(PDF) Sexual Difference in a Different Religiosity

Sexual Difference in a Different Religiosity: Writing the Nation in "My Life" Anirban Das philoSOPHIA, Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 2017, pp. 23-44 (Article) Published by State University of New York Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/phi.2017.0001 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/660555 Access provided by Tata Institutute of Social Sciences (15 Jun 2017 17:15 GMT) Sexual Difference in a Different Religiosity: Writing the Nation in “My Life” Anirban Das Section I: Toward a Feminist Historiography of Texts How to figure the question of sexual difference in historiography of texts? This essay tries to address the question of sexual difference in the production of the male aesthetic of literature, going beyond an enumeration of women’s contributions. Reading a “woman’s text” closely, I find some elements of a figuration of space-time and a figuration of religiosity both different from and intimately related to, respectively, the chronotope of the nation and the patriarchal religious. The difference lies, to put it in a formulaic manner, in enunciations of relating the body to the (real and ideational) space that one inhabits and in a displacement of a certain mode of devotion from the man to the woman. To act out this reading, the paper has to interrogate some prevalent ways of looking at the nation and at the religious. To begin, a set of questions has to be addressed. The first is that of the specificity of a woman’s enunciations in literature (even if we hold on to genre divisions). What are the specific elements that such enunciations provide, elements that are absent in that of the “man”? The second is the (almost unaddressed) question of the unacknowledged sexism in aesthetics that underlies the notions of a “good poet” or a “good author.” What are the parameters of poetry that can only mark men poets as “good”? Do women poets have the potential to expand or modify 23 philoSOPHIA_7.1_02.indd   Page 23 11/04/17 9:30 AM the notions of beauty, poetry, or literature? Do generalities of poetic beauty have universal validity? Are there other generalities? The third question is, how to read texts in a literary way, while being aware of the distinctions and specificities of genre, disciplines, or typologies? In this paper, I try to retain a sensitivity to these questions while striving to formulate a more or less coherent account of an autobiography written by a woman in nineteenth-century Bengal in the context of the nation that is known to her as Bharatbarsha. But is it a nation that she knows by that name? The question might very well, despite being addressed in my writing, hang in perpetual irresolution. Susie Tharu and K. Lalita had been addressing similar concerns in 1991 in their introduction to the collection of writings that has since been canonical, the two volumes of Women Writing in India. That introduction deals in detail with the contemporary Anglo-American traditions in feminist critical theory. Outlining, following Elaine Showalter, the two principal strands of feminist theorizing on the issue as “feminist critique” and “gynocritics,” it goes on to mark the implicit commonness of the two modes. Whereas the former strand focuses on the patriarchal underpinnings of the dominant male literary produc- tions, the latter is in search of a “distinctively female literary tradition” (Gilbert and Gubar 1979, quoted in Tharu and Lalita 1991, 19). Tharu and Lalita, while affirming the importance of these feminist efforts in no uncertain terms, raise vital issues to point at their limitations. These limitations, as the essay moves on to show, flow from the inherent and unacknowledged circumscrip- tion of these writings by the very history of the middle-class white Western concerns of their production. The essay delineates four elements that make up the conceptual grid of these feminist criticisms: 1) The idea of a loss that calls for a recovery assumes the parameters of dominant Western middle-class aesthetics instead of trying to displace them. 2) The idea of a release or escape in a feminist poetics accompanies the theme of loss. This idea in its turn echoes a Rousseauist call for the individual in the enlightenment paradigm that has been patriarchal and blind to class and race differences. 3) A feminist poetics of this variety draws on the authenticity of the “experience” of women. To treat experience in this manner is to blunt the political edge in the act of positing the experience of women to challenge and recast dominant modes of understanding. A naturalizing of the immediacy and spontaneity of women’s responses blinds one to the humanist and patriarchal ideologies at work in them. To posit women’s experience as a universal is to echo the universal of humanism that feminism had critically encountered. 4) A universal “feminine” is thus constructed in the mode of a realist fiction that set up the bourgeois hero as its protagonist. To summarize in the words of Tharu and Lalita, this mode of Western feminist theorizing “drew on a whole range of significations and inferential logics attached to them already in circulation, . . . [and] underwrote afresh their society’s consensus about the ‘real’ or the plausible” (33). 24     philoSophia philoSOPHIA_7.1_02.indd  Page 24 11/04/17 9:30 AM Thus, while they questioned the subordination of women, “they a­ cquiesced broadly in the consensus on the significations of other cultural and conceptual objects, disciplinary commitments, feelings, tastes, everyday ­p ractices, and, indeed, narrative fragments of various kinds that were ­o perative in their society and underwrote the politics of class, race, or imperialism” (33). As this logic entails, Tharu and Lalita move on to transform this critical sensibility in more radical directions. They speak of the joy and difficulty, implying a joy in realizing the difficult, of their task. Their aim is not to refurbish the canon but to transform it, they assert. For that they look out for “gestures of defiance or subversion implicit” in writings of women who experi- ence dominant ideologies in a different vein. Their tentative moves toward a new aesthetic define that in terms of an undoing of the strict distinctions between the literary and the social text. There is a shift toward plurality away from universalisms of the older dominant. They want to read women’s writings as documents that bring out the stakes in the fraught field of formation of self and agency, and not as monuments of existing institutions. For me, one who shares the joy in and respects the initial move away from the Western feminist myopias their work so distinctly announces, the task has to be outlined in more detailed textures. If one has to work across the boundaries of the literary and the social, does that not call for a formulation of a new aesthetic in terms of principles that might be contingent yet operative? How is one to recognize the subversive gestures in writings without referring to generalities different from the dominant one? How can these generalities be formulated? These and many other similar concerns have to be addressed bit by bit, text by singular text, avoiding the homogenizations of the universal