es posible acercarse y sumergirse en su
verdad.
A tal proceso de investigación decidió la joven Sunanda consagrar sus esfuerzos.
Entabló con él una muy particular relación de enseñanza-aprendizaje, llegando a ser su
secretaria personal y editora de sus enseñanzas. Participó en diálogos con eminentes
científicos, psiquiatras, profesores y eruditos (D. Bohm, S. Shainberg, J. Briggs,
Renée Weber, etc.) y fundó el Sahyadri Study Center. Antes de morir en 1999 dejó
ultimado el borrador de sus memorias: A Vision of the Sacred. My Personal Journey
with J. Krishnamurti, en las que la autora se acerca, con una reverencia y devoción
difíciles de comprender y aceptar desde la mentalidad occidental, a unas enseñanzas
que rompen radicalmente con la milenaria tradición hindú.
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Una visión de lo sagrado
Las memorias de Sunanda Patwardhan son la crónica encendida de una búsqueda de lo
sagrado al través de una investigación acerca de la realidad y la verdad. Al hilo de la
relación entre el maestro, la enseñanza y lo aprendido, la autora describe el camino
recorrido con aquél y repasa su propia trayectoria personal, intelectual y espiritual.
Cierto aire inacabado permite al lector avisado suponer la redacción última que le
hubiera dado la propia autora. La suya es una escritura directa, de estilo llano, sin
complicaciones retóricas, que busca la complicidad del lector: “He decidido escribirlas
como una historia personal, lo cual brinda al lector cierta sensación de intimidad y
transparencia. En una conversación así, hallo en mí la libertad que me permite ser
natural y abierta al describir y compartir mis pensamientos y experiencias más
íntimas” (Patwardhan 1999: 12).
A lo largo de décadas de relación, Sunanda P. ha ido tomando notas de cada encuentro
con J. Krishnamurti –ya fuera dentro de conferencias, seminarios, diálogos formales,
conversaciones privadas o charlas triviales–, dejando constancia de su personal “visión
de lo sagrado”:
¿Qué fue lo que atrajo a miles de buscadores, como yo, a Krishnaji? De su
presencia parecía emanar un flujo de compasión, una energía y un resplandor que
transmitían una sensación de asombro, la sensación de que uno estaba ante la
presencia de algo sagrado. Debido a que durante mis muchos años con él he
sido testigo de tal presencia, puedo decir con certeza que en la vida y en el
universo que todo lo penetra hay algo ‘sagrado’. Si yo no hubiera conocido y
sentido dicha presencia, es posible que nunca llegara a sentir esa vibración
tangible, la compasión y la inmensa vacuidad del silencio. No podría haber sido
palpado mediante sus libros, ni a través de las descripciones de las Upaniṣads o las
sentencias del Buddha. De vez en cuando, de época en época, cuando un
verdadero maestro religioso vive y habla, como respuesta a los tiempos y a las
necesidades de la conciencia humana, se comunica esa sacralidad. En el siglo XX
Krishnaji era ese maestro y su camino de liberación era una nueva canción
La relación tradicional guru-shishya
Durante milenios la sabiduría mística se transmitió de maestro a discípulo. Al iniciado
se le otorga el privilegio de tener acceso al conocimiento de unas enseñanzas
impartidas por un maestro, las cuales incluyen el adiestramiento en técnicas meditativas
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------orientadas hacia la meta religiosa final: la liberación. Es precisamente la teoría y
práctica del guruismo la que es puesta en entredicho y objetada por el nuevo tipo de
relación que sostienen J. Krishnamurti y S. Patwardhan. Una porción significativa de
los registros recogidos tanto en las memorias de ella como en las numerosas
conferencias impartidas por él, se refieren a la revisión crítica del proceso de
enseñanza-aprendizaje tal como se plantea en la relación tradicional maestro-discípulo:
el rol del maestro espiritual, la cualidad del discípulo, la cadena de transmisión de las
enseñanzas, los contenidos abordados, los mecanismos de trasmisión, etc.
Dado que en la actualidad el guruismo presenta signos de haber agotado su energía
creadora fundacional (mientras que, paradójicamente, se ha adaptado exitosamente a las
modas orientalistas de occidente, ocupando el vacío dejado por antiguas gimnosofías,
místicas autóctonas y “tecnologías del yo”), a fin de analizar tal relación resulta preciso
esbozar siquiera las líneas generales de su funcionamiento. Si fuera posible expresar
sintéticamente el sentido hinduista de la vida formulándolo en un objetivo básico,
este se centraría sin duda en un cultivo tal de la experiencia humana que encamine la
vida hacia el cumplimiento del deber espiritual de experimentar el encuentro ĀtmanBrahman (Dios), hasta llegar a ser capaz de encarnar su voluntad, su conocimiento y la
alegría de su ser. Alcanzar esta experiencia transformadora es una tarea ardua en la que
se ven implicados el dharma (deber religioso), un conjunto de enseñanzas contenidas
en el canon textual sagrado (Śruti y Smṛti, verdad revelada y recordada), un enseñante
realizado (guru) y un aspirante a la realización (shishya). En la obtención del resultado
es definitiva la interacción que se dé entre el maestro y el discípulo, es decir, la
relación guru-shishya.
Como se sabe, la palabra guru significa maestro, venerable, profundo, grande; su
etimología deriva de la raíz gu- (ignorancia) y de –ru (aniquilación). El guru ha
alcanzado el yoga (unidad) con el Ātman universal, se identifica con Brahman (lo
Absoluto), por lo tanto está en condiciones de iniciar a sus discípulos en el sendero
espiritual y guiarlos a la liberación; un guru realizado y reconocido es un ācārya. De
acuerdo a la mitología hindú hasta los propios dioses encontraron en Bṛ́ihaspati su
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------maestro espiritual, el devaguru o guru de los dioses; más aún, en Dakṣiṇāmūrti1 se
reconoce la manifestación del dios Śiva en su faceta de guru de toda clase de
conocimiento, comprensión y conciencia o parameṣṭhi-guru; en otras palabras, el
verdadero guru es Dios: guru-deva.
La palabra shishya se aplica a quienquiera que esté capacitado para aprender bajo la
dirección o guía de un guru; un estudiante competente es un adhikari. Se le reconoce
al gurú un grado máximo de maestría y autoridad en los órdenes intelectual, moral y
espiritual: es el depositario de un conjunto de enseñanzas que le han sido transmitidas
en una cadena ininterrumpida de transmisión (paramparā). Tales enseñanzas son
recibidas por el shishya en el lugar donde el guru reside (ashram), siguiendo un
itinerario formativo coherente con los cuatro puruṣa-artha (objetivos de la vida:
dharma, artha, kāma, y mokṣa, esto es, deber religioso, riqueza, placer y liberación
del ciclo de reencarnaciones, con los que debiera cumplir todo varón), así como con
las cuatro āśrama (etapas de la vida hinduista: brahmacharya, grihastha, vanaprastha,
saṁnyāsa, esto es, vida discipular, hogareña, retirada y renunciante).
En las Upaniṣads (upa- desplazamiento físico, -ni- movimiento hacia abajo y -ṣad:
sentarse, al pie del maestro para escuchar su enseñanza), las Manu Smṛti (Leyes de
Manu), etc., se encuentran sentencias que informan sobre el proceso de enseñanzaaprendizaje y los roles atribuidos al maestro y al discípulo. La relación dialógica que
sostienen el dios Krishna y el héroe Arjuna en la Bhagavad Gītā (Canto VI del
Mahābhārata) es un ejemplo representativo de clásica relación guru-shishya. Tal
relación fue acusando modificaciones a lo largo de las épocas védica (s. XX±X a.e.c),
upaniṣadica (s. X±VI a.e.c.), la de los mitos y leyendas (s. VI±III d.e.c.), los primeros
bhasya o comentarios (s. III d.e.c.) y la posterior época tántrica.
Las interpretaciones ortodoxas siempre entendieron la relación de acuerdo a principios
autoritarios, subrayando elementos tales como la disciplina, la obediencia, la
aceptación acrítica de cuanto fuere dicho por el maestro, su deificación, la relación
de tipo paterno-filial, el seguidismo, la sumisión, la total entrega del propio cuerpo,
1
Dakṣiṇāmūrti o Jnana Dakṣiṇāmūrti es uno de los aspectos, formas o personificaciones que
puede adoptar Śiva.
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------la mente y la riqueza personal. Dado que el gurú es el medio por el que se
comunica el conocimiento divino, como observa Panikkar (2004: 226-231), no se deja
espacio para el autoaprendizaje, nadie puede ser gurú de sí mismo, la realización no se
concibe sin el gurú y sin gurú no hay vida religiosa, porque en realidad “el guru no
enseña una doctrina teórica sino que dirige a una persona”. Del análisis de la dinámica
de la relación, según la analiza M.K.Raina (2002: 167), se desprende que el
resultado esperado en esta relación consistía precisamente en “la completa
transformación del shishya por el guru”. Por el contrario, las interpretaciones
alternativas quedaron al margen de la doctrina dominante. En un diálogo sostenido entre
Krishnamurti y varios investigadores (Valle de Rishi, 23/01/1971) se explica que:
SW [Swami Sundaram]: En la tradición nos encontramos con dos direcciones
bien definidas: la ortodoxa, que se rige por la interpretación verbal de los
hechos, y la tradición que surgió como movimiento de ruptura, plasmada en el
Dattātreya y el Yoga-Vasishta. Quienes tuvieron una percepción y se
independizaron de la tradición ortodoxa dijeron: «No necesitamos un gurú. Hemos
descubierto la verdad nosotros mismos. No juraremos sobre los Vedas. La
totalidad de la naturaleza, la totalidad del mundo es nuestro gurú. Observa y
comprenderás el mundo». En Buda también se dio esta ruptura; su enseñanza
representa la esencia del movimiento de ruptura con lo ortodoxo. [...]. Dice el
Yoga-Vasistha que la mente está llena de pensamientos y conflictos […] También se
trata en él extensamente la cuestión de los gurús. El Yoga-Vasistha dice que la
iniciación y otras acciones semejantes carecen de sentido. El despertar del
discípulo está en la correcta comprensión y en el darse cuenta: éste, y sólo éste, es
el hecho primordial y responsable. Estas bases esenciales son la médula del
movimiento tradicional de ruptura.
R [Radha Burnier]: Sin embargo, en muchas partes en el Yoga-Vasistha se
insiste en que sin un gurú uno no puede descubrir nada.
[…]SW [Swami Sundaram]: La palabra correcta es desika, no gurú. Desika es
quien ayuda al discípulo a despertar, quien ayuda a aquel que quiere comprender.
La palabra significa: ‘aquel que aprende’ (Krishnamurti, 1972: 232-3).
Al margen de las diversas interpretaciones, lo cierto fue que la transferencia controlada
de un conjunto de enseñanzas y el establecimiento de un sistema jerarquizado de
relaciones de transmisión y adquisición del conocimiento superior adquirió la mayor
importancia. Dado que en el hinduismo apenas han existido estructuras organizativas
permanentes, la institución del guru vino a ocupar el centro medular de la religiosidad
hindú.
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Las mujeres hindúes y la relación guru-shishya
Hasta ahora ha quedado sobreentendido que tanto el maestro como el discípulo son
varones que mantienen una relación paterno-filial acorde con el patriarcado
tradicional. Ello situaba a las mujeres hindúes en una posición problemática en el
contexto de esta relación: de acuerdo a la cadena de transmisión una mujer tenía que
haber sido primero aceptada como shishya de un guru, para llegar a ser guru y estar en
condiciones de aceptar a otra mujer u hombre como shishya. Como únicamente los
dioses podían conceder que excepcionalmente se rompiera la norma establecida, ello
nos lleva a tener que realizar algunas precisiones sobre la condición de las mujeres a
fin de situar en el contexto apropiado el tipo de relación observable entre S.
Patwardhan y J. Krishnamurti.
La distancia cultural entre India y lo que llamamos Occidente, entre el hinduismo
y las religiones abrahámicas, es tal que resulta difícil hallar conceptos precisos para
referirse adecuadamente a una realidad tan lejana. A lo cual cabe sumar cierta
propensión a soslayar los estudios sobre la diversidad cultural de sus mujeres y su
contribución tanto al conjunto la sociedad civil india como al hinduismo; tal como
indicó A. García-Arroyo en su conferencia sobre La representación de la Mujer en
India:
La teoría postcolonial, y más concretamente el artículo de Chandra T. Mohanty,
“Under Western Eyes” (1984), expone que la colonización siempre implica
dominio y supresión de la heterogeneidad del sujeto conquistado. Cuando el
sujeto-objeto de conquista es la mujer del tercer mundo, arguye Mohanty, el
discurso hegemónico occidental tiende a representarla como un bloque, un
monolito homogéneo y esencialista. En el caso de la mujer de la India, todavía
hoy, a través del discurso académico, de los medios de comunicación o del
pensamiento popular, frecuentemente nos encontramos con imágenes simplistas
que reducen y describen el total de la población femenina india, más de 600
millones de mujeres, con términos como ‘pobres’, ‘sexualmente oprimidas’,
‘carentes de educación’, ‘aferradas a la tradición y a la familia’, víctimas
sumisas, o devotas de un marido torturador (García-Arroyo, 2011: 1).
Durante las décadas previas al primer encuentro entre Sunanda Patwardhan y J.
Krishnamurti, el movimiento social de las mujeres indias había centrado sus
expectativas en las posibilidades de cambiar la situación civil y personal de la
población femenina: dependencia legal de un esposo, exclusión de la herencia
paterna, acceso limitado a la enseñanza, discriminación laboral, restos de antiguas
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------prácticas formalmente prohibidas como el sati (sacrificio ritual de viudas), la poligamia,
el matrimonio infantil, el infanticidio femenino, etc. Cuando J. Krishnamurti fue
invitado por la Women´s Indian Asociation a intervenir en la convención anual de
Madrás en 1928, puso palabras a algo que ya estaba en la mente de las mujeres más
avanzadas del subcontinente; de acuerdo a Evelyn Blau lo enunció así:
La vida es una, tanto para los hombres como para las mujeres. Porque hay
aflicción en la mujer al igual que en el hombre, el sufrimiento existe en la
mujer al igual que en el hombre; luego dividir a los seres humanos en hombres
y mujeres es de entrada un error. Debido a que sus cuerpos son diferentes,
pensamos –los hombres piensan- que se ha de tratar a las mujeres de un modo
distinto, que han de recibir distinta educación. […]
Las mujeres son guardianas de la tradición mucho más que los hombres. Si
las mujeres tomaran la determinación de cambiar cualquier aspecto del mundo,
podrían hacerlo mañana mismo, puesto que son capaces de sacrificarse mucho
más que los hombres, y su fuerza por tanto es mayor. Ahora bien, para que la
mujer que es guardiana de la tradición pueda comprender la vida, debe de [sic]
cambiar de actitud mental: debe dejar de ser esclava. Utilizo expresamente esta
palabra, porque las mujeres permiten que se las domine. Sé que muchas mujeres
están de acuerdo con esto que digo cuando se hallan lejos de sus esposos;
pero en cuanto regresan a sus hogares empiezan los problemas. Los hombres
entonces las empiezan a dominar. ¿Por qué habrían ustedes de ceder? […][62]
Nota [62]: De una charla a las mujeres de la India con ocasión de la reunión anual de la
Women´s Indian Association (Blau,1995: 157).
La consecución de la independencia, la promulgación de la Constitución de 1950 y la
profundización en el proceso de descolonización dieron un nuevo impulso al
movimiento social de la mujer. La élite dirigente comprendió que la modernización de
la India se quedaría en un sueño inviable sin la participación activa de las mujeres en
todos los ámbitos. La intelectualidad femenina proveniente de las clases altas y medias
fue llamada a incorporarse al nuevo proceso.
Sería precisamente una mujer coetánea de Sunanda Patwardhan, Indira Gandhi,
quien acometiera (estando al pie del Estado desde 1959 hasta su asesinato en 19842)
reformas decisivas. La apelación al ejemplo de las más destacadas divinidades del
hinduismo y la especial relación establecida entre la visión hindú de lo sagrado y el
principio de la feminidad tuvo su particular incidencia: ¿no se le habían ido
2
Con una interrupción de liderazgo tras haber sido la 5ª Primera Ministra (1966-77). Durante el
estado de emergencia (1975-77), se llevó a cabo el programa de esterilización obligatoria que
afectó a millones de mujeres y hombres de la India (ligaduras de trompas y vasectomías,
pagadas o bajo coerción).
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------incorporando paulatinamente a los primigenios dioses masculinos (Indra, Viṣṇu,
Brahmā, Rāma, Śiva…) diosas consortes (Indrani, Lakṣmī, Sarasvatī, Pārvatī…), que
encarnaban el aspecto femenino de la deidad masculina (su Shaktí o energía), que
alcanzaban el estatus de Deví (diosa) complementaria a un Deva (dios) y dándose
algún caso en el que pareciera elevarse al rango de divinidad suprema (ej,: Kālī)? Pero
sin una reforma a fondo del dharma hindú, ello resultaba inviable. Los sempiternos
tópicos
culturales
del
tradicionalismo
ortodoxo, cuya
misoginia
se
venía
transmitiendo desde dos mil años atrás, mantenían su peso. En su conferencia sobre La
Mujer y lo Femenino en el Hinduismo, J. Ruiz (2010: 1) menciona en concreto las Leyes
de Manu:
2. Día y noche las mujeres deben estar mantenidas por sus protectores en estado de
dependencia; y deben estar sometidas a la autoridad de los hombres de los que
dependen. 3. Una mujer está bajo la guarda de su padre durante la infancia, su
marido en la juventud y sus hijos en la vejez. A la mujer nunca se le debe dar
independencia. […] 17. Manu asignó a la mujer cama, asiento, adornos, deseos
impuros, ira, deshonestidad, malicia y mala conducta. 18. La mujer no puede
realizar rituales con textos sagrados, así lo dice la ley. La mujer no tiene fuerza
ni Escrituras, y es falsa: esa es una regla fija (Manu Smṛti. Leyes de Manu, IX).
En cambio, los textos sagrados tántricos aparentemente situaban a la mujer en el
centro de la religiosidad hindú mediante una idealización y glorificación no exenta de
cierto encanto: “Las mujeres son la divinidad, el aire vital que respiramos. Las
mujeres son diosas, ellas son la vida” [Sarvollasa Tantra], “La mujer es la creadora
del universo, el universo toma su forma, la mujer es el pilar del mundo, es la forma
esencial de cada cuerpo” [Shaktisamgama Tantra: II,13,43] (citado por García-Arroyo
2011: 1). Pero la visión tántrica del principio de la feminidad –que toma en
consideración el amor carnal, el cuerpo, concediendo a la mujer un papel protagonista–
conllevaba elementos equívocos: la manipulación del amor humano para reducirlo a
una mera técnica para alcanzar el amor divino, haciendo de la mujer “un simple medio
o instrumento para la ‘realización’ –generalmente del varón” (Panikkar 2004: 307).
