[Reader-list] Sort of a diary after February 28

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear Gayatri di,

Your e mail commenting on the silence in the Reader List on the events in 
Gujarat is salutary. (And your diary is one of the most moving texts that I 
have read recently about the events in Gujarat).There can be no excuses for 
this silence, and I don't consider it necessary to offer any.

You wrote - "Day 2: Woke up in the morning and went straight to the computer 
to check emails, with a certainty there would be messages in the Sarai 
Readers-List. Those would help me somehow to deal with the anguish that had 
been gnawing inside, growing over the rest of the previous day, cutting into 
a restless night. Nothing!"

The 'Nothing' in the face of the violence that gripped Gujarat (which many of 
us - at least those of us who are in India.  witnessed on television) is 
something for this list to be ashamed of. That is my personal opinion, and it 
bothers me as much as it bothers you. (there have been a few relevant 
forwards on to the list mainly by Harsh Kapur, and Reyhan Chaudhuri, in her 
response to the posting by Anand Taneja has drawn the necessary connections 
between what is permissible in Gujrat (rioting) and what is not permissible 
in Delhi (free speech) but the dearth of original writing on events of this 
magnitude is disturbing.

You go on to write - 
"Day 5: What is this silence? I am reminded of September 11 and thereafter.
Every morning we would wake to receive mails; they kept on pouring in all
day long. There was no time to read all of them. My son, working in a
molecular laboratory asked whether he should un-subscribe himself from the
list, since he could not do justice to all of those messages. Why isn't
anyone writing anything now?

I know the Sarai Readers' List is not the only 'site' to look for what
people are saying and doing - far from it. And yet, here is documented what
a sizable number of the intelligentsia - the very established ones, those
who are silently operative in their own spheres, those who are beginning to
make their marks in public spheres, visible spheres, and so on - thought and
wrote after the September event in the US. Why shouldn't the same happen
now? A number - any number - writing and sharing, informing and probing;
there would be some respite if not solace.

This silence must be questioned, investigated, talked about. I had phoned
Jeebesh a little while ago, enquiring whether my daughter's friend from
Zurich could travel from Delhi to Lucknow on March 5 and then I raised this
question. Jeebesh said in that case there was an outside enemy, in this
case, it is us. How can that be - if that is how this situation can be
analysed?"

Your questions are absolutely straightforward, "the silence, must be 
questioned, investigated and talked about, and I think any response in to 
this in terms of "outside enemies" or "inside enemies" is a sidestepping of 
the issue at stake. We are all outsiders/insiders now. The whole point about 
being a community of online discourse and reflection means that we are 
neither neared Gujrat nor nearer New York or Afghanistan. All these spaces 
are spaces which this list needs to travel to and listen to, whats the point 
of inhabiting the 'borderlesseness of the internet' otherwise. And if we are 
'inside' September 11, then we have to also take responsibility for being 
'inside' the fire and now the smouldering remains of the city streets of 
Gujrat.

My only question to you is - why look for solace or respite in the writing of 
public or private intellectuals, or people at Sarai, on the list. You, have 
intervened, that is what matters, and we need more such interventions on the 
list, without anyone of us bothering to think whether or not we are the kind 
of people to whom the 'priviledge' of speaking out devolves by some 
unaccounted for virtue. We could for starters, stop being tongue tied in the 
act of waiting for each other to speak. And if the "sizable intelligentsia" 
that you refer to in your psoting is silent, so much the worse for them.

But in saying this I also take exception to your expectation that some of us 
ought to be more responsible in terms of writing than others. Do correct me 
if I am wrong about this. I think everyone is equally responsible for the 
silence. The list belongs to all those who have subscribed to it. It does not 
belong more to those who happen to  work in the physical space of Sarai, and 
less to those who are located outside it . It does not belong more to the 
"sizable intellligentsia - the very established ones, those who are silently 
operative in their own spheres, those who are beginning to make their marks 
in public spheres, visible spheres", and less to any of the rest of us who 
are neither sizable nor particularly established.

The whole point  of a public (and as yet un filtered) list is that it is a  
completely free and open platform for any of its subscribers. I as a member 
of the list am glad that you, as another member of the list have in a sense 
substantively broken the silence about Gujarat. But we are all equally 
implicated in the silence until now.

I think there is a wider and more important issue at stake here than the 
question of who condemns which violence and when. And this is the expectation 
that some of us should be more articulate than others.That some of us (in 
this case on this list) have more of a responsibility to speak and be heard 
than others. I have serious reservations about this position.
 
In a recent posting another member of the list (Joy) had in a sense implied 
that free speech, in another  context, ( in the discussion of the judgment on 
Arundhati Roy) is a privilege and a luxury. That all of us are not in a sense 
equally equipped or capable to 'practice' free speech. Pradip Saha too had 
talked about whether in the debate about free speech, we might not risk 
underplaying the dispute over the dam and about water, which started the 
whole thing off in the first place.

I will respond to these question later, (about whether free speech is a 
luxury, or whether free speech is more or less important than the struggle 
for basic necessities) in another posting, but what I want to say right now 
that I find the implications and corollaries and tacit assumptions that 
inform these  position deeply unsatisfactory. 