yet not letting go of the communications through the general. Contemporary feminist historiography of texts (if one may extend thus the notion of a literary culture) has pointed at some such possibilities in its rereading of an autobiography in Bangla written by a housewife undistin- guished by any other social marks than her unique and powerful access to literacy that she herself acquired through the painful, dull, drudging labor (that the “woman” is very well acquainted with in her everydayness) of learning. At least four perceptive commentators have written, one among them extending to a book-length study, on Amar Jiban, the autobiography of Rassundari Debi. Three of them—Partha Chatterjee (1993), Sibaji Bandyopadhyay (1994), and Tanika Sarkar (1999, 2001, 2001 Bangla) —have discussed the importance of this text in the context of the formation of the “new woman” that the emergent nation of India was trying to forge as the nation’s repository and agent in the act of asserting its nation-ness. The focus of my attention is on the question of how a woman writing in the sixties of nineteenth-century Bengal, one who had herself laboriously gained one of the prerequisites of the Sexual Difference in a Different Religiosity    25 philoSOPHIA_7.1_02.indd   Page 25 11/04/17 9:30 AM “new woman”—the ability to read and write—figures the nation (she speaks, repetitively, of Bharatbarsha) in her text. This particular figuring of the nation points at certain generalities—other than that of the modern nation-state of India—which might operate in the imaginations of a woman at a little distance from the colony-nation axis of states and revolutions. Notions of the changing body and mind of the woman in the space of the familiar and the familial mark this imagination. As also, there are the remains of certain notions of the “beyond natural” in the form of gods and ghosts that animate this piece of writing. Gautam Bhadra (2011), the fourth commentator I was referring to, has been exceptionally sensitive to this aspect of Rassundari’s writing. He treats this as a call of the unanticipatable in the quotidian (“naimittik-o aprotyashiter barta nie ase,” 80). But, he is less than willing to read the text for a feminist end. For him, the transcendence enacted in the act of reading is a personal experience for Rassundari, not enframed in a social program (like feminism). She does not want to be an exemplar (82). My contention is that the stated intimacy of Rassundari’s experience does not lend it to a space beyond “social” significance. The quotes from Rassundari that Bhadra uses speak of her intentions. These intentions are personal and do not speak of a social intent or of an effect of the social on her thought. That does not preclude the significance of her act for the social. As such, I am in sympathy with attempts to read feminist significance of her work, even if that work is not done with a stated intent to that effect. Of course, the event of her writing cannot be reduced to its significance for a cause. The singularity of the act—as in all acts—transcends a single structure of understanding. Bhadra’s intervention, in my view, is of immense importance in pointing at the specific nature and dynamic of her act, and not in limiting its significance to the uniqueness of the particular. Not that this text is a repre- sentative one (it is far from so). One may read traces of the non-dominant in such texts. I only try to make a point regarding the sexual marking of the scene of writing in a text where it is least expected, in an autobiography of a barely literate Bangali housewife writing Bharatbarsha into her life, thus rescripting and reinscribing India the nation with her own space of the mindful body. This marks a shift from a feminist task in textual historiography of unearthing the contributions of women to that of a “recasting” of the presup- posed aesthetics of (men’s) literature. 1 For a re-accounting of what counts as contribution. This is as much a historical as a philosophical task. The question of the nation and its women has been addressed from the vantage point of how the condition of women is affected by the dynamic of the nation, or at most, how ideologies of nationalism and femininity are intertwined in such ways that women become repositories of the prestige of the nation, how the body of the nation and the body of the woman become synonymous and remain equally amenable to machinations of male supremacy. These texts 26     philoSophia philoSOPHIA_7.1_02.indd  Page 26 11/04/17 9:30 AM focus on the metaphoricity of nationalism and womanhood with a stress on the co-implication of the two. 2 I try to figure some rudiments of a different vision of the nation, a vision occurring piecemeal in certain literary produc- tions by a woman. Beyond the fixed ontopologies of the modern nation, this different vision works with what I call, following Spivak (2001), a dvaita mode of thinking and being. I focus on the (space and) time of the nation and the (time and) space of women. I have tried to work out certain conceptual issues through the reading of Rassundari’s autobiography. The ground of my exercise is that the work of sifting thus instituted is necessary in addressing the concerns I have spoken of in this introductory section. In the second section, I deal with the notion of space-time of the nation and speak about a mode of the messianic as opposed to the homogeneity of empty time. I end the section with the sugges- tion of a certain mode of thinking—analogous to a messianicity different from that of the Judeo-Christian tradition—operative in the Indic space inhabited by Rassundari. The following section reads Rassundari’s autobiography closely to bring out the co-constitution in her writing of the secular nation and the puranic Bharatbarsha even when they retain their own specificities. The fourth and final section relates Amar Jiban’s utterance of love and devotion for the god and the object with a displacement of the structure of mad bhakti (­devotion) associated with the male devotee of a certain kind. This essay does not inaugu- rate a comprehensive recasting of the (male) universals but attempts a clearing of grounds toward a disarticulation of given concepts. Section II: Thinking the time-space of the nation This section traverses the familiar territory of the relationships between the nation and a certain conceptualization of space. I try to highlight some aspects of the theorizations on this theme to point at a few ambiguities at work in these. The literature I refer to is well known to the extent of being canonical in the discussions on nationalism. Yet I intend to reread the canon to bring out some nuances that escaped earlier scrutiny. This, though ambitious, will be borne out in the following argument—I expect. Since Benedict Anderson’s seminal intervention (1983), the time of the nation has been known to be the empty homogeneous time of modernity. In the original enunciation of this concept in Benjamin (1992, the essay originally completed in 1940), the empty homogeneous time of progressivist histori- cism had been juxtaposed to the messianic time of revolution and (Benjamin’s notion) of “historical materialism.” Historicism—said to culminate in “universal history”—consists, according