Posiciones más centradas apareen en la Bhagavad Gītā [IX,32]: “¡Oh Parthā!, los
que se refugian en Mí [Krishna], sean de origen impuro, las mujeres, los vaishyas
[comerciantes], o los shūdras [agricultores], ellos también alcanzan el Fin Supremo”
(citado por Ruiz 2010 : 1).
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Como resultado de un complejo proceso socio-político, en la segunda mitad del s. XX
comenzó a hacerse efectiva la incorporación de las mujeres a la enseñanza normalizada
del sistema educativo:
[…]fueron las primeras generaciones de mujeres educadas en colegios de élite como el
Victorian Institution o el Bengal Collegue quienes no se conformarían con ser buenas
y sumisas esposas e inaugurarían asociaciones como The Women’s Indian Association,
The National Council of Women in India y The All Indian Women’s Conference, que
abogaron por el voto femenino […] abriendo nuevos caminos y extendiendo la
educación femenina a otras castas más desprotegidas.
La tímida apertura económica que comenzó́ a finales de los años ochenta ha
repercutido en las políticas educativas. La aprobación del New Education Policy en
1986, incrementó considerablemente el presupuesto en educación. Esta nueva medida
[…] ha dado lugar a la creación de escuelas y universidades en todos los estados (Val,
2010: 194).
Según datos de UNICEF (2015), la tasa de alfabetización femenina en la India alcanzó
el 67,6% durante el periodo 2008-12. Pero la realidad siguió siendo que en el plano
religioso sólo un exiguo número de mujeres encontraban en la práctica acceso
completo a las enseñanzas místicas, lo cual contribuía a mantenerlas en una
especie de analfabetismo o inopia espiritual. La inercia cultural seguía confinándolas
en los consabidos roles secundarios asignados a la religiosidad femenina (la educación
religiosa maternal, el emocionalismo religioso, los ritos y cultos de la religiosidad
popular, el papel otorgado a la esposa del gurú, la instrucción religiosa de carácter
asistencial, etc.), sin que hasta hoy día puedan constatarse cambios significativos.
Asuntos comprometidos tales como el monacato femenino, la mujer como gurú, la
mujer devadasi (prostituta sagrada), la representación de la mujer en el Acharya Sabha
(máximo consejo de maestros hinduistas), etc., permanecerían aún sin ser resueltos.
En tales condiciones no resultaba difícil que se siguiera –y se siga– propagando la
idea supersticiosa de que las mujeres carecían de la mente necesaria y la suficiente
inteligencia como para alcanzar mokṣa (la liberación). Habría que remontarse a casos
históricos singulares para poder citar ejemplos de mujeres en ruptura con las reglas
establecidas que lograron rebelarse contra el patriarcado arraigado en la casta
sacerdotal de los brahmanes, abandonando la vida de hogar para iniciar un camino
místico en libertad (cf. Ferro 2001: 223-33).
Sin dejar en el olvido el impulso previamente dado por las iniciativas reformistas (D.
Sarasvati, Ramakrishna, Vivejkananda, R. Tagore, R. Maharsi, S. Aurobindo, M.
Gandhi, etc.), los primeros cambios importantes llegaron a finales de siglo XX con
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------amplias admisiones de mujeres en aquellas órdenes religiosas que hasta entonces las
rechazaban. Con respecto al reconocimiento de la mujer como gurú, I. Gómez
menciona que “una de las excepciones es Satguru Swami Sri Jnananda Saravasti, una
mujer de nuestros días reconocida como gurú” (2006: 293). No obstante, las mujeres no
llegaban a constituir ni el sujeto ni el objeto de referencia en la relación guru-shishya,
donde su posición sigue siendo adventicia:
Esta relación no tiene por qué implicar necesariamente un maestro y una
enseñanza en el sentido convencional, incluso una madre [...], puede ser capaz de
actuar como un gurú en un momento u otro en la vida de un individuo. La historia
de la India está llena de ejemplos de este tipo. Gandhi en su autobiografía, The
Story of My Life, mencionó que su madre, su padre y su hermano fueron sus gurús,
respectivamente, en la enseñanza de la espiritualidad, los asuntos mundanos de
carácter práctico y la capacidad para soportar las adversidades (Raina, 2002: 191).
En el caso concreto de las mujeres dalit (parias, intocables), mayoría en las extensas
zonas rurales y los populosos suburbios urbanos, su postergación tanto social como
religiosa llega incluso a la actualidad:
Aunque en la India actual han surgido muchos movimientos feministas, no son,
por lo general, como los que han nacido en Occidente. Las mujeres están
conquistando su puesto en la vida tanto pública como privada y empiezan a
jugar su papel, a pesar de los muchos abusos todavía presentes en muchos sectores
de la sociedad –en especial entre las castas más discriminadas. Estas conquistas
las hacen afirmando su dignidad sin imitar un modelo ‘unisex’ –a pesar, y
también aquí, de la vida en centros urbanos altamente industrializados. Nuestro
estudio no es sociológico, pero debíamos mencionar y por lo menos subrayar el
papel de la mujer en la transformación imperativa del dharma hindú (Panikkar,
2004: 221).
Sobre cuál puede ser el rol de las mujeres en esta transformación del dharma hindú, tal
vez arroje luz el contenido de esta conversación en la que participó Sunanda y que tuvo
lugar en Rajghat:
¿Qué le está pasando a la cultura de este país, a la mente india? ¿Por qué se
deteriora? ¿Es la tradición, su peso, la autoridad de los Vedas, los gurús, el
dominio británico, el breve período de libertad? ¿Es la autoridad familiar?
¿Son todos estos factores los responsables del deterioro? [ … ] Miren la
tradición desde el punto de vista antiguo: la mente india se desarrolló, llegó y
avistó a Brahman, lo eterno, ¿qué le ha pasado a esa mente? […] El antiguo
cerebro ha caído en desuso. Se le suponía haber estado funcionado para alcanzar
lo más alto. Debe de haber sido un cerebro extraordinario. ¿Habéis perdido ese
cerebro, no el cerebro material, sino el cerebro que se cultiva? Por otro lado, ¿os
habéis convertido en especialistas, filósofos, teósofos, neo-teósofos, cualquier
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------cosa menos Eso? La mente antigua lo hizo, se lo trabajó.
[…] ¿Por qué no hay nadie que quiera seguir adelante con esto? ¿Es porque la
mente india lo traduce todo? India conectará todo esto que estamos hablando con
la tradición local, mientras que Occidente negará todo esto y habrá una mayor
división.
Hacia el final de la conversación, [Krishnamurti] dijo: «Lo que estoy tratando de
decir es que este país ha estado operando con este extraordinario cerebro. Pero
¿permitiríais que ese cerebro, esa mente, operara hoy? Por ese cerebro [me refiero
al] sentido de una verdadera investigación sin obstáculos (Patwardhan, 1999: 38).
Parece apuntar la evidencia al hecho de que la cultura, la mente y el cerebro hindú ha
permanecido funcionando demasiado tiempo sólo con una parte de su potencial,
prescindiendo inexplicablemente de la parte relegada.
Cambio de relación: dos aprenden
Desde que J. Krishnamurti comenzó a recorrer aquella India recién reencarnada ya en su
Independencia impartiendo enseñanzas, el tema de la relación guru-shishya aparece
de forma recurrente en sus exposiciones: “Ningún conocimiento o comprensión
pueden venir cuando nuestra relación es la del profesor y el alumno, un maestro y un
discípulo, o un guru y un shishya” (Krishnamurti 1933-86: Event ID/Serial No
1065/VB471127, Madras 27-Nov-1947 [¶3]). A pesar de estas advertencias,
reiteradas durante décadas, “Aquí en la India [Krishnamurti] estaba considerado
como un guru. Incluso se le conocía como el gurú que era un no-gurú. La gente caía
rendida sus pies […]” (Patwardhan 1999 : 84).
Hasta entonces el guruismo no había sido objetado con argumentos tan sólidos.
Desde la perspectiva de Krishnamurti, los gurús son hombres que se han encargado de
guiar a otros hombres hacia un punto fijo al que llaman la verdad, de establecer modos
de conducta; son los que tienen y dan la clave que abre la puerta a lo sagrado; ofrecen
el aliento, el sustento, la gratificación y la satisfacción espiritual que la gente pide. Se
parte de la idea de que el gurú pertenece a lo celestial, que está en un nivel superior
mientras el discípulo deambula por los mundos inferiores. Como cada cual se siente
confuso, piensa que es mejor que se le dirija y se le diga qué tiene que hacer, cómo
actuar e incluso se le indique cuándo ha llegado a la meta. En realidad casi nadie está
dispuesto a investigar, lo que se quiere es escapar de la realidad y situarse junto a
algo que otros hayan tomado por verdad:
181
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Yo no soy un gurú. Yo no quiero serlo por la sencilla razón de que no hay un
camino a la verdad. No se puede descubrir el camino, porque no hay camino, la
Verdad es algo viviente, y no hay ningún camino que lleve a lo que vive –
únicamente puede haber caminos para las cosas muertas. Al carecer la verdad
de caminos, para descubrirla uno tiene que aventurarse, presto al el peligro. ¿Cree
usted que un gurú le ayudará a aventurarse, a vivir en peligro? Buscar un gurú
obviamente indica que uno no se aventura, que simplemente está buscando un
camino a la realidad como medida de seguridad. Así que, usted puede hacer de
mí un gurú si quiere, pero eso será su propia miseria, porque la verdad no tiene
gurú, ni la realidad tiene líder. (Krishnamurti, 1933-86: Event ID /Serial No
1191/VB481003 [17] Poona 3-10-1948).
La relación que Sunanda y Krishnamurti mantienen va más allá del arquetipo
tradicional, uno que enseña y otro que aprende, el maestro y el amaestrado; en realidad
son dos que investigan, dos que descubren, dos que aprenden:
No fue una tradicional relación guru-shishya (maestro-discípulo) en la que el
gurú guía al discípulo a cada paso. Él no te trazaba ningún camino a seguir.
Una de las razones de tal ausencia de autoridad podría ser que él era un profesor
sensible que llevaba a una estudiante como yo sólo hasta el punto en el que el
condicionamiento y la propia capacidad de entender le permitieran progresar.
Quizá sabía que más allá de ese punto la alumna se limitaría a seguirle
ciegamente sin discernimiento alguno. El punto que quiero recalcar es que yo
estaba aprendiendo, no obedeciendo; veía y escuchaba todo lo que me rodeaba
con atención y cuidado (Patwardhan, 1999: 12).
Aunque están presentes el maestro, la enseñanza, lo enseñado, la relación, la
comunicación, el discípulo, lo aprendido, etc., lo importante no es el guru, ni el
adiestramiento, ni el resultado obtenido por el shishya. Eso resulta importante en el
entrenamiento militar, en la instrucción académica, en el aprendizaje de artes y
oficios; pero en la vida religiosa ello no supone ninguna prerrogativa: sadhus (santos)
reconocidos han admitido haber practicado pūjā, sādhanā, prāṇāyāma, dhyāna
(rituales, oraciones, técnicas de respiración y meditación), etc., durante años y años
sin que hubieren alcanzado el esperado samādhi (unión con el Absoluto) que se
habían propuesto como última meta volante antes de llegar a mokṣa (la realización
final). Lo verdaderamente importante es el propio proceso de investigación de lo
sagrado. A partir de ese punto, en la nueva relación que se ve aflorar entre Krishnamurti
y Sunanda no se sigue el curso de las técnicas ancestrales, no hay ritos, ceremonias,
templos, gurú deificado, transmisión de doctrinas… pues una vida religiosa receptiva
hacia lo sagrado no lo exige.
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RAFAEL QUIRÓS
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Lo que no se cuestiona es la relevancia de la presencia de alguien ‘realizado’ en todo el
proceso: “Incognoscibles son las experiencias no verbales y misteriosas son las
formas en las que un maestro las comunica. Lo que entendí […] es que las
transformaciones en una misma podrían tener lugar ante la presencia de una persona
iluminada, si una está abierta y es sensible a la enseñanza” (44).3 Pero el impacto de la
personalidad
del gurú o gurukripa (peculiar estado de gracia que irradia
bienaventuranza, beatitud, bien de forma natural y veraz, bien mediante el arte escénico
de un convincente actor profesional), puede constituir un serio obstáculo para el
shishya:
“Una vez le pregunté: ‘Krishnaji, ¿cuál es mi relación con usted? La respuesta
que me dio arroja alguna luz sobre lo que se podía o no se podía esperar de él:
«Sunanda, soy como el viento. ¿Puedes atrapar al viento con el puño? Yo soy así. No
hay nada que celebrar. Es por eso que te digo, no te apegues a mí. Se lo he dicho a
otros también, que no se apeguen a mí»” (81).
El problema se agrava cuando el impacto de la presencia física real se combina con la
elaboración de una imagen mental idealizada: “Siempre tenía presente la imagen de la
conciencia iluminada de Krishnaji, identificada como un modelo. ¿Me influyó quizás de
forma inconsciente esta imagen y devino en la manera de mirarme yo a mí misma?”
(71). La respuesta a esta pregunta se obtiene durante el propio proceso de investigación:
“Me he dado cuenta de que es una ilusión buscarla” (94), resolviéndose así tanto la
idealización del gurú como las conceptualizaciones que la acompañan a propósito de la
búsqueda de tal ‘conciencia iluminada’. Con lo cual se vuelve de nuevo al campo de la
realidad, de la experiencia, donde se encuentran las verdaderas oportunidades para ver
las cosas de un modo algo más cercano a tal como son:
[…] nos imaginamos que una persona iluminada sea todo tipo de cosas. Nos
quedábamos bastante impresionados y sobrecogidos cuando la imagen que
teníamos no se correspondía con la que veíamos. Tenía muchas facetas, algunas
paradójicas y otras incluso contradictorias. Era compasivo y sin embargo
parecía lejano y áspero en sus relaciones. Parecía distante, sin embargo,
cuando uno lo conocía podía resultar cercano y fácilmente asequible. Distante
y cercano, cariñoso y admonitorio, era una persona de la que uno nunca podría
decir: «Yo lo he conocido»” (81).
3
En las citas sucesivas sólo se indicará el número de la página correspondiente a la
referencia Patwardhan (1999).
183
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------A su vez, desde la contraparte, la relación no se presenta fácil. El problema primordial
es que todos los buscadores espirituales que se acercan a unas determinadas enseñanzas
traen consigo sus propios obstáculos para emprender la investigación propuesta:
“Sunanda, la gente viene a mí con máscaras. Sólo revelan lo que ellos quieren. Allá
ellos. No miro detrás de sus máscaras. Sería una invasión de la privacidad si uno
hiciera tal cosa” (82). Tales obstáculos entorpecen el inicio del proceso indagatorio,
interfieren en su desarrollo y malean su propósito; máxime si se toma en consideración
que la mera presencia del observador causa de por sí efectos adversos en la propia
acción de observar.
Puesto que a lo largo del proceso de observación se va descubriendo que ninguna
religión (temporal) conduce a la verdad (intemporal), que ninguna organización es en
sí misma religiosa (pues sólo es religiosa cada persona en particular, ya sea que se
adhiera a una organización o no), que carece de sentido la adquisición de
conocimientos religiosos, dogmas y doctrinas, y que ningún gurú puede aportarle un
sentido de lo sagrado y guiarla hacia esa verdad, etc., la clave de la investigación se
hace recaer en la capacidad y disposición de cada cual para abrirse a un modo libre de
percibir y conocer. Esa libertad implica que la relación adopte una forma dialógica: el
diálogo investigativo, el cual parece ser el soporte adecuado para proseguir con la
investigación.
El diálogo investigativo no se corresponde con lo que habitualmente entendemos por
diálogo convencional, por diálogo literario, ni por diálogo filosófico clásico: “El
diálogo no seguía ningún patrón o curso premeditado. Se trataba de un movimiento
dinámico dentro del proceso de la investigación. Por lo tanto, cada diálogo era exclusivo
de un contexto y una ubicación determinados” (59). La introducción del diálogo
investigativo en la India se remonta a 1948 (con precedentes en USA y UK); en los
años setenta la experiencia se extendió a seminarios y reuniones organizadas en los que
concurrieron participantes de las más variadas disciplinas y corrientes culturales
(científicos, filósofos, vedantines, budistas, escritores, artistas, especialistas en
computación y toda clase de buscadores de la verdad), tratando temas como la
naturaleza del cerebro, la mente y la conciencia, los límites del pensamiento, la
inteligencia, la libertad, el tiempo, el miedo, las relaciones, la muerte, la soledad, la
184
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RAFAEL QUIRÓS
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------verdad, la realidad, etc., muy alejados de la dogmática ancestral:
Los seminarios comenzaron en Madrás en 1976, y durante diez años yo [S.
Patwardhan] fui la encargada de organizarlos. Las discusiones en pequeño grupo
comenzaron en la India en 1948 y continuaron a lo largo de los años siguientes en
distintos lugares, especialmente en Bombay, Madrás y Varanasi (58).
Naturalmente, el ashram tradicional perdía su identidad y funciones características (al
igual que las comunidades religiosas de otras religiones autóctonas o importadas, y las
comunas alternativas que proliferaron en la India como resultado del turismo espiritual),
y no resultaba ser el lugar adecuado para tan distinta manera de acercarse a lo
sagrado. En su lugar cobran relevancia –sin alcanzar nunca popularidad- los centros de
estudio no basados en ningún ideal, creencia ni autoridad personal, centros donde
poder investigar la totalidad de la realidad y tratar de descubrir la verdad en libertad:
No hay residentes permanentes. Cuando la gente vive de forma permanente en un
lugar, por lo general se convierte en una comunidad con relaciones de naturaleza
jerárquica y dependiente, con fórmulas rutinarias y ritualizadas de vida […] Aquí
la gente viene para una estancia corta, durante unas semanas, y con un
profundo despertar se va de vuelta a encontrarse con una vida nueva […] No hay
gurú que guíe, ni jerarquía, ni conformidad, ni patrón de conducta. No hay
terapias de grupo ni confesiones. ¿Cómo se configura un grupo de este tipo? Es
esta una pregunta para vivirla y experimentarla. No hay respuestas hechas a
medida ni prefabricadas (92).
