Every journey I take away a lesson from. And yet I sink back into immanence the moment I am done imbibing it. Makes one wonder about the fallaciousness of being human. The million platitudes pushed our way to help us reconcile with the contrarian, oft disappointing nature of existence within society – they serve the purpose of coating the latter with a tint rosy enough to make it palatable.

That remains the tragedy of our lives; that we repeatedly use coping mechanisms to brush disillusioning experiences under the proverbial rug. I truly believe that the hopelessness that accompanies humanity has been the reason for religion, the arts, for every possible human pursuit which effectively diverts the mind. Undoubtedly, then, having a more evolved mind than the other species is a double-edged sword. Indeed we have the benefit of being the lead contenders in the Darwinian order. Simultaneously however, we are cursed with the ability to think. Now that posits a challenge to the way our species lives, because we never did seem to be satisfied with the primal alone being taken care of.

We crave purpose, meaning if you will – an answer to why our desolate, individual selves have been placed on this earth. Only the human could be so arrogant as to believe that he was created to fulfil some pre-ordained destiny, crafted solely for it. The problem of believing one is special is that disappointment is inevitable when one holds a mirror up to that belief. The mirror of the humdrum sameness of human existence shatters the illusion of uniqueness that has been carefully built to envelope us; comfort us, as it were. Faithlessness is the ineluctable outcome of such a comeuppance of one’s ego.

And then commences the internecine struggle within oneself. It is a churning that shall never be laid to rest – because it shall never be able to locate the element that would stabilize it and restore it to the tranquil lake of self-assurance it once was. Every campaign peters out in gusto eventually. So too with the battle against the monster of existentialism.

So how does one overcome this?

One doesn’t. The average human reaction would be to suppress such an uncomfortable realization. As a corollary of hitting this plateau, we adopt subversive tactics to tackle the issue. We dilute our idealism, become more practical in outlook – and forcibly drown out that which won’t stop discomfiting our otherwise confident sense of self. We conveniently term this form of escapism as “growing up”. So convinced are we of the need to act sensibly that we attach connotations to the act that the establishment deems positive – it is thus viewed as a necessary step in the direction of adulthood.

After all this turmoil, we expect sanity of ourselves, in spite of the countless paradoxes we are schooled to desire. The discourse of normalcy within which we seek to pigeonhole everybody is stifling for this reason itself. We foolishly create impossible ideals to aspire to; ideals which are deliberately calibrated to remain unfulfilled. Because somewhere we know that aspiring to these unreachable ideals obfuscates our internal vacuums. It is these voids that we are too terrified to confront as our uncomfortable truths. We create a purpose to have a purpose. It is thus that we choose to fight our demons of despondence.

The resolution to this conundrum lies beyond the realms of our comprehension, primarily because we have yet to design the individual who would be socially conditioned without having acquired the burden of social conditions. Even assuming that such an individual exists, he has not been allowed to proliferate his nihilism in the public space, lest he corrupt the filmy gossamer the unsuspecting sheep have smothered themselves with.

What would we find were we not to teach ourselves to construct our time on this planet as a medium to deliver on imaginary ideals?

One marvels at the possibilities.

One always wonders if there is hope.

 It’s not the first time the state has decided to punish those who engage  in pre-marital sex, which it perceives to be an immoral, value- devoid,  hedonistic, large-scale- social –disintegration- of –Bharat- Mata-  inducing- inferno. Before marriage, the state, as well as a vast section of  the Indian populace believes that sex is about as horrific an offence as  can be. Being the victim of rape might still be condoned in present  times, but positively consenting to sex before you are married? Surely  that must be a crime!

Well, it’s not. If you’re both above eighteen, and if you are both consenting to any form of sexual activity, the law does not criminalize it (with the exception of prostitution and homosexual sexual activity, which are currently illegal in India). Engaging in pre-marital sex is perfectly within the four corners of the law, as has been repeatedly upheld by the Indian judiciary. But our self-righteous police authorities take up the mantle themselves, flanked by multiple self-proclaimed ‘Senas’ , to disallow, ridicule, humiliate, assault and harass couples who dare to do something which is perfectly legal: have sex before they are married.

A popular, and fairly pathetic excuse for such behavior, is to bust prostitution rings. However, all standard hotels mandate production of a valid, government issued proof of age, identity and permanent address/institutional affiliation, in order to prevent the use of their rooms for prostitution. So long as guests are able to produce these documents, the excuse of combating prostitution is highly tenuous and deeply offensive. But more importantly, even with the lack of such proof, the fact that the police can force you to open your door, arrest you and drag you to the police station at their whim, with no whiff of a warrant or any other procedural backing is horrifying. In the recent incident in Mumbai, the police dragged unmarried couples out of their rooms in certain hotels, arrested them and imposed fines on them. Needless to say, all of this was done without a warrant for search or arrest, and the imposition of fines was directly in contravention to the Bombay Police Act, which only allows imposition of fines after conviction. The audacity of the state to drag you out of a room, without any adherence to the procedural law of the land, simply because you are doing something they disapprove of, demolishes any sense of security, liberty and privacy accorded to you as a citizen of India.

Now let me make it worse by telling you that it doesn’t have to be the police, even rogue ‘Gundas’ or unemployed youth swollen with an overdose of the state-spun Sanskriti can do this too, and Mr. Modi will beam and say to you – well, nothing. Because as a part of the youth wave that swept him to power, he can’t afford to alienate you by telling you that in the eyes of the state and most of the feverishly conservative Indian populace, pre-marital sex and prostitution are not very different, beta. Maybe you should read the Mahabharat (oh wait, read the Ramayan instead. Sita is cool, Kunti is not).

But I think the most pertinent question still remains, why are the state, the police and self-appointed moral policing squads able to get away with this? Why are individuals who engage in pre-marital sex so vulnerable, even if the law protects them? And there is a simple, yet distressing answer. Because it is not only the police which occasionally polices couples. Almost everyone in our society morally polices them, from the inquisitive neighbours who prey on their lives and broadcast this information to all and sundry to the doctors at hospitals who stop trying to treat them once they know that these individuals are unmarried and sexually active.

Pre-marital sex is, for some unfathomable reason, absolutely taboo in India. Most of us in our twenties cannot imagine going up to our parents and admitting to engaging in pre-marital sex. As a student your parents might probably micromanage your allowance and ground you, if your righteous institution doesn’t already do so at 6 pm every evening. As an individual who has a job and is ripe for the marriage market, you might be giving anxiety attacks to your parents with any such admissions. Any discussions pertaining to boyfriends/girlfriends are considered distasteful in many Indian homes even today, regardless of their social and economic class. It’s probably the most uniting opinion of the country, cutting across religions, caste, economic and social strata: pre-marital sex is unpardonable, especially if you are a woman. As a male, you’re probably just ‘having some fun’, but that’s still disapproved of by most of populace.