to Benjamin, in the mustering of “a mass of data” to fill in the emptiness of this homogeneous time. His call for the alternative theses on history is to establish a conception of the present as the “time of Sexual Difference in a Different Religiosity    27 philoSOPHIA_7.1_02.indd   Page 27 11/04/17 9:30 AM the now,” where the present “comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgement” (255), “shot through with chips of Messianic time” (255). The fullness of empty time gets fragmented with the realization of its constitution by those explosive chips. The time of the “now” combines the ghosts of times past and the traces of futures. Anderson tries to empiricize the notion of empty homogeneous time through his references to the simultaneity of the experiences of the citizens of a nation in reading the same newspaper daily in the morning, of sharing the time of printed novels with people whom one doesn’t see. This act of understanding progressivism through the possibility of simultaneity—the notion that time is rendered empty and amenable to linear serializing when unknown people share experiences of reading printed matters in a society driven by the dynamic of capital—displaces the scope of Benjamin’s intervention. This is to forget that progressivist historicism and nation’s time may correspond at places, but are not the same. Partha Chatterjee seems to hint at the predicament when he talks critically about Anderson’s purported utopia: People can only imagine themselves in empty homogeneous time; they do not live in it. Empty homogeneous time is the utopian time of capital . . . empty homogeneous time is not located anywhere in real space—it is utopian. The real space of modern life is a heterotopia. . . . Time here is heterogeneous, unevenly dense.” (1999, 131) Chatterjee here is working with a real time/utopic time binary. What is this real heterogeneous time he is speaking of ? In the version of the essay that forms the first chapter of his book (2004), he speaks of the tension between “the utopian dimension of the homogeneous time of capital and the real space constituted by the heterogeneous time of governmentality” (8). This formulation may be read (probably against the grain) in a way that lets one think of a non-real dimension of the time of governmentality, carrying a hint that the heterogeneous time may not be that “real” after all. The binary opposite set up in terms of space is utopia/heterotopia. This, again, does not and cannot wholly correspond to a imagined/real binary that Chatterjee seems to imply, by bringing in the term of the real in opposing the utopic time of capital. One may remember that Foucault (1986), whom Chatterjee refers to, speaks of utopias and heterotopias as “two main types” of spaces “which are linked with all the others, which however contradict all the other sites” (24). Earlier in the essay, Foucault has already spoken of a change in our notion of space from “emplacement” to “extension” to “site”: “Our epoch is one in which space takes for us the form of relations between sites” (23). 28     philoSophia philoSOPHIA_7.1_02.indd  Page 28 11/04/17 9:30 AM He speaks of “site” as something “defined by relations of proximity between points or elements,” formally describable as “series, trees or grids.”3 For him, the problem of site involves “the storage of data or of the intermediate results of a calculation in the memory of a machine; . . . the identification of marked or coded elements inside a set that may be randomly distributed, or may be arranged according to single or multiple classifications” (23). As such, both utopia and heterotopia are thought of as linked to—yet contradicting—all sites. First there are the utopias. Utopias are sites with no real place. . . . They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces. (1986, 24) There are also . . . real places, actual places, places that are designed into the very institution of society, which are sorts of actually realized utopias . . . sorts of places that are outside all places, although they are actually localizable. Because they are utterly different from all the emplacements [sites, in the 1986 translation] that they reflect or refer to, I shall call these places “heterotopias,” as opposed to utopias. (1998, 178) Though Foucault speaks of utopia as not referring to a real space whereas heterotopias refer to real spaces, this does not take away the imaginations acting in both these notions. The difference is, one is imagined to be imaginary whereas the other is not. And the nation, pace utopia, is not something to be imagined as imaginary. The imagination of the nation itself becomes hetero- topic. Not to forget, heterotopias, in these terms, are not necessarily figures of resistance. Here, heterotopia refers to a specific organization of space and neither more nor less than that. 4 The problem of historic progressivism that informed Benjamin’s writing remains to be addressed. Benjamin, if we remember, had posited messianic time against the empty homogeneity of historicist time. In recent theory, Jacques Derrida (along with a few others) had particularly been attentive to the problem of the messianic. Derrida (1999) differentiates his own notion of messianicity from the “Jewish messianism” of Benjamin. Messianism, for him, refers to “the memory of a determinate historical revelation” and “a relatively determinate messiah-figure.” Messianicity excludes these determinations and constitutes itself in a different register: The figures of messianism would have to be . . . deconstructed as “religious,” ideological, or fetishistic formations, whereas messianicity without messianism remains, for its part, undeconstructible, like justice. . . . [b]ecause the move- ment of any deconstruction presupposes it—not as a ground of certainty, . . . but in line with another modality.” (Derrida 1999, 253) Sexual Difference in a Different Religiosity    29 philoSOPHIA_7.1_02.indd   Page 29 11/04/17 9:30 AM But then, following a typical Derridean structure of argument, he c­ omplicates the situation. He asks, why then, should he use the term “messianic”? What are the traces in the word he wants to retain? For Derrida, it becomes impossible to speak of religion from the stand- point of a totally nonreligious secular. The event of thought is not reducible to a secure onto-theology (that closes off the undecidability in the event “to come”) of a determinate religion. Here, there is a call for a radical rethinking of thinking, the call of a response-ability to the other in the reflections on an unavoidable ideology/religion. Whether Derrida’s attempt to think of messi- anicity may be utilized to think of a time of messianicity is a moot question. One may, for a brief moment here, ponder upon the possibility of juxtaposing the heterotopicity of Foucault’s actual spaces to Derrida’s stress on the weight of the “presence” of the “now” in the notion of ontopology (1994, 82). Later in this essay, I refer to a certain fixity operating in the space-time of the nation—a fixity that does not allow different fragmentary modes of thought (of course, each fragment in its turn, is a generality for a different register) to operate in and through the structure of the nation. Conceiving the nation in terms