A week ago, before the Bombay attacks claimed news headlines, the story of another kind of antiquated yet high-tech violence was unfolding on television and in the morning papers. On the 15^th of September, the MT Stolt Valor, a multi-national water vessel with 22 crew members was hijacked by Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden, apparently 38 nautical miles away from the coast of Yemen. The Japanese-owned tanker (which is ‘managed’ in Hong Kong,) was carrying 23,818 tonnes of base oils and chemicals, and of its crew, 18 were Indian (including the Captain, Prabhat Kumar Goyal, who hails from- where else but?- Dehradun.) 2 came from Philippines, and 1 each from Russia and Bangladesh. The men were released after a $ 2.5 million ransom was paid, on the 15^th of November.

When the overjoyed and grateful Indian crew-members touched home soil once again, they recounted some experiences. The pirates, they said, were gun-toting drug addicts whose only goal was money. They spoke of their capture as “mental torture” and said “prayers kept [them] going.” Newspapers and t.v. screens filled up with pictures- moving and still- of the relatives of the crew members, of celebrations and sighs of reprieve.

Watching these events unfold was interesting because at no point did anyone seriously address what ought to have been the most basic question of all: who are these pirates? Somalia is not a country most Indians would have paused to hear about a few weeks ago. Come to think of it, they didn’t really pause to hear of it now either. The narratives of piracy that hold sway in the popular media generally go unquestioned. We accept what we hear at face value when we have no clue about what it is we are facing. Sometime last year, at a friend’s house, I happened to meet an aspiring young dabbler in film who had just returned from Ethiopia. The country, he said unequivocally and with lazy confidence, is a horror film come true; everyone has AIDS, cars overturn on the road all the time; there are accidents and deaths; how anyone survives is a minor mystery. There was more, but my memory fails me. The point is not so much whether his description of Ethiopia is untrue (which I’m quite sure it is.) What is important is the narrative itself, for it produces certain stereotypical racist normative Africa and African. The same holds, I think, for the discourse on Somalia. In their gushing orgasmic adoration for the Indian crew of the Stolt Valor, the media produced a Somalia devoid of history, a country stuck not in but across time and space. These pirates, it seemed, had emerged from nowhere. They were simply evil: gun-toting, drug addicted, bloodthirsty, terrorists.

Obviously, matters are not so simple, and in what follows I’m going to attempt a little historical exploration, to uncover a most interesting past and present that is filled with the usual ironies of international politics. Most conventional accounts of Somali piracy (no just Indian ones) tribalise and trivialise the country and its heritage. Most use the language of international relations and policy to repeatedly call Somalia a ‘failed state’ and much more. What emerges when one delves into Somali history however, is a past more complicated than many would like. And when seen in the context of this past, the pirates in the Gulf of Aden actually appear as a fitting response to the concerns of the international community. They reply to their critics in the same language their critics speak: money and policy.

Since 1991, Somalia has been, literally, stateless. Catherine Besteman’s work on the country in the immediate years following the collapse of the state provides a brilliant contemporary alternate reading of events. She challenges the thick-headed American presentation of Somalia as being torn apart by clan rivalries and primordial battles being fought with modern machinery. Instead, she argues- correctly- that international politics, interventionism, and high-modernist attempts at ‘engineering’ Somalia have played a leading role in the country’s present condition. Going through some of the media reports from America at the time, it is shocking to read what was written. A Washington Post story said “[r]ivalries that were once thrashed out with spears and stones are now being conducted with automatic weapons, an unfortunate legacy of the superpower rivalry.” The New York Times echoed these sentiments indicating an evolution in weapons (but not, apparently, human relationships,) from “traditional spears and shields” to “mortars and machine guns.” National Geographic, also quoted by Besteman, informed us that “Somali society evolved around small clans that roamed the arid plains … making alliances or warring … armed with knives and spears. … Today’s warlords and gangs are armed with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of modern weaponry.” And one more: the American ambassador to Kenya, Smith Hempstone, went much further in his exoticisation of Somali violence when, in a memo to the State Department. Hempstone wrote: “in the old days, Somalis raided for camels, women and slaves. Today they raid for camels, women, slaves, and food.” Besteman recounts these ridiculous reports and comments in an effort to underline the fact that in many ways, the prospect of American interventionism in Somalia was seen as a “late 20^th-century civilizing mission.” These accounts also, invariably if implicitly, supported the notion that somehow, colonialism had been a kind of blessing for the country. Instead, Besteman shows that Somalia’s history and social structure are not determined by some simplistic idea of premodern clan rivalries. Class, race, language, and other such identities have, in collusion with various kinds of statist policies and politics, played a central role in shaping contemporary Somalia.

Bypassing the details of a fascinating history of colonisation under the British and the Italians, we can pick up the story from a coup in 1969, led by an army officer named Siyad Barre. Barre’s capture of power ended the parliamentary government of independent Somalia and installed in its place, a Supreme Revolutionary Council. Siyad was, Besteman writes, a “self-styled scientific socialist.” In keeping with his socialism, he initially became close to the Soviet Union. However, when he launched a campaign to annex the Ogaadeen region of Ethiopia he found his Eastern Bloc allies had thrown their weight behind the enemy state. This brought Barre’s relations with the USSR to an end. America stepped in at this point, to take the place of its Cold War rival. Their support to the regime continued even in the late 1980s when human rights abuses were apparent and state collapse immanent. Besteman writes that as late as 1987 the U.S was building a beachfront property, two swimming pools, tennis courts, and a golf course (priced at $ 35 million) in Mogadishu. The 1980s were the ‘development years’ for Somalia, with a lot of international finance flowing into the country in aid of developmental projects. In what is by now a familiar story, rural populations were displaced in great numbers as urban dwellers concentrated their holding over villages as well as cities. One of the eagerly awaited projects being financed by the World Bank was a dam- the second largest in Africa- on the upper Jubba River. Besteman argues that conventional writings on Somalia have focused largely on elite politics and have therefore ignored the brutal process of class formation that happened in the 1980s. This period was characterised by a battle of resources- specially land and water- between the rich and the poor, the urban and the rural. Farmers in the south of the country suffered most as richer sections of society monopolised the state and controlled the corridors of power.

Simultaneous to these processes were Barre’s attempts at ‘creating’ a modern Somalia of his liking. To this effect he banned tribalism, and consequently, any kind of acknowledgment of ‘clan’ and its associated rituals became criminal acts. He played a similar game with language when he designated the ’standard’ Somali tongue as the official language, thus outraging many- specially those who spoke the maay-maay dialect. On another front, Barre closed schools in for the 1974-75 year in an elaborate effort to transform the countryside. Students and teachers were expected to travel to villages and teach nomads and agriculturalists the script of the new national language as well as “hygiene, modern animal husbandry methods, basic civics and the aims of Scientific Socialism.” (I.M Lewis, cited in Besteman.) However, a serious drought hit the countryside that year, and the (re)education campaign ended up looking more like famine relief. In course of his reign, Barre bred discontentment among ‘his’ people. Apart from the attempted annexation of Ogaadeen (leading to the influx of massive numbers of refugees into Somalia,) Barre managed to enrage the Isaaq, the largest clan-family in the north of the country. As the Isaaq rose in rebellion, Barre’s dictatorial approach became increasingly violent. In 1988 Siyad ordered the bombing and strafing of towns in the north in an effort to quell the uprising. By the following year, noises about human rights violations in the country became loud enough for the Americans to finally reduce their aid package to the repressive regime. As insurrection moved south as the Somali National Movement (SNM) and the United Somali Congress (USC) became leading actors in the north and the central parts of the country respectively. Interestingly, although clan-based opposition was very much prevalent, Besteman argues that the formation of the SNM (in London) and the USC (in Rome) is an indication of how colonial identities sometimes persist in different ways in regional histories. At any rate, in 1991, Barre was ousted and he fled southwards, thus bringing chaos there. We need only note that even as battles broke out over food, water and other such basic requirements, warlords continued to maintain a tight grip on power because they controlled weapons. In the post-1991 period, warlords became major players on the political scene.