Thus, if you were to threaten these twenty year olds to call home and tell their parents they’ve been having sex in a room they paid for, they’re effectively doomed. They have grown up hearing their elders talk with disgust about pre-marital sex and those who have indulged in the same, they’ve been shamed about having a boyfriend/girlfriend, and they have often been threatened with dire consequences if they venture into any form of ‘relations’ with the opposite sex before marriage (relations with the same sex would led to you being disinherited instantaneously I suppose).

So when unmarried couples attempt to book a room, they are exposed to dangers from every level of the social chain. The police could barge in and arrest them (again, for doing something which is perfectly legal), the hotel manager/ staff may harass them or there may be hidden cameras in their room, the contents of which may be used to blackmail them later.

There is a need, and in light of the recent raids, an urgency to change this. Why? Because pre-marital sex is real. For those of you who still think it’s a rare occurrence, which your kid/sibling will never engage in – well, too bad. Put on your invisibility cloaks and hang around a mildly liberal college campus, and you will know that I’m not fibbing. An unprecedented percentage of late teen/ early twenties today have engaged in pre-marital sex. The average age of initiating sexual activity has been estimated by various surveys to be between 17 to 22 years in India. No survey will accurately provide such information. It’s too dangerous to admit to engaging in pre-marital sex, even to strangers (they may tell your mummy-papa/amma-appa, or be an undercover agent of ‘let’s- pick -on –vulnerable- blameless- individuals- Sena’). But there you have it, pre-marital sex is not an outlandish phenomenon, it is increasingly acceptable among younger generations, and there is nothing wrong with it.

Thus, we have an elephant in the room. As parents/responsible citizen who are terrified of the plague of pre-marital sex, ponder over this. If your child was seriously unwell, or harassed at university, you would rush to their side at the first call. But what sort of a society would you constitute, if you refused to protect your child/loved one against such unwarranted, unnecessary and extremely dangerous harassment? And where do you think a society which governs its citizens based on its social judgement rather than the letter of the law is headed? Thirty years on, a majority of those of us in our twenties today will sign up our children for sex education, tell them all about consent and contraceptives, and battle any authority which harasses and judges our children. But until then, for the next few years, how our own families will support and tackle such issues will impact our lives and liberty greatly. Relationships, sexual activity and this incessant vulnerability are a significant part of our lives. The support we receive from our families, as in all other significant things, will count.

The inspiration to write this post has arisen in response to a ‘dare’ given to freshly enrolled first year female students at my university during one of their early courses, urging them to resist the ‘temptation’ of wearing the Little Black Dress by the end of their first year, among other sinful temptations. In the spirit of the thought provoking and eye opening discussions I fondly remember from my own first year, I would like to present a differing opinion; one endorsing the merits of falling for that temptation, and donning that Little Black Dress with pride.

I shan’t dwell much upon the fact that female students, or for that matter women anywhere, should be able to wear whatever they want, be ‘tempted’ by whatever dresses they want, and should not be harassed or judged for the same.  It’s a simple point that’s been made often enough, and I daresay will continue to be made, as it should.

I shall, however, dwell most seriously on the positive need for us to embrace the little black dress, not purely for its appeal to the eye, but for all that it represents. The Little Black Dress or the ‘LBD’, as it is fondly called today, was an expression of more than just the designing genius of one Coco Chanel.

For beginners, it was black. Today this constitutes a bland observation. But back in the early 1900s and well into the 1940s, black was strictly relegated to widows and servants. For up to four years after her husband’s demise, a widow was strictly confined to all-concealing, unalluring black garbs. And because it was positively scandalous to be seen in black unless you were a lowly servant, widows were further confined to their rooms or houses and isolated from any public life or company. As legend goes, when Coco Chanel lost her paramour in a tragic car accident, she felt ‘black’ in grief. But she was not a widow, and she definitely didn’t intend to stay confined anywhere for four years – her business was booming, and she had already begun her own revolution for women’s liberation through her designs (which included introducing pants for women and doing away with oppressive corsets during the First World War). And so, she decided it was time the world around her embraced the colour black.

Coco wasn’t an aristocrat or even a genteel. She was a seamstress who had rubbed shoulders with the black-clad servants since she was born. And she had smashed the glass ceiling to dress the crème de la crème of Parisian society, who vied for her appointment despite her humble origins. So when she brought out her Little Black Dress, made immensely popular when it was endorsed by Audrey Hepburn, it added a very decisive nail in the coffin of ostracising the colour black, and those who had been ostracised with it.

Secondly, the little black dress was, well, little. This naturally raised quite a furore in a society where the flash of an ankle was generally the subject of the week’s gossip or the plot of heartrending romantic literature. But over the decades, it became a staple in most women’s wardrobes, worn at parties, to formal events or even to work. Today we bemoan the attitude of those who claim that the length of our skirts determine our character, who believe that our appearance if ‘tempting’ enough erases the requirement of consent and that ultimately, women and the treatment they deserve is based on what they decide to wear.

But the Little Black Dress, with its history and its function, stands tall against such attitudes. It was created by a woman who changed the rules of clothing for women, who freed them from social and historic confines and a woman who broke down barriers of classes with her creations. The Little Black Dress is worn by women all over the world today, who stride into workplaces, enjoy themselves at parties and don’t believe that the length of their skirt determines anything about their personality or sexual availability.

So I say that we all fall for the ‘temptation’ of an LBD, if we find it alluring enough. Coco Chanel’s creation is obviously more than just another fashion output to enhance physical allure. It is the result of her personal rebellion in sync with a historic purpose, revolutionary in its function and empowering in its effect. And I urge those first years to lose that ‘dare’ and be tempted by the LBD. Rest assured, the truth of your substance is definitely not resident in the length, colour and design of the dress you wear. So the next time you wear a fabulous Little Black Dress, or any dress for that matter, and are made to feel badly about it, just glare back and stride on. Because that’s what Coco would have done.

Sharwari Pandit

On my first day in Law School, as a vaguely clueless kid, all of seventeen years, I entered the library, and wandered around until I found my way to the top floor. Seeing a senior sitting there, I went up to him, and asked, “Could you recommend to me a book about the law?” He looked at me quizzically. “What do you mean by that?” “You know… a book about what law is.” By now, he’d probably recognised that I was a first year, and utterly lost. “Do you mean jurisprudence?” I’d heard my father once talk about “jurisprudence” as if it was something nice. I nodded vaguely. “I don’t know. I think so.” He grinned. “You do mean jurisprudence. Come with me.” He took me to the NLS Juris section, and pulled out The Concept of Law. ”Here, this should give you a good place to start.” He paused. “Or, if you’re feeling adventurous…” He walked a little distance, and pulled out a purple book with a vaguely statuesque, wreathed female figure on the cover, and the emblazoned title that read: Taking Rights Seriously. He grinned again. “Try this. And in your next legal methods class, tell Rahul Singh that you’ve been reading Dworkin.”