of heterotopia does not permit the distinction between fixed and transformative modes in the gesture of bringing together of different spaces. The discussions in terms of fixed ontopologies and the unanticipatability of the messianic lets one work with this distinction in a productive way. One can now think of singularities of the enunciation of a time-space that may interrupt the fixed ontopologies of the nation. The politics of this interruption is unavailable to a thinking of a heterotopicity in terms of actually existing “realized utopias.” I began with a discussion of Benjamin’s opposition of the “time of the now” to the “homogeneous empty time” of progressivist historicism. The idea of a linear progress in history required a notion of homogeneous time to be filled in by historical happenings. Benjamin’s notion of the “time of the now,” as opposed to this, is associated with a messianic time where the present cohabits—and is thus displaced from having a full presence—with the past and the future. Derrida’s notion of messianicity without messianicism seems to follow the thrust of Benjamin’s argument to a logical extension. Here, the “time of the now” intervenes and interrupts the secure ontopology of a full presence in a certain articulation of the “now.” Anderson’s use of “empty homogeneous time” in the thinking of the time of the nation does not directly address these contestations. Though, a discerning reading like that of Chatterjee brings out the utopic dimension of nation’s time thus perceived, Chatterjee’s attempt to question this with the heterotopicity of real space concomitant with the heterogeneity of real time is a gesture toward addressing the messianic in a different register. For me, the Derridean move of interrupting the ontopology of empty homogeneous time of the nation with the events of messianicity is more relevant. This move also brings in the notion of a religiosity that might 30     philoSophia philoSOPHIA_7.1_02.indd  Page 30 11/04/17 9:30 AM work with and beyond the time-space of the nation. My concern in this paper, postponing the Derridean gesture toward a different ethic and hauntology, is to think of a certain hint of a messianicity that does not belong to the structure of the Judeo-Christian waiting for the Messiah. Here, something analogous to, yet very different from, the messianic is at work in a non-monotheist setting. I refer to a woman writing her life who writes the name Bharatbarsha as the space that situates that life. Section III: Writing “My Life”: In and Beyond the Nation The first paragraph of the first full-length autobiography in Bangla (written by an unknown village housewife) runs: “I was born in the month of Chaitra in the year 1216, and in this year of 1303, I have completed eighty-eight years of my life. Coming to Bharatbarsha, I have been living for so long a time.” (Sarkar 1999, 140, translation modified) 5 Bharatbarsha, the Bangla name for India, is at once the land where she lives and the land where she has come to (from where?). It is the space of the nation, a name given to the space that marks her identity, yet at once a space that she occupies only in transit. Coming from somewhere else, she is headed to a different location. This very real space of the nation is at the same time transitory, the identity that is bound to it is evanescent, as impermanent as her own body and mind. Rassundari continues: “This body, this mind, this very life of mine have been of different kinds. I do not fully remember how the conditions of my body or the states of my mind were at different times, or for how long they remained thus. I am writing whatever little that comes back to me.” (140) Bharatbarsha is the heterotopic location—the non-empty space—where Rassundari lives. It is non-empty as it is filled in, among other things, by the frail, degenerate, old body of the author—a theater for the changes wrought in the body and mind of Rassundari. Bharatbarsha is the stage for the enactment of “her life.” It is filled in by the quotidian of her existence, her family and her god. The theme of her grateful amazement in this stay in Bharatbarsha is that no one has ever been bad to her. The everyday fills up the transcendent— “I came into Bharatbarsha such a long time back, and I am still here. When I look back on everything, I find that no one has ever said anything unpleasant to me. I have always had nice things said to me. No acquaintance or friend, no neighbor or villager that I can think of, has ever said a word in rebuke that I can recall. I thank the great Lord for this.” (193–94) Sexual Difference in a Different Religiosity    31 philoSOPHIA_7.1_02.indd   Page 31 11/04/17 9:30 AM The striking feature of the above quote is not the nicety of everyone around that is important to Rassundari’s life but the link she makes between this happening and the stay in her country. She doesn’t make a logical point, does not try to connect them causally. But the association of the two is not an isolated one. The association recurs throughout the text, especially in the latter part, where she speaks more of her god than herself. As she addresses her god who is the lord of the world, she recurrently speaks of her own location in Bharatbarsha. And, more often than not, she also speaks of her own body, about the changes wrought about in the body over time. An amusing verse brings out her present state of the body: “The frail body can hardly move Straight lips are getting twisted at places. The skin sags, the hair is graying And teeth have melted away from the mouth. What to say how my movements are Day by day the shape gets hideous.” (193, 68 Bangla) This is followed by the following remark, “Anyway, it is difficult now to support this body of mine. The body is gradually wizening. The decorations with which Parameshwar had adorned this body- ship he himself is taking off one by one. . . . It now seems that he would set off only after taking away all the things with which he had decked my body up. . . . [H]ow strange are Jagadishwar’s ways! Parameshwar alone knows what amazing things have happened through this body of mine, and what is yet in store.” (193–94) Her god—whom she affectionately called Dayamadhab or reverentially addressed as Parameshwar or Jagadishwar—her country that was a lot more than an empty name Bharatbarsha, and her body, which was spoken of in union with her mind, were the three axes that made up her identity. To be specific, this is how Rassundari wants her reader to understand her identity to be. For, unlike many of the autobiographies written at that time (and also later), Rassundari’s writing is marked by a certain critical distance from her lived being. She approaches the general almost all the time she speaks of the particular and the immanent. And body, country, and god are the three generalities she invokes often and in conjunction with each other. Her stay in the country is also an inhabiting of her changing body, the stay almost defined by the changes. Her god places her in the country and brings about these transformations of her body. 32     philoSophia philoSOPHIA_7.1_02.indd  Page 32 11/04/17 9:30 AM Rassundari is almost always aware of the “construction” of her ­autobiography, almost always at a remove from the sense of