It has been 17 years since the collapse of the Somali state. Media reports across the board portray the country as a less than ideal place to be. The obvious side-effects of a stateless society are summoned in aid of such portraits: lawlessness, violence, armed gangs, warlords, Islamic courts, terrorism, and of course, piracy. But, could the picture be a little more complicated? Ken Menkhaus’s survey of Somalia without government (in 2003) goes some direction in this respect. Menkhaus poses a tough question on the very first page of his essay: why is there resistance in Somalia to the re-formation a state for governing the country? There are certain simple answers to this, but what we are in search of is something other than the simple answer. Menkhaus complements Besteman’s reading of contemporary Somalia by focusing on forces inside the country which have deep vested interests that serve as obstacles to renewed statehood. At the outset however, I ought to note, that in spite of his perceptive analysis of the situation, Menkhaus shows flashes of nostalgia for the State- and more importantly, the State as described and understood by the language of international politics. By no means can one argue that all is well is Somalia today. But at the same time, this longing glance at an universal model does not appear to be very useful- and I say this based very much on my reading of Menkhaus. After 1991, all attempts are forming a new government have been unsuccessful. The most promising effort came in August of 2000 when the Transitional National Government (TNG) was established. Although, very soon, this too became useless. The same has happened with local governments. Commenting on Somalia’s present disposition Menkhaus offers this:

“Somalia’s inability to preserve even a minimal figleaf of central administration over twelve years puts it in a class by itself among the world’s failed states. The fact that Somalia’s quarrelling political elites have not been able to make such a cynical bargain among themselves is itself a puzzle. Somalia is, in an odd way, a failure among failed states.“

There is a fairly significant point being made here; and by that I’m referring less to the comment about ‘failed states’ than to the fact that the elite in Somalia have failed (now over a 17 year period) to come to an understanding about a paper state. After all, in international politics, even a paper state that makes all the right noises can go very far. Possibly, there is a deeper question about class-composition and its potential conflicts with other identities that might be lurking beneath the surface here. The other part of the story is in Somalia’s almost forced experimentation with anarchism. The World Bank has, in a short document, hailed the more disturbing side of this development: where private corporations enter the realm of the state and take charge of essential public services- from transport and communication to water distribution. But this is one aspect of it. As Menkhaus argues, although many ills of Somalia can be connected to the absence of a central- or regional- state, this absence is “not inherently linked to other concurrent crises in Somalia, such as criminality and armed conflict.” In fact, he makes the case that for considerable sections of the Somali population, peace and lawfulness exist in spite of a central authority, not because of it. Some Somalis argue also, that violence is actually much worse in Kenya, even though a central state very much functions there. Menkhaus then goes a step further and argues that it might even be possible to suggest that violence in Somalia has shot up precisely when efforts have been made to create a new state. We could go on a bit more, but I’ll fast-forward to one other important observation made in the essay, which is central to my desire of trying to excavate the figure of the pirate. The law and order problem in Somalia is provoked not so much by random strangers on the street (as our amateur film-maker would have us believe in the context of Ethiopia,) but by the rich and powerful- in fact, the very business leaders and politicos who are invited to international peace meets. Among their list of crimes, Menkhaus lists the following:

“incitement of deadly communal violence for narrow political purposes, embezzlement of foreign funds, introduction of counterfeit currency into circulation (which, by creating hyperinflation, robs average Somalis of most of their savings,) huge land grabs by force of arms, export of charcoal (illegal in the past government and highly destructive,) and involvement in piracy, among others.” [Emphasis added.]

Now, having performed this semi-elaborate task of taking apart a bit of Somali history, let us compare the accounts I have spent time going through with some other account I spent a little less time going through. A report by Chatham House (which wants to be “a world-leading source of Independent analysis, informed debate and influential ideas on how to build a prosperous and secure world for all,”) warns the global order against ignoring piracy in Somalia any longer. Apart from the dangers these guys pose in sheer monetary terms, there is also the threat of ‘Islamist terror’ lurking close by. The essence of the report (which is for the most part, a highly policy-driven one,) is summed up towards the end, where it calls Somalia one of the “most dangerous and violent places in the world,” where arms are freely circulating. The report also speculates that a portion of the money generated by piracy might very well go into feeding local wars and terrorism. The Chatham House report functions very much within the logic of the general discourse on Somalia. Much of the reporting- national and international- of piracy has echoed this idea of Somalia as a dangerous place. The point, once again, is not so much to contest the validity of these claims and test to what extent they are true. Rather, the point is to try and understand the minds which try and understand piracy. For this, in large part, dictates how we look at the problem in the first place. The geographical location of Somalia doesn’t help its case. Some Indian accounts reproduce racism in a simple, blatant and truly Indian way. Take for example, the comment made by Commodore Uday Bhaskar in a Times of India report. The Commodore says: “Somalia, like Afghanistan, is a failed state. The conditions on land are so bad that many pirates say that they would be happy to be arrested by Europeans, so that they can live in European jails rather than go back to their own country.” A rather simple question crosses my mind as I read these lines: why then, do the pirates not simply hijack a ship and then surrender? Surely if their desire is to spend a lifetime in the luxury of European jails, then this is the best and easiest way of doing it!

Puntland, an autonomous region in Somalia, has become one of the central locations of Somali pirates. A BBC news story provides rare, fascinating insight into piracy as a way of life. The report is scathing in its criticism of the pirates, but it illustrates how an entire industry has been spawned by this occupation, with ancillary jobs springing up. There are those who claim to be chief-negotiators and accountants of the pirates, restaurants have opened catering to the need of the pirates and their hijacked hostages. Those involved in the actual hijackings are sophisticated, extremely capable of handling ubermodern machinery, and, of course, armed. The successive successful operations in the Gulf of Aden have also lead to massive accumulation of wealth, which goes in financing the elaborate lifestyles of these pirates. Some aspects of this phenomenon stand out for me: first, the act of piracy seems somehow, to be leading, to another (the second?) phase of class-formation- or perhaps the elaboration of existing class formations in Somalia. These rich and powerful pirates are not, I would think, identical to the elites in power (politicians and businessmen) who protect them. Those who are coming into money now are not- unlike the elites of the 1980s- doing so on the backs of the poor of Somalia. Instead, the source of their wealth lies outside. And here the second aspect, more poetic, of these operations comes into play: the relentless tormenting of European ships in the Gulf of Aden is almost like payback for the drain of wealth that happened during colonialism. Of course, one can rebut immediately that these pirates are selfish and not interested in larger matters of politics or justice. Such a rebuttal is however, only half true and leads us into the third aspect of this phenomenon. The argument that Somali pirates are merely gun-toting mercenaries (’errand boys’ to evoke a memorable cultural artefact,) can only be made when those making it are confining themselves to the stereotypical racist notion of the anarchist savage clannish African. The fact of the matter is that Somali pirates plying the Gulf of Aden are anarchic in a very disciplined way. Two interviews demonstrate this point adequately. In interviews given to reporters from The Guardian and New York Times, representatives of these ‘rogues’ talk openly about their operations. After a ship is hauled in, Xan Rice, the Guardian reporter was told by a 42 year-old pirate, Asad ‘Booyah’ Abdulahi, the pirates assure their captors that they want only money, that they will not hurt anyone. Both interviews make clear two things. One, that hunger and a lack of other economic opportunities is a central reason for piracy. And two, that piracy does not happen devoid of principles. The logic here is intriguing- specially because it plays by the rules of the game as set up by international policy. The ships coming into the Gulf of Aden, argue the pirates, have no license. Somalia has no government. But Somalia is a nation. Effectively, these foreign ships are therefore transgressing into Somali territory without paying taxes. The ransom is only compensation for this amount. When Jeffrey Gettleman of NYT asked a spokesman of Somali pirates, Sugule Ali, the name of his group, he replied “[o]ur name is the Central Regional Coast Guard.”