And that was the first time I heard the name of Ronald Dworkin, a name that would go on to become one of the most familiar things in the world, conjuring up, the moment it was spoken, a raft of thoughts, feelings, emotions, memories. I didn’t read Taking Rights Seriously, then. I didn’t read jurisprudence at all, through my first year of college. But then came constitutional law. Suddenly, there were a host of issues that I found myself passionately interested in. Free speech. The freedom of religion. Equality. Personal liberty. What were these words that sounded so alluring, and yet bore the faintly vague promise of the breaking of barriers, of constraints, of… danger? What did they mean? What were all these arguments about? I went back to the juris and the political philosophy shelves, and quite by chance, my eyes alighted upon Freedom’s Law. I took a look at the list of contents. Seemed interesting enough. I took it down and started to read. And a world exploded in my head. A constitutive conception of democracy. What was this radical way of thinking, about a democracy that didn’t treat the vote of the majority as determinative? What were these words, “equal concern and respect“, that seemed to lie at the heart of a new, compelling order of things? And above all else, the writing, oh, the writing, so beautiful, so simple, so elegant, so utterly, absolutely, bewitchingly compelling. I was hooked. I read Freedom’s Law. I read A Matter of Principle. I tried to read Taking Rights Seriously. I don’t think I understood much, back then (I don’t know how much I understand now). But I knew that I had found a voice that spoke to me, a voice that made thinking seem beautiful, a voice that, by turns, surprised, astounded, bewildered and outraged, but never failed to inspire.

Because Dworkin didn’t just write legal or political philosophy; he created a world, a world that you wanted to believe in with all your heart, to argue for, to fight to build and protect, if it came to that. It was a world of liberal egalitarianism, of individual rights, of strong and principled judicial ‘activism’ (a word that I know D would disapprove of), a world of – to use his own words – “equal concern and respect“. A world of Brown v Board of Education, Roe v Wade, American Booksellers v Hudnut and Lawrence v Texas. I am no longer as entranced by that world as I once was; but Dworkin, as its exponent, was utterly convincing.

In my fourth year, after having read and re-read Dworkin’s political philosophy, I finally summoned up the courage to tackle Law’s Empire. And, just like in the case of TRS, I felt the frisson all over again, and in all its glory. Interpretation. What a marvelous idea. The philosophers of courtesy. Interpretive concepts. And then came that bit about intention, literary theory, art and constructive interpretation. It was frisson after frisson then, explosion after explosion, a hurricane, a typhoon of ideas swirling in my head, clashing dissonantly with each other, din, chaos, confusion, disharmony, disarray, and oh, all so beautiful. Dilthey. Gadamer. Habermas. Stanley Cavell. Language. Literature. Law. Hamlet, for heaven’s sake! If there has ever been a time when a single text transformed my life, it was the time I first read Chapter Two of Law’s Empire. It changed the way I read, the way I understood, it changed the very way that I thought. And everything that I’ve done since then can, I think, in one way, be traced back to that wild, trembling reading of Chapter Two.

I read all of Law’s Empire, went back and read Taking Rights Seriously, and then back and forth, criss-crossing through Dworkin’s corpus. Gradually he converted me from being vehemently anti-abortion to qualifiedly pro, from being in favour of banning pornography to being entirely opposed to any form of ban, from being supportive of restrictions on free speech to being in opposition to them. In short, I was moving across the spectrum from social conservative to social liberal, purely on the reasoned eloquence, the gentle yet firm and persistant argumentation, and the utterly inspiring vision of Ronald Dworkin. He was a segue into other things: Rawls, Hart, Raz, Berlin, Hayek, Nozick – Dworkin was the foundation, the starting point, the fount of ideas and engagements, and the ultimate point of comparison. When I came out of college, I had developed – in however vague and ill-defined a sense – a “philosophy of life”. At the heart of it was Dworkinian liberalism.

And that, I think, is what makes Ronald Dworkin so special, so central, so integral a figure in my own, individual life’s journey. There is a time in our lives, I feel, when we first experience the need to define ourselves for ourselves, and to position ourselves in relation to others, to the rest of the world. A time in our lives when we first feel the irresistible pull of those tortuous, haunting questions: how should I live? What ought I do? What is true, good, right, just? What is the meaning of it all? It is a time when we first begin to struggle with our own sense of the self, and with a world that is out of joint, where everything seems by turns senseless and hopeless, when nihilism is a step and a shadow away. And I think that at that time, there is nothing more important than to have a guide, a Virgil taking Dante through hell, a set of signposts, a voice that can bring a semblance of order to the maelstrom of our thoughts. And I don’t mean someone who can give us answers – but rather, a compass, a point of reference, that safe harbour from which we can begin our journey, always knowing that we can sail back to it for a while, to rest and recover, if the open sea becomes too frightening. Someone who can set us thinking, in some direction. The rest, I believe, is up to us – but the point of reference is critical. Dworkin was – is – my point of reference.

I’m grateful to Dworkin because I cannot imagine having selected – albeit through pure luck – a better point of reference. That is not because I think he’s correct (I don’t anymore, not entirely), but because he taught me to think. He taught me to question the premises of every argument, to critically imagine my own deepest, most naked convictions, to follow where the argument leads, and above all else, to never stop arguing, questioning and thinking. He taught me that there are no absolutes, no positions that are beyond criticism, modification or reversal, no questions that are or can be off the table, no ideas that ought ever to be taken for granted. For six years, since the time I first ‘discovered’ him, he has been with me, that voice, again, that always reminds me to take nothing for granted, assume no axioms, establish no postulates, think, think, think. But parallel to that, he has taught me also that there are questions worth thinking about; things that matter, issues that count. He has saved me from both mocking cynicism and Thrasymachean amoralism, one of which two seem to infect so many of the people I see around me, and in doing so, has taught me to believe that there can be a meaning to life, and that one must always strive to seek it, even though, like the horizon, it always recedes from your grasp. I do not think that there can be a greater service that one human being may render to another.

