[Reader-list] Posting 3. “Jashoda’s Household: Marxism and Family Function of the Mess-Houses”

[Bodhisattva Kar]

In Shahartali ["Suburbia"], one of his early novels published in 1940-41, Manik Bandyopadhyay tells the story of Jashoda, an extraordinary middle-aged woman who lives on the rents from two houses in an industrial suburb. Jashoda lets out one of her houses to small income group families and reserves the other for the single migrant males. The first one is "a zoo", says Jashoda, and the second "a homely mess", thus clearly indicating her lack of sympathy for the familial hanky-panky. What we find really interesting in the novel is how Manik purposely takes the idea of an urban mess-house out of its usual bhadralok context and pushes it to a different life-history in the suburban slums. Jashoda is explicitly insistent on the "non-bhadralok" character of her "homely mess". As an assemblage of browbeaten wage slaves, desperate jobseekers and dispirited unemployed, Jashoda's mess positively refuses to grow into a family (quite a popular ideal among the bhadralok mess-dwellers at that
 time). This is not to say that emotive bonds are not at stake in Jashoda's household, or that libidinal investments are not made. On the contrary, as a very unconventional attempt to resist the deodorization of the family function, the narrative of Jashoda's household develops a new politics of the affective. Jashoda's constant attention to the happiness and comforts of her defaulting mess-dwellers is irreducible to 'motherly' care and affection, as it is always cut across by her recurrent "forgetting" of her own womanhood. In failing to recognize herself as a "woman", Jashoda succeeds in framing her little community outside familial categories. Her discourtesy, her matter-of-fact ways of dealing with indiscipline in the mess, her guarded emotions, and her sheer bodily strength: these work towards destabilizing the established mother figure, the sentimental keystone of the patriarchal institution called bhadralok family. In the difficult years of the early forties, a non-familial
 solidarity in the suburban slum household emerges as the Marxist counter-imagination of urban community. Necessarily, the geography of neighborhood also undergoes a radical change. Instead of remaining an isolated identity hub on the margins of mainstream city life, Jashoda's non-bhadralok mess develops into a thriving center of industrial unrests. Conflicts with the industrialists begin; the community faces desertion and defection; new friends are discovered in the neighborhood; but the imagination of the community refuses to die. We strain this remarkable text against its own grains and those of the checkered history of the "party communes" in the forties and fifties. Did Manik's depiction presage the lives lived in these communes? Could the communes, organized by the undivided Communist Party of India in different locations of Calcutta, really grow out of the family function of mess-houses? Or was the strong Marxist utopia of non-familial camaraderie forced to strike a compromise
 with bhadralok familialism to ensure a smooth running of the communes? Were the mess-houses inflecting the shared universal dream with its distinct colonial urban history of uneven belongingness? Our interviews with commune-residents indicate towards the latter possibility. But now we must move to another perspective on urban politics.

		
---------------------------------
Check out Yahoo! India Rakhi Special for Rakhi shopping, contests and lots more. 
http://in.promos.yahoo.com/rakhi/index.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20050815/cfa9d2a5/attachment.html