This is of course, a very superficial attempt at grappling with something much more complex than I’ve been able to make it out to be. But I’d like to think it’s a start, because we can only enter these treacherous spaces of international diplomacy and politics with competence once we have shed our cultural superiorities. And the coverage of Somalia only shows how unwilling we are to do such a simple thing.

      

Look on low

look on high

see with Love’s

inhuman eye

not only charge

of opposites

(the broken heart,

the healing fix)…[1]

Following Leonard Cohen’s advice in this poem, I will employ and expose Love’s inhuman eye and attempt to move beyond the charge of opposites into an area where black and white yield to gray, and comfortable explanations lie in a dusty and distant past. This paper originates in human debris of a massacre that occurred in Virginia Tech in April of last year. As a keen observer of young people who wield guns, I was naturally drawn to this excessively violent event. When the events of that day were dissected in the media, everything seemed to be running according to script: we discovered the killer was a loner[2], he was depressed[3], possibly Schizophrenic[4], had received court-ordered psychiatric help[5], and even had selective mutism[6]. We were told that he had written some terrible violent plays for his English class[7] and was basically, a tinderbox waiting to explode. Its no surprise to see America ‘othering’ those it produces- from Bin Laden to every school shooter, its pretty much the same thing. That is why, in the case of Virginia Tech, what came into focus, were morally upsetting plays, not the video package[8] the killer delivered to NBC. In the media package, Seung-Hui Cho posed with guns and ranted like the madman everyone wanted him to be[9]. It’s worth noting that the debate following the airing of the tape focused primarily on the ethical correctness in airing it[10]. Everyone was comfortable in sweeping under the carpet, issues of race, class and social segregation that Cho spewed out[11]. It was my frustration with Virginia Tech that made me want to write this paper. In it, I will not deal with the ‘debate’ on gun control. Nor will I focus on the more interesting- and therefore ignored- role that anti-depressants might have played in several incidents of youth violence in the United States in recent years.[12] What fascinated me in the aftermath of the massacre was the way in which America turned tragedy into spectacle. One report from Fox News is enough to illustrate this. The report referred to the massacre as a “stark, grisly… horror.” It said Cho “began mowing down people with two handguns.” The report continued: “the scent of smoking guns wafted through the corridors.” The title of the report itself is revealing: ‘Witnesses of Virginia Tech Massacre Paint Grim, Grisly Picture of the Horror That Gripped Campus.’[13]

In what follows, I have attempted to travel back in time and explore America’s masochistic relationship to sites and situations of pain. The scope of such exploration far exceeds what one paper can contain, and therefore here I will restrict myself to the antebellum American South and the cultures of sentimentality in the U.S in the nineteenth-century. Recent work by scholars like Mark Seltzer and Hal Foster have pointed to the development of what Seltzer calls “wound culture” and “the pathological public sphere.”[14] While both Seltzer’s work and Foster’s essay on Andy Warhol[15] are rooted in the contemporary, certain notions they use can be applied to antebellum America. Foster writes of the “mass subject” and how, as a witness to disaster, this subject can react sadomasochistically: “even as he or she may mourn the victims, even identify with them masochistically, he or she may also be thrilled, sadistically, that there are victims of whom he or she is not one… Paradoxically, perhaps, this sadomasochistic aspect helps the mass subject cohere as a collectivity.”[16] I will try to bring forth the relationship this notion of sadomasochistic involvement had with sentimentalism in modern America. Underlying these complex relations is the question of representation. Therefore, this paper is also about the challenges of representing the pain of others and the reception of such representation, (over which the one who is representing has no control.)

Before moving on to the specifics of America, it would be useful to have an overview of developments in the modern age. Karen Halttunen, in a sweeping essay published in 1995, identifies the linkages between sentimentalist and humanitarian thought and “the pornography of pain” in England and America.[17] Humanitarianism and sentimentalism was propagated in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries, by Latitudinarians. They argued that human nature possessed intrinsic capabilities for feeling sympathy. The third earl of Shaftesbury developed this theory further; and after him, the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment picked up this line of thought, emphasising benevolence and sensibility as the best ways of preserving moral community. In literature, Halttunen argues, “spectorial sympathy” was the crucial operating principle of sentimentalist writings. Relentless presentations of suffering, from women to slaves and beasts, characterised the approach by which a sentimental work tried to grab the reader’s attention and arouse his sympathy. By the end of the eighteenth-century however, the philosophy of sentimentalism was being criticised for presenting forms of pleasurable suffering. The virtue assumed in the intention of these works was now being questioned. Some, like William Godwin, even accused such literature of sadism.[18] Indeed, as Halttunen points out, de Sade’s novel Justine (1791,) was indebted to Samuel Richardson’s sentimental tome Clarissa (1747-8,) where violent sexuality and torture featured prominently.

Running alongside these philosophical developments, is the story of pain. Halttunen discusses the pre-eighteenth-century alliance between religion and medicine in seeing pain as something inevitable, part of the healing process. However, in the eighteenth-century, physicians and surgeons became aware of pain.[19] In America, this awareness came to bloom in the nineteenth-century with the rise of liberal Protestantism as a challenge to Calvinist orthodoxy. The Christian humanism that now emerged, abhorred the idea of pain and cruelty- administered by God or man. Elizabeth Clark explains that the “bleeding body had long been the centerpiece of Christianity,” as evidenced by the celebration of human suffering, the importance of crucifixion etc. However, liberal humanists of antebellum America began to rework the image of God into that of a benevolent paternal figure who looked out for his children.[20] Even as these changes were occurring in the theological realm, in medical science too, pain was being reconceptualised. Halttunen and Clark both testify to the increasing emphasis on pain as pathology, but treatable pathology. As early as 1845, a “national market” had emerged for pain cures, and a certain Perry Davis had registered the trademark of his “Celebrated Pain Killer.” Anaesthesia was first administered in a Massachusetts hospital in 1846.[21]

Gothic fiction and a journalistic appetite for gore exploded in America and England. In eighteenth and nineteenth-century America, trial reports, autobiographies, criminal records, journalistic accounts of crime, etc. became commonplace. Descriptions of murders became more detailed, and reconstructions more frequent. The suffering of the victim, the wounds inflicted, and the condition of the dead corpse were important narrative elements.[22] An entire debate began in the American north over the use of electricity (seen as a sign of progress) in executions.[23] This form of execution was ’sold’ as more civilised. Elizabeth Barnes argues that this debate attempted to blend the old and the new. In other words, even though modern notions of pain saw it as obscene, the idea that the social body could only be restored through the sacrifice of the criminal, was still very much present.[24] As Halttunen argues therefore, humanitarian thought was, paradoxically, responsible for a novel revulsion of pain, as well as the sexualisation of the same. All this came to a head in some ways, towards the end of the nineteenth-century, when Richard von Krafft-Ebing discussed sexual pathologies and created the terms “sadism” and “masochism.” His work compiled “dozens of case studies” where subjects were documented talking about enactments of judicial torture, slave whippings, schoolboy floggings etc. One subject even confessed to reacting sexually to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin- an assertion made later by Freud too.[25]