I came to Oxford a confirmed Dworkinian. Not the most comfortable of positions to take in the home of analytical positivism. I was apprehensive, at the beginning of the BCL year, that the heirs of Joseph Raz would, through sheer intellectual power, convert me to their side, and the vision of Dworkin was one that I did not want to give up. The exact opposite happened. I brought all my Dworkinian bloody-mindedness to class, spending all my year defending – or trying to defend – Dworkin. I told Professor John Gardner that he perhaps hadn’t quite taken theoretical disagreement into account.  I spoke about plovers’ eggs to Professor Green. I took along Law’s Empire to Professor Finnis’ class, holding it up and reading out passages like some circus showman, to make the point that Dworkin had been misrepresented by his critics. I suggested to Professor Endicott that, if he examined his own position closely enough, he would find that he was a Dworkinian. I texted my friend telling him that Nicos Stavropoulos’ exegesis of Dworkinian interpretivism was so beautiful, that it showed Dworkin’s structure for the magnificent, coherent whole that it was so perfectly, that it had brought tears to my eyes. I walked with another friend in the Balliol Fellows’ Garden, saying things like “But why can’t they bloody see that Dworkin is just… bloody… right! It’s blindingly obvious… isn’t it?” I messaged a third with stuff like “Today, I argued for fifteen minutes with Professor Endicott, and at the end he said… “that’s… interesting.” Yes!!!” It was the taking up of lances, the riding out the joust, the thrill of (trying to) cross swords with the foremost men of jurisprudence, in defence of a man and a set of ideas that I was passionately committed to. It was fun. It was brilliant. It was life. And then, in the middle of the year,Justice for Hedgehogs came out. I bought my copy at Blackwell’s the first time I saw it, and stayed up all night reading it. It was, of course, the last of Dworkin’s books, and the last of my frissons on reading a new Dworkin work. It was a beautiful synthesis, the coming together of a lifetime’s work on law, politics and moral philosophy; and as I read it that night I saw, once and only once, not just law, but the world, the whole world, according to Dworkin: coherence, elegance, simplicity, beauty – the final, harmonious coming together of all things. I have never seen it that way since, but the blinding power of that vision has remained with me, and one of the most beautiful things that Dworkin has done for me is to make me believe if for but one moment, that such a world is possible to imagine.

I applied for an MPhil on Dworkin (of course). What better way to spend a year than reading Dworkin? And over the last few months, the journey has taken me to wild and unexpected places: to literary theory, via Stanley Fish, Derrida, Bakhtin and Foucault; to the philosophy of language, via Wittgenstein, McDowell and Hacker; to aesthetics, via Roger Scruton; and to radical political theory, via Marx. It’s been utterly wild. I’ve gone off in random directions based on my hunches on reading a line in Law’s Empire here, a sentence in Hedgehogs there, a phrase in TRS, and so on. Yet although it’s been random, it’s been incredibly enriching. Although I now find myself disagreeing with Dworkin as much as I agree with him, although I no longer find the ideal of coherence and harmony as compelling as I once did, it’s because he created in me the urge to question. And although I am as confused and lost as I was six years ago, it’s been some ride along the way!

I had a dream. That after finishing my MPhil, I would send it to Dworkin, and he would tell me what he thought - whatever it was – about my bumbling, year-long efforts to defend his legal philosophy against the positivists. I did dream of finally meeting him, and I imagined our conversation many, many times in my head. Now time has killed the dream… like it kills so much else.

–

In my journey along the path I have taken, the study of law, there are two men without whom I would (for better or for worse) be nothing today. One of them is gone. That’s why, today, I feel bereft. That’s why, despite never having met the man, I feel like I’ve lost someone very close to a parent. Although I will return to his work, now, and in the future, again and again and again, I can never again imagine the presence behind those beautiful words. That voice, so powerful, so eloquent, so… liberal, is forever stilled. And the world is a poorer place for it.

What comforts me is that until the very end, he wrote. He wrote in defence of the causes he believed in, the ideas he was passionate about, the things he thought mattered most. He was shattering his lances in the joust even as death whispered a lullaby, he was on the field until the last sun set forever. Like Voltaire, nothing could halt his pen but the grave. And for me, there can be no better example of a life lived well and long, in service of cause and ideal. If I can die like that after having lived like that, I think I will die happy. Because, as Dworkin once told us…

“On occasions like this one it is hard to resist speaking directly to young scholars who have not yet joined a doctrinal army. So I close with this appeal to those of you who plan to take up legal philosophy. When you do, take up philosophy’s rightful burdens, and abandon the cloak of neutrality. Speak for Mrs Sorensen and for all the others whose fate depends upon novel claims about what the law already is. Or, if you can’t speak for them, at least speak to them, and explain why they have no right to what they ask. Speak to the lawyers and judges who must puzzle about what to do with the new Human Rights Act. Don’t tell the judges that they should exercise their discretion as they think best. They want to know how to understand the Act as law, how to decide, and from what record, how freedom and equality have now been made not just political ideals but legal rights. If you help them, if you speak to the world in this way, then you will remain more true to Herbert Hart’s passion and genius than if you follow his narrower ideas about the character and limits of analytic jurisprudence. I warn you, however, that if you set out in this way, then you are in grave danger of being, well, interesting.”

[Image Attribution: By David Shankbone. (Own work.) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons]

Dr. Gopalkrishna Gandhi

The Ex-‘Figurehead’ of Bengal

Subject: Reflections on a Lecture

Dear Dr. Gandhi,

As a lawyer, I find it difficult to write or think without an argument. My years of education and training have instilled in me the need to think about an argument, buttress it with sufficient justifications, avoid inconsistencies and make the most persuasive case possible. Oftentimes, this instilled, yet essentially unfamiliar way of thinking, gives way to a deeper, more spontaneous sense of feeling. After all, I am Bengali, and the overpowering of emotion, irrational and blind, is second nature. It creeps in unobtrusively into legal answer scripts where protoplasmic globules that slithered around strongly and purposively to evolve into more advanced life forms are used to provide perspective to a question of separate legal personality of corporations, in lectures where Hugo’s ‘Armies cannot stop an idea whose time has come’ is used to explain the challenge to parliamentary sovereignty in England. But never has it shed its pusillanimous and apologetic self to dominate my thinking so totally, as it did this afternoon when I read the full transcript of your Kamala Lecture delivered at the Calcutta University a few days back. Hence this letter to you, at a time, when my legal education is chafing at my ill-thought out and wayward indiscretion.

Writing this is painful for a number of reasons. Personally painful because the demons of education in my head are advising caution, careful thought and rational editing at the end of each sentence. Intellectually painful because I am completely bewildered by how a lecture that talks about so much pain can be so equally pleasurable. And most deeply painful as a Bengali, because the Bengal that pains you so is simply descending into an abyss of pain, suffering and hopelessness unredeemed by its usual richness of creative outpourings, substituted instead by a growing hubris of a cultural superiority that once was and perhaps is, but shall remain only as a figment of our collective imaginations of a glorious past where pain, despite being torturous, could still be poetic, a window into life complete with all its frailties. Hubris rarely makes for creativity; observing pain keenly does. Which makes it ironic that when there is so much pain around, infant deaths, economic backwardness, displacement of livelihoods, forced migration, large-scale unemployment, rampant mediocrity, unfulfilled hopes and dreams, we are becoming progressively and creatively blind to it. But your lecture gives Bengal hope. Of pain that is used creatively, that is overcome with a flourish of a poet’s pen, a director’s insights or a musician’s fingers. Of a cultural renaissance in India, with Bengal leading from the front.

