[Reader-list] provocation et al

[Rana Dasgupta]

further to what i wrote yesterday, just wanted to
expand comments in response to last posting:

> It is
> precisely the near impossibility of accommodating
> the magnitude of distress and suffering that
> catastrophic events elicit in language, in forms
> like tragedy or comedy. Attempts to do so often end
> up trivialising the torment of the survivor, unless
> attempted by very skilful hands. One might argue
> that the tragicomic tone in Manto, particularly,
> emerges as a worthy negotiation with historical
> trauma. And perhaps only fragments a la Siyah Hashye
> and Khol Do can encapsulate the disturbing abyss of
> psychic experience unleashed by the partition
> itself. 

[...] 

> Pankaj Butalia's Moksh touched upon the
> impact of Partition trauma on the second generation
> in a moving fashion, which can be sharply
> differentiated from the crowd-pulling jingoism of
> Gadar. I grant the film-maker his right to vend his
> product in the marketplace of ideas, but I also hold
> to my judgement of Gadar as a cheap manipulation of
> traumatic memories and a prostitution of Partition
> suffering. 

what i was trying to hint at in my last mail was that
such debates about what the 'proper' representational
form is for tragedies of this sort carry with them a
politics that needs questioning.  the reason for this
is that the question itself implies that the meaning
of the suffering has become fixed.  it has become
fixed 'beyond' or 'before' articulation, and the role
of the artist (etc) is to find those few modes of
articulation that can live up to the role of speaking
that prediscursive tragedy.  the modes that pass the
test - to return to similar debates about the
holocaust - are characterised by:

extreme intellectual seriousness on the part of the
artist (and usually a historical claim to involvement
in the tragedy)

the tropes of high art, and an energetic distancing
from everything that is everyday or commercial

a plainness of representation, without excessive
melodrama or aestheticisation

a focus, where possible, on the authentic voices of
victims as the only people truly qualified to speak

a reverent silence on the part of commentators in and
outside the artwork

a language of epic memorialisation to explain the
purpose of the work - 'Let us not forget', 'Lest it
happen again' etc etc

there is absolutely nothing wrong with any of these
things.  i haven't seen either of the films you
mention but i'm sure i would share your preference for
Karvan over Gadar.  it's just that, as I said in my
last posting, there is a distinct similarity between
such debates about how to represent tragedy and many
different religious debates about how to represent
God, and this 'sacralisation' needs to be probed a
little bit.  there is of course no representation of
Partition that can go beyond its nature as mere
representation, no representation that is 'ultimately'
faithful.  so what is the purpose of, and the basis
for, the elaboration of an aesthetic matrix which will
help distinguish the 'authentic' representations from
those which are merely a 'prostitution' of the
original suffering?

some random reflections in response to this question:

1) when we put into place a set of rules that are
designed to protect a historical event from
over-articulation, when we implicitly place that event
'before' language and seek to control which great
masters of language be solely allowed to gesture,
whisperingly, towards its unarticulability, we are
forbidding the majority from speaking about it.  this
imposed silence may seem like reverence, but it is
also censorship.

2) this struggle against the 'quotidianisation' of
such events by building holy walls around their
articulation is an attempt to rescue them from their
continuities with the rest of life and to enshrine
them as unique and unforgettable.  there are really
pernicious consequences of this when we are talking
about something as long ago as Partition.  firstly
those that see themselves as the heirs of the tragedy
feel that they have a unique cause, a holy memory to
defend, a tragic-heroic role in history that is immune
to critique and that need not always justify itself. 
secondly, this has exactly the opposite effect of that
which is so often stated: "We remember so that no one
need go through this again."  this justification of
the memorialisation of a *specific* past through
reference to a *generally* better future is usually
disingenuous.  it actually amounts to a *fixation*
with the specific history, a constant psychological
circling in on it.  the outward, cosmopolitan movement
rarely comes.  

3) the selection of which events can mobilise the
energies of the intellectuals, artists, politicians
and community leaders who jointly turn a historical
event into a 'holocaust' is a precarious process.  to
me it always seems as if eligible candidates lend
themselves well to the forms of high art: clashes of
enormous, primordial forces, the questioning of the
ultimate value - or pointlessness - of human life, the
interplay of the grand concerns of kings and rulers
and the effects in the lives of ordinary people swept
up therein, epic characters whose concern is the
making and meaning of history, a stage strewn with the
slain over which sobre survivors make serious
resolutions about the future, and of course a
continuity of some sort with urgent contemporary
political agendas, without which the whole point would
be moot.  the bhuj earthquake would not make a
holocaust because there is not enough meaning in a
shaking of the ground.  more significantly the
systematic killing of women in dowry deaths across the
country, which meets several of the criteria (deaths
systematically engineered by people of extreme evil on
victims who have done nothing to deserve them,
affecting very large numbers of people) is unlikely to
be called a holocaust because it does not erupt
manfully into the forum of political rule, it does not
divert the course of history.  

in sum i don't think that the search for an adequate
memorialisation of the suffering of people affected by
Partition is a simple question of mimesis in which
representers and their representations may be selected
or rejeced on the basis of their serious moral
dedication to the original, authentic moment.  i think
the act of selecting *this* event over others, and the
launching of a quasi-theological debate over what the
rules of representation will be link into far less
naive structures.

i've just noted some ideas here which seem to be
connected; they don't all arise from previous
postings.

R

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