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Literature the Journal of Commonwealth The Journal of Commonwealth Literature http://jcl.sagepub.com/ Beyond the subaltern syndrome: Amitav Ghosh and the crisis of the bhadrasamaj Makarand R. Paranjape The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 2012 47: 357 DOI: 10.1177/0021989412450702 The online version of this article can be found at: http://jcl.sagepub.com/content/47/3/357 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for The Journal of Commonwealth Literature can be found at: Email Alerts: http://jcl.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://jcl.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://jcl.sagepub.com/content/47/3/357.refs.html >> Version of Record - Sep 14, 2012 What is This? Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at STELLA MARIS COLG on April 22, 2013 JCL47310.1177/0021989412450702The Journal of Commonwealth LiteratureParanjape 4507022012 THE JOURNAL OF COMMONWEALTH Article LITERATURE The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 47(3) 357 –374 Beyond the subaltern © The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub. syndrome: Amitav Ghosh and co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0021989412450702 the crisis of the bhadrasamaj jcl.sagepub.com Makarand R. Paranjape Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India Abstract Using some of Amitav Ghosh’s influential non-fictional writings to understand his own novels, this paper problematizes Ghosh’s works in terms of the crisis of the bhadrasamaj or the middle class makers of the nation and civil society in India. Indeed, we may detect a direct line of literary and cultural descent from the two iconic figures of recent Bangla culture, Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray, to Ghosh’s complex career. But instead of a continuity, Ghosh’s works are a record of epistemic ruptures engendered by the breakdown of grand narratives of nations and the eruption of civic violence. The crisis in Tagore is a combination of private and public failures exemplified in a text such as Nashtonir, filmed so eloquently as Charulata by Ray. A similar crisis in the private and public domain is seen in Ray’s Ganashatru and Agantuk, his last works. While versions of similar crises are visible in Ghosh’s novels including The Shadow Lines, The Calcutta Chromosome, and The Hungry Tide, I argue that instead of confronting them head on as his predecessors did, Ghosh tends to be evasive, either by not allowing them fully to develop or escaping into coincidence, “doubling”, or romanticism. Does such a retreat into narratives of exodus or romanticized celebrations of failed experiments such as the Morichjhapi settlement signify a shift in both the self-confidence and the priorities of the bhadrasamaj, whose product and representative Ghosh is? Keywords Amitav Ghosh, crisis of the bhadrasamaj, postcolonial, diaspora, subaltern Amitav Ghosh is celebrated for his extraordinary virtuosity as a chronicler both of our compelling presents and forgotten pasts. As one of his ablest critics Anshuman Mondal puts it, Ghosh as a writer is keen to examine the world from the perspective of the unsettled, or uprooted – possibilities that might offer insights unavailable to others . Ghosh visualises “movement” as . fundamental to human experience. a potentiality that inhabits the consciousness of even those Corresponding author: Makarand R. Paranjape, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Mehrauli Rd, New Delhi, 110067, India. Email: [email protected] Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at STELLA MARIS COLG on April 22, 2013 358 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 47(3) people often regarded as “settled”, such as peasants. Indeed, much of his work challenges the assumption that human history is one of “settled” populations and “stable” cultures. (2007: 3) But these unusual narratives also make major epistemological gestures. For exam- ple, the hidden account of the forgotten Slave of MS H.6 in In An Antique Land (1992) or the untold “history” of malaria in The Calcutta Chromosome (1996) may be construed as attempts to formulate “‘para-colonial’ knowledges within a colonial and post-colonial milieu” (Mondal, 2007: 8). Nevertheless, though the general response to Ghosh has been laudatory, especially in the several essays on individual works, it has not necessarily added much to a critical understanding of his entire oeuvre.1 That is why this essay is at variance with much of the secondary work on Ghosh. I focus neither on a specific text, nor am I entirely enthusiastic about Ghosh’s main preoc- cupations. Instead, I wish to focus on what I call the crisis of the bhadrasamaj2 (or the middle class) as a key issue in his texts. Usually, Ghosh’s central preoccupation is seen as his commitment to subaltern or fugitive narratives. In contrast, I see these very preoc- cupations as emanating from his reluctance, if not inability, to respond squarely to