To call you the poet of Bengal’s pain would be apt. Although left to yourself, your humility would not allow such a description, how else could I describe a lecture that encompasses the pain associated in disparate elements such as the sacrifice in Gandhiji’s human shortcomings, of the poignancy of a father donating his entire savings for the lighting decoration of his only daughter’s marriage so that an itinerant kabuliwala who his daughter couldn’t even recognise could be reunited with his own daughter, the overwhelming sense of Harihar’s loss when Durga dies, and the pain endemic and eventually triumphed in most of Tagore’s songs? But such a title would also do you a great disservice. Because you are so much more. Your lecture cannot be pigeonholed into the narrow confines of alliterative epithets. For it is not just pain that you talk about. For me, what you talk about is life in Bengal and of Bengalis. Of Nirad Babu and Guru Dutt, of epistolary communications to the Governor and your visits to the districts, and of Gandhiji’s letter to Bidhan Babu that laid the most wonderful background colour to the melange that followed, coloured by your paroxysms of pain. To attempt to summarise it or describe it would be foolhardy. So, as tribute, it is My Bengal that I write to you about, disagreeing with you, like a good Bengali, about a place and a people whom I love so dearly that it often and very easily transforms into despair, anger and hate. Perhaps this is the “risk of love” that is concomitant with my being Bengali.

Once, when I was about 7, I was returning from Barddhaman, where my father was posted, on the Santiniketan Express. As we were passing the lush green fields of Janai Road, 20-odd kilometres away from Howrah, a couple seated next to me were talking loudly and pejoratively of Bengal’s under-development. I distinctly remember them saying how in Mumbai the city began at least 50 kilometres from the city centre whereas in Calcutta we were less than 20 kilometres away and it was still “cows and fields”. Bengal is hopelessly backward, the husband said. I went home and cried that night for a reason that was as inexplicable to my parents then as it is to me now.

Today my Bengal is a place I can’t dream of returning to live in. I see it as a melting pot of mediocrity, overrun with lumpen elements that pride themselves on their boorishness and a civilised minority cocooned in their upper middle class Ballygunge and Alipore homes complaining, criticising and doing nothing. The green fields of Janai Road are still as green as before. And I still see them as beautiful. But they are not my abiding image of Bengal any more.

Bengal speaks to me today, not through its depressing contents, but rather more powerfully through its absences. Of people like myself, who, despite professing their love for the state and its people are too cowardly to return, preferring the more comfortable life that Delhi, Mumbai or London promises. Of software engineers who left in an exodus in the nineties lured by the dream of a new India in the steel-and-glass cities of south Indian suburbia. Of the millions of Bengali domestic help in Delhi and Bombay driven to these cities by utter desperation; the goldsmiths in Gujarat, the daily wage labourers in construction sites in Tier 1 and Tier 2 Indian cities, cooks and chefs in roadside joints in faraway lands- the list, just in my personal experience, is seemingly endless. In my Bengal, the loud silences that emanate from these absences, speak louder than anything else. Much like the ghostly silence as one passes the skeleton of the Tata Nano factory on the Durgapur Expressway.

This is why your dominant association of Bengal with pain strikes a chord. But the eloquence with which the chord is struck is so pleasurable that pain almost becomes a virtue and masochism creeps in through the interstices of uncertain feeling. I feel proud that I come from the land of Tagore, Ravi Shankar, Bibhutibhushan, Saratchandra, which has had such a tremendous impact on great men, and I use the combination advisedly, like you and both your grandfathers. To be reminded of Bengal’s influence in nourishing such greatness, so delightfully as you have done, was indeed a joy. As is your wonderful thesis that it was predominantly pain that was the genesis of their timeless masterpieces.

But pain, Dr. Gandhi, is all things considered, not a virtue. Pain may provide fuel for the creative juices of talented Bengalis, but for the voiceless majority, most pain is a burden that must be borne because someone somewhere failed to prevent it. The deaths of innocent infants, the paucity of farmer support programmes, the failed promises of industrialisation, are active testaments of the same pain. Unfortunately for them, there is no ‘jibono jokhon sukae jae’ to follow, nor is there a moving sitar dhun. Bengal does bear its pain with fortitude, Dr. Gandhi and it can certainly teach India how to do that. But when that pain is not a consequence of our mortality or human nature, but primarily the product of flawed governmental policies, of years of failed governance, unfulfilled promises, corrupt and high-handed administrations, of lazy officials who refuse to work, of indisciplined students more willing to create a ruckus than study, of a party which wrecked the education system and industry for its petty political gains, of another which attempts to beat the first at its own game, then I cannot, no matter how much beauty it can lead to, acquiesce in romanticising it. It must be condemned and sought to be prevented at any cost.

This does not mean for a moment that I question your assessment of Bengal. So beautiful is your grasp of my people, so erudite is your rendition, so commanding your sweep and breadth of knowledge, that my piddly rational argument stands no chance against it. And since I can feel the rational side of me is now taking over, I’ll stop because I know it’s pointless. Your thing of beauty must and will remain a joy forever.

Aapnar bedona aamar monke notun chetona diyechhe Dr. Gandhi, kichhui diyi-ni, shudhu niyechhi prochoor aapnar theke. Oshesh dhonnobad.

Yours sincerely,

Arghya Sengupta

[For the full lecture see here; for cover image attribution see here]

In his essay, Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translations, A K Ramanujan pointed out the astonishing number of tellings of the Indian epic, Ramayana  over the past 2,500 years in different languages, regions and mediums. For instance, in some versions Sita is Ravana’s daughter; some versions portray Ravana as a great savant rather than the asura that the Valmiki version makes him out to be; some versions portray Hanuman as a ladies’ man rather than a celibate Brahmachari. For over two decades, this essay was in the prescribed reading for the Ancient History course ( B.A) of Delhi University. However, in October this year, the essay was dropped by the academic council of Delhi University in the face of pressure from some fringe right wing groups, who complained that the essay was blasphemous. Oxford University Press, the publisher of the essay, had initially decided to discontinue its publication but later rescinded that decision. Unlike OUP however, Delhi University has not rescinded its decision.

2. Gita ‘as it is’ and extremism

Authorities in Siberia sought to ban the translation of the Bhagavad Gita written by the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) founder A.C.Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada titled ‘Bhagavad Gita as it is’ (to be sure, it  still is an interpretation though labelled ‘as it is’) on the ground that it was extremist literature which could incite violence and bring about social discord. While many sections of the Indian media portrayed this as a purported ban on the Gita tout court, the truth was that it was a purported ban on Swami Prabhupada’s translation alone. Finally, the court dismissed the arguments of the authorities and struck down the ban.