With this picture laid out, we turn now to the American south. In a 1973 essay entitled ‘The Erotic South,’ Ronald Walters asks us to consider the moment of antislavery. Why, he wonders, did the abolitionist movement become so powerful when it did, i.e; in the early 1830s? Walters argues that in this period, “culturally determined attitudes about sex” coalesced with several other factors and suggested an “uncomfortable” similarity in conditions in the North and South. This led reformers to the search of “a new set of answers” in the 1830s.[26] What emerged from this search was an idea of power as the lynchpin sustaining the institution of slavery. The salve-owner came to be seen, alongside the preacher and the politician, as a tyrant. Slavery was defined by a master-slave dynamic. The economics of slavery were of secondary importance, following the lust for power. These ideas were closely tied to sexuality because, as Walters points out, in the minds of the abolitionists, it was a short journey from “lust for power to mere lust.”[27] But along with power, came the fear of subjugation. This is why abolitionists had no bleeding-heart sympathy for the slave population. Their rationale was: emancipation is the only way to contain the black population which, if freed, will disperse throughout the country. However, if slave populations are not set free, they will pose the danger of overpowering their masters and endangering white women. The slave woman was also seen as dangerous in that she seduced her master and destroyed his condition through “physical overindulgence.”[28] This rhetoric meant that the South soon began to be portrayed as “ONE GREAT SODOM,” “a vast brothel”; compared to the Southern slave states even “a Turkish harem is a cradle of virgin purity.”[29] Following from this, the South began to be juxtaposed to the North. While the latter was a symbol of progress and goodness, the former was a stagnant, morally decaying and economically regressive area where neither factories nor railroads had made any significant appearance.[30]

Sexuality of an exhibitionist sort therefore, played an important role in the politics of the American South in this period. For writers who chose to speak for the slave population this presented a difficult situation because in any talk of slavery titillation was always lurking behind the nearest door. Most practioners of abolitionist literature played up the spectacle and masochistically drew in their readers. A plethora of writings from the 1830s and ’40s- from speeches to pamphlets and letters- indulge in detailed descriptions of “the beatings, the brandings, the iron yokes, the croppings, the mutilations, the hunger, the want, and nakedness.”[31] Frederick Douglass’s autobiography contained four “unprovoked” murders in one chapter. John Brown described the practice of ‘bucking’ where salves were whipped till bloody and then washed in a mixture of salt, red pepper and water. The titles of some works are revealing: Life and Narrative of William J. Anderson, Twenty-Four Years a Slave; Sold Eight Times! In Jail Sixty Times! Whipped Three Hundred Times!!![32]

In such a climate, the portrayal of slave suffering was intentionally manipulated to excite and disgust. Even in cases where authors may not have intended exhibitionist narratives, how readers received those narratives was out of their control. Hence the fact of many readers finding Stowe’s sentimental novel catering to their sexual fantasies. Carolyn Sorisio analyses the works of Lydia Maria Child[33] and argues that Child used emerging discourses in nineteenth-century America to her advantage and subtly made the case for emancipation with minimum shock-value. Child attempted to politicise the suffering of the slave, and by doing so she moved into territory very few had explored. Scholars like Richard Brodhead have argued that nineteenth-century America witnessed, through the emergence of correctional facilities and the like, a move away from punishment and towards discipline. Child, Sorisio argues, was well aware of these new ways of looking at crime and social deviance. She therefore, pitted the emerging ideas of the North against the older ideas of the South, pointing to states like Maryland where the punishment for slaves guilty of “petit treason, or murder, or willfully burning of dwelling-houses” was “to be hanged in the usual manner, the head severed from the body, the body divided into four quarters, and the head, and the quarters set up in the most public places of the country.”[34] Although the first chapter of her book, An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, did mention four gruesome episodes of slave torture and murder, Child presented these episodes in the political context of Northern penal reform. As Sorisio argues, the entire point of a slave torture is the creation of the spectacle. And in order to give the spectacle meaning, the master must, first, have an audience, and second, control the “text of power” in such a way so as to restrict its interpretation. However, this seldom happened. And stories of slave torture did migrate from the South to the North, to writers like Child, writers who recognised the political power of these stories if their interpretation could be restricted in a different way.[35] While Sorisio seems confident that Child was successful in her attempts to ‘repackage’ these episodes, and while I concede that her efforts were by far more complex than those of other writers, I feel a little skeptical of going the whole distance with this argument- regardless of the fact that many individuals were converted to the cause of antislavery by Child’s works.[36]

In following this story to its conclusion- if indeed there is a ‘conclusion’ at all- I must hint towards the situation after the Civil War and Emancipation Proclamation. Elizabeth Clark argues that antislavery literature provided a set of “interpretive conventions” for its representations of slave suffering, and in the absence of such a “strong normative context” these stories could “easily be greeted with unsympathetic emotions like sadistic pleasure or contempt.”[37] Moreover, she contends that abolitionist efforts were crucial in creating a language of rights which allowed the oppressed in the post-Civil War era to beckon the state to their aid. In this atmosphere distinctions were made between “acceptable and unacceptable violence” and a novel style of legal reasoning emerged.[38] While such an argument is not totally off the mark, in many senses it seems naïve of the situation that emerged after the Emancipation. C. Vann Woodward has pointed to the ways in which sharecropping and the penal lease system condemned free blacks to great poverty. He also illustrates the processes by which, between 1890 and 1910, black voters were legally disfranchised; and the institutionalisation of racial segregation that cemented a new racism.[39] Add to this the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan and the endless cycles of violence through lynching, and one begins to wonder how much worth distinctions between “acceptable and unacceptable violence” continue to hold. Martha Hodes signals the emergence of this menace when she argues that the Klan bequeathed a language of “sexualized politics” to white Southerners. This language marked a departure from the language of democracy and republicanism. Terrorising the black male was central to the violent ‘politics’ of the Klan.[40]

In an illuminating discussion of lynchings in the South in the Reconstruction era, Robyn Wiegman brings forth the complexities of gender and race and how these categories collided in the actions of the Klan.[41] Castrating black men became a primary form of violence upon them. Castration was connected to the mythical construction of the black man as rapist, and therefore, the symbolic effect of this action was an imposition of femininity upon the body of this mythical super-man. In this period we find a resurgence of graphic reports of violence and torture in the media. These accounts, Wiegman argues, positioned lynching as a form of “surveillance by reiterating its performative qualities.”[42] There is a transformation in the characterisation of the black man in the periods before and after the Civil War: he goes from a simple, passive “Uncle Tom” to a much-mythicised rapist, an aggressive representative of “hypermasculinity.”[43] Underlying these changing conceptions, there was a further dynamic to the castration, that of a sadistic sexual connection between the white aggressor and the black victim. In castrating the hypermasculine black man, the white man regains his sexual/political prowess- but he does so by destroying the myth that he himself has perpetuated. In this sadistic interaction between the white man and his ex-slave (and now legal citizen,) there is a fixation with the “sexual sameness” of both parties. There are accounts of lynchers dividing pieces of the black man’s genitals among themselves.[44] All of this points towards a complex scenario where in the face of a rising (new) citizen body, the old gatekeepers of political power clamber to reclaim their lost glory through a violent politics that at the same time imposes femininity upon the victim and recognises his (hyper)masculinity in an explicitly homoerotic way.

To leave the nineteenth-century, abruptly, and travel forward to the twenty-first again. I don’t mean to suggest there is one line of historical understanding that will carry us from Virginia Tech to its ‘point of origin.’ If we see history as a “Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in common,”[45] then we will stumble upon the bewildering fact that there are a thousand roads that lead to Virginia Tech. This is only one. And why just Virginia Tech? When Zizek wrote that on September 11 “America got what it fantasized about,”[46] he wasn’t very wrong. The violence of September 11 was pure poetry. On that day, eyes were glued to television sets in a way that they seldom are to children dying of malnutrition in Sudan. Throughout this journey into the masochism and violence of American history, I couldn’t help but come back to a question posed by the late French philosopher Jean Baudrillard in his hallucinatory travels across America: “In the heartland of wealth and liberation, you always hear the same question: ‘What are you doing after the orgy?’”[47] It would be presumptuous on my part to ask the question I have most wanted to ask: ‘is there after the orgy?’

---

[1] Leonard Cohen, ‘All My News’ from Book of Longing (Ecco, 2006.)