Resultados
Los efectos del cambio de relación introducidos alcanzan enseguida a la metodología, la
didáctica, la dinámica del proceso enseñanza-aprendizaje, los contenidos, las actitudes:
sin ritos, sin ceremonias, sin templos, sin gurús deificados, sin técnicas meditativas
prediseñadas, sin doctrinas preestablecidas, sin amaestramiento, sin academicismo
institucional… Y sin embargo, el maestro, la enseñanza, lo enseñado, el aprendiz, el
aprender, lo aprendido, están presentes bajo las formas nuevas y libres que la
creatividad sugiere y la investigación descubre. Son dos (o más) los que observan,
dialogan, investigan, descubren y aprenden, sin una parte dirigente y otra dirigida. Con
ello se llevan al límite de la contradicción las bases institucionales, jerárquicas y
doctrinales de la pedagogía religiosa tradicional, obligando a repensar sus
fundamentos.4
4
Iván Illich, interlocutor también de J. Krishnamurti, plasmó de forma muy peculiar alguna de
esas ideas en La Sociedad Desescolarizada (1971), aunque refiriéndolas a la Pedagogía General.
185
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Las obras de J. Krishnamurti constituyen un corpus de primer orden para rastrear la
crítica teórica del guruísmo (en sus versiones orientales genuinas y en sus versiones
occidentalizadas) y de la “mistagogía” occidental (tan propensa hoy día al orientalismo
espiritual); es decir, para la revisión crítica de los fundamentos de la propia pedagogía
religiosa (lo que enseña y educa por doctrina o ejemplos). No obstante, su significado
completo no se comprende bien sin las grabaciones audiovisuales de sus exposiciones
en público, diálogos y seminarios, que constituyen la verificación de su práctica
cotidiana: didáctica creativa aplicada en estado puro, ocasiones únicas –accesibles a los
investigadores educacionales– para poder observar el alcance y resultados de su
ejercicio positivo en situaciones concretas de enseñanza-aprendizaje.
A su vez, las memorias de S. Patwardhan contienen el testimonio veraz del otro término
de la relación, el complemento indispensable para disponer de datos precisos para
evaluar el alcance de situaciones que van allá de la tradicional relación guru-shishya;
un complemento de carácter excepcional que nos provee de la información necesaria
para escudriñar las particularidades de una relación vista desde la perspectiva de una
mujer hindú que se enfrenta a los desafíos de la tensión contemporánea entre tradición y
revolución, ocaso del patriarcado y apogeo de los feminismos. Similares apreciaciones,
aunque desde otras ópticas, pueden corroborarse al indagar en los escritos de Pupul
Jayakar, biógrafa hindú de J. Krishnamurti, o los de Mary Lutyens, su biógrafa
británica, entre otros.
El resultado final obtenido a lo largo de la relación sostenida entre Jiddu Krishnamurti y
Sunanda Patwardhan no es la completa transformación del discípulo por el gurú, como
era de esperar de acuerdo al canon hinduista. Lo que ella encuentra al final es su
propio resultado, ella misma como resultado de sí misma, hecha a sí misma, una
mujer tan nueva, creativa y auténtica como fuera capaz de serlo o no, pero en última
instancia bajo la responsabilidad del propio criterio (no con preceptos doctrinales
antiguos o nuevos). No cabe la transformación del shishya por el guru: “Recuerdo una
ocasión en la que casi al borde d e la desesperación le pregunté a Krishnaji por qué
no me transformaba él a mí. Me dijo, «Yo no puedo. Tienes que hacerlo por ti misma.
Aprende de la vida»” (95).
186
R
RAFAEL QUIRÓS
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Los viejos conceptos sobre los que durante milenios se fundamentó la transmisión de
enseñanzas místicas han venido perdiendo su solvencia inicial y consecuentemente su
vigencia. Inevitable resulta que el sometimiento a crítica de la institución del gurú (y
por extensión, del mistagogo, el guía espiritual, el líder, etc.), implique la inmediata
adopción de reformas, las cuales pueden consistir en simples renovaciones de antiguas
tradiciones o por el contrario orientarse hacia la introducción de innovaciones
revolucionarias. No podemos saber qué camino tomará definitivamente la inteligencia
religiosa hindú en los albores de este nuevo milenio. Lo cierto es que desde otras
perspectivas culturales y religiosas allende el subcontinente indio se observa con interés
e inquietud esta lenta y silenciosa meditación, cuyos resultados modificarán el curso de
la religiosidad contemporánea universal en su propia base: la transmisión de las
enseñanzas místicas.
OBRAS CITADAS
BLAU, E. (1995). Krishnamurti. 100 años de sabiduría. Barcelona: Kairós, 2007.
DE PALMA, D. (ed.) (1995). Upanishads. Madrid: Siruela, 2006.
FERRO, M.J. (2001). El misticismo silencioso de las mujeres indias. En Beneito, P.
et. al. Mujeres de luz: la mística femenina, lo femenino en la mística. Madrid:
Trotta.
GARCÍA-ARROYO, A. (2009). Historia de las mujeres de la India: Sobre mitos y
realidades. Barcelona: Laertes Editorial.
GARCÍA-ARROYO, A. (2011). La representación de la mujer en India: imágenes de
la Historia. Conferencia, accedido en http://www.universitatdelapau.org/ el
29/01/2014.
GÓMEZ, I. (2006). Género y espiritualidad. En Arriaga, M. et. al. (eds.) Mujeres,
espacio y poder. Sevilla: Arcibel.
KRISHNAMURTI, J. (1933-86). The Krishnamurti Text Collection. Software, version 3.3.
Krishnamurti Foundation of America / Krishnamurti Foundation Trust, 19912005.
KRISHNAMURTI, J. (1972). Tradición y revolución. Barcelona: Sirio 2006.
LUTYENS, M. (1975). Krishnamurti: los años del despertar. Buenos Aires: Kier, 1998.
187
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------PLA, R. (ed.) (1997). Bhagavad Gītā. Edición bilingüe con introducción y
comentarios finales de Roberto Pla. Madrid: Etnos Índica.
PATWARDHAN, S. (1999). A Vision of the Sacred: My Personal Journey with
Krishnamurti. O j a i : Edwin House Publishing Incorporated.
PATWARDHAN, S. (1982). Acerca de lo que he comprendido. En VV.AA. Dentro de
la mente. Buenos Aires: Kier, 1993.
PANIKKAR, R. (2004). Espiritualidad hindú. Sanatana dharma. Barcelona: Kairós.
RAINA, M.K. (2002). “Guru-Shishya Relationship in Indian Culture: The Possibility of
a Creative Resilient Framework”. Psychology & Developing Societies, 2002, 14,
pp. 167-198. DOI: 10.1177/097133360201400109. Versión online disponible en:
http://pds.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/14/1/ 167.
RUIZ, J. (2008). Breve historia del hinduismo: de los vedas al s. XXI. M a d r i d :
Biblioteca Nueva.
RUIZ, J. (2010). La mujer y lo femenino en el hinduismo. Disponible en Asociación
para el Diálogo Interreligioso de la Comunidad de Madrid, accesible en
http://www.adimadrid.com/ el 3/02/2014.
VAL, A. (2010). “La educación femenina en la India durante la época colonial”. UNED
Educación XX1, 2010, Vol. 13, núm. 2, pp.185-197. DOI:
http://dx.doi.org/10.5944/educxx1.13.2.245. Versión online disponible en
www.revistas.uned.es/index.php/educacionXX1/article/view/245.
UNICEF (2015). “Tablas estadísticas del estado mundial de la infancia, 2015”. Accesible
en www.unicef.org/spanish/sowc2012/.../SOWC-2012-Tablas-estadísticas.pdf, el
21/12/2015.
RAFAEL QUIRÓS está cursando su doctorado en la Universidad de Cádiz (Programa Artes y
Humanidades). Es profesor de Lengua Española y Literatura y es Presidente de Solidaridad
Directa
188
Miscellanea
Special dossier: sri lanka
Indi@logs
Vol 3 2016, pp. 191-193, ISSN: 2339-8523
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHELVA KANAGANAYAKAM: A TRIBUTE1
University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka
[email protected]
It was with profound sadness and deep shock that I learned of Chelva Kanaganayakam’s
passing at the age of 62 on 22nd November 2014. He was driving home from Montreal to
Toronto after being conferred the title Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in recognition
of his signal contribution to Canadian literary studies and culture, when he succumbed to a
heart attack. “Kanags,” as he was known at Trinity College, Kandy, Sri Lanka, excelled in
studies and other pursuits. He played cricket for the school and also acted in plays. Since his
father was Professor of Tamil at the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya, academe was in his
DNA, as it were. Consequently, once he graduated from Kelaniya with English honours, he
taught in the University of Jaffna for a while before completing his PhD at the University of
British Columbia on a Commonwealth Scholarship. He was Professor in English at the
University of Toronto when he died and Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies for
several years.
Chelva was indubitably one of the most distinguished English academics produced by Sri
Lanka in recent times. He published over six books and several articles pertaining to Sri
Lankan and Postcolonial literature in English. He was equally well known for his research on
Tamil Literature and his translations. He won several accolades but one which he especially
cherished was receiving the Faculty of Arts and Science Outstanding Teaching Award—an
honour indeed given that he was an expatriate working in the most prestigious English
Department in Canada. Furthermore, those whose theses he supervised hold major academic
positions across the world.
1
An earlier version of this memorial tribute appeared in The Island on 28 November 2015.
CHELVA KANAGANAYAKAM: A TRIBUTE
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Despite living overseas for several years, Chelva never lost touch with Sri Lanka. He edited
issues of Nethra for ICES, translated the Tamil novel Sandangu as Ritual for the Gratiaen
Trust, contributed to The Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities and Navasilu, was a plenary
speaker at a SLACLALS conference and was working on a major article for Phoenix for me
at the time of his demise. Chelva had the wonderful attribute of being a counsellor, guide,
friend, benefactor and much more to people regardless of class, creed, or ethnic divide. To
cite one example, he was looked after by a Sinhala ayah in his formative years. This ayah was
very close to his mother and when she died in Canada, Chelva requested me to go to a village
off Katugastota and personally communicate the news. He subsequently sponsored her
pilgrimage to Dambadiwa, one of the most sacred Buddhist shrines in India, and after
overcoming many administrative obstacles hosted her in Canada as well.
Because he was senior to me in high school, I did not know him well, initially, but when he
learned through a mutual friend that I would be visiting Canada in 1999, he not only invited
me to give a talk in Toronto but also insisted that I stay with him, his wife Thiru and two
children.
His home was my first port-of-call whenever I visited Toronto thereafter. The last
time we met was at the ACLALS conference in Castries, St Lucia, in 2013, when he insisted
once again on treating me to a home cooked meal even though he was living in a rented
condominium for the duration of the conference. His hospitality was indeed legendary.
I shared the news of Chelva’s death via academic networks and the response from his peers
across the world was staggering. Prof. Amirjit Singh of the University of Ohio says, “he
mentored students of all backgrounds – white and black, Sinhala and Tamil, Hindu and
Muslim. And his students just adored him for his giving and supportive ways”; Dr Anupama
Mohan who did her thesis under him declares, “On Facebook Chelva’s protégés are sharing
their loss together and recalling vivid memories, and in a way, we are all bereft. Few people
measured up to Chelva”; and according to Dr Michael Bucknor of Jamaica, a past Chair of
ACLALS, “he was one of the kindest and most supportive academics I met as a young
graduate student studying in Canada. With his and Victor’s [Ramraj] passing, it seems like an
entire epoch is coming to an end in Commonwealth/Postcolonial scholarship.”
It was Samuel Butler who said that “to die completely, a person must not only forget but be
forgotten, and he who is not forgotten is not dead.” Such words would bring little solace to a
family that continues to grieve a year after his demise but given the numerous tributes paid to
192
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ him since his passing, there can be no doubt whatsoever that Chelva’s legacy as a respected
academic and a prince among gentlemen will last for generations. He and I worshipped
different gods but we shared a love of literature so I could do worse than invoke the Bard in
trying to come-to-terms with his untimely death: “Then to the elements / Be free, and fare
thou well!”
SENATH WALTER PERERA is Senior Professor in English, University of Peradeniya, Chair of
SLACLALS and the Gratiaen Trust, and a Bibliographical Representative for JCL. Formerly,
he chaired the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia); edited SLJH, Navasilu and Phoenix;
was articles editor for Postcolonial Text and on the inaugural Advisory Committee of the
DSC Prize. His research has appeared in several publications worldwide.
193
Indi@logs
Vol 3 2016, pp. 195-209, ISSN: 2339-8523
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------TERROR, TRAUMA, TRANSITIONS: REPRESENTING VIOLENCE IN SRI LANKAN
LITERATURE
MARYSE JAYASURIYA
University of Texas at El Paso
[email protected]
Sri Lankan literature in English, Sinhala, and Tamil has been shaped to a remarkable
degree both by the brute fact of violence and by the varying ways in which Sri Lankans have
responded to violence. The twenty-six year conflict between the Sri Lankan government and
Tamil militant groups like the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the briefer, but still
bloody, conflict between the government and the Janata Vimukthi Peramuna (People’s
Liberation Front: JVP) required a response from nearly every Sri Lankan writer, resident or
diasporic, in each of Sri Lanka’s three languages. Sri Lankan writers sought to understand the
roots of the conflict, foster dialogue and reconciliation, and bear witness to terrorism and
repression by all sides.
The military conflict in Sri Lanka ended in 2009, marking a milestone in the country’s
long-running ethnic conflict. During the war and its aftermath, much has been written about
violence. This essay seeks to provide an overview of the literature written about war, violence
and terrorism by Sri Lankan writers. While my focus will be on Anglophone writers, I will also
consider some works written in Sinhala and Tamil, which are now available in English
translations. Some key subjects have captured the attention of writers: the 1983 pogrom in which
Tamil lives and property were destroyed in Colombo; the terrorist acts carried out by separatist
groups such as the LTTE; the second JVP insurgency in the late 1980s and early 1990s; the
TERROR, TRAUMA, TRANSITIONS
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------aftermath of the military conflict during which attacks were carried out against journalists and
activists.
Remembering Atrocity: The Burning of the Jaffna Public Library and the 1983 Ethnic
Pogroms
There are two moments to which writers go back over and over again because they
signify the reasons for the start of the ethnic conflict, a rending of one type of nationalism and
the inauguration of another. The first is the burning of the Jaffna Public Library by the police in
1981. The library was a centre of Tamil culture and learning, containing one of the biggest
collections of writings in Tamil as well as priceless, irreplaceable ancient manuscripts. The
burning of the building and the tomes inside represented to Sri Lankan Tamils an attack on their
very culture and identity. The poet Cheran [Rudhramoorthy], son of the great Sri Lankan Tamil
poet Mahakavi, writes about this in his poem “The Second Sunrise” (as translated from the Tamil
by Chelva Kanaganayakam): “What happened?/ My town was burned;/ my people became
faceless;/ in my land, my air,/ in everything,/ the stamp of outsiders” (Cheran, 2011: 7; l.10-15).
The poet is outraged and rallies fellow Tamils to fight: “From the ashen streets, arise and march”
(Cheran, 2011: 7; l.22-23). M. A. Nuhman, another Tamil poet, writes of this event in the poem
“Murder” (as translated from the Tamil by S. Pathmanathan) as the destruction not only of Tamil
culture but also the beliefs and values, perhaps the very humanity, of the majority of the
Sinhalese who profess to be Buddhist. The speaker dreams that the Buddha, who preached nonviolence, has been shot dead by the police “on the steps/ of the Jaffna library” (Nuhman in
Selvadurai, 2014: 448; l.7-8) since “Without killing him/ it was impossible/ to harm even a fly”
(Nuhman in Selvadurai, 2014: 448; l.16-18).
Deepika Bahri has referred to the Partition as “an enduring trauma, […] a wound that has
never quite healed” (Bahri, 2006: 222). The so-called riots of 1983 have played a similar role in
Sri Lanka and have been emphasized in many literary works. For a long time the official
narrative was that the atrocities of July 1983 were the random eruptions of anger by Sinhalese
who were enraged by the killings of thirteen Sinhalese soldiers in the North by Tamil guerrillas.
In fact, the destruction wrought on Tamil homes, businesses and lives was orchestrated by the
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------government, which was apparent because the perpetrators had electoral lists that enabled them to
target Tamils. July 1983 was a shock to the system for many who had previously not seen
themselves as involved in any particular ethnic conflict. Jean Arasanayagam writes about this in
her poetry collection Apocalypse ’83. As a Burgher (the descendant of Dutch colonizers) married
to a Tamil, she finds herself and her family under attack and her loyalties—as someone with a
hybrid identity—questioned; she realizes that she has to choose a side. She also writes about the
experience of living in a refugee camp following the riots. The death and destruction caused by
the riots resulted in many Tamils going into exile and becoming refugees in other countries.
Shyam Selvadurai writes about the shock and horror of “Black July” in the first-person through
the journal of his young Tamil protagonist Arjie in the novel Funny Boy. Since the last chapter of
the novel is in the form of a journal, the horror of the violent events is conveyed with much
immediacy and power: “all the Tamil shops had been set on fire and the mobs were looting
everything. The police and army just stood by, watching, and some of them even cheered the
mobs and joined in the looting and burning” (Selvadurai, 1994: 284). Arjie and his family seek
refuge with their Sinhalese neighbours while their house is burned down by the mobs. Later they
learn that mobs had set fire to the car of Arjie’s grandparents with the elderly couple still inside.
Arjie’s family, like Sri Lankan Tamils all over the country, feel betrayed and make the decision
to go to Canada as refugees. As Arjie writes in his diary, “I long to be out of this country. I don’t
feel at home in Sri Lanka any longer, will never feel safe again” (Selvadurai, 1994: 296).
Decades later, Karen Roberts in her novel July, V.V. Ganeshananthan in her novel Love
Marriage, and Nayomi Munaweera in her novel Island of a Thousand Mirrors describe the tragic
events of July 1983. Yalini, the protagonist in Love Marriage, is actually born in the United
States while the anti-Tamil pogroms are happening in Sri Lanka: “Black July: more than two
decades later, I think that almost every Sri Lankan Tamil knows what it means. I was born, and
halfway across the world, Tamil people died, betrayed by their own country, which did nothing
to save them” (Ganeshananthan, 2008: 18). Yalini’s father watches the news from Colombo on
television, sees that “people were being killed for their Tamilness” (18) and realizes “that he had
left Sri Lanka totally and absolutely” (Ganeshananthan, 2008: 19). Munaweera, in her novel,
writes of the far-reaching impact of July 1983: “Arteries, streams, and then rivers of Tamils flow
out of the city. Behind them they leave: looted, soot-blackened houses, the unburied or unburnt
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------bodies of loved ones, ancestral wealth, lost children, Belonging and Nationalism. It is a list that
stays bitter on the tongue, giving birth to fantasies of Retribution, Partition, and Secession. […]
the events of that July will make them the most militant and determined of separatists”
(Munaweera, 2012: 89). Both Roberts and Munaweera describe the violence of July 1983 and the
resulting rending of the national fabric through the conceit of tragic romantic relationships
between characters on opposite sides of the ethnic divide.