It is very easy to read the Gita as exhorting violence; after all the plain language of the text does seem to show Krishna asking Arjuna to ‘kill’. However, to literally take this as a prescription from Krishna to Arjuna to resort to violence and kill would be to miss the point completely. Bhagavad Gita is not a deontological text, specifying any do’s and don’ts. This is beautifully explained by Aldous Huxley in his introduction to the Bhagad Gita by Christopher Isherwood and Swami Prabhavananda ( in my opinion, this is the best translation available in English). He argues that the Bhagavad Gita properly understood exhorts neither action nor inaction but points out that there is no actor who does any action; the very point of the Gita is to lead one to that realization.

3. Georg Simmel Returns : The Philosophy of Money

Philosophy and Money are thought to be mutually dissonant. Philosophers are thought of as abstract thinkers who have little time for anything practical and the one interested in commerce and business (the one making money, in other words) has a tin ear for philosophy. Occasionally philosophers like Berkley have turned their philosophical gaze towards money. In April 2011 Routledge  brought out an affordable edition of the hitherto rare and prohibitively expensive Philosophy of Money by the German philosopher and sociologist ,Georg Simmel. First published in 1904 , Philosophy of Money is a great analysis and meditation on the concept of value and money. While reading this classic, one cannot resist the feeling that we exert ourselves so much for money all our lives but think so little about what it is and why it matters to us. Some of the central arguments of the book may sound provocatively paradoxical. For instance, Simmel argues that when we desire a thing, it occupies our minds and the satisfaction of the desire on acquisition of the desired thing puts that occupation of mind to rest: we stop thinking about it. He argues that if we look closely we pursue a thing just because we want to stop thinking about it. The most counterintuitive of results! This implies one can achieve that state by not only achieving the thing in question but by not desiring it at all in the first place. All this may sound very Buddhist; and Simmel’s book does seem to borrow a lot from Buddhist philosophy.  A fascinating read not just for philosophers but for anyone interested in understanding the one thing that takes up so much of our lives.

4. The Man without Money

Sticking to the themes of money and philosophy, how would it be to live your life without any money at all? Henry David Thoreau experimented with the idea and put down his results in his classic Walden.  When one Irish Businessman, Mark Boyle, saw the film Gandhi it changed his life. He decided to act on his long held conviction that money causes a disconnect between us and our actions. The result: he gave up money completely and began to lead a money free life. He not only survived without money but claims to be healthier and happier without it. His experiences are chronicled in his book The Moneyless man: a year of freeconomics ( btw he doesn’t receive any royalty for this book).

P.S:Incidentally Mahatma’s Gandhi’s inspiration for civil disobedience came from some of Thoreau’s writings.

5. A Mighty loss for Indian art and culture

This year saw the passing away of some of the giants of Indian art and culture: M.F.Hussain, Pandit Bhimsen Joshi and Bhupen Hazarika. Among the many accomplishments of Pandit Bhimsen Joshi was the setting up of the Savai Gandharva music festival in Pune in the 1950’s. The Savai Gandharva festival typically takes place in the second week of December and showcases some of India’s best musicians and upcoming talents. After Pandit Joshi’s death the festival was rechristened Savai Gandharva Bhimsen festival. Ashutosh wrote a stirring obituary for Pandit Joshi on criticial twenties which can be found here.

The Alpha Male’s “mother-whore” dichotomy

Naseeruddin Shah’s portrayal of Surya, a powerful superstar of the film industry, full of bigotry and chauvinism, was masterful. But his character is the only one out of all the main characters which sees no growth or movement. It is symptomatic of the entrenched institutional malaise and everything that is wrong with it – his inability to look inward, the blindness towards his own wrongdoings and lack of any sense of guilt reflects that he is almost beyond redemption. Right till the end he chooses to outcast Silk after his purpose is served and when she starts to threaten his comfortable constructs. Surya’s character is an explicit rendering of a powerful theme seen in many Indian men, the fear of the wife as a woman, i.e. a sexual being. In popular crude understanding, this is the split many men feel between their love and lust located in different women. As Sudhir Kakar describes this in Intimate Relations more exactly, that it is the age-old yet still persisting cultural splitting of the wife into a mother and a whore which underlies the husband-wife relationship. Popular literary example of such a character would be Devdas. The mother-whore dichotomy is a well-known Freudian syndrome, which describes the separation of sexuality from tenderness, the object of desire from the object of adoration. The psychodynamics of this occurrence in which a man idealized one kind of a woman, generally his own social class is visible in Surya’s relation with his wife where she is seen as “higher” and “purer” than him, where he feels almost impotent with her. While on the other hand he is capable of sexual relations with a woman of a lower social situation like a courtesan or in this case a dancer like Silk. In spite of expensive gifts for Silk and his sexual relations with her, Surya’s unflinching “devotion” to his wife is not merely for public consumption of a happy marriage but rather symptomatic of an idealization of a mother on whose image, in its purity, the man-boy still relies for nurturance and undying support. Therefore it becomes easier for the likes of Surya to split the mother image into the goddess (his wife) and whore (Silk) to allow the man to sustain a sexual life without being crushed by the anxiety and horror of “de-idealizing” a mother and seeing her for what she actually is. This hypocrisy is laid bare several times in the film and are some of the most powerful moments of truth like the awards ceremony where Silk vows to strip her clothes as long as the so called “shareef log” (refined people) keep wool over their eyes.

The Repressed Lover

Ramakant, a repressed and reserved lover, played to the tee by Tusshar, is Surya’s younger brother in the film and plays an important role in exposing Silk’s symptoms – her failure to control her narcissistic arrogance at the party, the one evening when he had requested her to control herself because he wanted to introduce her to his parents. His honest portrayal of an immature, easily excitable lover is best shown when he breaks into an uncontrollable dance from a mere peck on the cheek by Silk. It’s not ironic that his debut as a writer coincides with his sexual maturity bestowed upon him by Silk, which even he has the truthfulness to acknowledge. The failure of their relationship is nevertheless used to heighten Silk’s tragedy when she laments – “Why don’t people whom I give strength to stand up for themselves fail to stand up for me?”.

The Voice of Sanity

The film critic Naila is the voice of sanity in the film and effectively represents the feminist dilemma over Silk where at one level she symbolized sexual freedom of a woman in a deeply repressed patriarchal society; and at another level exploiting her sexuality to further herself and therefore perpetuating the fetishization of women in general. This conflict is seen in similar debates relating to sex-work and pornography where the issue of female agency is in conflict with whether consent in a deeply exploitative environment can ever be free? The truism of the film and of life lies in her comment, when Silk decides to dance on top of a car and openly kisses the man she loved to ruin Naila’s party – “Iss film industry ki asli hero tum ho Silk”.

Despite a remarkable attempt, for a mainstream bollywood film, to understand and portray the complexity of human sexuality backed by some credible performances, the film’s drawback lies in excessive use of punchlines, which is clever in parts but loses its effect due to overkill and renders the pathos superficial. The film also fails to capture the decline of Silk’s character as well as it portrays her sexual eclecticism and her meteoric rise.