immediacy that marks a writing self. Indeed for her, it is the act of writing that fashions the self. Tanika Sarkar especially has written touchingly on this aspect of Amar Jiban, which translates as My Life. Indeed, as Sarkar is acute enough to point at, the naming of this autobiography transgresses the neat binary that Partha Chatterjee had created in his otherwise perceptive piece on “women and the nation”—that between the predominantly male Atmacarit (where the individual is at the center) and Smritikatha (tales from memory), the reserve of women. My Life, as the name suggests, puts her own life at the center and tells its story, reflexively making the act of retrospection evident in writing. And yet another paradox lays in the way her own life is spoken of as being crafted by the hands of her god. Here is a woman writing her own story of attaining literacy, learning to read in the confines of her ghomta (the drooping cover of saree), in the intermittent attention paid to the printed pages in the space of the kitchen against the odds of a social taboo regarding women’s education, well aware of the changes in body and mind and the unanticipatable play of chance acting thereon (not giving in to a telos of even god’s good willed intervention, interpreting chance as the caprices of a playful god), yet unambiguous in her total submission to a god both affectionate and all powerful. Manu Goswami (2004) has historically traced the multiple processes that went on to constitute the conception of a modern and historicist nation-space of India as Bharat. She has referred to the public enunciation of this concept in the 1860s and 1870s. Imaginations of the nation in newspaper articles, textbooks for schools, and individual tracts in the regional vernaculars like Hindi and Bangla have been dealt with. Goswami has used the notion of chronotope—literally meaning time-space—to speak about the formation of this new imagination of a national space named Bharat. The Bakhtinian notion of chronotope, earlier used by Bandyopadhyay (1994b) to mark the making of the colonial time-space of India, continues to be a fitting description of this complex process. For here, the space of the nation and the time of history constitute each other to re-orient prior imaginations of composite temporal and spatial axes. This heterotopicity of the nation has its own transcendental fixities. Rassundari’s Bharatbarsha inhabits a space below and beyond the dominant nationalist imaginings that Goswami deals with. It is also at a remove from the notion of India as a nation imagined dominantly in terms of a Hindu identity, a notion that was forged in poetry produced by the English educated literati in Bengal since the 1820s.6 Yet this Bharatbarsha bears traces of that “structure of feeling” which animates the tensions in the larger arena of conceptual drifts. Vettam Mani’s Puranic Encyclopedia (2006) gives one of the many meanings attributable to the word Bharata as Bharatbarsha to be in Jambudvipa, one of the seven continents Sexual Difference in a Different Religiosity    33 philoSOPHIA_7.1_02.indd   Page 33 11/04/17 9:30 AM that constitute the earth according to the puranic sources.7 The uniqueness of this “space,” as Mani points out, is that “[t]here was neither the passage of time nor the fear of ageing or death in any of these continents excepting Bharatvarsa” (123). We can now relate Rassundari’s vivid and intimate description of the changes in her body to the multiple reiterations of the fact of her being in Bharatbarsha. “I was born in the year 1216. Now it is 1304—and I am eighty-eight years old. I have appeared in this Bharatvarsha so long ago. I have lived in Bharatvarsha long enough, it is not yet decided whether I’ll live or stay on.” (Devi 1999, 102) “This land of Bharatvarsha, full of such precious gems—there are hundreds of mines full of priceless gems, . . . I have lived in this Bharatvarsha for eighty-eight years and what have I been doing? I am still at my variety store.” (Devi 1999, 106) Rassundari, writing in the same 1860s and 1870s that Goswami speaks of, iterates the imaginations of a mind-set that tangentially relates to the national space-time she bodily inhabits. Rosinka Chaudhuri (2014) has gone into the minutiae of the events through which the word Bharat “had . . . begun to be transformed into an emotive/ affective idiom in literature and song” (193) at least since the 1860s. The word “Bharat” thereby replaces the term “Banga.” The idea of India (Bharat, in Bengali) as the name of the nation begins to replace—though almost never fully—the national aspirations of the name Bengal. India here is the name of the generic nation “with fixed territorial definitions” (Chatterjee 1993, 110). Chatterjee has been here tracing the change in the historiographical sensibility with the coming of the colonial education. The earlier notion of puranetihasa (puranic history) —which Chatterjee (1993) discussed on the basis of the text Rajabali (1808) by Mrityunjay Vidyalankar—had its own account of chronological succession and geographical space. In that succession and in that space, the human and the divine moved smoothly one into the other, and causality remained marked indelibly by dharma, the religio-ethical law. 8 From Chatterjee’s discussion, the break in such a sensibility is evident with the inauguration of the nation-state in historical consciousness. In that modern transformed mode, the Hindu-ness of the sense of India leads to a perceived externalization of the Islam. An idea of a singular national history retrospectively created a single source of Indian tradition, namely, ancient Hindu civilization. Islam remained as “either the history of foreign conquest or a domesticated element of everyday popular life” (113). Chatterjee ends the discussion with certain possible alternatives to this dominant universal, which are now “submerged . . . by the tidal wave of historical memory about 34     philoSophia philoSOPHIA_7.1_02.indd  Page 34 11/04/17 9:30 AM Arya-Hindu-Bharatvarsa” (114). For the moment, he points at the necessity to mark the processes inherent in this forced universality. For Chaudhuri, the empirical moments of the formation of the ideas of the nation lay in “poetical rhetoric,” “in lines of poetry that came into exis- tence in Bengal in the English language in early nineteenth century and in Bengali verse in the late nineteenth” (180). Her study centers on the poem “Bharat Sangeet,” written in 1870 by Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay, celebrated in its time. In this poem, and in similar others coming from the same period, the historical and geographical markers (as Chaudhuri calls them) remain pan-Indian (190), and the name Bharat referred to something very different from its puranic antecedents. Yet, the names bore paleonymic traces of earlier uses. Gestures of a radical break from an earlier sensibility retained “symbolic accessories” (212) of earlier images. Chaudhuri points at a single line of Hemchandra’s poem that speaks of the need—through an almost secular militancy—to fight “monsters” that were different from those of the past (“e sab daitya nahe temon”). 