Tracing Terror: The JVP, the LTTE, and the State
The atrocities that helped to inaugurate Sri Lanka’s conflicts were reenacted in various
forms throughout the war between the government and the LTTE and the second JVP
insurrection. In particular, attacks on civilians by government forces (military and paramilitary),
the JVP, and the LTTE shocked the conscience of many Sri Lankan writers. The suicide
bombings carried about by the LTTE in the 1990s and early 2000s became particularly visible on
the international stage. Literary works focused on the violence in the North and the East between
separatist groups—particularly the LTTE—and the Sri Lankan military during the various phases
of the war.
In certain literary works that do not have the ethnic conflict as a primary focus, violence
nonetheless pervades the lives of characters. For example, in Shehan Karunatilaka’s awardwinning novel Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, the focus is on a cricket prodigy who
has disappeared from public view and a journalist’s attempt years later to find out what happened
to him. We learn of how the violence of July 1983 affected Mathew, a Tamil, and the novel is
punctuated by the war in the North and the East as well as the suicide bombings carried out by
the LTTE in Colombo. Karunatilaka builds into his novel on cricket a murky subplot that
involves the protagonist, an aging sports journalist obsessed with Pradeep Mathew, who is
summoned to a secret hideout by an ostensible leader of the LTTE, and major plot elements
frequently hinge on the possibility that Mathew is being exploited by the LTTE, even as it
becomes evident that the trauma of the 1983 anti-Tamil pogroms and the anti-Tamil racism that
he has experienced since have clearly traumatized Mathew.
Some have tried to depict the conflict through the eyes of both factions, attempting to
help readers comprehend the complexity of the conflict and explain the motivations of the
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------opposing sides to each other. In Nihal de Silva’s novel The Road from Elephant Pass, the
protagonists, a Sinhalese soldier and a female LTTE cadre, are thrown together when the latter
offers to be an informer about the whereabouts of LTTE leader Prabhakaran and the soldier is
ordered to take her to army headquarters. During their journey, the LTTE cadre details the
discrimination and oppression faced by the Tamils that necessitated the struggle for a separate
state and the soldier describes the terrorist acts of the LTTE that called for action to quell the
separatists. In Cheran’s poem “A Letter to a Sinhala Friend” (as translated from the Tamil by
Lakshmi Holmström), the speaker reminds his correspondent how she might initially have
perceived him, a Tamil: “It will not take long/ for you/ and your friends/ to recover from the
shock/ of meeting me, an ordinary man,/ from an unseen and distant land/ where, you had heard,/
we sow lead-shots from guns/ instead of seeds” (Cheran, 2012: 47; l.1-9). He describes how he
was moved by her singing a Sinhala song and how they, despite their different languages, were
able to savour the beauty of falling flowers and the movements of a peacock. He urges her “Tell
your people/ here too, flowers bloom/ grass grows/ birds fly” (Cheran, 2012: 49; l.73-76). In
both the novel and the poem, an attempt is made to bridge the gap between the Sinhalese and the
Tamils by means of an emphasis on common humanity and shared experiences.
Writers explore the reasons why people might take up arms, resort to violence and carry
out terrorist acts. The female suicide bomber seems to be a figure that is of particular fascination.
As I have argued elsewhere, attempts at understanding why a woman would choose to inflict
violence, death and destruction on others tend to be aligned with gendered reasons such as rape
or the loss of a family member in addition to the woman’s political engagement or commitment
to a cause. In order to understand or empathize with a female suicide bomber, the tropes of
victimhood and/or motherhood are usually used to humanize the individual. In Amila
Weerasinghe’s poem “Suicide Bomber,” the female speaker addresses a Tamil woman who has
killed herself and others in a suicide attack and imagines that she must have been driven to this
violence because she was raped by people of the speaker’s own ethnicity, the Sinhalese.1 In
Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors, Saraswati is a Tamil girl who is raped by
Sinhalese soldiers. She struggles with the trauma of the violence enacted on her body: “In
Amma’s cloudy mirror, I catch a glimpse of a girl. I know she is me, only because there is no
1
See Jayasuriya, 2013.
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------one else in the room. She is big-eyed, bruised, with a wounded torn mouth” (Munaweera, 2012:
149). The once-ambitious student is now no longer able to go to school due to trauma and the
fact that she has been raped precludes the possibility of marriage within her context. Her mother
finally urges her to join the LTTE: “What will you do here? What man will take what the
soldiers have spoilt? Who will give their son for your sister? If you don’t go, you will ruin us all.
[…] You must go. Show people that you are a good girl. If you don’t go, no one will believe that
you were taken by force” (Munaweera, 2012: 132). Saraswati is thus victimized twice, once due
to her ethnicity and again due to her gender. With apparently no other option left to her, she joins
the LTTE and ultimately undertakes a suicide mission, dressed as a pregnant woman with
explosives wrapped around her belly. Right before she detonates the bomb, she thinks: “They
will remember me. All of them. My portrait, miles high, will hang everywhere extolling my
bravery, the new cadres will come to stand in front of it, inhale the scent of my jasmine garland,
be inspired by my fearlessness and dedication. Amma and Appa will be proud. Luxshmi will be
the sister of a martyr. I cannot give them more than this” (Munaweera, 2012: 203). An exception
to this type of depiction of the female suicide bomber is Lal Medawattegedera’s short story “The
Last War,” which describes the aftermath of a suicide bombing: the remains, now literal
fragments, of a variety of people who were killed during the attack—including the eye of the
female suicide bomber—have a discussion about what happened. The eye of the suicide bomber
remains defiant, steadfastly maintaining that the reason for the destruction she caused was the
oppression faced by the Tamil people in general at the hands of the Sinhalese and arguing that
such destruction is necessary to bring attention to the plight of the Tamils.
Literary works have also highlighted the so-called “Reign of Terror” in the South, during
the second JVP insurgency. From the late 1980s to the early 1990s, Marxist-leaning, universityeducated youth carried out an attempt to overturn the status quo, and the Sri Lankan state, along
with paramilitary forces, attempted to quell the insurgents as well as anyone associated with
them. Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost is set in that era, and dwells on the “disappeared”
and the trauma of abduction and murder on those left behind through characters like the artist
Ananda, who takes to drink and attempts suicide following the disappearance of his wife.
Ondaatje even includes the actual names of those who were disappeared along with the dates of
their abductions and the variety of ways in which they were taken. The novel also highlights the
ethics of external intervention, of the journalists and human rights monitors who enter and leave
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------a conflict zone and make reports and judgments based on a paltry few weeks of investigation
through debates between Anil, a forensic anthropologist working under the auspices of the
United Nations, and two brothers — Sarath, an archaeologist, and Gamini, a doctor — who live
in Sri Lanka. Sarath and Gamini urge Anil to be responsible and to provide necessary
contextualization in her reports about the violence in Sri Lanka. The terror psychosis of those
who have experienced violence and therefore do not resist the demands and orders of
perpetrators is described in Carl Muller’s Colombo, a work that is referred to as a novel by the
author but is actually a hybrid of creative non-fiction and fiction. In one episode, a couple living
in an exclusive Colombo neighbourhood hear the sound of gunshots outside their house at night
but refuse to investigate or call the police. They say and do nothing since they are uncertain
whether the perpetrators are JVP insurgents, agents of law enforcement or paramilitary groups,
all of whom would retaliate against any who would report the crime.
Many writers focus on atrocity, condemning the culpability of those whom they might
have initially supported or with whom they are associated. In Cheran’s “A Poem That Should
Never Have Been Written” (as translated from the Tamil by Lakshmi Holmström), the speaker
looks upon brutalized bodies and castigates the perpetrators, who happen to be from the same
ethnic group: “For this is not the work of our enemies/ but bears the imprint/ of our own people’s
murderous hands” (Cheran, 2012: 60; l.46-48). In Buddhadasa Galappatty’s poem “The Stealing
of a Jeweled Lamp” (as translated from the Sinhala by Malini Govinnage), the speaker is asking
JVP insurgents—whom she seems to have supported and still refers to as “comrades”—why they
killed her husband for the “crime” of lighting a lamp during a time when the JVP had imposed a
blackout. She declares that she had asked her husband to light the lamp only because their child
was afraid of the dark, not as a challenge against the authority of the JVP: “Where is your
justice?/ Why could you not find out/ the reason he broke your law/ before you put out the lamp
of my life?” (Galappatty in Selvadurai, 2014: 459; l.18-21). At a time when dissidents were often
attacked or assassinated, these moves can be deemed courageous.
Other works describe the traumatic effects of living in a conflict zone, witnessing almost
daily acts of violence and experiencing trauma and survivor’s guilt. In her short story “Exodus,”
Arasanayagam writes of a two-year old girl who already knows what to do when there is an air
raid: aerial attacks have become part of her normal diurnal routine and she has learned the art of
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------self-preservation. In Sivaramani’s poem “Oppressed by Nights of War” (as translated from the
Tamil by Lakshmi Holmström), the poet describes the impact of violence on the young:
“Oppressed/ by nights of war/ our children/ become adults” (Sivaramani in Selvadurai, 2014:
473; l.1-4). Reflecting the violence they see all around them, the children “pluck away/ the
wings of dragonflies/ they shoulder sticks for guns/ their friends become their foes” (Sivaramani
in Selvadurai, 2014: 474; l.24-27). Kamala Wijeratne in the poem “White Saree” writes about
the way in which attending the funerals of young men who have been killed on suspicion of
being members or sympathizers of the JVP has become a daily occurrence. It has become so
frequent that the speaker feels there is no point in putting away her mourning attire.
Memorials to the victims of violence are also an important focus. Sometimes the
emphasis is on figures in the public eye—particularly those who refused to align themselves to
one side and criticized wrongdoing on both sides—who have been assassinated; remembering
these figures is a means of memorializing the countless and nameless others who have been
killed or disappeared. It is a way of “re-membering” a shattered society. There have been many
poems written about the brutal murder of journalist and poet Richard de Zoysa, who was
abducted from his home by paramilitary forces and whose body washed up on a beach days later.
There has been a similar attempt to memorialize the assassination of human rights activist and
university professor Dr. Rajani Thiranagama, who criticized and wrote against the actions of the
Sri Lankan government and the IPKF (Indian Peace Keeping Force) but then also condemned the
atrocities carried out by the LTTE and was killed as a dissident by the latter. In both cases,
literary works have focused on grief at lost potential.2 Others who were less well-known have
also been memorialized: Vinothini’s poem “Krishanthy” (as translated from the Tamil by M.A.
Nuhman) is an elegy for a young Tamil schoolgirl who was gang-raped and murdered by six Sri
Lankan soldiers: “When she was born as a female child/ neither she, nor her mother, could have
thought/ of such an end” (Vinothini in Selvadurai, 2014: 467; l.6-8). Sumathy’s poem entitled
“To the Memory of the Three-wheeler Driver Purportedly Shot Dead by the LTTE for Being
Familiar with the Police” is a reluctant tribute by the speaker to an ordinary person, a cab driver,
whose murder inconveniently threatens to disturb a ceasefire and is thus generally ignored.
2
For an extended discussion of the importance of poetry in memorializing figures like Thiranagama and De Zoysa,
see Jayasuriya, 2012. For more on Sri Lankan Anglophone literature and its contested status, see Qadri Ismail,
Abiding by Sri Lanka and Minoli Salgado, Writing Sri Lanka.
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Sometimes the people who have been killed are remembered by means of the particular
ways in which the destruction took place, such as the bombings of the Temple of the Tooth in
Kandy in 1998 and the Colombo airport in 2001. Punyakante Wijenaike’s novella An Enemy
Within focuses on the bombing of the Central Bank in January 1996, and the different types of
people—particularly civilians from different ethnicities—who were killed. The shifting narrative
perspective enables Wijenaike to examine the trauma of the survivors and the victims’ loved
ones as well as the probable reasons for the suicide bomber who undertook the mission—the
murder of his young son at the hands of the Sri Lankan army; he too is a victim. Raghu, the
imagined suicide bomber in the novella, “did not allow himself to feel for those unknown,
unarmed civilians” (Wijenaike, 1998: 18) who will die when he drives his lorry packed with
explosives into the Central Bank building. “A smile twisted his mouth for a second to think that
they, the Tigers, had caused such caution in Colombo. After today, there would come up more
barricades, more fear. The army may have conquered Jaffna but Colombo was cowering in fear.
A tooth for a tooth” (Wijenaike, 1998: 19).
Attention has also been given to the moral dilemmas faced by willing and unwitting
participants of the conflict, both combatants and civilians. In Arasanayagam’s short story “I am
an Innocent Man,” Das, a Tamil schoolteacher, feels guilty about his determination not to take
sides—neither joining the militants nor cooperating with government forces trying to defeat the
militants—and realizes that the very act of witnessing makes him complicit in the violence. In
Neil Fernandopulle’s short story “The Left-Behind,” the widow of a soldier, even as she mourns
the loss of a beloved husband, wonders uneasily about what he might have done—looting,
raping—during his time in the North. In S. Vilvaratnam’s poem “The Worship-Scar” (as
translated from the Tamil by A.J. Canagaratna), the speaker asks about the scar on the forehead
of a Muslim friend’s father and is told that it is a “worship-scar”—“calling for Allah/ he had
bowed until/ his native soil had scarred his bowed forehead” (Vilvaratnam in Selvadurai, 2014:
478; l.8-10). The speaker is overwhelmed with guilt because he has participated in the expulsion
of thousands of Muslims from their “native soil” in the North, an act of ethnic cleansing carried
out by the LTTE in 1990: “Their worship-scars seared/ the guilt-stricken scar of my conscience/
[…] When, but when, will my scar disappear?/ When will my crime/ violating the beauty of the
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------soil/ that is etched on their foreheads/ be expiated?” (Vilvaratnam in Selvadurai, 2014: 479; l.1624).
Some writers have connected what has happened in Sri Lanka to violence taking place in
other parts of the world at other times. Anne Ranasinghe has drawn parallels between the need to
remember what happened in the Holocaust and what has happened in Sri Lanka in order to
prevent such violence erupting again in poems such as “July 1983.” At a point when terrorist
violence has become a global concern, Aparna Halpé, in her poem “Of this November, Mumbai”
connects what happened during the terrorist attack in Mumbhai in 2008 with the bombings that
have occurred over the years in Colombo. Making these connections can perhaps make the local
global and preclude the possibility of sensationalizing particular places as inherent sites of
violence.
The Murder of Civil Society: Recent Literary Responses to Violence Against Journalists
and Dissidents
Following the end of the military conflict, writers have focused on the killing of activists
and journalists. The murder, in broad daylight, of Lasantha Wickrematunga—editor of The
Sunday Leader and fierce critic of the government—has been marked in Vivimarie
VanderPoorten’s poem “Death at Noon.” There have also been critiques of the government, the
lack of genuine attempts at reconciliation and increasing militarization. The ongoing trauma of
people displaced by violence and confined to camps as “IDPs” are also described. The ordeal of
a country coming to terms with nearly three decades of war and violence and finding ways to
cope are highlighted in Romesh Gunesekera’s Noon Tide Toll and Lal Medawattegedera’s
Playing Pillow Politics at MGK.
In Gunesekera’s novel, the protagonist, Vasantha, is the driver of a van for hire and he
plies his vehicle up and down the country. In the first section of the novel, he takes clients—
ranging from tourists eager to see locations exoticized by the war and diasporics attempting to
find their roots to representatives of foreign NGOs and international entrepreneurs interested in
investing in the country—to the North, while the second section focuses on his travels around
Galle and other areas in the south of the country. In his travels to the North, Vasantha encounters
former combatants—people who were in the Sri Lankan military or members of militant groups
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------such as the LTTE—who are attempting to reconcile themselves to the so-called peace. Many of
them have been left scarred—emotionally and physically—by acts of violence they have
perpetrated or witnessed. For example, Dilshan, a former soldier who is now a guide for tourists
coming to the North, tells Vasantha about how he had to execute a female Tiger cadre who was
suckling her baby; now he cannot look at his own mother without seeing the face of the woman
he killed (Gunesekera, 2014: 21-22). Vasantha also meets Miss Saraswati, the assistant manager
of the Spice Garden Inn in Kilinochchi, who believes that “it is better not to ask about the past”
(Gunesekera, 2014: 102). Though she is determined to conceal her past and tries to keep areas of
herself “cordoned off” (Gunesekera, 2014: 104), she is barely able to suppress feelings of loss or
guilt; Vasantha observes her methodical and unflinching killing of rodents, sees her callused and
discoloured trigger finger and her scarred neck, and suspects that she might have been a member
of the Tigers. Other soldiers that Vasantha encounters “want to go back to the job. To have
something to do, you know. […] Rest and recuperation is not what they want” (Gunesekera,
2014: 132). As Vasantha observes, “The war was over. But you could say it was an encounter
with the war within: guilt, which I am beginning to see riddles everything” (Gunesekera, 2014:
27). Along with the efforts of entrepreneurs to take advantage of the post-war situation and
embark on money-making endeavors, there are also attempts to bring perpetrators of war crimes
to justice. The question that the van driver wrestles with is “After all, people lose control, don’t
they, in times of war? The whole business is insane anyway, killing and maiming like there is no
tomorrow. How can you shoot someone in the head and call it duty? How can anyone be normal
after that?” (Gunesekera, 2014: 58). The issue at hand seems to be whether to allow witting or
unwitting participants in violence to forget the past, reinvent themselves and live their lives, or to
remember past atrocities in order to prevent their recurrence.