[2] http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/20/shooter.childhood/

[3] http://www.roanoke.com/vtinvestigation/wb/wb/xp-130177

[4] http://abcnews.go.com/Health/VATech/Story?id=3050483&page=1

[5] http://abcnews.go.com/US/print?id=3052278 & http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2007/0419071cho1.html

[6] http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB118756463647202374-Ov_1NZv4xxHzWuURpyNEJzRhdYw_20070918.html

[7] http://www.roanoke.com/vtinvestigation/wb/wb/xp-130177, http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2007/0417071vtech1.html, & http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2007/0417071vtech1.html

[8] http://www.postchronicle.com/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi?archive=14&num=75707

[9] A forensic psychiatrist, Michael Welner even said, ‘Showing the video is a social catastrophe.’ Welner argued ‘I think that’s very important for the viewing audience to understand. This is not him. These videos do not help us understand him. They distort him. He was meek. He was quiet. This is a PR tape of him trying to turn himself into a Quentin Tarantino character…’ Go to http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/VATech/story?id=3056168&page=1 for more.

[10] http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/VATech/story?id=3056168&page=1

[11] In the course of the tapes, he said, ‘You had everything you wanted. Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you brats. Your golden necklaces weren’t enough, you snobs. Your trust fund wasn’t enough. Your vodka and Cognac weren’t enough. All your debaucheries weren’t enough. Those weren’t enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything.’ (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18195423)

[12] For more on these themes its useful to look at Thomas Szasz’s ‘The Therapeutic State: The Tyranny of Pharmacracy’ (The Independent Review, 2001.) On the specific connections to youth and Virginia Tech respectively, its worth traveling to: http://www.prisonpotpourri.com/JUVENILES/Pittman/Pittman2007/Pittman,Christopher.’Zoloftdefense’killerhascorpsofsupporters-CNN_com.html

and:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/virginia-tech-aftermath-_b_46280.html

[13] ‘Witnesses of Virginia Tech Massacre Paint Grim, Grisly Picture of the Horror That Gripped Campus,’ by Catherine Donaldson-Evans, April 17, 2006, Fox News.

[14] Mark Setlzer, ‘Serial Killers (II): The Pathological Public Sphere’ (Critical Inquiry, Autumn, 1995,) & ‘Wound Culture: Trauma in the Public Sphere’ (October, Spring, 1997.)

[15] Hal Foster, ‘Death in America’ (October, Winter, 1995.)

[16] Foster, p55.

[17] Karen Halttunen, ‘Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture’ (The American Historical Review, April, 1995.)

[18] Ibid, p 304-308.

[19] Ibid, p 309-10.

[20] Elizabeth B. Clark, ‘”The Sacred Rights of the Weak”: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America’ (The Journal of American History, Sep, 1995,) p 470-72.

[21] Halttunen, op cit., p 310.

[22] Ibid, p 312.

[23] Elizabeth Barnes, ‘Communicably Violence and the Problem of Capital Punishment in New England, 1830-1890′ (Modern Language Studies, Spring, 2000,) p 9.

[24] Ibid, p 20.

[25] Halttunen, p 330-31.

[26] Ronald G. Walters, ‘The Erotic South: Civilization and Sexuality in American Abolitionism’ (American Quarterly, May, 1973,) p 177-78.

[27] Ibid, p 180-81.

[28] Ibid, p 181.

[29] Ibid, p 183.

[30] Ibid, p 190.

[31] Quoted in Clark, op cit, p 465.

[32] Ibid, p 468-69.

[33] Carolyn Sorisio, ‘The Spectacle of the Body: Torture in the Antislavery Writings of Lydia Maria Child and Francis E. W. Harper’ (Modern Language Studies, Spring, 2000.)

[34] Ibid, p 50.

[35] Ibid, p 52-53.

[36] p 57 of Sorisio’s essay discusses the impact of Child’s work.

[37] Clark, op cit, p 486.

[38] Ibid, p 492.

[39] C. Vann Woodward, from Origins of the New South, in Eric Foner, America’s Black Past (1970, Harper & Row.)

[40] Martha Hodes, ‘The Sexualization of Reconstruction Politics: White Women and Black Men in the South after the Civil War’ (Journal of the History of Sexuality, Jan., 1993.)

[41] Robyn Wiegman, ‘The Anatomy of Lynching’ (Journal of the History of Sexuality, Jan., 1993.)

[42] Ibid, p 451-52.

[43] Ibid, p 459.

[44] Ibid, p 460-65.

[45] Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon (Vintage, 1998.)

[46] Slavoj Zizek, ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real’ (http://www.cosmos.ne.jp/~miyagawa/nagocnet/data/zizek.html, 2001.)

[47] Jean Baudrillard, America (Verso, 1989.)

References:

1.        Hal Foster, ‘Death in America’ (October, Winter, 1996.)

2.        Mark Seltzer,

-          ‘Serial Killers (II): The Pathological Public Sphere’ (Critical Inquiry, Autumn, 1995.)

-          ‘Wound Culture: Trauma in the Public Sphere’ (October, Spring, 1997.)

3.        Karen Halttunen, ‘Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture’ (The American Historical Review, April, 1995.)

4.        Anna Mae Duane, ‘Review: An Uneasy Union: Pain, Pleasure, and Power in American Sentimental Fiction’ [Reviewed Work: The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature by Marianne Noble] (NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Spring, 2000.)

5.        Elizabeth Barnes, ‘Communicably Violence and the Problem of Capital Punishment in New England, 1830-1890′ (Modern Language Studies, Spring, 2000.)

6.        Ronald G. Walters, ‘The Erotic South: Civilization and Sexuality in American Abolitionism’ (American Quarterly, May, 1973.)

7.        Carolyn Sorisio, ‘The Spectacle of the Body: Torture in the Antislavery Writings of Lydia Maria Child and Francis E. W. Harper’ (Modern Language Studies, Spring, 2000.)

8.        Elizabeth B. Clark, ‘”The Sacred Rights of the Weak”: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America’ (The Journal of American History, Sep, 1995.)

9.        Martha Hodes, ‘The Sexualization of Reconstruction Politics: White Women and Black Men in the South after the Civil War’ (Journal of the History of Sexuality, Jan., 1993.)

10.     Robyn Wiegman, ‘The Anatomy of Lynching’ (Journal of the History of Sexuality, Jan., 1993.)

11.     Eric Foner, America’s Black Past (1970, Harper & Row):

-          C. Vann Woodward, from Origins of the New South.

12.     Slavoj Zizek, ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real’ (http://www.cosmos.ne.jp/~miyagawa/nagocnet/data/zizek.html, 2001.)

13.     Jean Baudrillard, America (Verso, 1989.)

14.     Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing (Ecco, 2006.)

      

I

This paper is an attempt to unravel the history of Indian nationalism and its relationship to what is commonly called ‘the women’s question.’ My effort here is to read India’s journey from colony to postcolony in a specifically gendered way, to look at the various discourses that shaped, defined, and even theorised the role of women in the course of the national movement. The focus of this paper is Bengal, although temptations to generalise in the context of the nation as a whole are not always resisted.

One finds in colonial Bengal, a vast network of complex interactions between an European discourse born of the Enlightenment, and an Indian discourse that has been understood in different ways by different authors in different contexts. Two important mental notes need to be made at the beginning of my explorations. The first, as articulated by Ania Loomba and Lata Mani in the context of debates on sati in colonial India. Both Loomba and Mani make crucial interventions in our conventional understandings of the Age of Reform, when supposedly progressive reformists like Rammohun Roy fought for the emancipation of women. While one need not deny the doubtless good intentions of Roy and his fellow reformers, and while one has to probe in greater detail the truly complicated nature of the debates on sati and widow remarriage in colonial Bengal, it is important for now to keep in mind Mani and Loomba’s argument that on many an occasion, such debates were not about women, but about tradition and modernity.[1] Women, as Mani reminds us, seldom had a voice in determining their own fates and instead became canvasses upon which (male) architects of reform prepared their blueprints for female ‘liberation.’ Secondly, on the question of the national movement, Partha Chatterjee’s response-of-sorts to Benedict Anderson’s idea of imagined communities is worth paying attention to. Chatterjee argues that Asian and African nationalisms are posited on a “difference” with what he calls the “modular” nationalisms of Europe and America.[2] Further, he argues that anticolonial nationalism carves out for itself a sovereign domain even before it challenges the colonial oppressor.