9 Notwithstanding these remainders, the reminders of difference, the images served a completely different purpose. These worked to congeal the heterogeneous space-time of the nation, as it is lived, into the fixed ontopologies of the homogeneous empty time of the nation. In the Hinduized version of the imagination of the nation-state India, this called for a transcendence of the Hindu spirit over the innumerable moments of thoughts and practices irreducible to that spirit. In one particular instance of enunciation of such rigid ontopology, “neo-Hindu nationalist and poet” Sri Aurobindo writes in 1906, “What is our mother country? . . . It is a mighty Shakti, composed of the Shaktis of all the millions of units that make up the nation” (quoted in Chaudhuri 2014, 176–77). Aurobindo’s nation is transcendent over and assimilates the many units. Rassundari’s Bharat treads a different chronotope. The connection with the body—the intimate, phenomenal body of the woman—interrupts the disembodied soul of the nation. Herein is laid, it seems to me, a key element that marks a space-time different from yet marked inalienably by the space-time of the nation. Section IV: The Dvaita and the Monotheist: Displacements I try to mark this element in terms of what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2001) calls a dvaita mind-set. 10 To characterize what she means by the word “mind- set,” Spivak speaks of the ethnos treated as “structure of feeling” (culture—in the making) in the sense of a fluid and ever-changing formation. This is posited against what one may call a “system of belief.” According to Spivak, dominant versions of “Hinduism”—philosophico-theological, juridico-legal, monotheist, and monist—define themselves in terms of these fixed “systems of belief.” Polytheist imagination as a structure of feeling, in her understanding, Sexual Difference in a Different Religiosity    35 philoSOPHIA_7.1_02.indd   Page 35 11/04/17 9:30 AM negotiates with the “unanticipatable yet perennial ­p ossibility” of the “­metamorphosis of the transcendental as supernatural in the natural.” Thus for the dvaita mind-set, the future anteriority of every being is potentially unan- ticipatable, an avatar in the general sense. She carefully differentiates between the polytheist and the dvaita, the former defined in a poly/mono dichotomous structure of Judeo-Christian thinking whereas the latter is defined through a different dichotomy, that between the two (dvaita) and the (not one but) non-two (a-dvaita). For dvaita as two-ness, oneness is defined in terms of non-two (nondual, or a-dvaita), rather than as the singular. And polytheism is defined in terms of monotheism (other than mono). This difference between the dvaita and the polytheist is reflected in the parallel distinction between avatarana (coming down) and reincarnation (putting on flesh). Thus an avatar is a god (one of many) who comes down, not The God acquiring flesh. For Spivak, dvaita is an impossible invagination of the other (radical alterity) in the everyday. The figure of invagination denotes a condition of the part containing the whole where an internal pocket, bulging in from the surface, gets larger than the whole. As each being is potentially and unanticipatably an avatar, sheltering the invaginated radical other, so each little god acts as great god. The woman has the unforeseen possibility of being the “devi.” For the nationalist construction of the woman as debi to originate and to work, this dvaita habit of thinking is a presupposition and also an interruption. For the nationalist construction of the debi, the “present-being” of the debi is “indis- sociably” linked to “its situation, to the stable and presentable determination of a locality, the topos of territory, native soil, city, body in general” through the “axiomatics” of ontopology. 11 This construction takes off, presupposes, the dvaita figuration of the “devi” but is created through a definitive rupture in that dynamic. That rupture produces the fixity and full presence that binds the debi with the nation. The fluidity, tentativeness, and unanticipatability of the dvaita are lost here. Bharatbarsha is where Rassundari spent her time—the dvaita (not messianic) time of her god and her self, opposed to as well as constituted by the “empty homogeneous time” of the nation. The structure of this constitution is not yet fixed and rigid (as it becomes later in someone like Aurobindo). The dvaita mind-set is haunted by the unanticipatable as in the messianic. Yet the structures of space-time that constitute the messianic are different from those that inform the dvaita. To remember the dvaita mode as an element of a different space-time one can see here is not something with fixed definition over time. It is also contingently created in interactions with various other elements, one of which is the time-space of the nation. The specific articulation it gets in Rassundari is deeply marked by the bhakti mind-set she is working with. A mind-set wherein the bhakta, the subjugated one, gains immense agency by the sheer immensity of her submission—she does what she wants for all her wants 36     philoSophia philoSOPHIA_7.1_02.indd  Page 36 11/04/17 9:30 AM belong to the bhagaban she worships. Rassundari can transgress social norms for her god wants to make her do it. She cites many instances where this will of god is acted out to make her do what she is. The most telling occasion is when her husband unknowingly makes accessible to her the same book, Chaitanyabhagbat, that she has seen herself to read the night before in her dream. The taboo against reading that operates for the woman in Rassundari’s immediate social milieu is thus made vulnerable by the signal from her god through her husband. Her submission to her bhagaban enables her to begin reading anew. Chaitanyabhagbat (Brindabandas 1995) probably is the earliest biography of Sri Chaitanya, the medieval Bengali figure who made a major intervention in the religious and literary sensibility of Bangla through his recasting of bhakti sensibility in Bengal. Interestingly, at the beginning of this book, there is the aphorism about the god incarnate to be saying that his devotee’s worship is greater than his self : “Aamaar bhakter puja ama hoite boro.” To quote thus is not to take the assertion at its face value. The freedom that the bhakta attains, even only in perception, flows from her total submission to the lord: that she acts becomes the proof that the Lord wants her to act thus. Of course this does not imply that bhakti is a well-defined mode that is always enabling for the subjugated. There have been innumerable variations on the theme of bhakti in medieval Bengal, and many of them had been at least as patriarchal as the Brahminic dominant. Yet, there is a large body of literature that rightfully points at the liberatory potentials, not always actualized, of this mode. The dvaita mode allows the phenomenal body of the woman in her mundane domesticity to be in a relationship of coextension with her bhagaban, the lord. With respect to the nation, it allows the thinking of Bharatbarsha in its connection with the body of Rassundari, rendering bharat with an ephemerality which the nation that is India could never have. The continuities of the space (Bharatbarsha), the woman (Rassundari), and the universal (Radhamadhab) are articulated in manners