Speech, and the ability to communicate our ideas, whether soberly or 
passionately, hysterically or eloquently is something we all share. To remain 
silent oneself, and expect someone else to do the talking, it seems to me is 
in a sense similar to the 'distaste' that is sometimes expressed, when 
someone is seen as being a person who 'talks too much'. Their is such a thing 
as the inverted snobbery of the inadequately articulate. And this is not a 
valuation of silence, but a rationalization of one's own unwillingness to 
work on making an intervention in a conversation. And here I will include all 
symbolizing activity, verbal, textual or non verbal as some form of 
conversation.This is the smugness of the 'I am not going to try and express 
myself, but if anyone else does it and does it well, than I am going to sit 
back and carp about  it' 

In fact when we are saying that someone is 'talking too much', or that their 
speech act is 'overvalued' we are actually pointing to the fact that no one 
else is speaking. Perhaps if everyone did a little bit of speaking up now and 
then, than neither the silence nor the speech act of any particular 
individuals, ('sizable' or 'established' ) would mean such a big deal. 

On the one hand we have some people complaining about the way in which the 
list has drawn attention to someone speaking, and on the other we have you 
protesting, very rightly, about the fact that no one (and you have pointed a 
finger at those you consider to be "sizable intellectuals") has spoken. I 
think this is a fascinating paradox for a list to find itself in.

Behind both statements, the twin poles of the paradox, if you like, lies the 
assumption that Arundhati Roy's speech act,in one instance, or the "sizable 
intellectuals" non-speech act, in another instance, is somehow a class apart 
form other speech acts and non speech acts. And that one persons personal 
silence is heavier than anyone elses on this list. Or, for instance, that 
Arundhati's speech act is heavier than Joy's. The media, with its penchant 
for "celebrity speak' would say so. But none of us is under any compulsion to 
accept this weighing of speech and silence. This list is not the front page 
of the Times of India.

I want to contest this implicit acceptance of the "weightage" of speech acts 
on this list. Free speech is free only when everyone wants it to be free.A 
monologue is not an instance of free speech, a conversation is. I agree 
completely with Jeebesh (in his posting in response to Joy) that a corollary 
of free speech is the right to remain silent, but a further corollary is also 
that free speech can only flourish within a discursive community. 

This list is, or hopes to be, a discursive community. Within it, all speakers 
have the freedom to speak, and the freedom to remain silent. But one cannot 
expect the freedom of the most of us to remain silent, as the necessary 
condition for the freedom of some of us to speak. 

If anything it must be seen the other way round. The freedom of each of us to 
speak is the necessary condition for the freedom of all of us to speak. If 
there is silence on any issue, (like the Gujrat killings) it is because each 
and all of us were silent, until you broke it. It is possible to measure more 
and less speech, because some people speak/write  more, others, less. But is 
it possible to measure silence? Can we say, that some of us were more silent 
about Gujrat than the rest of us in the list? 

There are hints in your posting that this is so. I need to know how this 
fluctuating amplitude of silence can be measured, before I can agree with you 
on this.There was silence, and we are all equally culpable in that silence. 
If a person standing outside the list were to say - "this list is worthless, 
because it could not bring itself to discuss the violence at its door" I 
think they would be perfectly justified in saying so.But all of us on the 
list are equally implicated in what is said or not said on the list, because 
the list does not belong more to any of us, and less to any of us.

I agree that the silence was a shame, but I think it is even more of a shame 
that people should have to wait to speak, or to see if others have or have 
not had their say. What got our collective tongue? What prevented any one of 
us, regardless of the completely meaningless category of any or our private 
or public intellectual statures from speaking. And if some of us had spoken, 
would it then have been all right for some (others) of us to "not write" 
about Gujrat?

I share your anguish, and I am very relieved that you have posed the question 
as sharply as you have done. But, the question is a mirror in which every 
silence is reflected.

Of course it will not do for any of us to say "we have said that killing is 
horrible a thousand times and so we can not say it any more". There is no 
point in saying that one must wait for 'new things to say' when old things, 
like pogroms, keep happening over and over again.If it needs a thousand 
repetitions, it still needs to be said. But not more by some of us, and less 
by some of us.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts, and the experiences that you have lived 
with in the last few days. They really made me sit up and think about things. 
There is a lot to be mined in what you have said, and I hope that especially 
in a climate such as what we are living through now, others on the list can 
take up the whole question of alternate cosmopolitanities, that you evoke 
with your reference to Syed Muztafa Ali. 

Its high time we realised that there is a time honoured tradition of crossing 
all sorts of borders in the mind in our milieu. Of learning to say no to the 
question of whether one is an 'inisder' or an 'outsider' . Thank you for 
reminding us all about this fact. I learnt to cross my first borders in the 
pages of Deshe Bideshe as well, and it remains one of my favourite remedies 
(along with the Comprehensive Persian English Dictionary of Steingass)for 
insomnia.In fact out of some bizarre co-incidence, Muztafa Ali was precisely 
whom I waw reading ( a long description of a sarai on the way from Peshawwar 
to Kabul in 'Deshe Bideshe') when I got up to check my mail in the middle fo 
the night and found your wake up call. 

The list was a year old yesterday, and I hope that your wake up call will 
make its mark on all of us,and help us to remain the discursive community 
that we have been at times, and which we failed to be in the days when Gujrat 
was burning.

I hope that someone else will now take up the thread of this conversation, 
and weave other things that are waiting to be said.

Cheers

Shuddha