Archaeology of Vagabondage: South Asia's Colonial Encounter and After
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ARCHAEOLOGY OF VAGABONDAGE: SOUTH ASIA'S COLONIAL ENCOUNTER AND AFTER A Dissertation Submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts and Science TRENT UNIVERSITY Peterborough, Ontario, Canada (c) Copyright by Avishek Ray 2014 Cultural Studies PhD Graduate Program January 2015 ABSTRACT Archeology of Vagabondage: South Asia's Colonial Encounter and After Avishek Ray My research examines the figure of the 'vagabond' as a case study to illustrate how 'modern' perception of the 'vagabond' has depleted the diversities in its 'pre-modern' counterparts. It argues that the paranoia towards the 'vagabond' was inherited from the west out of the colonial contact leading to the birth of the nation-state and its liaison with 'instrumental rationality' during the high noon of advanced industrial capitalism, while (quasi-religious) itinerancy, on the contrary, had always been tolerated in 'pre-modern' India. The problems I am addressing are: What is the line of thread that separates the 'traveler' from the 'vagabond', the 'explorer' from the 'wanderer'? How do we then politically account for the historic 'ruptures' in the vagabond having been tolerated in the ancient 'Indic' thought [cf. Manusmriti, Arthshastra], encouraged in early Buddhist discourse [cf. Samannaphala Sutta], revered as the 'holy Other' in the Middle Ages [cf. Bhakti-Sufi literature], and eventually marginalized in the 'modern'? While considering issues of cultural differences, my thesis points to how the epistemic shifts from the classical to the medieval, from the medieval to the modern radically alter the value system immanent in the figure of the 'vagabond'. The research argues that the cultural baggage that the expression 'vagabond' is generally associated with, is a product of a specific western/utilitarian value system, which is a distinct 'cultural' category of the 'modern' west that had no resonance in 'pre- modern' India, and hence cannot be necessarily universalizable. The project works in a number of registers: historical, archival, cultural, philosophical and representational, involves analysis of literary, filmic texts, also legislative documents, and is genuinely interdisciplinary in nature. As of ii discourse analysis, the project studies the politics of cultural representations both of and by 'vagabonds'. Keywords: Vagabond, India, Vagrancy Act, 1943 Bengal Famine, Chittaprosad, Zainul Abedin, Samannaphala Sutta, Buddhism, Rahul Sankrityayan, Kalkut, Premankur Atorthy iii Acknowledgments First, I want to thank Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay for all his support and encouragement. I wish this project measures up to his unconditional support and colossal erudition. At various stages of this project, I have greatly benefited from stimulating conversations with and insightful feedbacks from Shibaji Bandyopadhyay and Sandip Bandyopadhyay. I sincerely thank both of them. Tejaswini Niranjana's formidable mentorship, lamentably for a short phase though, had helped me think through the project when it was very nascent. I also want express gratitude to my friends, Jeremy Leipert, Laura Greenhood, Corey Ponder, and Soumik Datta for generously agreeing to render editorial assistance at different phases. Jonathan Hodges, Hugh Hodges and Ramin Jahanbegloo deserve thanks for their comments and feedback during the thesis defence. Last but not the least, my heartfelt thanks to Ihor Junyk, my supervisor, for his support and critical inputs, and Ian Mclachlan, my committee reader, in remembrance of the excellent conversationalist that he has always been. iv Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgments iv Introduction 1 A Note on Pre-history of Vagabondage 30 Imag(in)ing the Vagabond: Virulent Mobility in Post-Colonial Times 94 Literarizing The Vagabond: Towards a Radical Theory of Wandering 157 Conclusion 220 References 238 1 Introduction In 1907 the Bombay Government denied a ‘vagabond’ his right to his father’s pension only because he was assessed to be a ‘vagabond’. The 1907 file from the Bombay Police reads: ‘[T]he widow had only one son – a vagabond – and so the pension was granted to the widow (instead of to the son) for the support of herself and her daughter’. Next, the reportage legitimizes the decision by citing a similar case – what the report calls a deviation from the ‘proper course’ – with another widow. In the latter case, however, the widow received a pension because her two elder sons had separated from the family. Notwithstanding the gender-angle, what catches my attention is the ‘cultural baggage’ associated with the idea of the vagabond, and how it acts as key factor in the verdict of this case. The pledge that the pension of seven rupees -- by no means a paltry sum in 1907 -- must go in favor of the widow instead of the son, has been solely supported by the fact that the latter had become a vagabond. The case is also interesting for a second reason: it involved a conflict of opinions