Here we enter, what seems to me, to be a peculiar moment in the history of Bengali (if not Indian) nationalism. Broadly most historians of colonial Bengal are in agreement over the fact that the private sphere (which Chatterjee includes within his notion of ‘the spiritual,’) became the arena where nationalist politics played itself out.[3] Interestingly therefore, in colonial Bengal one seems to find, simultaneously, not only the creation of a colonial public sphere- though not necessarily, we must remember, along the lines of the European public sphere- but also the creation (or at least, the reinvention) of a private sphere in such a way that a major part of nationalist politics located itself outside the domain of the public, and demarcated the home as sovereign territory where no state could intervene. The late-nineteenth century age of consent debate typified the culmination of this politics.

I will return to this point via a short detour. For the time being I turn to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s analysis of what he calls ‘the birth of the subject’ (by which he means the modern subject,) in colonial Bengal. At the outset, Chakrabarty defines what he means by a “modern subject”: not one who witnesses suffering and feels for the one who suffers, but one who witnesses suffering and in the process becomes a “secondary sufferer,” one who takes it upon himself to extend individual suffering to a social context, one who inscribes such suffering on the social body (so-to-speak,) and one who intends to use such inscription for social intervention.[4] It is through such an idea of the modern subject that we glimpse at social reformers like Roy and Vidyasagar. Their clarion calls for compassion, empathy and sensitivity to the plight of women came up against a hurdle in the form of a simple question: how can one bequeath compassion to Society as a whole? Both reformers gave a peculiarly European answer to this question. They claimed that Reason could liberate people from the shackles of blind tradition and senseless custom. In fact, Roy argued that it was precisely because sati had become a custom that people as a whole felt no compassion for the widow who committed it.[5] While Roy and Vidyasagar took recourse to an European conception of Reason as the source of compassion, as Chakrabarty points out, there did exist indigenous responses to the question of compassion. One word which he directs us to is shahanubhuti, a Bengali word, derived from Sanskrit, and vastly different from “Smithian or Humean” notions of sympathy. Chakrabarty argues that there are fundamental differences in the conception of compassion as represented by these two words. The European understanding of sympathy involves “imagination,” which means, that any observer truly understands suffering when she places herself in the shoes of the one suffering. On the other hand, shahanubhuti is tied intrinsically to the idea of hriday. A person with heart, therefore, feels compassion. Such a person, in some senses, reaches out to one who is suffering.[6]

Embedded in the compassion of social reformers, however, was a sinister version of masculinist prejudice. Consider Vidyasagar’s plea in favour of widows: “People of India! … Open your eyes and see how India, once a land of virtue, [is now] awash with the sins of adultery and foeticide … You perhaps imagine that with the loss of their husbands, women’s bodies turn into stone, that they do lose all feelings of pain and sadness, that their passions are eradicated once and for all …”[7] Here Vidyasagar’s logic is laid bare. Foeticide becomes an issue because of unwanted pregnancies. Unwanted pregnancies occur because of sexual intercourse between young widows and men within or outside the family. The problem therefore, is located on/in the body of the woman (girl.) The widow, this argument holds, is young, too young to undergo the ascetic rituals prescribed for widows in general. The passions of “physical youth” would always keep alive the danger of social disgrace. According to this rhetoric, widow remarriage becomes a formula to ’save’ young women, to channel their passions in socially acceptable ways. However, as Chakrabarty points out, the challenge for a project like this, was not merely to theorise the physical, but to also delve into the psychological. For in arguing about the passions of young women one moved beyond the realm of something ‘observable’. And this was where the nineteenth century novel stepped in.

Three authors- Bankimchandra, Rabindranath, and Saratchandra- pioneered a new way of theorizing desire (which, precisely, was desire-less.) With these authors we see the creation of a realm of love as distinct from lust. Central to this was the use of a word that became increasingly common between 1870-1920: pabitra. When appended to prem, it came to mean a love that transcends physical attraction. Chakrabarty argues that this idea of a love cleansed of physical desire was inspired by medieval Vaishnava poetry, interspersed with European Romanticism.[8] European influences were often writ large on the works of authors of this period. In fact, in his novel Bishabriksha, Bankim used Auguste Comte’s idea of conjugality to theorise a wife’s devotion to her husband.[9] Swati Chattopadhyay departs from this point and argues that this shift in the male gaze from the exterior of the woman’s body to her mind, consisted of a “peculiar violence.” Although this discourse was produced from the site of the sexed female body, it located itself in a disembodied space where the female subject had no claims. Unlike in European literatures, here there was no concept of ’sexuality’ to mediate the physical and the psychological passions.[10]

Any discussion on discourses of sex and sexuality in colonial Bengal immediately leads one back to Foucault in The History of Sexuality, arguing that repression as such, never existed in Western European societies and that what is conventionally written as a history of repression is in actuality a history of production of discourses about and around sex/sexuality, designed to regulate, control, manage and normalise social and sexual practices.[11] In Bengal of the colonial age, similar modes of control begin to appear. Chattopadhyay refers in this context, to The Contagious Diseases Act (1868,) which extended the reach of the 1864 Cantonment Act. The latter Act was used to regulate Indian sex workers who served British soldiers. The 1868 Act engulfed common sex workers within its fold. As Chattopadhyay points out, two blatant assumptions led to the passing of such an Act: first, that soldiers cannot control their sexual desires; and second, that sexual diseases emanate from the body of the woman. More importantly however, its important to recognise that the intention of the colonial state was not moral. It did not wish to eliminate sex workers from the city. Quite the opposite. They were seen as important resources for the functioning of the army. What the state intended to do was to control this population of sex workers. The Act was implemented in 1869 in Calcutta. In 1881, a peculiar innovation was made: a cordonne sanitaire (sanitary cordon) referred to “the band of space… that separated black and white towns,”[12] and protected the ‘white town’ from diseases of the ‘black town.’ In Calcutta however, the cordonne sanitaire got a makeover. Here the cordon was placed in area where “women who are visited by soldiers reside.”[13] Opposition from the press and the Indian community, along with the government’s realisation that the legislation was not preventing venereal diseases, led to the abandoning of the Act in 1886.

But by now nationalist discourse had begun to play a somewhat complementary role. Whereas the colonial establishment attempted to sanitize the public space of sexual encounters, the nationalists of Bengal went back home. Their obsession, increasingly, was the separation of body and mind; as well as the reworking of the body, often with reference (even if absent reference) to the sex worker. Chattopadhyay discusses a crucial problematic in this context, one that I hinted at a little earlier. The location of the discourse on women was in some senses strange, in that in straddled- frequently rather uncomfortably- the public and the private. Women could only be theorised into their homes once they had be produced in public. The discourse on domesticity- epitomized by nineteenth-century household manuals and even novels- came from an essentially public space. The road to the private lay very much through the public. At the same time, upon reaching the private, the author was confronted often, with the question of how he had reached there. In other words, the very act of theorising the private involved an act of transgression. The sacred space of the private, many readers felt, was being invaded by authors who did not know how middle-class homes were run, who did not understand the affairs of bhadramahilas, and who took liberties in their fiction. This dilemma reveals not only the problem of the politics of representation, but it also hints at a spatial politics underlying these tensions. For women, in the public (bahir) and the private (andar) were always subjects without voice. It was only in those blurred areas between andar and bahir, in moments when respectable women had their respectability snatched away from them, that they learnt to articulate themselves as subjects.[14] Perhaps one group of women who occupied this extraordinarily difficult terrain were the actresses on the Bengali stage at this time. Binodini’s story, told in her autobiography, is perhaps the most famous of these. She was symptomatic of a larger phenomena wherein sex workers were picked up to work on stage, where they encountered (European and Indian) modernity. However, even as bearers of this modernity, they found on many an occasion, that the respect they believed they deserved never came their way.[15]

