Historicality in Literature: Subalternist Misrepresentations
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Historicality in Literature: Subalternist Misrepresentations In History at the Limits of World History, the historian Ranajit Guha makes an extraordinary plea – for the historian to ‘recover the living history of the quotidian’ and to ‘recuperate the historicality of what is humble and habitual’ so as to turn the historian into a ‘creative writer’. Yet Tagore, whose essay Guha cites in his work, and much later J M Coetzee, had protested at literature being subsumed by history; a history that was taken to be a ‘fixed, self- evident reality to which the novel was supposed to bear witness’. While the question whether creative writing is a better way of writing subaltern history is to be debated, the repercussions of such a move on the future course of subaltern historiography remain to be seen. ROSINKA CHAUDHURI Ordinary history is traditional, higher history mythical, and the below’ had, in a sense, incorporated an element of creativity and highest mystical. imagination from its very inception. But the extraordinary plea – Goethe, cited in Bhudev Mukhopadhyay’s epigraph to here for the historian ‘to recover the living history of the quo- Pushpanjali (Calcutta, 1876) tidian’, this appeal to ‘recuperate the historicality of what is humble and habitual’3 attempts to turn the historian, in fact, into istory as a narrative concerned with the everyday world: a creative writer. Ironically, literary history shows that it was, this is the objective Ranajit Guha, in the epilogue to his in fact, the high modernist conception of art that defined the task HHistory at the Limits of World History (2002), wishes of the creative writer as involving such a recuperation of the historians to attain, and for a readymade manifesto for this ‘living history of the quotidian’: Proust, Joyce, and Woolf come programme he turns to the last but one article of Tagore’s prose immediately to mind. writings as it appeared in his Centenary Edition, called Sahitye In an appendix to his book, Guha takes it upon himself to Aitihasikata or Historicality in Literature (1941). Guha sees translate the essay by Tagore that he has discussed in the epilogue Tagore, in this essay, speak up against the ‘pedantic historian’, to History at the Limits of World History. The reading of it is and consequently, somewhat startlingly, he endorses the idio- an interesting experience, because it alerts the reader to a number syncratic approach of the creative writer to history as an aim for of simultaneous developments in the thinking of not only Guha historians generally. Guha’s attempt to sidestep the necessity, but also his colleague and fellow subaltern historian, Dipesh for a historian, of the tools of his trade, of facts that constitute Chakrabarty, in his essay on Tagore, ‘Nation and Imagination’ the ‘net of external events’, leads him through Tagore and the in Provincialising Europe (2002). It is worth noting here that Upanishads, to the ‘facticity of being’ in Heidegger, which is recently, a number of Bengalis fundamentally associated with the opposed to the ‘factuality of historiographical representation’. Subaltern Studies project, namely Guha and Chakrabarty, Gayatri It is facticity that leads to that desirable historicality that Tagore Spivak (whose Deuskar lecture at the CSSSC on February 10, 2003 invokes, for facticity, in Tagore, is ‘an instrument of appropria- was on ‘Disgrace, Tagore, and Primary Education in West Bengal’), tion by which the self has made the world his own’. The ‘object- and Partha Chatterjee (who delivered the Sunil Sen Memorial historical conventions of historiography’ that Tagore opposes are Lecture at Rabindra Bharati University, Calcutta, on ‘Rabindrik countered by a facticity that is located in the primal scenes of Nation ki?’ or ‘what is Tagore’s ‘nation’?’ in Bengali on April his childhood, for, ‘Unlike the factuality of historiographic 29, 2003), seem to all be returning to Tagore (not infrequently representation, the facticity of being must be grasped in ad- reviled in his time for his wealthy, elitist family background, for vance’.1 This is an ideal method, proclaims Guha, for the pre- being a ‘bourgeois writer’) in articles, speeches and epilogues. history of Tagore’s growth as a writer is contained there; thus This sudden rediscovery of Tagore, that icon of the middle historicality is situated at a depth beyond the reach of the ‘aca- classes, after 30-odd years and a lifetime devoted to the subaltern demic historian’. project, is in itself a sociological phenomenon worth commenting Guha’s need to challenge and change the nature of historio- upon for the deeply bhadralok instincts of a group of intellectuals graphy thus leads him to a different field altogether, ‘over the who represent a generation fundamentally and all pervasively fence’ as he puts it, ‘to neighbouring fields of knowledge’ like influenced by the