]]> http://www.criticaltwenties.in/philosophyreligionculture/part-ii-sexuality-and-the-dirty-picture/feed 2 http://www.criticaltwenties.in/philosophyreligionculture/sexuality-and-the-dirty-picture http://www.criticaltwenties.in/philosophyreligionculture/sexuality-and-the-dirty-picture#comments Fri, 16 Dec 2011 17:27:11 +0000 Arghya http://www.criticaltwenties.in/?p=4066 [In this two-part series, Zoheb Hossain, explores the theme of sexuality in The Dirty Picture. Spolier Alert: This is not a review but an analysis. If you want a review without spoilers, see Danish's review here]

Ever since I have seen The Dirty Picture, I have been eager to write about it as I found its central premise of sexuality and the characters therein rich for psycho-analytic thought. At the outset, I wish to clarify that this is not a review of the film, but an attempt at exploring and analyzing the underlying themes of sexuality portrayed in the film through its characters. And secondly, for those who haven’t seen the film, beware of spoilers ahead. Due to the length of this piece, this analysis is divided into two parts – with the first part focusing on characters played by Vidya Balan and Emran Hashmi, who I think reflect the contrapuntal forces to the film, an important dramatic technique to create conflicts, whose resolution becomes the film’s and the characters’ purpose. The second part analyses the characters that serve to highlight larger problems which affect the protagonist of the film and are used to lay bare the symptoms of the times.

PART I

The Dirty Picture’s central theme is one of the most complex phenomena which we find ourselves struggling with – sexuality and more specifically female sexuality, which even philosophers and psychoanalysts have only sought to understand. As Freud put it, “. . . psychoanalysis does not try to describe what a woman is – that would be a task it could scarcely perform – but sets about enquiring how she comes into being’. [1]

The film’s success lies in confronting head-on the popular conceptions of sexuality, and laying bare the truth that sexuality can never be equated with genitality or a simple expression of biological drive. That, it “is always psycho-sexuality, a system of conscious and unconscious human fantasies involving a range of excitations and activities that produce pleasure beyond the satisfaction of any basic psychological need.”[2]

In this analysis, apart from appreciating the film’s attempt to critique a male-dominated film industry, I seek to show how the film successfully plumbs the psychological depths of a plethora of characters, who are at various stages of their sexual identities.

Vidya ‘Silk’ Balan

“Interest (monetary) and love are not opposed, but the search for the means of subsistence must predominate” – Kamasutra 6.1.19

A quote from the Kamasutra[3], the oldest extant treatise on erotic love is fitting here; since sexuality, the central theme of this film, is as popularly misconceived as the Kamasutra, being a book on merely sexual positions.

Vidya Balan as Silk is iconoclastic, bold and irreverent which makes her immediately attractive not simply because she exhibits “ample breasts, cleavage, legs, and biting of her lower lip” but because she seduces people to wholeheartedly embrace the ibid, the repository of instinctual desires – a courage which they often lack in themselves. The time and context – a poor lower class girl in a thoroughly male-dominated Tamil film industry in the 1980s, makes Silk’s courage especially laudable. Surya, a male protaganist’s disparaging comment in the film that – “the career of an actress is like governments in a democracy – it only lasts for around 5 years” – about his erstwhile heroine now playing the role of his mother is symptomatic of the deeply entrenched cultural inequality and prejudice against female actors within the Tamil film industry at the time.

To understand splits in Silk’s psyche, it would be important to see how identities are formed. The formation of identity is a process of cognition by the subject and its recognition by the society one inhabits. Cooley’s “looking glass self” theory explains the process that a person’s self grows out of society’s interpersonal interactions and the perceptions of other.  He summed up in his statement: “I am not what I think I am and I am not what you think I am; I am what I think that you think I am”.[4] The skewed growth of Silk’s psyche and her mental illness exposes the warps, poisons and ills of society. The sexuality, which brought her meteoric success and heightened her narcissism, in turn increased her loneliness and tyrannized her and resulted in her ultimate downfall. People’s inability to see beyond Silk’s body disabled her from seeing herself within, as a person capable of feelings and thoughts, and not merely an object for producing sexual excitation. Silk’s rise as well as her fall lays bare a sad truism that success and failure of a woman in a deeply stratified and patriarchal society (of which the Tamil film industry is only a microcosm) will depend on how far she is willing to further and perpetuate the dominant constructs.

Silk’s difficulty lay in her inability to understand and stare at what lay beneath the skin – the internal reality and take up problems in the mind until the pain and suffering forced her to do so; which is when she faced a total collapse in the dark recesses of her mind which she had never visited before.

Emran Hashmi – The Dark Horse

“The problem lies with the gaze, not its object.” [5]

While Vidya Balan was expected to dazzle in the film, it is Emran Hashmi who is the dark horse and pleasantly surprises in the role of an “intellectual” filmmaker, Abraham. He not only breaks his own stereotype from earlier films of being a one-dimensional sexualized lover but is also seen taking a dig at it with the remarkable ease and security of an actor who has found himself. Emran portrays Abraham’s inability to deal with his own sexuality with aplomb. This was evident from his raging outbursts at Silk’s overt sexualism in her first film as a dancer and his act of burning the film-roll so that it can never be used by the producer for cheap commercial gimmicks. His anger mixed with disgust towards Silk and what she symbolizes is well essayed. Abraham’s inability to own up and deal with his sexuality is also obvious in the intellectualization of emotions in his films, which others accuse him of as a lack of masala – a euphemism for lacking sexuality. His acknowledgement that his own films put him to sleep is a signifier of his impending growth. His character is almost as tortured as Silk’s throughout the film although more privileged and therefore less desperate and insecure. But he evolves through his conflicts and is seen owning up the ridiculous which is an inherent part of being human as well as accepting and mocking his own excessive sexuality by playing a triple role of a debauched old grandfather, father and son openly enjoying their sexuality in the company of beautiful women. While strangely, this reflects his growth, he is far from living out a real relationship till the end and his only hope soon dies thereafter. It’s not ironic that he manages to acknowledge his love for Silk only in her decline when her erstwhile ‘beauty’ is almost de-sexualised by her alcoholism and mental illness and her sexuality no longer poses an acute threat to him. In spite of this, he can only manage a “Sufiyana” love for her, which is often bereft of sexuality; one, which is felt for Gods and Goddesses and not “our everyday real love”. While the credit for imagining a complex character as this one goes to Milan Luthra, the director and Rajat Arora, the script writer, Emraan Hashmi shows what he can do given a difficult role.

[Part II will follow next week. For another take on the Dirty Picture see Suhas's piece: here]

[1] (Freud, XXII, 1933, o. 116: italics added)

[2] (Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the limits of love and knowledge, 1972-73 (Encore).