Nationalism also produced the counterpart to the bhadralok, that much-mythologised figure of nineteenth-century Bengal.[16] The bhadramahila was a male creation. ‘Enlightened’ Hindu men fashioned the bhadramahila into existence: they defined her look, her tastes, her duties, her wants, her character. But this is only half the story. By the late nineteenth-century, and specially by the beginning of the twentieth, women had begun articulating these desires on their own. Perhaps it is wise at this stage to remind ourselves of Partha Chatterjee’s reading of nationalism as essentially a hegemonic project, because something similar appears to have been occurring in Bengal at this time. This articulation of an essentially male vision of femininity by ‘enlightened’ women themselves betrays traces of the hegemony men of their own class possessed. The process of creating the bhadramahila was also the process of civilising upper-class Bengali women. One important ingredient of this process was clothes, which, as Bannerji argues, were understood to mark a progress from primitivity to civilisation. The other central ingredient, was the discourse on lajja, which Bannerji rightly translates as ’shame’ (rather than ’shyness.’) Bannerji is right in saying that lajja can refer to manner or morals. She cites a work by Kumari Soudamini where this question is dealt with in a forthright way. Soudamini writes: “Shame is of two types. Of these one prevents human beings from sinful deeds, the other is peculiar to women … Those who are truly modest cannot have hearts which contain pride or insolence, they are adorned by gentleness, politeness, good manners, tranquility, etc.” Such a view internalises lajja and binds it up to notions of purity, innocence, and civility.

One can of course go on at length about this. But I will end with on the following note: what we find in most of the situations I have discussed above, is a spatial politics that is central (yet often elusive) to the construction of the woman in colonial Bengal. The logic of this politics- whether filtered through the lens of the colonial state or nationalist rhetoric- transcends class, albeit in different ways. Various modes of control, through language as well as physical barriers, were deployed in these efforts. Within this spatial politics, what becomes a running theme is the tension between the public and the private. This is a contradiction I have mentioned before, but its one I must return to now in order to move towards a temporary ending of this narrative (temporary because, I think, such stories seldom have an ‘end.’)

II

Tanika Sarkar has written about the fact that for a considerable period of time Bengali cultural production critiqued colonialism by critiquing modernity. In representations of Calcutta dating from this period, Sarkar argues, there was a conscious effort to avoid discussing railways, electricity, telegraph, urban growth, city crowds etc. Yet, Hindu nationalists of this era hailed mostly from Calcutta or from other culturally productive regions of the province.[17] Sarkar no doubt, makes an interesting observation. But I find Chattopadhyay’s analysis of the refusal of representation to be more persuasive. Her plea to not view modernity as something bestowed by European upon a hapless colonised population is important to keep in mind. Neither is she wrong in suggesting that it might be fruitful to interpret modernity in the colony as a network of negotiations between different players: communities, individuals, and the state of course. Contrary to Sarkar, this view holds (and I would concur with it,) that the refusal of writers, painters, musicians and others from Calcutta to locate themselves in the city was not a refusal of modernity. In fact, even as these producers of culture harked back in their works to distant rural idylls far away from the noisy urbanism of Calcutta, they embraced a certain form of anti-modern modernity.[18]

Regardless, the nineteenth-century represented troubled times for the Bengali man (babu.) Sarkar points to the fact that Bengali capital was entangled in urban real estate and rural landholding, neither of which offered a dynamic future. At the top of this chain was perched the European coloniser. And just below him, a new actor: the Marwari businessman.[19] In a cruel twist to the tale, Sarkar suggests that the way the Bengali babu responded to his continued effeminisation in colonial discourse was not to hit back with a vengeance, but to accept all the ills of society. The effeminate babu thus produced was one who exercised hegemony by valourising his weakness.[20] Hence Bankim’s quip: ” By the grace of the Almighty, an extraordinary species of animal has been found on earth in the nineteenth century: it is known as the modern Bengali … Some believe that in its inner nature too it resembles humans; others hold that it is only externally human, in its inner nature it is closer to beasts … We believe in the theory which asserts the bestiality of Bengalis.”[21]

If we move forward a few decades and peer into the last decades of the nineteenth-century, we find a strange paradox. Women, much theorised, debated and discussed until now, suddenly seem to vanish from the public sphere. However, this was not caused by the abrupt unimportance of the woman question. Nor was it caused by the fact that nationalism provided a clean answer to the problem and went on fighting the British. Rather, as Chatterjee has argued, what we see happening in these closing decades, is the carving out of a domain of “inner sovereignty” which effectively removes women from the public domain and in that sense, perhaps even solves the politics of the spatial I mentioned above. [22] Here Chatterjee returns to the problem posed by Lata Mani. Mani pointed to the fact that the British, in their attempts to codify, understand and legislate Indian tradition, assumed Indian Hindu tradition to be synonymous with Brahminical tradition. In the sati debates, this had several fallouts, one of which was the refusal on the part of the colonial state, to accept any deviations from textual ‘truth’ as authentic.[23] In this way colonial discourse framed the nationalist problematic. So, when Indian nationalists chanced upon the women’s question they saw it as a problem already constituted, i.e; a problem of Indian tradition.

Nationalism created a binary within which it placed itself and its women. An inner/outer, home/world, material/spiritual polarity was defined in order to identify a domain of internal sovereignty. It would be wrong on our part to argue that nationalist rhetoric looked inward at a regressive Indian tradition and rejected modernity. For in fact, nationalism worked out an “ideological principle of selection,” which synthesised the nationalist project to a modernity of its choosing. This is a crucial point to realise if we are to make the next claim: that nationalism, in creating this ideological principle, subjected women to a new patriarchy where a contrast was made not only with Western patriarchy but also older indigenous patriarchies. Central to this conception was the idea that the woman would attain her liberation on her own. Chatterjee refers to the “central ideological strength nationalist resolution of the women’s question.”[24] Although Sarkar has had disagreements with Chatterjee on a number of questions, here her imagery of the new woman in the age of social reform right through to the age of consent debates of the 1890s come strikingly close to the idea of a newly liberated nationalist woman. This new woman of Sarkar’s narrative was a byproduct of the effeminisation of the babu. She was a woman who came to represent Kali, a new India, a chauvinistic cultural symbol of Hindu nationalism.[25]

The strength of this nationalist discourse was based on its ability to theorise a silent voice but also to let it speak. Nationalism excelled at being a hegemonic project which, in spite of its predominant masculinity, incorporated the marginal and subversive.[26] The theoretical point Chatterjee makes in this regard is also central to comprehending the problem we’re trying to negotiate. And that point is this: even within a dominant, hegemonic discourse, subjectivity cannot be erased. If the subject had no autonomy, “power would cease to be a relation.”

As I said before, I doubt there is an ending to this narrative. The resolution that I have described above is only a sketch of Chatterjee’s more elaborate formulation. But my intention has not been to provide crude historiography. What I have attempted to do is to arrive at a problematic and leave it there, without, as it were, ‘resolving’ it.

References:

1. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (OUP, 1993.)

2. Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism (Permanent Black, 2005.)

3. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton University Press, 2000.)

4. Swati Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta: Modernity, nationalism and the colonial uncanny (Routledge, 2006.)

5. Himani Bannerji, ‘Attired in Virtue: The Discourse on Shame (lajja) and Clothing of the Bhadramahila in Colonial Bengal (in) From The Seams of History: Essays on Indian Women, Bharati Ray (ed.) (OUP, 1995.)

6. Ania Loomba, ‘Dead Women Tell No Tales: Issues of Female Subjectivity, Subaltern Agency, and Tradition in Colonial and Post-colonial Writings on Widow Immolation in India’ (History Workshop Journal, 1993.)