culture of Tagore. Without venturing into any literature, which historians must learn from in order to deal with larger generalisations on the portent and symbolism of these ‘historicality’.2 While the foundational aim of the subaltern Bengali subalternists’ qualitative investment in Tagore and what project had been to critique elitism in south Asian historiography, that might mean to subaltern studies generally, it should be 20 years on Guha stretches that intention to its limits, and at a enough to remark merely that perhaps at the root of this return depth, he acknowledges, unknown to his work till now. Guha’s to Tagore lies the shared personal and intellectual traditions of vision of a new historiography had been located then on the growing up in post-Tagorean Bengal, and that this current pre- question of subaltern representation in history; ‘history from occupation perhaps reflects the very nature of the beginnings of 4658 Economic and Political Weekly October 16, 2004 the subaltern studies project, whose ‘internal coherence’ has been expected no more than a few words on the subject from him. The seen by critics to be as much intellectual as personal and the next day as soon as I arrived he said: ‘What a lot of trick questions endeavour being impelled by both ideological imperatives and (bor-thokano prasna) you have come up with. Here.’ With that group loyalties.4 Tagore then becomes a site in which both these he handed me a manuscript written down by Rani Chanda; he began elements – the personal and the intellectual – that inform these it after he woke up and by the time we had woken up, it was finished. subalternists’ project come together in a problematic way. Two days later he felt that he had not said enough on the topic, so he added another short article to it…8 Tagore formulates a poetics in his essay that is constructed around a moment of epiphany or transcendence that lifts him A letter from Tagore to Buddhadev, dated May 24, 1941, out of his everyday existence into a communion with the sublime, mentions the conversation, and carries the entire text of the article; which is the essence of creativity. That moment of joy is remi- the editor of Chithipatra (Letters) refers to this as a ‘typed letter- niscent of Wordsworth’s most important conceptual image in The article’ (patra-prabandha).9 This letter had been reproduced as Prelude: those ‘spots of time’ ‘That with distinct pre-eminence an article in letter form by Buddhadev in the journal Kabita in retain/A renovating virtue’...‘enshrining/Such is my hope, the 1941 under the title Sahitye Aitihasikata O Sahityer Utsa or spirit of the Past/For future restoration.’ Wordsworth continues: ‘Historicality in Literature and the Source of Literature’. The ‘Such moments/Are scattered everywhere, taking their date/From second part, Sahityer Utsa, – missing from the centenary edition our first childhood’, and in it, ‘ordinary sights’ become ‘vision- Guha uses – is in complete contrast to the first part, being a vague ary’.5 For Guha to suggest that the academic historian should and generalised pronouncement on the essential characteristics try to enter that state of heightened perception leading to creativity of creativity in mankind: from the delight of his own history in in order to rid historiography of its ‘statist blinkers’ is, at the the first part, we turn now to a programmatic history of man. very least, a misreading of Tagore’s intention. “All we need to Crucially, there are a couple of sentences at the start and a final do”, Guha quotes the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre as concluding sentence here that are missing from the text of the saying, just as Tagore did, “is to open our eyes and see”: advice first part, Sahitye Aitihasikata, as it appeared in the centenary that has been ‘ignored by historians these last 60 years’.6 Such edition. Tagore begins, in his letter: “Buddhadev, when I talked a clarion call to historians to arise, awake, and change their to you yesterday of historicality in literature, I had always known methods and aims is, paradoxically, eerily reminiscent of the in my own mind that I was exaggerating. The reason for such countless exhortations of nationalists such as Vivekananda in deliberate exaggeration was that much bitterness has accumulated the 19th century who similarly commanded the people of India somewhere inside me.” The concluding sentence of the letter to ‘open their eyes’ and slumber no more; that this paradoxical reverts to this theme: “That is why, if you people go too far echoing is completely contrary to Guha’s own lifelong politics (barabari koro) with your insistence on the lessons of history, of historiography, fashioned against Indian elitist/nationalist then I too shall get ready for battle (komor bedhe) and begin historiographies in favour of a study of societies, histories and to go too far (barabari korte)”.10 (my translations) cultures ‘from below’ is obvious, but still unnerving.