[3] http://books.google.co.in/books/about/Kamasutra.html?id=nYqLAAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_glass_self

[5] Kakar, Sudhir, The Ascetic of Desire, p. 66

http://www.caravanmagazine.in/Story/1187/When-Paris-Met-the-Mahatma.html

Did you know that when Mahatma Gandhi visited Paris, he met the public in a circus? It looks like he was paraded around like some sort of oriental exoticism for the citizens of the city of light to ogle at. This and more in this article by Mira Kamdar in Caravan.

*******

Ustad Sultan Khan dies

The Indian media kept up its tradition for coverage of  classical music by sticking to what seems to have become an unwritten rule: Maintain deafening silence about any form of classical music unless somebody very decorated dies. Ustad Sultan Khan, the sarangi maestro joined Pandit Bhimsen Joshi and Jagjit Singh, the ghazal exponent in the list of luminaries who have passed away in 2011. It says a great deal when any google search on any famous classical musician only yields obituary pieces in the first page. Try the following as an exercise: Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, Gangubai Hangal, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan… point proved. I think the most sensible move by Indian periodicals would be to have a new section entitled :”Obituaries/Classical Music”.

Here are some samples:

http://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/report_sarangi-maestro-ustad-sultan-khan-of-soulful-baritone-dead_1618277

http://www.tehelka.com/story_main51.asp?filename=hub101211Appraisal.asp

http://www.thehindu.com/arts/music/article2665605.ece

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Saul Bellow speaks

An article that caught the eye was the transcript published in the New York Review of Books of a talk given by Saul Bellow in the late eighties. It is a riveting and free wheeling talk and Saul Bellow is in his elements while trying to map his “jewish identity”.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/oct/27/jewish-writer-america/

*******

Ferguson v. Mishra [See what Anisha has to say on this here]

An excellent demolition of the “white-man’s burden” ideology implicit in the history being peddled by the likes of Niall Ferguson by Pankaj Mishra in the London Review of Books. Far from being a very objective review of Ferguson’s new book The West and the Rest, it does read like a prejudiced rant against  Ferguson  – as Ferguson himself alleges in the extremely entertaining letters section on the piece. But who cares – I agree with Mishra  – any “historian” who describes the consequences of 300 years of imperial slaughter as “misdeeds” deserves every bit of the ranting he gets up his street.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n21/pankaj-mishra/watch-this-man

]]> http://www.criticaltwenties.in/philosophyreligionculture/philosophy-religion-and-culture-critical-digest-6-12-11/feed 1 http://www.criticaltwenties.in/philosophyreligionculture/durga-puja-2011-one-year-on http://www.criticaltwenties.in/philosophyreligionculture/durga-puja-2011-one-year-on#comments Thu, 06 Oct 2011 13:57:35 +0000 Arghya http://www.criticaltwenties.in/?p=3847 Sequels rarely work. But sometimes sequels break the mould of their illustrious predecessors and are seen as masterpieces in their own right (Think: Ray’s Aparajito and Apur Sansar, Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke and Coppola’s Godfather II, amongst several others). Durga Pujo last year in London was exhilarating: GPS-navigated drives to far-flung destinations where yet another Bengali splinter group had started its own pujo, volunteering at the neighbourhood pandal watching Bengalis jostle with each other for bhog, the tiny fragments of bel pata during the anjali and for almost about anything else which was in short supply and meant to be shared, and being witness to amateurish cultural performances that took me back to warm autumn nights of puja performances in Calcutta where earnestness, effort and the sense of community were more than sufficient substitutes for real talent.

The sequel, Durga Pujo 2011, though could not have been more different- I didn’t volunteer at any pandal, didn’t have the patience to sit through yet another promising musical evening with ‘famous artists from Calcutta’ always too famous to be named, and most tragically didn’t have a car that would ensure that pandal-hopping in London was achieved with minimal effort, something which appeals deeply to my largely sedentary lifestyle. Nonetheless, it was an unforgettable five days— adda sessions deep into the night, reuniting old bonds that I had once thought were lost, making new acquaintances with the same giddy childlike innocence that pervaded teenage conversations at Maddox Square and discovering that walking wasn’t that bad after all.

A combination of an insatiable desire for seeing Ma Durga in as many places as possible, a reserve of intrepidity that only reveals itself during these five days of the year and like-minded company meant that distant Fairlop was our starting point on pandal-hopping Ashtami. Apart from the sense of adventure of travelling on a Hainault via Newbury Park train to a station on Central Line’s terminal loop, Fairlop provided a particularly English setting to a Bengali festival. The expanse of rugby fields and the din of long distance trains in the backdrop provided a surreal contrast to the loud Sanskritic chants of the pujo and garrulous Bengalis engaging in making light of the world’s problems through their ready solutions. The cherry on this Benglish pie was provided by an old grandmother-like lady who embraced me with deep affection when she heard that I read law at Balliol, and looked at my friend with equally deep disdain when she heard that though he too was at Oxford, he was at Mansfield College- “In our time, with due respect, Mansfield wasn’t really considered much of a college.” Fair reward for a formidable trek to Fairlop?

Undeterred, and in fact keenly looking forward to newer insights into the Bengali mind conditioned by an extended spell in England, we ploughed on (on foot, wherever possible) into the innards of Harrow, Ealing, Wembley, Ilford, Upton Park, King’s Cross and Belsize Park. From confused Brit bong accents announcing Bengali cultural programmes to bizarre requests in the middle of an arati (“Do you have a Blackberry phone charger?”), from Gujarati businessmen hoping to make a quick buck by selling grossly overpriced sarees to unsuspecting Bengali clients to collecting free HDFC Home Loan bags at every puja; bags that became the true mark of an official pandal hopper (“You have only three bags; I have five! Take that. ) the days passed in a whirl, giving way to long, meaningless evenings, where we too, unleashed the Bengali within us (or provoked the dormant Bengali in friends from other communities and countries) by chatting away the world’s problems, laughing at the most politically incorrect humour and drowning in passionate discussions on subjects that were close to our hearts. Old connections were rekindled, new ones were formed, as adda once again, spread its all-pervading tentacles to absorb everything and everyone in its warm embrace.

As I sat in the Belsize Park pujo pandal on Nabami evening, I felt that I was part of a celebration of fraternity that is rather sadly an anachronism in today’s world. As the ladies gave the traditional uludhwani, and the sound of the conch shell resonated around the hall, beautiful Bengali damsels traipsed around causing many an eyeball to turn, not least my grandmother’s who sensed a prospect, followed around by anxious Bengali males, hoping to steal that glance that would give them the license to dream. It was a mix of the spiritual and the sensual—innocent, hopeful and uniquely Bengali. And then the arati began and once more She became the centre of my attention— dressed in her finery, resplendent in her vermilion, looking straight at me with a hint of a smile, lighting up my life and answering my unarticulated prayers.

Shubho Bijoya to all.