between the Finance Department and the Bombay Government. While the latter was in favor of granting the pension to the widow for life, the Finance Department proposed that the pension should be paid for twelve years or till her remarriage, whichever was earlier. Curious about whether there had been any repeal or revision, I wanted to check on further follow-ups of the case. But this must have been in reality a very insignificant incident, one potentially incapable of grossly stirring public curiosity, for there had been no further follow-ups available on record; moreover, hardly half a page was spared for this single report in its entirety. Nevertheless, questions do persist: When and how did the widow or the Government come to the conclusion that the son had become a ‘vagabond’? Did the ‘vagabond’ son really ‘disappear’? Did he ever return? Does his becoming a ‘vagabond’ 2 bear the same kind of consequences as becoming ‘separated’ from the family? Even in the lack of verifiable sources on the whereabouts of the son, one cannot but be amazed at the way one's becoming a ‘vagabond’ has been uttered in the same breath with one's ‘separating from the family’, and has been equated with self-ostracization in the eyes of the law. From the manner it has been reported, it follows as if like a corollary to vagabondage, that the vagabond son may now be disentitled, if not deprived, from his claims although there is no mention of him having either renounced the family or refused to support it financially. What needs asking at this point is: how do we unpack the 'constructedness' of the apriori assumptions that cloak the idea of the ‘vagabond’? How did they crystallize at all in the first place? Why and when is the idea of vagabondage naturalized as a punishable crime? What conflates this idea with the notion of abstaining from responsibilities, familial or otherwise? These questions comprise the central problematic of my research. My research examines the figure of the ‘vagabond’ as a case study to illustrate how ‘modern’ perception of the ‘vagabond’ has depleted the diversities in its 'pre-modern' counterparts. It argues that the paranoia towards the 'vagabond', in the context of India, was inherited from the West out of the colonial contact leading to the birth of the nation-state and its liaison with 'instrumental rationality' during the high noon of advanced industrial capitalism, while (quasi-religious) itinerancy, on the contrary, had always been tolerated in ‘pre- modern’ India. The problems I am addressing are: What is the line that separates the ‘traveler’ from the ‘vagabond’, the ‘explorer’ from the ‘wanderer’? How do we then politically account for the historic ‘ruptures’ embodied in the transitions from vagabonds being tolerated in ancient ‘Indic’ thought [cf. Manusmriti, Arthshastra], encouraged in early Buddhist discourse [cf. Samannaphala Sutta], revered as the ‘holy Other’ in the Middle Ages [cf. Bhakti-Sufi literature], to eventually being marginalized in the 3 ‘modern’? While considering issues of cultural differences, my thesis points to how the epistemic shifts – from the classical to the medieval, from the medieval to the modern – radically alter the value system immanent in the figure of the ‘vagabond’. The research argues that the cultural baggage the expression ‘vagabond’ is generally associated with, is a product of a specific Western/utilitarian value system, which is a distinct ‘cultural’ category of the ‘modern’ West that had no resonance in ‘pre-modern’ India, and hence cannot be necessarily universalizable. The 'vagabond' is basically an umbrella-term for a swarm of different categories of travelers: hippie, gypsy, peregrinator, bohemian, hobo, vagrant, tramp, wanderer and so on. The gypsy is the prototype of the footloose, the peregrinator of the quasi- religious mendicant, the tramp of the itinerant miscreant, so on and so forth. They refer to different modes of traveling practices, bear different undertones, positive and negative. But, there is hardly any doubt in the fact that whenever we face these phrases, we tend to take them as ‘naturalized’ concepts without questioning the classificatory intentions therein. Who were the proponents of setting up these classificatory categories? When and why were these set up? What is the ‘telos’ of this dividing practice? Which politico-historical milieu among others allowed this exclusionary dividing practice? And above all, if people had been traveling from antiquity and in so many unessentializably diverse forms, why certain travelers had to be branded as ‘vagabond’? How do we account for the paradox in the ‘explorer’ being venerated in history lessons while, on the flipside, the ‘vagabond’ being convicted of Vagrancy acts? In this project, there is a family of words that I have set in motion around ‘vagabondage’, which is the keyword for the project. These surrounding words – wanderer, nomad, refugee, itinerant, vagrant, the homeless etc. – create regional, 4 context-specific, but overlapping concepts, and do not necessarily allude to any single overarching concept.