the crisis of the middle classes, of which he is a part. Second, I develop this argument by placing Ghosh’s work in a lineage of influence extending back via Satyajit Ray to Rabindranath Tagore. In thus contextualizing his works, my methodology is not com- parative, but genealogical. I wish to show how this theme of the crisis of the bhadrasa- maj, almost like a chromosome, reproduces itself from writer to middle class writer, across generations. In addition, I also pay close attention to his non-fiction as a way of understanding his fictional project. To me Ghosh’s work is especially important because it represents his problematic relationship with the dominant ideology of the still significant bhadrasamaj in Bengal and in India. By bhadrasamaj, which may be translated as “genteel society”, I mean the Bengali bourgeoisie newly emergent under colonialism. This amorphous and diverse “middle class” was not only constituted by colonialism but also went on to resist it to help forge the nation that became India. To explore this crisis in Ghosh’s works, I not only draw on his non-fictional writings, but also try to place him in a lineage of influence going back to Satyajit Ray and Rabindranath Tagore, the two emblematic representatives of Bengali creative genius. Both Ray and Tagore belong to this social group – as does Ghosh – whose crisis, as I shall argue, he also strives to articulate, but does not quite succeed in resolving. To this class, writing was very important. As Ghosh himself admits in “The March of the Novel through History”, “we were a cultivated people . Calcutta is an oddly book- ish city” (2005: 104). Dipesh Chakrabarty describes how important the “literary” was in the formation of modern Bengali identity: For a long time, the comportment of being a modern Bengali person has had much to do with certain kinds of personal investment in Bengali language and literature. Sometime in the nineteenth century, in the mist of times that for the bhadralok have been partly historical and partly fabulous, things happened in British Bengal that made books and literature central to modern Bengali identity. (2004: 655) Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at STELLA MARIS COLG on April 22, 2013 Paranjape 359 Indian modernity, I believe, came into being through a unique sacred–secular partnership that was involved in the romance of the “word”, which is why I might consider calling this journey at the heart of Ghosh’s creative project a pilgrimage. But reading habits, as Chakrabarty shows, are changing; the loss of the prestige of Bengali has given way to the adoption of English as the preferred language of many a bhadralok. The crisis that I shall discuss also has much to do with this shift. What is this crisis of the bhadrasamaj that is so central to my essay? How is it mani- fested in literary texts and cultural production? Simply put, this is an ethical as well as social crisis, consequent upon the displacement of a once-privileged group from its cul- tural pre-eminence in pre-Independence India. Some of this loss of privilege is mani- fested in various expressions of nostalgia and melancholy as in Parimal Ghosh’s evocative description of the changing demographics of a Kolkata neighbourhood in “Where have all the ‘bhadraloks’ gone?” (2004). But its main manifestation is in the challenges posed to the traditional notions of noblesse oblige that this class had assumed as much to legiti- mate its ascendency as actually to give back to society. I shall argue that what we see in Ghosh is an abdication of this responsibility consequent upon the “loss” of the nation that both his fiction and non-fiction underscore. What ensues is the typical diasporic flight from the real problems of the nation; whether this means that the work of the bhadrasa- maj is done or “un”done remains, of course, to be seen. To elaborate my case, it would be apposite to place Ghosh in a lineage of cultural influence and descent in which two of the greatest cultural heroes of modern Bengal feature prominently. I speak, of course, of Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) and Satyajit Ray (1921−1992). That Ghosh was deeply influenced by both is well-known. By translating Tagore’s “Khudit Pashaan” as “The Hunger of Stones”, Ghosh not only acknowledged his debt to Tagore, but also offered a compliment to Tagore’s spectacular spectrology, the peculiar haunting of the present by the past, which in an interview con- ducted by S. Chaudhury (Ghosh, 2000b: n.p.), Ghosh describes as “an elaborate meta- phor of colonialism” (cited in Mondal, 2007: 34).3 As to Ray, what could serve as a more comprehensive acknowledgement than Ghosh’s fulsome tribute to the maestro published in 2003, twelve years after the latter’s death? Here he not only confesses that The Shadow Lines “clearly shows the influence of Satyajit Ray” but admits that Ray played an important role “in shaping the imaginary universe of my childhood and youth” (Ghosh, 2003: 5).
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