that allow certain interruptions of the universal by the singularities of the phenomenal. These continuities resist the fixities and weight of the ontopology of the nation. Yet, in each new enunciation, they face the perennial risk of being secured into stable identities—attaching well- defined topologies to their ontologies. One may, while carefully avoiding the stabilities, focus on the resistance that still haunts the securities of the nation. Amar Jibon consists of two parts written separately. The first, consisting of sixteen compositions, was published in 1876. The author subsequently added fifteen more compositions, and the book in its present form was published posthumously in 1906. Each of the thirty-one pieces is prefaced by a verse composition. Some of the pieces have more verse compositions within the text. Yet, as I have been discussing before, the verses often serve the purpose of narrating facts or emotions, not differentiating their functions as poetry from Sexual Difference in a Different Religiosity    37 philoSOPHIA_7.1_02.indd   Page 37 11/04/17 9:30 AM prose. Rassundari encountered letters for the first time when her brothers read out their studies on their own, overhearing that which was not allowed her. Years of family chores followed, with marriage, children, and the daily toils in a society that proscribed education to women. The hidden desire for letters could surface only when the husband’s unknowing comment fortuitously matched the dream of reading. Page by single page of Chaitanyabhagbat was learned under the drooping veil of the saree in the kitchen. Amar Jiban is replete with the joy of this learning and the great humility born of a greater achievement. The bhakta’s achievement is the mark of the master’s power. Rassundari’s poems speak of these achievements in the language of praise for God. She can thus speak of madness, the disposition of the male poet, as a trait of her own. The propriety of the genteel housewife gets displaced into the error-ridden insanity of the bhakta poet: Ras’s mind, listen to me, been mad for what reasons, Does the mad know of any order. Satya Treta Dwapar Kali, in the four jugs you came and went, Still are not rid of the error. (Dasi 1995, 115) Yet, this gesture also points at a displacement from the other side. The tran- scendence of the family and the familiar world—that marks the male bhakti—is displaced into intimate ties with the immanent in the bhakti of the woman. The insensate madness of the man gets displaced into a madness linked closely to affective connections to the material world. Toward the end of the book, Rassundari enacts yet another shift in the text. At the age of twenty-two, she was the mother of two children; she had lost a golden besar, an ornament of the nose, while swimming in the pond adjacent to her house. The search, by many people in the household, proved futile. She gave birth to eight more sons and two daughters. The pond gradually dried up with earth. It became a small jungle. The jungle was cleared and the pond dug again. The clay was stored by the side of this new pond. With that clay, a wall was built around the pond. Gradually, the wall broke down again. One day, while standing on the bank of the pond, Rassundari saw before her eyes that very same besar, washed by raindrops and lying on that half-broken wall. The text is eloquent at this point. Eloquent with the emotions of the eighty- two-year-old Rassundari with the besar in her hands. This is not unexpected to the reader. The joy of the “woman” with the prodigal object returning to her folds is something not extraordinary. Yet there is a small twist to Rassundari’s emotions: “Holding the Besar in my hands, I as if knew I have got none other but you.” An inversion is operating here. The woman’s love of the object is here her love for the god. The object is the god. The god appears here as the thing. 38     philoSophia philoSOPHIA_7.1_02.indd  Page 38 11/04/17 9:30 AM The love of god appears in the interactions with things. The love of god does not transcend the world of objects. This love resides in the world of objects. The immanent world of objects bears within, invaginated in its exterior folds, the transcendence of a god. For Rassundari, the gold and the ornament are residents of the heterotopias of the nation and the puranic world at the same moment, the time the empty homogeneous time of the nation and something like the time of messianicity together. Derrida has read Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism as inalienably related to the structure of religion. 12 He was thus speaking of, in both religion and commodity fetishism, the two-step working of firstly, an abstraction from concrete relationships, and secondly, a hypostasis of that abstraction into a seemingly concrete entity. Rassundari’s love of god in and as the object is different from this analogical structure. The double invagination of the imma- nent and the transcendent is different from the process of reification acting in the understanding of the relations between people as relations between things. The unanticipatability of the dvaita works at a remove from the fixity of the hypostatization active in the fetishization of commodities. A love and respect for the object is also a respect for the other, the object a bringing in of the alterity rather than a projection of the self. Rassundari has a rare sense of importance and respect for her own work. This respect is seasoned with a humility of the woman in the family, who, working within that familial fold, is not reducible to that fold. For her, that “fold” holds in its inner invaginations, the outside. At the end of the book, Rassundari declares, “I have written this book with my own hands. I practically am not a literate person. Do not neglect it, dear readers; do not look down upon it. There’s no need to write more” (Dasi 1995, 142). Rassundari enacts the insane bhakti of the male bhakta who renounces the family and the earthly ties. That enactment, coming from a woman, forces a displacement on the notion of lunacy and that of bhakti. Rassundari leads the perfectly normal life of the housewife while nurturing the craving for the words and the god. Woman is excluded from the mad world of bhakti even when she participates in the structure. The struggles of the “woman” to gain access to the madness may, in certain contexts, be a feminist gesture even in this theo- retical frame of sexual difference. Not unproblematically, not universally, but in contingent ways. The woman may aspire to the empty homogeneous time. Yet, traces of women’s time persist in the endeavor. Rassundari places, enunciates herself in the location of a named space called Bharatbarsha. A component of the heterogeneous imagined time-space of the modern nation, bearing traces of a beyond in a form that is analogous to yet not Messianic, her Bharatbarsha is the stage of her dvaita god. Her god is the adhikari, the manager-owner- director of this jatra called Rassundari’s life. Yet that life inhabits as much the space of the nation-to-be and the time of the master of the secular wor(l)d. Sexual Difference in a Different Religiosity    39 philoSOPHIA_7.1_02.indd   Page 39 11/04/17 9:30 AM Jitaksharaa (literally, syllable-winner, the