Lata Mani, ‘Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India’ (in) Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, Kumkum Sangari and Suresh Vaid (ed.) (Kali for Women, 1989.)

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[1] Ania Loomba, ‘Dead Women Tell No Tales: Issues of Female Subjectivity, Subaltern Agency, and Tradition in Colonial and Post-colonial Writings on Widow Immolation in India’; Lata Mani, ‘Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India.’

[2] Chatterjee, op cit., p5.

[3] See for instance, Tanika Sarkar’s Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation, Chatterjee’s work cited above, and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe.

[4] Chakrabarty, op cit., p119.

[5] ibid, p122.

[6] Of course, this sort of a formulation leads to further complexities which I will not go into in detail. In short, while many defenders of Roy and Vidyasagar used the European argument, many others invoked the hriday as the central factor in determining the reformers’ capacity for sympathy. But how could anyone acquire a hriday? What we have therefore, is the un/easy coexistence of two contradictory conceptions of compassion/sympathy within a single but dynamic discourse.

[7] ibid, p132.

[8] ibid, p135.

[9] Swati Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta: Modernity, nationalism and the colonial uncanny, p241.

[10] ibid, p249.

[11] Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. Himani Bannerji, in an essay cited below, uses this approach to analyse the construction of the bhadramahila in Bengal in the period in question.

[12] On the notion of the black and white town, see Chattopadhyay’s ‘The Limits of “White” Town.’

[13] Chattopadhyay, op cit., p254-59.

[14] ibid, p265-66.

[15] Chatterjee, op cit., p151-55.

[16] For the purpose of the following discussion I have relied on Himani Bannerji’s ‘Attired in Virtue: The Discourse on Shame (lajja) and Clothing of the Bhadramahila in Colonial Bengal.’

[17] Tanika Sarkar, op cit., p29-30.

[18] Chattopadhyay borrows this concept from Marshall Berman, who wrote: “To be modern is to live a life of paradox and contradiction … it is to be both revolutionary and conservative; alive to new possibilities for experience and adventure, frightened by the nihilistic depths to which so many modern adventures lead … to be fully modern is to be anti-modern.” Cited in Chattopadhyay, op cit., p4-5.

[19] Sarkar, op cit., p34.

[20] ibid, p32.

[21] Chatterjee, op cit., p69.

[22] ibid, p117.

[23] Mani, op cit.

[24] op cit., p127.

[25] See ‘A Pre-History of Rights?: The Age of Consent Debates in Colonial Bengal’ in Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation, op cit.

[26] Chatterjee, op cit., p136.

      

“Each critic sees only certain aspects of the matter, certain intentions of the author, and the picture he gives will always need supplementing. But it would be much the same if the author himself attempted to criticize his work… Today I am scarcely a competent interpreter of Death in Venice; I have almost forgotten the writing of it.”

- Thomas Mann, 1915.

*

I.

First published in 1911, Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice has by now established itself as one of the major works of homosexual literature- if not all literature. In the following pages I will attempt to read the text in the context of queer culture and politics from Mann’s time down to our own. I will trace some of the debates and discussions around homosexuality in late-nineteenth century Germany in an effort to place Mann in his specific cultural and historical context. From here I will move into the text and its many (queer) lives. What is fascinating about a work like Death in Venice is the way in which it has drawn gay artists into its web over the years. One summons here the film version of the novella, directed by Luchino Visconti, the opera based on the work, by Benjamin Britten, and more recently, references to the object of Gustave Aschenbach’s ‘pursuit’ in the story, in a song by Rufus Wainwright. In fact, it is worth asking- when one moves beyond the ‘original’ text- whether the world’s appetite for Death in Venice and its principle charmer, Tadzio, is whetted by the description(s) of the boy that Mann provided, or whether they are the encouraged by Bjorn Andresen, the exquisite beauty that Visconti chose to cast in the part of Tadzio. Moreover, what ought to be thought about is the fact that Death in Venice exists as different texts not only in different mediums of communication, but also in the form of literature itself. Many translations have been done of the work, and some, like the one I have consulted (by H. T. Lowe-Porter,) are restrained and conservative in their translation. The passion, as one critic (Andrew O’Hehir) has noted, is just not there in Lowe-Porter’s version. However, in spite of many ‘authorings’ and interpretations, Mann’s voice appears to survive- the slow burn of repressed passion can either be written sensationally or with added-care. But in either case, a different face of the German author comes to the fore. For me, there is one theme in the work that seems to transcend all others. This is the idea of knowing without being known. In thinking about why a work like Death in Venice should attract so many even today, I can think of very few reasons other than this.

II.

In the late-nineteenth century physicians saw homosexuality as the “manifestation of neuropsychopathic degeneration, a protean and vaguely conceptualized pathological condition of the central nervous system causing behavioral as well as physical abnormalities.” Chandak Sengoopta points out that the idea of degeneration was a vague one, and allowed many diseases to be grouped together under this label: alcoholism, misshapen ears, clefts, tuberculosis, and homosexuality were all grouped under this category. Degeneration was also believed to be hereditary, though it was argued that the same disease would not necessarily pass from one generation to another.

Over time degeneration was replaced by a newer strand of thinking, which saw homosexuality as linked to ‘development.’ Embryologists, as Sengoopta points out, believed that human genitalia were initially undifferentiated and only later developed to identify with one sex. The same logic was now extended to the psyche. It was argued by developmental theorists that owing to developmental errors, a child might develop one set of genitals and a non-corresponding psyche. For example, a person with male genitals might have a “femininely functioning brain”

In Germany in the same period, debates on homosexuality were quite common. Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) was a pioneer in research and academic debates on the subject. Hirschfeld and his followers summoned Science to argue that- among other things- Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, which declared “sodomy” an “unnatural vice” ought to be struck down. Hirschfeld and company faced a stiff challenge, however, from moral- mostly Christian moral- purists. John Fout argues that these battles meant that in post-1890 Germany, there was a “restatement” of preexisting conceptions of gender and sexuality. The moral purists, he contends, played a crucial role in this “restatement.” They held monogamous sex-for-procreation as the ideal. All deviations were abnormal, and could be called: immoral, illicit, illegal, unhealthy, even anti-German. Of course, this does not mean that scientific opinion was free of such notions of ‘normality’. In his 1886 work Psychopathia Sexualis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing used monogamous sexual intercourse in marriage, directed towards reproduction, as a ‘normal’ category, against which every deviation was to be measured.

In 1897, Hirschfeld and his Scientific Humanitarian Committee (SHC) petitioned the Riechstag asking for the abolition of Paragraph 175. This petition, Fout points out, set the course for future actions of the SHC and clearly defined their approach to the question of homosexuality. Science, it was argued, had proven that homosexuality manifests itself across time and place and “therefore must grow out of deep internal constitutional dispositional.” In other words, everything was natural and in-built. Homosexuals could not therefore be held responsible for morally reprehensible behaviour- after all, it was nature herself that had given birth to this “puzzling phenomena.” Paragraph 175 was thus presented as anti-scientific, anti-progressive etc. Hirschfeld was also influenced by the developmental theory outlined above, except that he made one change to the theory as it then existed: he extended the notion of feminisation beyond the psyche and infact, argued that male homosexuals were a sort of third sex, with a harmonious mixture of both male and female bodies and psyches. It’s worth quoting a passage from Sengoopta’s essay to show what Hirschfeld believed to be the characteristics of the male homosexual:

“Male homosexuals, for example, often manifested periodic, menstruation-like phenomena such as nosebleeds and bleeding from the mouth or the anus or migraine, backaches, and depression. At the age when females experienced menopause, male homosexuals could exhibit similar symptoms, especially those of depression. To take another instance, the singing voices of male homosexuals were reminiscent of the description of the voices of the castrati…”

While it is true that this rhetoric of science and medicine was resisted by some homosexual