If Gunesekera’s novel deals with discrete individuals’ experiences and the memories and
guilt that accompany them, Medawattegedera’s highly-experimental novel attempts to probe the
psyche of the nation in the post-war period. In Playing Pillow Politics at MGK, a young boy with
disabilities named Deshan recounts the stories of a squatter community living on an isolated
mountain called Maha Geeni Kanda (the “MGK” of the title) whose struggles and victories are,
counterintuitively, parallel to those of Sri Lankans in general. Using fantasy and dark humour,
Medawattegedera critiques the violence in what is supposedly a post-war Sri Lanka and the
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------manipulations, exploitations, corruption, election fraud, surveillance, intimidation, silencing of
opposition, thuggery and politically-motivated murders that have become endemic in the
country. One of the main figures in the novel is Natami, who realizes that he can “read pillows”
and discover the thoughts and ideas of the individuals whose heads rested on those pillows—thus
literally making pillows talk. When news of Natami’s unusual talent spreads to people beyond
the mountain, he is pressured to focus his skill on reading the pillows of enemies of the
government. He sees a pattern—anyone who is critical of the government ends up dead,
beginning with the killing of the man he calls “Baba”—the editor of “The Pure Truth”
newspaper (undoubtedly a reference to the murder of Lasantha Wickrematunga), who “roused
Natami’s sleeping political animal. During their long chat in Natami’s hut, Baba lectured him on
how intelligence could be used to undermine political authority. Baba showed him the power of
political dialogue, the power of the written word, the power of resistive narration”
(Medawattegedera, 2013: 351). After Baba’s murder, Natami decides to seek revenge by
“reading pillows” in such a way that he can get thugs, masterminds behind politically-motivated
killings, and hired assassins themselves killed—by suggesting that they are on the verge of
betraying the powers that be who have employed them. The escalation of these killings means, as
Natami fully realizes, he himself has blood on his hands even if he tries to rationalize that those
he gets killed deserve to die.3
Indeed, what ties together the many literary representations of and protests against
violence in contemporary Sri Lankan literature is the way that so many texts expose complicity
in violence. Some works point toward the complicity in violence of elites within the community
that the writer does not belong to, some point towards the complicity of the author’s own
community, some point towards both, and some analyze the complicity of the international
community. Many of these texts also seek to witness, acknowledge, and mourn the effects of
violence, and many also seek to imagine a way beyond the impasses that the authors see at the
time of writing. Despite hopeful signals in the news recently about Sri Lanka that impunity may
be challenged and that reconciliation may be pursued with increasing vigor, the aspirations
toward a just and lasting peace that so many of these texts express remain to be realized. Six
years after the end of the military conflict, with so many uncertainties still hanging over the
3
For a fuller discussion of Gunasekera and Medawattegedera, see Jayasuriya, 2015.
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------nation, imagining a path toward peace and reconciliation remains essential. The task that Sri
Lanka’s writers of fiction and poetry have taken on in recording and responding to violence
continues.
WORKS CITED
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ARASANAYAGAM, JEAN (2002). “Exodus.” The Dividing Line, New Delhi: Indialog: 123-40.
ARASANAYAGAM, JEAN (1995). “I Am an Innocent Man.” All Is Burning, New Delhi: Penguin:
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Sarasavi. 52-61.
GANESHANANTHAN, V.V. (2008). Love Marriage. New York: Random House.
GUNESEKERA, ROMESH (2014). Noontide Toll. New Delhi: Penguin India.
HALPÉ, APARNA (2013). “Of this November, Mumbai.” Precarious: Poems. Colombo, Sri
Lanka: Bay Owl: 20-24.
207
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ISMAIL, QADRI (2005). Abiding by Sri Lanka: On Peace, Place, and Postcoloniality.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
JAYASURIYA, MARYSE (2015). “Amnesia, Hallucinations and Fantasy: Narrating Sri Lanka’s
Post-War Conflict in Romesh Gunesekera’s Noontide Toll and Lal Medawattegedera’s
Playing Pillow Politics at the MGK.” Phoenix XII, 89-100.
JAYASURIYA, MARYSE (2013). “Exploding Myths: Representing the Female Suicide Bomber in
the Sri Lankan Context in Literature and Film.” Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and
Societies 4:1, 233-257.
JAYASURIYA, MARYSE (2012). Terror and Reconciliation: Sri Lankan Anglophone Literature,
1983-2009. Lanham: Lexington Books.
KARUNATILAKA, SHEHAN (2011). Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew. New Delhi:
Random House India.
MEDAWATTEGEDERA, LAL (2013). Playing Pillow Politics at MGK. Colombo: Akna.
MEDAWATTEGEDERA, LAL (2008). “The Last War.” Can You Hear Me Running. Colombo, Sri
Lanka: Zeus: 78-83.
MULLER, CARL (1995). Colombo: A Novel. New Delhi: Penguin Books India.
MUNAWEERA, NAYOMI (2012). Island of a Thousand Mirrors. Colomob, Sri Lanka: Perera
Hussein.
NUHMAN, M.A. (2014). “Murder.” Many Roads through Paradise: An Anthology of Sri Lankan
Literature. Ed. Shyam Selvadurai. London: Penguin: 448-49.
ONDAATJE, MICHAEL (2000). Anil’s Ghost. New York: Knopf.
RANASINGHE, ANNE (1991). “July 1983.” At What Dark Point. Orugodawatte, Sri Lanka:
English Writers’ Cooperative of Sri Lanka: 171.
ROBERTS, KAREN (2001). July. London: Phoenix.
SALGADO, MINOLI (2007). Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance, and the Politics of Place.
London: Routledge.
SELVADURAI, SHYAM (1994). Funny Boy. San Diego: Harcourt Brace.
SUMATHY, SIVAMOHAN (2008). “To the Memory of the Three-Wheeler Driver Purportedly Shot
Dead by the LTTE for Being Familiar with the Police.” Like Myth and Mother: A
Political Autobiography in Poetry and Prose. Colombo, Sri Lanka: Sirahununi: 44-49.
208
MARYSE JAYASURIYA
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------VANDERPOORTEN, VIVIMARIE (2010). “Death at Noon.” Stitch Your Eyelids Shut. Colombo,
Sri Lanka: Akna: 38-39.
VILVARATNAM, S. (2014).
“The Worship-Scar.” Many Roads through Paradise: An
Anthology of Sri Lankan Literature. Ed. Shyam Selvadurai. London: Penguin: 478-79.
WEERASINGHE, AMILA (2001). “Suicide Bomber.” Anne Ranasinghe, ed. Channels: A
Compendium of Creative Writing 1989-2001. Colombo, Sri Lanka: English Writers’
Cooperative of Sri Lanka: 63.
WIJENAIKE, PUNYAKANTE (1998). An Enemy Within. Colombo, Sri Lanka: Sarvodaya Vishva
Lekha.
WIJERATNE, KAMALA (1994). “White Saree.” White Saree and Other Poems. Alawatugoda, Sri
Lanka: Malinda: 7-8.
MARYSE JAYASURIYA is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of
Texas at El Paso. She received her Ph.D. from Purdue University. She is the author of Terror
and Reconciliation: Sri Lankan Anglophone Literature, 1983-2009 (Lexington, 2012), which
explores the English language literature that has emerged from Sri Lanka’s quarter-century long
ethnic conflict. She has published articles on South Asian and Asian-American literature in such
venues as South Asian Review, Journeys, Margins, and The Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and
Societies. She co-edited a Special Issue of South Asian Review (33.3) entitled Sri Lankan
Anglophone Literature.
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Indi@logs
Vol 3 2016, pp. 211-228, ISSN: 2339-8523
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------POETRY AFTER LIBRICIDE AND GENOCIDE
University of Windsor, Ontario
[email protected]
Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings
- Heinrich Heine1
1.The Second Sunrise and the Poetics of Libricide
Thirty years ago, after witnessing the burning of Jaffna town and its reputed public
library by the Sri Lankan security forces, I wrote a poem titled irandaavathu sooriya
uthayam (“The Second Sunrise”).2 The title was an obvious reference to the libricide 3
committed by the Sri Lankan state forces. It was also the title of my first anthology of
poems. I was an undergraduate student at the university of Jaffna and active in student
politics then. A group of my friends and I were staying at the fifth floor of the
Balasingham Hostel for men located a short distance from the main buildings of the
university. It was sunset and we could see heavy smoke billowing from the direction of
Jaffna town centre. Initially, we had no idea of what was burning. Then the story spread
1
Almansor: A Tragedy (1823), as translated in True Religion (2003) by Ward, 2003:142.
English translation of the poem appears in, You Cannot Turn Away, Poems by Cheran, translated and
edited by Chelva Kanaganayakam. Toronto: TSAR Publishers, 2011 and The Second Sunrise Cheran’s
Poems, translated and edited by Lakshmi Holmström and Sascha Ebeling, New Delhi: Navayana, 2012.
3
Rebecca Knuth’s book, Libricide: The Regime Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the
Twentieth Century (Praeger: 2003) uses the term to describe ideologically driven and systemic destruction
of books and libraries that paralleled acts of genocide in the 20th century.
2
POETRY AFTER LIBRICIDE AND GENOCIDE
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------like another fire: the entire Jaffna town including the library and the offices of the Tamil
daily Eelanadu had been set on fire. We rushed to the town but could not make much
headway because of the presence of state security forces. By the time we managed to
reach the library, in the morning, the burning was complete. The historic edifice with
97,000 books, invaluable old manuscripts and archival material was in ashes. Father
David, a polyglot, an ardent lover of the Jaffna public library and a great man of letters
saw the burning of the library from the second floor of the Jaffna Bishop’s House and
died of a heart attack. We saw hundreds and hundreds of people walking toward the
library from all directions in shock. Sri Lankan security forces that were brought
specifically for the “assignment” from southern Sri Lanka were stationed next to the
library in the Thuraiappah stadium. Several of them were standing on the pavilion seats
and taunted us:
“Oh poor souls, don’t cry, don’t’ cry! All is gone? Right?”
Then they stared laughing at the people and began dancing to the tune of Baila-a popular
Sinhala music of Portuguese origins. I had no inkling that celebrating the destruction of a
cultural icon then was a harbinger of events to come in the next thirty years.
I vividly remember that day. We were helpless and angry. Thousands of us were
mourning the deliberate destruction of a cultural symbol and the repository of knowledge
while the very forces responsible for the carnage were celebrating our tears and sorrow.
The air was filled with lament and curses. I recall seeing a middle aged woman throwing
a handful of sand at the state forces and cursing them loudly.
I had been very attached to the library for a long time. When I was a child, my father, a
senior Sri Lankan government civil servant, would drop me off at the library’s children
section every Saturday morning. As the District Land Officer (DLO) in the government
secretariat he always worked on Saturdays. He would pick me up later in the afternoon.
Since I was an avid reader, I thoroughly enjoyed the time there and the library became
212
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------my second home. After I grew up I discovered the library auditorium as the place for
writers, journalists and poets to gather for book launches and literary meetings. I still
remember the fight I had with the library authorities in the mid seventies. People who did
not live within the municipal limits of Jaffna were not allowed to borrow books. As I was
from a village ten miles from the Jaffna town I was ineligible to borrow books and I
protested. Eventually, a compromise was reached and I gave them the address of one of
my relatives who lived in the town area and became a member. I kept my library card
until we were forced to leave our home by the army in 1992 and the subsequent
occupation of our village and hundreds of others.
The burning of the library, hundreds of shops, the Eelanadu daily newspaper’s office and
press, and the office of the Tamils United Liberation Front (TULF) was perhaps the
public, political, cultural and violent articulation of difference by the State. In two other
symbolic acts of violence, the forces had broken the statues of great Tamil poets
Thiruvalluvar and Avvaiyar in the Jaffna town on the same night. Whether the forces
knew the importance of the statues was not clear. However, the statues might have been
perceived as culturally important for the “Other” and therefore breaking them up was a
necessary violent act of re-inscribing the differences. The other act was the demolition of
the memorial for the 11 people killed in the final day of the International Tamil Research
Conference held in Jaffna in 1974. Commemorating and celebrating our “own” while
destroying and eliminating the “other” is a pervasive logic of genocide that was
frequently deployed by the state.4
In addition to the political and cultural significance these were also acts of revenge and
retaliation to the killing of two policemen at an election rally by Tamil militants. It was
4
Anthropologist Michael Roberts, in his essay (Nethra,1993) on the July 1983 pogrom against Tamils,
“Agony and Ecstasy” describes the celebratory attitude of the Sinhala goons that were killing Tamils. On
December 3, 1984, as a journalist working for the Jaffna-based English language weekly Saturday Review,
I interviewed several survivors of a massacre at Othiyamalai in the Vanni. 32 men were massacred by the
Sri Lankan army. The survivors described how after killing the victims one by one the army loaded the
bodies on to tractors and sped off while singing and dancing. After the war, the security forces have
systematically erased all the monuments and cemeteries called maaveerar illam (Great Heroes Cemetery)
constructed by the Tigers in the North and East while building numerous monuments to commemorate the
fallen Sinhala soldiers. The people in the North and East are not even permitted to remember and
commemorate their dead.
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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------widely reported that two senior ministers of the then United National Party (UNP)
government, Gamini Dissanayake and Cyril Mathew were present in Jaffna when the city
was burned.
We returned to the Jaffna University students’ council room after spending several hours
in the Jaffna town. An emergency council meeting ensued. For the whole of next week
hundreds of us did not attend classes – opting instead to travel village by village with the
message that the time for our national liberation struggle had come. Eelanadu was the
only Tamil daily newspaper published in Jaffna at that time. Since its office had been
burnt down, there was no longer any reliable media in town. We decided to publish a
newspaper in Tamil and English until Eelanadu could resume publication. No printer in
the town was prepared to print our newspaper so we had to rely on old cyclostyle
machines to issue our newspaper, Jaffna on Fire out. This was formative experience in
political journalism and reporting from a war zone. Several of my friends, fellow students
and youths from various parts of the Jaffna peninsula and the East were involved in these
activities. Later, several of them became leaders of various Tamil militant groups. It was
this moment that catalyzed the nascent Tamil militancy. Most of this group are now dead
– killed by state forces in the ensuing war – or targeted in internecine warfare; some of
them “disappeared”; a few still live in exile; a handful engaged in the “democratic”
mainstream in Sri Lanka. And, I, sitting far from where I was born, lament my inability to
name all of them now.
2.The Apocalypse and After
2011 marks the release of my eighth collection of poems, kaadaatru (Healing the
Forest).5 The poems were written mostly during the last stages of the war that ended in
May 2009 with the military defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), once
considered by all as an invincible military force. The English translation of Healing the
5
Nagercoil: Kalachuvadu publications, 2012. Some of the poems in this collections are translated into
English and included in Kanaganayakam (2011) and Holmström and Ebeling (2012).
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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Forest does not capture the depth, imagery and ritual undertones of the Tamil title.
That’s inherent in many a translation and I have no qualms about it.
One of my poems in an earlier collection written in 1999 was “Uuzhi” (Apocalypse). I
wasn’t expecting an apocalypse, nor had I any premonition of the events of May 2009.
Strangely, the images I evoked in “Uuzhi” became a haunting reality. Perhaps, I wanted
to write that poem before the Apocalypse, since writing poetry after apocalypse or mass
slaughter may not be possible or could be considered barbaric.
But is it?
It is true that Adorno alluded to this when he suggested, “The critique of culture is
confronted with the last stage in the dialectic of culture and barbarism: to write a poem
after Auschwitz is barbaric, and that corrodes also the knowledge which expresses why it
has become impossible to write poetry today” (Adorno.et.al. 1981:34).
However, he didn’t maintain that conviction for long - as evident in his subsequent
observation that:
[p]erennial suffering has as much right to express itself as the tortured has the right to
scream. Therefore, it may have been wrong to say that no poem could be written after
Auschwitz. But what is not wrong is the less cultural question if after Auschwitz one can
still live... (Adorno, 1973: 363).
Kaadaatru poems were partly provoked by the horrible slaughter of thousands of Tamils
in May 2009 and partly the continuation of the poetic strand left hanging in poems such
as “Uuzhi” because:
215
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------When people die
To shroud in silence
To withdraw in silence
is not for the poet6
In that spirit it could be argued that poetry after apocalypse may be a way to
simultaneously transmit and mourn the trauma and unimaginable suffering. The trauma
and suffering become even more poignant - amplified and sustained as the perpetrators
and the state celebrate our apocalypse as their “victory over terrorism” with ordinary
people enthusiastically joining the celebrations.
Kaadaatru is a death ritual performed on the third day after cremation and involves
gathering the ashes and bones of the dead. Performing kaadaatru is the beginning of
closure. However, the poem sketches the haunting inability to perform kaadaatru and
therefore, the impossibility of achieving closure.
Death and numbers have a strange interplay in the Sri Lankan context. For two years the
government of Sri Lanka maintained there were no civilian casualties. Initially, the UN
did not want to publish casualty figures although it had the information. As the
spokesperson for the UN Secretary General said at a press conference, the UN “was
trying to save people, not count bodies” (Weiss, 2011: 198). According to Louise Arbour,
the former UN Human Rights Commissioner and the current chair of the International
Crisis Group (ICG), “the UN withheld information that would have forcefully alerted the
world on the impact of civilians of the last chapter of the war” (ibid: 251). Hopefully the
reason for this will be explained in the report commissioned by the UN itself to look into
its activities in the last stages of war in Sri Lanka.
6
See “The Last Word” in You Cannot Turn Away.
216
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The UN experts’ panel report issued two years after the end of the war estimates that
more than 40,000 civilians were killed in the last stages of the war. However, in a
submission to the Sri Lankan government appointed “Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation
Commission”, the Rt. Rev. Dr. Rayappu Joseph, Catholic Bishop of Mannar, has asked
for clarification about the fate of 146,729 people who were unaccounted for between
October 2008 and May 2009, based on government statistics and documentary evidence.
It may not be that all 146,729 were killed. Many may have escaped. But how do we
know? Where’s the accountability?
In 2008 the World Food Programme and the government of Sri Lanka had agreed that
350,000 people were living in the war zones. Subsequently, the government began
lowering the numbers and in the final phases of the war the government had maintained
that only 70,000 people were left in the region, the number parroted by the government
media and the Indian minister for Foreign Affairs.7 As the UN Expert Panel confirms, the
deliberate whittling down of people is to cut down the supply of food and medications to
the war zone.
After the war ended, people streamed out of the war zones and more than 300,000 Tamils
were interned behind barbed wires and in open spaces giving lie to the “official”
government numbers. The photographs of men, women and children behind those barbed
wires are chilling evocations of various other internment camps that sprung up in the
midst of atrocities over the past century.
The UN Genocide Convention of 1948 defines genocide narrowly and insists upon a very
high number of casualties before the mass slaughter of civilians can be classified as
genocide in international law.8 Genocide is a complex social, political and cultural
7
For a detailed explanation of these numbers see Weiss, 2011:178-179; The Government of Jaffna, Ms.
Imelda Sugumar testified at the government appointed Lessons Learnt and reconciliation Commission
(LLRC) on November 4, 2010 that there were 360,000 people in the war zones.