woman who has won the akshara, that is, the letters) is a word coined by Rassundari in writing her life. 13 Rassundari straddles two worlds. One is the secular feminist world of attaining literacy and of the first full-scale autobiography in the printed space of her vernacular. The other is that of her personal god whom she addresses in her writing and of the puranic space of transitory Bharatbarsha. This second world has certain analogies with, but is distinctively different from, both high Hindu belief-systems and the messianic time-space of a Judeo-Christian mind-set. The two worlds of Rassundari are irreducible to each other. Yet they constitute each other inalienably. The consequence is not a hybrid where the colonized mimic the colonizer. The two worlds, distinct from each other, interpenetrate. Like mutual invaginations. The uniqueness of that event of Rassundari’s writing Amar Jiban is perhaps symptomatic of a generality. The attainment of literacy does not lead her totally into the world of Anderson’s utopia. She is only half-heartedly a participant of the anonymous readership of nation’s homogeneous time. Her Bharatbarsha remains too much embedded in the changes of her body. Her letters are too much avataranas of the will of her personal god Dayamadhab. Yet it remains undeniable that letters and the public space of vernacular publication skew her dvaita enunciations in ways not anticipated in those utterances. * Acknowledgments Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, Gautam Bhadra, Rosinka Chaudhuri, Rajarshi Dasgupta, Hans Harder, Bodhisattva Kar, Sourav Kargupta, Samita Sen, Ritu Sen Chaudhuri. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the International Conference on “Nationalist Ideology and the Historiography of Literature in South Asia” at Halle University in September 2006. I thank all the participants of that conference. Special thanks to the philoSOPHIA editors and the two anonymous reviewers for their critical comments and encouragement. —Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta Notes 1. That these two “tasks” are not antithetical to each other is well borne out by Williamson (1984) where she advocates a focus on the ideological study of “non-traditional” writings (like “sentimental novels”) by women accompanied by a restructuring of the whole notion of literary canon to widen its scope “to 40     philoSophia philoSOPHIA_7.1_02.indd  Page 40 11/04/17 9:30 AM include business letters, film, slave narratives, graffiti, treatises on the economy, psychoanalytic cases, or radical popular poetry” (147). A new organization of texts is thus called for. My contention is a bit different from Williamson’s in that I focus on a further rethinking of the notion of ideology to avoid a too easy celebration of texts that are denigrated by the canon. The ideology of the dominant is often more nuanced than what it seems to be. 2. Das and Sen Chaudhuri (2007), and Ritu Sen Chaudhuri’s Ph.D. dissertation (2010) Interrogating the Nature of Construction: Bengali Woman in Retrospect provide summaries, from the viewpoint I endorse, of the literature on the Indian nation and the figuring of women in the context of a specific structure of thought. 3. The two translations available of the text “Des Espaces Autres” (published in French in Architecture-Mouvement-Continuité in October 1984, from a lecture given in March 1967) differ to some extent in the modes of expression. The most impor- tant terminological difference is in the renderings of the three forms of space as emplacement, extension, and site in Miskowiec (1986) and consecutively as localization, extension, and emplacement in Hurley (1998). I have mostly used the former while occasionally switching over to the latter translation, indicating that in parentheses. 4. Foucault goes on to discuss the six principles of “heterotopology,” the principles of organization of heterotopias. I do not deal with the details of that discussion. 5. Though Sarkar’s study of Amar Jiban is quite exemplary in its scope eye for minute details, I feel compelled to modify her translation somewhat. In all the quotes hereafter, I refer to the pages from her book but liberally modify her translation. The translation by Enakshi Chatterjee (Devi 1999) is more ­e xhaustive—it retains all of the very important poems that precede each chapter of the book—and is yet in need of some modifications for my purpose. In her introduction, Chatterjee correctly points out the erroneous addition of the surname Devi to Rassundari in Sarkar’s translation. The custom at the time was not to use any surname for a woman. If anything, the appropriate surname (for Rassundari’s caste) would be Dasi, as the Bangla publication (1995) had earlier used. 6. Rosinka Chaudhuri (2004) has described in detail the role of Henri Louis Vivian Derozio (1809–1831) in the making of this sensibility. 7. The theme of the seven lands that constitute the earth and the special (inferior) status of Bharatbarsha among them is present, among others, in Mahabharata Vishmaparva. 8. For an analytic account of dharma in the context of Indian historiography, see Guha 1989 and Chatterjee 1993. 9. For a detailed and nuanced analysis of the moment, see Chaudhuri 2014 (211–12). 10. The word dvaita is used here in a sense looser than the strict philosophical meaning of the word. From the middle of the f irst millennium AD, the Vedantic school of thought was giving rise to at least five important streams of Sexual Difference in a Different Religiosity    41 philoSOPHIA_7.1_02.indd   Page 41 11/04/17 9:30 AM thinking: the Advaita (early protagonist being Sankara in the eighth century), Visistadvaita (Ramanuja in the eleventh to twelfth centuries), Dvaita (protagonist being Madhva in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries), Dvaitadvaita (Nimbarka in the twelfth century), and Shuddhadvaita (early protagonist being Ballava in the fifteenth century). The Vaishnava tradition of Bhakti—a subset of which was Achintyabhedabhed tatva (associated with Sri Chaitanya) that informed texts like Chaitanyacharitamrita (1963), which seems to have permeated Rassundari’s sensibility—did also follow a similar classification. In this classificatory scheme, which also included other streams like the Saivadvaita, Dvaita is one of the many schools of Vedantic philosophy. Spivak ’s use here refers not to this canonical formation but to a more diffuse structure of feeling that informed the everyday. 11. The quotes in the above sentence are from Derrida 1984 (82), where they refer to a more generalized scene. I use them here in the context of the figuration of the debi in nationalist thought in colonial India. 12. See Derrida 1994. Das 2010 and Keenan 1997 have dealt with this reading in detail. 13. Professor Gautam Bhadra had been astute enough to point out that the word Jitakshara was not a coinage of Rassundari but had already been used in the (probably) sixteenth-century text Chaitanyacharitamrita. He had also spoken of the resonance of Chaitanyacharitamrita in the structuring and in the implicit theoretical references of Rassundari’s autobiography. I still want to retain Rassundari’s claim to the origin of the word for two reasons. 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