8
The Genocide Convention defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to
destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of
the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting
on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d)
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;(e) Forcibly transferring children of the
group to another group”
217
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------phenomenon that should not be measured by a single set of criteria. However,
anthropologically and sociologically speaking what happened on the banks of
Nandhikkadal and in the war zones of Vanni in Sri Lanka was clearly genocide; in fact,
genocide foretold.9
In my view, what transpired in the areas of Nandhikkadal and Mullivaikaal constituted
the first genocide of the twenty-first century. This was preceded by numerous genocidal
massacres of Tamils in Sri Lanka. As a professional journalist between 1984-1987, I
visited the sites of these massacres and reported on several massacres by the Sri Lankan
army, navy and air force for the Saturday Review Newspaper in Jaffna.
On a personal note, I lost more than eighty of my friends and relatives in that genocide.
Dozens of my relatives and friends were interned. Many of them have not been able to
return to their homes and villages.
The international community -whatever that means in the current context – along with the
government of Sri Lanka and mainstream media – have readily accepted that “closure”
has taken place and the most important task at hand is development and “reconciliation”.
However, Tamil literary voices that have emerged from the ashes steadfastly refuse to be
coerced in the official paradigm of closure, reconciliation and economic development.
Numerous collections of poetry and several testimonies of survivors published in Tamil
attest to this.10 Poetry now has become a vibrant expression and archive for the Tamil
experience of genocide. The title, Mullivaaikkalukku-pin (Post-Mullivaaikkal/Poetry after
Mullivaikkal) itself is an implicit response to Adorno’s earlier statement. A powerful
collection of poems by Packiyanathan Ahilan is entitled, Saramakavikal (Poetry of Death
and Mourning). In the afterword of the collection the poet says:
9
For a detailed analysis of the anthropology of genocide, see, Alexander Laban Hinton (ed). Annihilating
Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide. Berkeley: UCLA Press, 2002. At least one UN official, John
Holmes, Humanitarian Affairs Chief of the UN warned in April 2009 that a bloodbath was imminent
(quoted in Weiss, 2011:188)
10
For instance see the following collections of post May 2009 or post Mullivaaikkaal poetry: P. Akilan,
Saramakavikal (Poetry of Death and Mourning), Jaffna: 2011; P. Sujanthan, Nilam pirinthavanin kavitha
(Poem of a person who was forced from his land); Kutti Revathi (ed).Mullivaaykkaalin pin (Poetry After
Mullivaaykkaal), Chennai: Aazhi Publishers, 2010; and A.M.Rashmy, Ee than peyarai marantha pothu
((Fly has forgotton its name), Nagerkoil: kalachuvadu pathippakam, 2011.
218
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A million traumatized minds live in my poetry. Individually and as cumulative heart beat
of a population, these poems are entrenched in our collective consciousness… it is
impossible to find even a single poem not drenched in blood…these poems have been
constantly tossed around by loss, tears and unceasing sorrow (Ahilan, 2011: 49).
In a series of poems entitled Hospital Notes: Vavuniya and Trincomalee, March 2009,
Ahilan “records” and “registers” the combined space of mortuary and surgical room in
chilling detail:
Corpse Number 183 and Life Number 2
Lifeless
Blood is your saree.
Hanging from the vagina
An infant dangles on the placenta
We cut and slap
It cried.
I wrote on the register:
Corpse Number 183
Life number 2.
A different kind of “closure” is taking place now. That is enclosure, encampment and
occupation. The number of military camps and check-points in the North and East are
increasing even after the end of the war. According to the military’s own statistics, in
Jaffna, there are more than 35,000 troops for an estimated 626,329 people, an average of
one military personnel for every 18 civilians.11 The government has declared 147 army
camps in the Tamil areas as permanent. In addition, large swathes of lands in Tamil
11
See http://www.cimicjaffna.com/Population.php
219
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------majority areas have been converted into High Security Zones (HSZ). These zones are
prohibited areas for Tamils. In 2010, the Jaffna peninsula alone had fifteen HSZ. Military
officials control day-to-day affairs.12 Sinhalese villagers from southern Sri Lanka are
being settled in the North and East with the assistance of the security forces – irrevocably
altering the patterns of demography in the Tamil areas. The names of Tamil villages are
being Sinhalicised and new Buddhist temples are under construction in the Tamil areas.
Freedom of expression is routinely trampled upon. The military effectively rules the
North and East even without martial law. These are the facts on the ground – all of which
are taking place in the name of post war reconciliation and development. The history of
occupation from other parts of the world tells us these are naked acts of occupation.
3. Poems of Genocide
One of the critical questions posed to me at the various writers’ festivals I have attended
over the past few years concerns how I ‘reconcile’ or negotiate my poetry and social
sciences. To the surprise of many, I often say that there’s no need for “reconciliation” or
for complex negotiation.
Are they two irreconcilable domains? Am I conflicted between the two? Although my
“application for tenure and promotion” file did not contain a single reference to my
poetry or plays, the common thread that runs through various social sciences, humanities
and poetry is imagination. After all, the sociological classic by Wright Mills is entitled
Sociological Imagination! (Mills,1959)
I believe there’s a certain degree of interdependency of poetic, literary, anthropological
and sociological imagery. This interdependency is what Ivan Brady (1993) calls the
“artful science”. The beautiful part of this interdependency is the “in-exactitude” of the
interdependent relations. Poetics in this sense is not just a study of literature or poetry but
a field and space that extends its cursive tentacles into anthropology and sociology as a
way of expanding our understanding and perception of the human condition.
12
For a well documented report on the militarization of the North and East see:
http://groundviews.org/2011/11/19/post-war-situation-in-northern-sri-lanka-prospects-for-reconciliation/
220
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------What takes place when I simultaneously engage in poetry and sociology is, to use a
military and occupational metaphor, a kind of “mutual encroachment”.
The four poems I offer in English translation chart the trajectory of Occupation,
Obliteration and Oppression from 1981-2011. Through these and countless other poems
that were written by various other poets in various places of occupation, I invite you to a
deeper and profound understanding of genocide, occupation and internment.
While I am comfortable writing plays, and creative non-fiction in English, for reasons
unknown to me I always find it impossible to translate my own poetry.
“The Second Sunrise” and “Healing the Forest” were translated by Chelva
Kanaganayakam. “Apocalypse” and “Cousin” were translated by Lakshmi Holmstrom.
The Second Sunrise
On that day
There was no wind
No rising tide,
Even the waves had died.
Sea.
Walking across
Feet sinking in the sand
Again a sunrise.
This time in the South.
What happened?
My town was burned;
My people became faceless;
In my land, my air
In everything,
221
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The stamp of outsiders.
Hands clasped behind you,
Who did you wait for?
On the clouds
Fire
Has written its tale;
Who waits even now?
From the ashen streets,
Arise and march.
(1981)
Apocalypse
In our own time we have seen
the Apocalypse. The earth
trembled to the dance of the dead;
bodies burst apart in the wild storm;
darkness shrieked as everything caught fire
inside and out.
The last flood dragged out children and men
and threw them on the flames.
We died in an untimely hour.
Glancing sidelong with our dying eyes
at the helplessness
of those who surrounded us, watching,
we smouldered and smouldered
then rose up in a cloud. of smoke
222
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Kafka was denied the chance
to set fire to his works.
But Sivaramani burnt hers.
Poetry is destroyed in mid-air.
What others write now
refuses to live.
We have all gone away;
there is no one to tell our story.
Now there is left
only a great land
wounded.
No bird may fly above it
until our return.
(1999)
Cousin
When my cousin speaks
of enduring six displacements
within nine years
the wrinkles gather and droop
along her face.
The single electric light above
merely deepens the darkness.
A sense of loss prevails
always
223
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------like a lamp keeping vigil
at a dead man’s head.
Her words are not punctuated
by sobs; they are taut
with sorrow.
Stirred by old memories
of providing shelter, so often,
to those who escaped the patrolling guards
and travelled secretly, by night,
she glances towards the threshold
from time to time.
She leaves her backdoor open.
When her children, grown up now,
smile at her, in an instant
the legendary milk-ocean materialises.
Her house was on the road
which stretched all the way to the sea
from the front of the temple.
Not a sign of it now.
We went to take a look, in the morning,
accompanied by soldiers
into the high security zone.
Not even a single parrot left
nesting in the holes of palmyra palms
224
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------which still stand upright
although their crowns are shorn.
Upon ripped and fragmented land,
men who hold no attachment to it
nor kinship,
squat, holding weapons.
We return through the ruins,
the south wind that sprang up yesterday
scattering the dust ahead of us,
the heat burning us up with fury.
Only headless shadows follow us.
We whose hearts were moved with love
not only for humankind
but also for plants and trees and houses
endure in our times
only the scourge of human arrogance.
(2004)
Healing the Forest
To heal a still
smoldering land,
we went;
no bird in sight.
An empty sky
225
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------above the sparrow-flying
earth.
An ash-covered landless earth
to the edge of that wide expanse;
here, no one knows
how to gather bones.
Yet,
Our libation of milk
the relentless
welling of tears
now mocked with glee
with dance and song
by an estranged foe;
what then is the
way ahead?
To cool the burning heart
there is nothing today.
No witness
for the drop of blood
still not dry.
To claim closure
to dissolve ashes in the sea
226
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------to scatter in the air
to close one’s eyes,
there is no air
there is no sea
there is no way
to heal the forest.
(2009)
WORKS CITED
ADORNO, THEODOR, SHIERRY W. NICHOLSEN & SAMUEL WEBER (1981). Prisms.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
ADORNO, THEODOR (1973). Negative Dialectics [Negative Dialektik.] Translated by E.
B. Ashton. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
AHILAN, P. ( 2010). Saramakavikal. Jaffna, Sri Lanka: Published by the author.
C IVIL M ILITARY COORDINATION IN JAFFNA. “Population Density.” Civil Military
Coordination in Jaffna. (http://www.cimicjaffna.com/Population.php).
GROUNDVIEWS. “Post-war situation in Northern Sri Lanka and Prospects for
Reconciliation.”
(http://groundviews.org/2011/11/19/post-war-situation-in-northern-sri-lankaprospects-for-reconciliation/)
HILTON, ALEXANDER (2002). Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
KNUTH, REBECCA (2003). Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and
Libraries in the Twentieth Century. Westport, CT: Praeger.
MAITHRI, MALATHI, KUTTI REVATI & LAKSHMI HOLMSTRÖM (2012). Wild Girls, Wicked
Words: Poems of Malathi Maithri, Salma, Kutti Revathi and Sukirtharani.
Bangalore: Sangam House and Kalachuvadu Publications, Nagercoil.
M ILLS, WRIGHT, C. (1959). The Sociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ROBERTS, M ICHAEL (1996). Exploring Confrontations: Sri Lanka: Politics, History and
Culture. Amsterdam: Hardwood Academic (Medical, Reference and Social
Sciences).
RUDRAMOORTHY, CHERAN & CHELVA KANAGANAYAKAM (2011). You Cannot Turn
Away: Poems in Tamil. Toronto: TSAR Publications.
UN OFFICE OF THE HIGH COMMISSIONER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS. “Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” UN Office of the High
Commissioner for Human Rights
(http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CrimeOfGenocide.aspx)
WARD, GRAHAM (2003). True Religion. Oxford: Blackwell Publications.
WEISS, GORDON (2011). The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the
Tamil Tigers. London: Bodley Head.
CHERAN RUDHRAMOORTHY was born in Alaveddy in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, and began
writing poetry at an early age. His two early collections Irandaavathu suriya
uthayam (The second sunrise) (1982) and Yaman (God of Death) (1984), together with an
anthology of Tamil resistance poems, Maranatthul vaalvom (Amidst death, we live)
which he edited in 1985, are all landmarks in contemporary Tamil poetry. Since then he
has published several acclaimed poetry collections. He is currently a professor in the
Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Windsor, Canada.
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-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------READING LESSON
SUVENDRINI KANAGASABAI PERERA
Curtin University, Australia
[email protected]
Some girls on a beach.
Warm, sweet, water laps their thighs.
Peals of laughter frozen in the photographic moment; shrieks shrill as the sourest pangs
someday to pierce these hearts.
Over the horizon life and ‘O’ levels await.
The camera makes a moment out of time, but by no means timeless. You can tell by the
hemlines we’re somewhere in the mini-skirted, psychedelic seventies (fashions arrive
belatedly in these parts).
And the place? Now the clues are fewer. An island nation, aren’t we, warm sea and palm
trees everywhere? Beaches are our thing. Though not as much, believe me, as they are going
to be. No giant coaches, nor pale, sagging flesh in evidence, yet. (What’s that phrase:
Thailand for girls, Sri Lanka for…
Stop it, please. Just stop there. We’ve established that it’s not that time. Yet.)
But the place? A beach, yes, but where?
Knowing your fashions can take you only so far. There’s no help to be got, for instance, by
eyeing those roll-neck collars and elbow-long sleeves. That’s what we wore then, regardless
of heat and humidity, no questions asked. (An image stored irrevocably in the memory, to
surface, against the odds, just here, just now: P--- P---, father returned last week from
London, in ivory mini dress and peacock-blue nylon tights, sweatily resplendent at the CMS
fair.)
READING LESSON
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Quit stalling. The place?
Give up? This is Miss Ratnanayagam’s fifth form on the annual excursion to Jaffna.
Immediately the beach demands another look.
The image remains the same, almost. Some girls. A beach. But an island nation? Not quite,
not even then, though bicycle murders and gun battles were (like tourist coaches) still around
the corner. But surely there is some knowledge in the air, some intimation? Soon, very soon,
the brother of one of the girls outside the photo’s frame will be arrested for a bank robbery,
will flee to India, will return clandestinely to fight, and soon after that, by all accounts, to die.
But it’s part of the story, too, that this girl is not in the photo. What she could tell about this
place, this beach, that shining afternoon, would alter the picture irrevocably. If she were in it,
this would be another photo. It would not be in my album, would not be being contemplated
by me, in Sydney, in the centenary year of our (though more mine than hers) old school.
So – no intimation? No unspoken knowledge?
Girls: names to thread on a many-coloured necklace: Muthulakshmi, Kamalini, Shyami,
Prabha, Vanusha. Juliana. From these names alone, or the tangle of limbs, hair and miniskirts
in the photo, you can’t always tell who is what. One day this was, and will be again,
incredibly important, literally a matter of life or death. But not quite now. Not yet. Though
there are hints and portents. There are whispers abroad that those girls are not mixing enough.
Even Miss R, ever faithful to her role, admonishes: you lot are sticking together like the
seven sisters.
If truth be told, and pictorial evidence to the contrary, in Jaffna I am a fish out of water. Or, to
switch metaphors, I’m not a fish at all, but I am no fowl either. Jaffna is a place I know in
broken webs of story that do not hold together. First, my mother’s world of well baths and
baroque family trees, where first-bed and second-bed interweave with serial intermarriages
in fantastic combinations. Then there’s the easily recognizable, partly buffoonish, partly
sinister, figure who Comes From Jaffna, a character to disown at any price. Beyond these is
an unknown Jaffna, whose inflections are irretrievably foreign, unintelligible. The tiny
“Tamil Stream” in our class excursion cannot but approach Jaffna with ambivalence: it is
ours and not ours, a place we recognize and deny. In Australia now there’s a term for it: the
cultural cringe. Against the presumed sophistication of Colombo, Jaffna plays the role of the
provincial, the hidebound and (dare I say it?) the colonial.
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-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------(Remember that morning in the back garden? You don’t look like a Tamil girl.)
Some day I might run into her at the airport, in Rome, or perhaps in some obscure North
American college town, teaching (what else?) postcolonial literature. Maybe she’s an affluent
matron in Singapore, looking for a visa to the West before her son turns eighteen? A nurse in
Qatar? One day will I see her in the pages of Machang or Hello magazine, grand proprietor
of a private island adored by film stars and presidents? Then there are the girls I have no
likelihood of ever meeting again, those girls outside the frame of the photo, though her
everyday life, or hers, may not be so different from mine, in Sydney or Helsinki, Toronto or
Chennai. But we live in different diasporas. If we chance to glimpse each other across the
aisles of an Indo-Fijian supermarket in Homebush, our glances will quickly diverge, in
indifference or distaste, fear or recognition. There is nothing, there is too much, to say: it
comes to the same thing.
Girls frolic on a beach. Tomorrow two of us (I remember clearly which two, but I’m not
telling) will be told to let down our hemlines. This is Jaffna, after all, and tomorrow we visit
St John’s, Chundukuli, our sister school in the Anglican order of things (though St John’s and
Chundukuli, in fact, are far older than the upstart Ladies’ College, who only now is
approaching the dignity of three figures). Except for one more visit five years later, for the
burial of my grandmother’s ashes, transported from Colombo, in the church yard of St
John’s, I will not see this landscape again.
My grandfather, a peoples’ warden of this Church for twenty-five years, and my young uncle
flank Amamma. They died together, father and son, in an epidemic. Enteric, an antiquated
name for typhoid, stamps them with a Victorian distance. Various other relatives, maternal
and paternal, are arranged around. If I can claim roots in any place, this must be it. But
strange how my memory of this final visit, even with the knowledge I have now, remains less
vivid than the schoolgirl junket.
On the night before Amamma’s memorial service we stayed in the same precinct, but at the
Principal’s residence at St John’s, my cousin Anandarajah’s house. In a few more years he
too will die, murdered, incredible to contemplate, in the ola-fenced streets of this ancestral
town. And even more preposterous the reason for his killing. He dies, as far as we can tell, for
having the temerity to arrange a cricket match between the Sri Lankan army and St John’s
College boys. This improbable reason for his death is the reason that his story too is part of
the photo, cannot be left out of it. Like cricket, Miss Ratnanayagam’s fifth form excursion to
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READING LESSON
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Jaffna tells something about the old school and what it asked us to believe about ourselves
and about the world.
In our family album this photo, of girls on a beach somewhere in Jaffna, mirrors another one
taken almost a decade earlier when my cousin, a young housemaster then, brought a group
from St John’s to breakfast at our house. They are on their way to Adam’s Peak, a final rite of
passage as they step outside the world of school in Jaffna. Here I am at six or seven, finger in
astonished mouth, wondering, perhaps, to find myself in a family group with a crowd of
sixth-form boys. They sport a variety of styles, got up to face the unknown up-country. The
rush in their almost grown-up voices, the imagined beat of the drum one holds as another
reaches to play it, provide the unheard soundtrack.
This photo must have its counterparts in scores of family albums in transplanted households
in Sydney and Helsinki, London and Toronto. Perhaps they went up in flames in Colombo in
1983 or floated away in the serial evacuations of Jaffna. Or were some simply ripped apart in
anguished protest against a future so divergent from its early promises?
Can the failures and aspirations of photos like these be acknowledged in the official stories of
my school and others? I am asking too much, I know; reading too much into Miss
Ratnanayagam’s yearly trip to introduce the fifth form to Jaffna. But the photos are material
evidence of a set of beliefs, misplaced, misguided (shall we call them delusions?) about
ourselves: who we were, where we belonged, about our making as future citizens and
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-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------subjects of our island nation -- yes, I know, we’ve done that bit already, but was there a
moment when you could say our island nation and mean it? Isn’t that what these islandencircling travels were about? Or is Miss Ratnanayagam’s annual excursion to Jaffna already
the evidence of the failure of that grand fiction, the island nation?
It is Saturday afternoon in my photo. Early on Sunday morning R---- H------’s grandparents
will arrive to visit us in our dorm at Chundukuli. A cream cracker tin packed with milk
toffees, which we all share around. And other things too.
For three days now, in a spectacular act of disavowal, I have refused to drink the water that
tastes like tears. Stubbornly I have kept going on Vimto and Orange Barley. Perhaps this
accounts for my heightened, feverish memories of the final day and night: cigarettes, rumours
of forbidden thrills and cuddles? Did two of us really walk into a shop and walk out again
with a ring we didn’t pay for? Was it her and her, those entwined shapes in the darkness of
the dorm room? And, am I certain I hear, or do I imagine, as the Yaal Devi rattles its way
back into Fort Station, beneath the rattle of the rails, under the raunchy singing in three
languages, an imperceptible vibration, grating, incessant, like the hiss of an untuned radio,
like an exhalation of some unspeakable emotion: the frequency of fear?
Some girls frolic on a beach.
Over the horizon life lies in wait.
Peals of sweet laughter frozen in the photographic moment; shrieks shrill as the sharpest
pains some day to pierce these hearts.
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READING LESSON
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Born in Sri Lanka, SUVENDRINI KANAGASABAI PERERA completed her PhD at Columbia
University, New York, and now lives in the port city of Fremantle, Australia. She is Research
Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Media Culture & Creative Arts and Deputy
Director of the Australia-Asia-Pacific Institute at Curtin University. Perera is the
author/editor of six books, including Australia and the Insular Imagination: Beaches,
Borders, Boats and Bodies (2009). Her research interests include histories of coexistence,
state violence, and diaspora cultural studies. She is working on a book on trophy war images
titled Old Atrocities, New Media
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------AT SUNSET
APARNA HALPÉ
Centennial College, Toronto
[email protected]
There is a particular time in the afternoon, when the breeze picks up over the lake, and the sun begins
its madcap, dappled water-dance. Usually, by this time, you've clambered out, seesawing over slimy
rocks; usually, by this time, you're just sunning yourself like an ancient carbuncled turtle. Your lover
shifts and sighs into the rock, drifting into languorous dreams of childhood picnics. Perhaps it is just
the deep slumbering goodness of things that takes over and plays dice against time and memory.
Perhaps it is simply that we never really forget.
“I wonder how people get over something like that.”
“Mmm?”
He turns over, clear blue eyes opening, squinting against the sun. The sweetness in my skin hasn't
caught up with my question yet, and it slinks back, pushing desultorily against this quickening line of
thought.
“Lose a child. You know, like the kid in that show.”
A girl, just a girl in the wrong place at the wrong time. Her story has been obsessing us. I remembered
now, that she disappears on the night her family goes camping. They'd left her behind to be on her own,
to be grown up. Except she never would.
I will never have children. Having found love in middle life, passion is timeless and generous, opening
and embracing separate worlds, making room for it all. It is too late for children, but there are his two
AT SUNSET
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------girls, and just the thought of anything happening to them knocks the wind out of me. They are old
enough to want all that freedom; young enough not to recognize the ancient paths of violence and
terror.
I sit up against the breeze, goosebumps peppering my skin.
I was young once. 16 in Kandy, a place that was sacred to Buddhists, and before that, before the
measuring of time in chronicles, sacred to the Bhairavs who guarded the secrets of the mist capped
mountains that ringed the puny habitations of man. But when I was 16, Kandy was a place where
people disappeared off the streets. In 1989, Sri Lanka was a country petrified by the habitual violence
that becomes a commonplace of conflict. And when I was 16 there were two wars, one happening next
door and in the market place, and the other, more remote and long lasting, happening in the North and
East. You couldn't know which one you were caught in. You could stand at the bus stop waiting to catch
the bus home, and a black van would drive up, and the kid next to you would be snatched in front of
your eyes. To be anywhere was to take the risk of being that kid in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In a few days, a body would be left at the gates of the school, each bruise, gash, each torn finger a
lesson to any of us who harbored radical hope or dared to dream of the promise of revolution.
In the end, I suppose I was lucky. One learns to bury the dead, and then to go on having conversations
with them as if nothing has changed.
“I had a cousin like that girl. Killed.”
“Accident?”
“No, murder.”
“What?! Why?”
“I don't know. No one knows. Someone shot him.”
“Was he involved in something?”
“No. Nothing like that. No. Nobody knows why. But they shot him at his house, on the driveway. His
family was there. His kid sisters. He was 16.”
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------A family never recovers from losing a child.
No one does.
They were distant cousins who had grown up in the Middle East and returned to Sri Lanka to be closer
to family, to take on the responsibilities of caring for aging parents. Suranga's father was soft spoken,
sure of himself and, even at first glance, the kind of person you just knew you could trust with your
life. And Suranga was a younger, ballsier version of his father. Sharp as a knife, his barbed jokes would
make you wince while you laughed at yourself, and yet, underneath it all, he had the kindness and
solicitude of a wise and benevolent elder.
They settled in the lower hills that ringed the city, taking over an acreage and becoming gentleman
farmers. My visits there were filled with laughter and long walks, all the kids tramping to visit chickens
and splash around in the clear mountain streams that would gush unexpectedly around rocks covered in
lantana and sunflowers. There were three generations in their family, and three in ours, and these
gatherings over fried rice and spicy chicken curry would invariably end with grandparents swapping
stories about notorious aunts and uncles while the children sneaked sips of ice cold shandy.
But Suranga and I were already not really children, and he made no bones about the fact that he had a
crush on me. He was sure of himself, sure as well, that he would eventually win me. But even at 16, my
affections were always contrary, and usually spoken for. I much preferred to long for the hopelessly
arrogant and inaccessible young buck who would casually flirt with me and my best friend at the same
time. I would swallow the humiliation, retreat to some corner to scribble my bruised heart and ego into
a diary filled with the kind of nonsense a teenager high on Hemingway could cook up. Suranga
watched all of this with a mixture of irritation and pity, sensing already, that I preferred to document
life rather than get caught up in the mess of living. He would sit with me in my corner, offering a
logical analysis of the situation, and exhort me not to waste my energy chasing an arrogant prick when
he was right there, waiting. And he was, after all, smarter, funnier, more handsome. And he would
always, always treat me right.
I'd tell him to get lost.
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AT SUNSET
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------And as if he knew the only real way to get through to me was to prove without doubt his far superior
intelligence, Suranga finally challenged his nemesis to a battle of wits to be proved by winning the
highest scores in all term exams, thus securing the highest academic achievement of the year. That got
my attention alright, and I sensed, already, that this was far beyond child's play or some sort of
adolescent posture. This was about truth, this was about making me see clearly.
Suranga lost his wager by a few points. He endured the mockery of his schoolmates with candor, but he
could barely face me. I wanted to tell him it was just a game, it was just bad luck, but the way his lips
had set warned me off platitudes. Suddenly, a chasm had opened between us, and it was one I knew I
couldn't cross.
And just like that, there seemed to be no more time for spats over girls or long talks about books.
Suranga became a man, an adult stranger.
A few weeks later, Suranga was shot on a rainy evening as he went to lock the gates of their house for
the evening. Nobody witnessed the crime, although some described a motorbike speeding away with
two men in masks. The police and the ambulance took too long to arrive. He bled to death in the rain as
his mother tried to hold back the life slipping through her fingers.
We went to them as soon as the news reached us. The home was suddenly hollow, locked in silence and
despair. Only the voices of the little ones could be heard from time to time. They still had language, a
sort of buffer from the horror that had enveloped us all. Suranga's mother retreated that day and she
never returned.
As if by habit, I went straight to his room. It was still full of that sense of being lived in, full of smell
and bustle, and I half expected him to walk in any minute. On his table, his math textbook was turned
face down. When I turned it over, it was open to the problem that had defeated him in his test. It was in
that moment, when I knew that he was gone, that my childhood ended.
It’s been 26 years.
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------When I finish telling this story, the sun is already turning golden, its rays irradiating the soft blond hair
on my lover's forearms. His eyes, so still and blue like the lake that surrounds us, are open, and I know
that they receive this gift of memory, even as they answer the curse of history with the only antidote we
ever have, love. As I lean into his warm skin, and kiss him, I know that I have lived to be complete, that
I have known everything I ever needed to know. That I have been broken and rendered whole, that I
have loved and that I love.
But Suranga died at 16 without ever being kissed, without tasting the slow reprieve that time always
offers us in the end.
And for that, I am sorry.
I am sorry.
I am so sorry.
APARNA HALPÉ holds a doctorate in English Literature from the University of Toronto and is Professor
of English at Centennial College, Toronto. Aparna’s poetry has been published in various journals
including Channels, The Journal of the English Writer’s Cooperative, Sri Lanka, and Postcolonial Text.
Her scholarly work has been published in South Asian Diaspora (Routledge), Moving Worlds (Leeds)
and Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (U Alberta Press).
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I T M UST B E
AMEENA HUSSEIN
Writer & Publisher, Perera Hussein Publishing House, Sri Lanka
[email protected]
Imam Zakir looked after the retreating figure of the woman shrouded in black. A toddler holding
onto her little finger swayed with hurried steps to match her stride, looking like a diminutive
sailor. The child could not have been more than two. The priest turned towards the shopkeeper
who watched the scene silently. Zakir’s eyebrows raised no more than a millimeter, asked a
question answered with a minute nod by the tradesman. The incident had happened more than a
year ago, but Shopkeeper Kareem knew precisely what the Imam wanted to know. He looked
sympathetically after the woman, now a black speck against the horizon.
That morning, Khairun Nisa had no idea her life was going to change on the very day. It started
normally, no more different from the hundred days past, or she believed, the hundred days that
lay ahead. She woke at dawn, finished her ablutions, completed her prayers. Again, as with any
other day, she trotted off to Kareem’s shop to buy bread for breakfast, her arrival timed fifteen
minutes after delivery of the bakery van. Sometimes, she would take her son; most often not. By
the time she returned home, the warm bread tucked under her arm, her parents, husband and
younger brother and sister would have woken up, and begun getting ready for their day. The
younger siblings preparing for school, her mother busy in the kitchen or with her grandson, her
father cleaning his bicycle that would carry an assortment of household utensils he bought from
town and hawked in the adjacent villages and her husband ready to leave for work on a
neighbouring coconut estate.
IT MUST BE
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------But that day, after she bought her bread and turned away from the counter to leave, she saw the
new priest appointed to the local mosque. As their paths crossed, Khairun Nisa respectfully kept
her gaze on the ground wondering if this new religious man would be better than the last. The
previous Imam, a home grown candidate, had been more intent on leaving the country for
Malaysia than tending to the spiritual needs of his flock. Khairun Nisa’s husband often came
home after Friday prayers with a complaint on his lips of the Imam’s frivolity and lack of
commitment. As expected, one day he reported the Imam had vanished. He had spirited himself
off to Singapore followed by a journey overland to the country of his dreams. The community
had to look for a replacement.
Imam Zakir, was a recent graduate from a Saudi sponsored religious school on the West Coast of
the country. One of many that were dotted around the country. This was his first posting after
returning from a year in Pakistan in a remote area governed by tribal law. A month after his
arrival, the village began to brag about their new Imam - his Arabic accent, his Quranic
knowledge, and his firebrand sermons. He was the authentic deal, the elders praised.
The brief encounter that morning at Kareem’s shop left Zakir smarting with indignation. Cutting
his purchases short he rushed back to his quarters adjoining the little brick mosque. Entering his
small one room apartment he shoved his modest bag of supplies on the table and sat abruptly on
his narrow hard bed. His light brown eyes constricted with concentration as he mechanically
stroked his beard. His mind was racing. The cheek of it, he thought crossly. After a few minutes
of reflection, Zakir decided to pray. “There is nothing that prayer can’t solve,” he muttered as he
flung open his cloth prayer mat laying it carefully on the cement floor, facing west. It took three
more sessions of prayers, and a reading of a passage in the Quran before Zakir came to an
acceptable conclusion. Imam Zakir sighed soulfully, it was not easy bearing the spiritual
responsibility of a whole group.
Khairun Nisa, in the meantime, carried on with her day which so far passed uneventfully. With
her son Aman by her side, occupied with bits of paper, plastic and string in his efforts at play,
she completed her household chores with her mother, chatting and sharing bits and bobs of
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- gossip, news, and updates from the locale. A wedding and a funeral had occurred in the past
month and they cheerfully dissected and analyzed details of both, merrily passing judgment on
what worked and what did not. The arrival of her younger sister and brother after their school
day caused commotion, chaos and noise in the little house, as they chased the hens in and out of
the dwelling, teased their little nephew needlessly to tears and willfully interrupted every chore
Khairun Nisa and her mother attempted to complete. But the older women were indulgent and
attended to every mess and disturbance with good humour. It was a happy home.
After the day had long passed and the event had come and gone but was never forgotten, years
later, Khairun Nisa and her mother wondered how something like this could happen and a human
being have no warning, no instinct, no alert, alarm or notification of an event that was about to
hurtle like a bolt of lightning and change lives so completely. But it is so and they were among a
hundred other souls whose lives change from one second to another so dramatically that nothing
ever is the same again in their lives until they die.
Imam Zakir was at peace. He had made his decision and it sat well with him. The day was Friday
and he reasoned there was purpose in his morning encounter. Friday was like no other day for
Muslims and today would be like no other day for his people.
He conducted Jumma prayers calmly and steadily. But before prayers began, before even his
sermon he made an announcement. He asked that all those present return to the mosque well
ahead of the sunset prayer and to kindly spread the message to others. He emphasized that all
men of the area, young and old should come. An important pronouncement would be made at
that time. This was nothing new to the commune. The mosque was the only institution that had a
loudspeaker system and often it was used to disseminate information for the welfare and good of
the village, be it state, religious, school, or even world affairs that dealt with the Muslim
community at large.
By 5.45pm a fairly large crowd of men had begun to assemble outside the mosque. Imam Zakir
walked about the crowd, welcoming his parishioners here and there, looking at the gathering,
identifying and noting all those present. Half an hour earlier, Imam Zakir had made sure he wore
243
IT MUST BE
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------his bleached and pressed crisp white Saudi robe, that his long beard was carefully combed and
groomed, and that he was wearing his best, elaborately embroidered skullcap on his head when
he entered the mosque. He wanted to make a good impression and the reaction from the
community when they caught sight of their new Imam, spoke of approval. In his exercise of
greeting and meeting, Zakir saw Khairun Nisa’s husband and father slip in through the small
wooden gate; he inclined his head in salutation but didn’t speak to them. Imam Zakir readied
himself to begin proceedings when the assembly had grown to about two hundred men. The
entire male population was present. A low hum prevailed as the men-folk chatted in low tones
about sundry topics. Not a single one of them was uneasy, except perhaps Shopkeeper Kareem.
The Imam solemnly climbed up to the pulpit. The crowd hushed. He looked down at a sea of
expectant faces all focused on him. He was the star. He grasped the microphone, cleared his
throat and made an announcement. “Send a message to the women of the House of Mansour to
come to the mosque.” There was an immediate uproar from the crowd before him. Imam Zakir
silenced them with a raise of his hand and a look of his eye. Shopkeeper Kareem standing in the
middle felt a cold finger caress his spine. The consternation around him continued in low tones.
He looked around for Khairun Nisa’s husband and father. They stood with bowed heads as a
small space arose between them and the rest. He saw Mansoor’s younger son push through the
throng and dart out of the mosque. The message was being sent.
In a small rural society nothing is secret. By now all present knew the subject matter of today’s
meeting, but they didn’t quite understand the reason they were there. A few busy men clicked
their tongues in annoyance at this interruption to their daily lives. Why were they asked to
interfere in essentially a woman’s problem? Yet, not a single man left the mosque. A few of the
men looked sympathetically at the two men most affected. A wealthy man close to them, the
sand contractor, knew that had it been him, he would have been able to smooth things over, but
poor families like Khairun Nisa’s were utterly powerless and when it came to religion there was
little anyone could do. God trumped the State. That was the order of life for them.
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Khairun Nisa sat with her mother on the kitchen floor preparing dinner. Her younger sister
played with her son in a corner of the room from which emitted giggles, coos and whispers. The
two worked mostly in silence, wondering occasionally what the message from the mosque could
be about. Her younger brother ran in breathless and recited his message with great speed. The
women stopped whatever they were doing mid way- one holding a knife, the other a half peeled
onion. As soon as the boy stopped speaking his mother began to wail and beat her breast. The
two children stopped their play and the toddler began to cry loudly. For Khairun Nisa, in an
instant, all had gone from tranquil to turbulence, from routine to disturbance, from happiness to
distress. The little boy gabbled on hurrying his mother and sister to come immediately. Khairun
Nisa looked at the onion in her hand and felt her stomach lurch. Her heart pinched with fear but
outwardly she remained composed – a Seneca upon hearing Nero’s centurion knock on his villa
door. She rose in one fluid moment shook the vegetables out of her dress and without saying a
word, her face stone set, began to prepare to change her clothes and make herself suitable for the
religious place she had been ordered to enter. Against her brother’s dither, she took her time. She
washed her face and took ablutions at the outside tap. Combed her hair and changed her clothes.
Her heart banged wildly against her breast but outwardly she looked unperturbed and controlled.
She donned her black outer gown over her tunic and trousers. The gown dropped heavily to her
feet covering her neck, arms. Lastly she carefully draped a black veil over her head, covering
every strand of hair, adjusting and settling the cloth well on her scalp. She stood in front of the
sole mirror in the house, cracked and discoloured. Satisfied with her reflection, she turned
towards her mother, dressed similarly standing by the entrance, her wrinkled hand enclosed over
a tiny fist. The toddler stood beside his worried grandmother, his cherubic face lightened by a
smile, now that calm reigned over the household once again. Khairun Nisa smoothed his hair
gently, smiled at him and the three of them began to walk the half kilometer towards the mosque,
her brother having raced ahead like an emissary from an enemy camp.
The trio walked on the red earth gravel road with quick fast steps and within a few moments, the
little boy whimpered unable to keep up. His face puckered, his eyes about to crinkle in a cry.
Khairun Nisa looked down and swooped him up in a sinuous movement, not missing her stride.
She straddled him on her hip and continued. They walked in silence. She passed Shopkeeper
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Kareem’s store boarded and padlocked, she went by the primary school, the neighbourhood
water tank, the small playground- all strangely absent of people and children and the normal
activity that punctuated rural life. If at this point Khairun Nisa witnessed the sky turn green, she
would not have been surprised. Instead, as she gave a quick glimpse, it was its normal cerulean
blue. She noted a yellow orange sun hung low above the horizon but sunset was still a quarter of
an hour away. The coconut trees rippled their leaves overhead serrating the air above them and
homing birds twittered and screeched as they circled the sky.
As they neared the mosque, they heard the strident voice of the Imam over the loudspeaker
closing the evening prayer. Women from the houses closest to the mosque had gathered near the
entrance to their compounds but upon seeing the little group walking rapidly towards them the
spectators slipped inside not wanting to make eye contact with the women. Khairun Nisa knew
they were the women who had sympathy for her, but there were others who stayed on glaring at
her, throwing insults and taunts in low voices, making sure she could hear them. Khairun Nisa
walked on, her head held high, her eyes directed in front. Her mother however, began to flag
under the heavy judgment volleyed from the sidelines. Unlike her daughter, she was not made of
stern stuff and by the time they entered the large compound belonging to the mosque, her mother
had fallen behind forcing Khairun Nisa to wait at the low wooden gate for her mother to join her
and her son. The setting sun cast a glow around them, and Khairun Nisa glancing up saw pink
streaks reflecting the rays of the sun, evenly spaced, splayed in an arc against indigo. She had
never seen a sunset like this, before. Involuntarily the beauty of the moment made her lips twitch
upwards. As her mother reached her, Khairun Nisa put her son down pushing his hand into her
mother’s. The boy happily smiled at his grandmother while he pushed the fist of his other hand
into his mouth and sucked contentedly.
Upon seeing the trio a few men standing by the door of the mosque relayed a message that
swelled and surged through the crowd towards the Imam. The two women and child stood by the
gate awaiting further instructions. Imam Zakir stepped down from the pulpit smoothing his robe
and with solemnly folded hands across his stomach, walked through the corridor of space that
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AMEENA HUSSEIN
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- formed within the assembly. As he passed each line, they closed in so that he marched at the
head of a large following like a regent with his entourage.
He stepped out of the door of the mosque and halted halfway on the grounds. The crowd paused
behind him. Holding a hand to stay them, Zakir left the flock, moved up to the women and stood
in front for a moment until he was sure the male congregation had arranged themselves suitably
in a semi-circle around the visitors. Then he began. It was to be his finest hour.
“Look at this woman,” he began pointing accusingly at Khairun Nisa. He cleared his throat. He
wanted his tone louder, deeper and more authoritative. “Look at this woman,” he started once
again. “She is an example of how our society has disintegrated completely and how we have lost
our way.” Khairun Nisa stood unbending before him. She was a tall slim woman with a beautiful
face. Her black gown was cut narrow to show off her figure, there was lace trim at the wrists and
neck. Her mother in contrast, stood wrapped, a shapeless black figure, bowed and quivering
before the Imam unable to look him in the eye. Zakir continued strident, “This wretch leaves her
family to greedily earn money in the Middle East. It is only families with no breeding, no faith
who send their women off to work for men in strange countries.” He paused to look around and
the other heads of households who had wives and daughters working in Arab countries, some
even in Greece, Cyprus and Singapore, shifted uneasily, looked down and hid behind their
neighbours hoping to divert the Imam’s wrath away from them. Imam Zakir caught sight of his
neighbour, Lateef, a man he liked very much, a God fearing man, who virtually lived in the
mosque, so frequently did he visit, but had unfortunately got, not one daughter working abroad
but two. Zakir softened, he recollected the many generous recent donations made by Lateef both
to the mosque and to himself personally. He remembered that all are not fallen angels, it is only
those who have been tempted by Satan. He changed his stance and cleared his throat again. “It is
not a bad thing to go abroad to earn money. We are all not rich. Many of us are poor. We must
work hard, after all our religion tells us we must be useful and help one another. What better
thing is there for a daughter or a wife to leave the secure loving fold of her family, go amongst
strangers, work hard, be a good Muslim and return and see her family much improved due to her
hard work? Those women are saints. They are examples of good true Muslims. And then,” he
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IT MUST BE
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------turned towards Khairun Nisa vengefully, “we have harlots like this.” As if they were connected
by a push-pull cord, the more Khairun Nisa stayed upright and straight her mother wilted further
and further. “This creature goes to the country of our Arab Brethren and stains our community
over there. She acquires a lover.” Zakir spat out the word ‘lover’ in English, so that it stood out
amidst the Tamil they spoke in the area. “She is like a bitch in heat and forces the man to sleep
with her. But Allah in his wisdom knows that she cannot get away. He gives us evidence of her
immorality and soon she is with child.”
The men looked down at their hands clasped before them. They all knew the story. In fact the
situation was nothing new. Periodically, each generation has had a similar situation which each
affected family dealt with in its own way. A tolerant and mild community, they were reassured
that in a few years, the woman and child would be absorbed into the families, community,
village and when the time came to get married, the struggle to find a suitable partner for the child
was solved by bringing in an unsuspecting stranger from another distant hamlet who could be
persuaded to marry the girl or boy and take them away to live elsewhere where no one knew of
how they were begotten. It was a system that worked and there had been no need for change. But
Imam Zakir would have none of it and change would begin here and now.
“We cannot have this kind of woman here, living without shame in our company. We have to
cleanse our homes of such filth.” Zakir paused. He had set the stage. Now he had to execute his
God ordained plan.
Like a theatrical director in charge of a spectacular show he ordered each man present to strip a
young coconut frond from the numerous coconut trees around the mosque. He watched pleased
at the scramble to get to the trees. Fifteen minutes passed before each man was satisfied with his
palm leaf. Zakir paced among the crowd recommending trees as good candidates and dismissing
others. All the while, Khairun Nisa and her mother stayed standing and silent. She caught sight
of her husband and father who stood apart, their faces distraught silent.
248
but even they remained
AMEENA HUSSEIN
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Zakir moved onto the next stage. He asked the men to rip away the leaves leaving the hard spine
in their hands. The men obediently did so. Under Imam Zakir’s eagle eye, they had become
cattle. Soon each man was in possession of a large supple cane that some tested by swishing
through the air, relishing the sound of beaten wind. Khairun Nisa felt her heart jump at the
sound. She pressed her sweaty palms together and felt rivulets of perspiration run down her
spine. She saw the men smiling, some laughing, they looked as if they were enjoying themselves,
like they did when they engaged in preparations for the annual mosque feast.
The men were asked to form a large circle. The men shuffled in the dust looking like a group of
dancers taking their place. But Imam Zakir realized a two hundred man circle was untenable and
so two circles were formed. The night air bristled with excitement. Zakir stood back and
reviewed the scene. He seemed satisfied. He turned towards Khairun Nisa and her mother and
child. He motioned to the older woman to take the child and stand by the gate. He knew that
once it started, they would not have a clear view of anything, but they were not the stars in this
act.
Khairun Nisa was asked to lie face down in the middle of the circle. As soon as the Imam made
his request it became clear to Khairun Nisa’s husband what was about to take place. He shouted
desperately to his wife to stay and angrily screamed at the Imam to stop. The audience was
shocked. The Imam was a man of God, one did not speak to such a man in this way. Khairun
Nisa’s husband spoke, breathless; he addressed the group of men. Men he knew, men he worked
for, men he worked with, men he was related to, men like him. He gabbled on. He was desperate.
“I married her. I married her knowing everything. I love the child, I am her husband, the only
father the child knows is me. You all know the story,” he appealed to the men turning round and
round trying to reach one person. “Let her be, please,” he begged. “If I have accepted her, why
do you have a problem?”
Zakir smiled peacefully “Let’s ask our brothers,” he said. He looked around with authority. He
spread his hands apart and asked the throng of men “Won’t you do this for Allah?” A roar of
approval rose from the group. Khairun Nisa’s husband drooped. He knew he could not win this
battle. Allah always won. He was asked to stand aside. He could not look at anyone else, he
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IT MUST BE
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------fixated on Khairun Nisa hoping to force her to look at him. She walked to the middle of the
circle. She did not focus on her husband, but she was proud of him. She knew if she looked at
him, she would cry and at all costs, she didn’t want to cry. Once in the middle, she stood and
waited and the men fell silent. They watched and waited, all eyes focused on Imam Zakir. Zakir
strode to the centre, he made noises that indicated he wanted Khairun Nisa to kneel and then
stretch out on the dirt. His hands hovered over her shoulders but did not touch her. Khairun Nisa
looked steadily at him and Zakir felt uneasy. He knew this was irregular and if the police got to
know he would be in trouble. But as he looked at the crowd, he knew he was safe. What could
the police do? This was his community, he ruled in the village, he was king and now he had
started a new custom.
Khairun Nisa knelt, placing her hands down on the earth. She saw her husband and father being
made to stand right in front and a coconut spine forced into their hands. Tears ran down their
cheeks. She could not see her mother or her son. She was glad. She did not want the boy to see
her humiliation. She stretched out and folded her arms on the soil and rested her forehead on
them. She could smell the earth and waited silently for what was to come. It was a punishment
she had seen meted out to many victims on a Friday in the country she worked in. It was a public
spectacle that was televised commonly, she never thought that so far away from that dreadful
land she would be a victim in her own country. She took a deep breath, she began to pray.
Each man was ordered to lash her once with the hard stick starting with her husband and father.
Khairun Nisa felt a gentle touch on her spine. The Imam asked the man to do it again, harder, it
must hurt. Khairun Nisa knew it was her husband. She heard him refuse and walk away. Imam
Zakir strode back and forth orchestrating the performance. The lashes fell, and they hurt.
Khairun Nisa never imagined how they would hurt. She had never in her life gone through so
much pain, not even when Aman was born. Her tears fell and created a muddy pool just below
her nose. It went on and on. She didn’t know how much time had passed, when she was lifted up
by gentle hands and turned around. She could not walk, she could not speak, she could not
recognize. She felt two men carry her gently, one at her head, the other at her feet. She looked up
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AMEENA HUSSEIN
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- at the blue black sky, a crescent moon lay below Venus, the star of love. With all her strength,
she filled her lungs with air and arching her back upwards, shouted weakly, “Are you happy
God? I hope you are happy.”
AMEENA HUSSEIN is a writer and co founder of the Perera Hussein Publishing House, which has
established itself as the frontrunner for cutting edge Sri Lankan fiction from emerging and
established Sri Lankan authors. Her novel The Moon in the Water was longlisted for the Man
Asian Literary Award and the Dublin IMPAC. Her first short story collection Fifteen was
shortlisted for the Gratiaen Prize in 1999 and her second collection of short stories Zillij won the
State Literary Prize in 2005. She has also edited three collections of children’s stories and a
collection of stories for adults. She is currently at work on a novel and a travelogue on Ibn Batuta
in Sri Lanka.
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Indi@logs
Vol 3 2016, pp. 253-260, ISSN: 2339-8523
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------C HECKPOINTS
JEAN ARASANAYAGAM
Writer, Sri Lanka
[email protected]
Checkpoints I
On our way to the North, we pause at checkpoints,
look around us, young soldiers in trim khaki
uniforms bodies stalwart, yet slender, faces fresh
with youth unmarred by memories of a three
decades war pluck green mangoes from the
laden trees, branches overhanging with clustering
fruit, teeth biting into tart flesh, reminders
of their lives in remote villages in the South,
student days, school boy memories, running
wild and free on stretches of unmined land,
swimming in swift-flowing streams far from
camouflage uniforms and deafening artillery fire
in the jungles and the deadly war zones.
This is the new King’s Highway, no room for
brigands, highwaymen, guerrillas, concealed in
dense jungle cover, mines going off, ambush,
the beheadings, the amputations, the feared
terror of taking the last breath.
CHECKPOINTS
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Killinochchi Highway, the road straight,
pointing in the direction of our ultimate
destination, yes the wars are over,
tender lips, tongues, pucker at the tartness,
the sting of sour-sweetness, youth is too impatient
to wait for ripening, the guns for the moment
are laid aside, they go back, the young soldiers
to their campsites, taste the everyday rations
doled out, three square meals a day at any rate.
Before we resume our journey, a soldier rushes
up to our vehicle and slips in a parcel of mangoes,
the driver will take them home, he has brought
a whiff of homesickness from the South,
we will eat ripe mangoes when we reach
the North.
I think to myself, remember stories from the past,
child soldiers in uniform armed, often cannon
fodder on the battlefront, wearing cyanide lockets
round their tender throats, come upon laden
mango trees on a reconnoitring sortie,
aim at the fruit, training their guns at
the childhood-tempting trees, shoot at the
fruit till they tumble down onto the earth
handling the AK47’s adroitly, strip the tree
and then proceed with the unfinished journey
to the battle front.
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JEAN ARASANAYAGAM
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Will they return?
Childhood is over.
There is no return to that lost innocence.
Never.
Checkpoints are familiar to me in the South.
Years later, I am an innocent passer-by.
1983
“Halt!” was the peremptory sentry order as we drove
during the night hours past curfew
to our safe haven at the Refugee Camp.
The gun was pointed at me.
If it went off and there was fear on
both sides would there be blood splatter
on the car seats from gunshot wounds.
No. Not this time.
“Did you notice?
The gun was pointed from the wrong end
of the weapon, I was told by the police officer.
We drove on.
Choked notwithstanding with fear and terror.
1983
Faraway time.
The mangos were ripe and ready for plucking,
the pliant stalks severed by the curved iron hook
tied with strong rope to the firm pole,
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CHECKPOINTS
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------reaching the branches, bringing down the dangling
fruit, one by one, picked up with care,
carried into the house, arranged on gunny sacks,
spread on the floor, waiting for their ripening
the golden nectar dripping from succulent flesh.
Our going away was hurried, unplanned.
The camps for fugitives from fear being
set up, to spell uncertain safety.
Refugees.
Crowding at the doors of a school
waiting, waiting to push themselves in.
A processional of uninvited guests
awaiting hospitality which was never
denied, the walls bursting at their seams
with the press of bodies, strangers to each other.
We too inched ourselves in,
sweat impregnated bodies,
no change of clothes at hand,
searching for space, space, space
in any classroom niche or passage.
Insect life.
Overwhelming overspill
waiting to feed on crumbs.
Evening.
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JEAN ARASANAYAGAM
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------All we could see were fiery flames
and orange-red, sunset-coloured flamboyants
from the windows of the classroom
before the darkness of pluming smoke
billowing in the wind, obscured our vision.
We returned home after those fugitive spells,
home, from where we had been spirited away
seeking a temporary, uncertain safety.
Opened locked doors,
the stench of rotting pervading the rooms,
not the longed for fragrance of ripened
mangoes,
blackened, splotched oozing skin,
the juices gelid,
a thickened lava flow from split gashes,
the gunny sacks damp and sodden,
the fruit all spoilt and staling,
but the seed will push our roots,
is there hope that the seed will thrust out
roots, entrenched themselves deep within
grope within the fissures of the earth to emerge,
grow into tall strong trees,
clusters of creamy mango blossoms appear
hope-buds of re-awakening.
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CHECKPOINTS
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Checkpoints II
I feel their loneliness, their isolation
they come from distant landscapes,
villages from the South of the island,
young men far from their homes
I have lived in their villages,
eaten the food cooked on their hearths
fish in the South wrapped in the pungent
sharp amalgam of ground spices, goraka,
pepper, garlic, dried chillies, curry leaf
crushed beneath the oblong pitted stone
to a fine paste, fish from the sea,
blood fish and I have eaten the food
from the hills, tender jak and manioc yams.
What do the young soldiers eat here?
They are healthy and strong, uniforms crisp,
skins smooth, hair black and silky,
I think of my students young men, women,
they look so much alike to me in their
identical garb, now that the wars are over
they dream of return to incomplete uncompleted
hopes combing the long dark oiled strands
of their hair letting it hang loose about their
shoulders....
the mango trees are laden with fruit,
258
JEAN ARASANAYAGAM
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------hand plucking is easy, they feel they
are back in the village, before our vehicle
takes off one of the solders, runs up to
the closing door, slips two mangoes inside.
Ambalevi, Karathokolumban...
tasting sweet ambalevi and the bitter taste of their
own blood spilled from wounded bodies,
finding myself in a wasteland
yet I see myself as a survivor following all
those unborn strateginess for survival.
Wild creatures now have longer genealogies
while the human lineages exist in tattered scraps
of indecipherable names of men and women who had
their day, remembered in obscure maps of unequal
apportioning out of inheritance left to any vagrant
claiming the family name to falsify an identity,
deface those inheritance maps with forgeries,
all the grandeur that was bandied about in
that feudal stronghold scrawled over with
forgeries, counterfeit names inscribed upon
those documents pinholed by silver fish,
obliteration, unrecognizable to the myopic
gaze of those who have lost their undefended
birthright.
The knee-length wilderness I once viewed decades before
is now a full blown growth, thick un-impenetrable
jungle, no footpath leads me to any destination,
I know where it begins but not where it ends,
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CHECKPOINTS
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------nor do I venture to plunge headlong into that
darkness, here I would not find the Burning Bush
of Moses as I part the screen of dense green leaves
but I know that there is power contained with
those secret enclaves, those rare sightings of the
deities my husband worshipped, fill those treeenclosed shrines with their presence, emerge
at the opportune time, those fleeting images
reflected in those transient visions hold out hope
that the land is not benighted.
JEAN ARASANAYAGAM is a Sri Lankan writer of Dutch Burgher extraction, married to a
Tamil. Her writing engages with a variety of genres, and she is the author of no less
than 28 poetry collections, 12 plays and 12 works of fiction. Among them are With
Flowers in their Hair, Apocalypse 83, Mind Zones, All is Burning, Dragons in the
Wilderness and Fault Lines. Her themes focus on gender, ethnicity, inheritance,
identity, travel, diverse cultures in a plural society, colonialism, postcolonialism and her
own life and times. She holds an Honorary Doctorate from Bowdoin College,
Brunswick, Maine. Jean is also a painter.
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