An Eye for an Eye

Revenge, perhaps swings on the logical fallacy of institutionally established statements such as "Two wrongs make a Right" and "Love thy neighbour as yourself". Nussbaum states of the dimensional aspects of revenge thus,""The primitive sense of the just—remarkably constant from several ancient cultures to modern institutions ...—starts from the notion that a human life ... is a vulnerable thing, a thing that can be invaded, wounded, violated by anther's act in many ways. For this penetration, the only remedy that seems appropriate is a counter invasion, equally deliberate, equally grave. And to right the balance truly, the retribution must be exactly, strictly proportional to the original encroachment. It differs from the original act only in the sequence of time and in the fact that it is response rather than original act—a fact frequently obscured if there is a long sequence of acts and counteracts"

The problematic of revenge explicates itself in Shakespeare's great tragedy: the meaning of Hamlet's hesitancy in seeking to obtain revenge for his father's murder- which has been called the sphinx of modern literature.Ulrici was the first critic to detect the internal conflict of Hamlet over the moral legitimacy of challenge. Von Berger saw the conflict arising from a noble mind against a baser world. Foss sets the conflict against a moral conscience. Kohler saw the conflict on ethical planes as  a precursor of Law; an observation refuted by Loening through historical  consideration. Schipper, gelber and Stoll read the conflict on intellectual lines. Figgs makes a summation by viewing the play as a tragedy of honour; Hamlet's delay being the consequence of a thoughtful mind. Typically Freudian, Ernest Jones,scrutinizes Hamlet with the traditional tools of psychoanalytic psychology and questions the discrepancy between Hamlet's intense sense of duty and his continual evasion of its execution through every possible excuse. Though it is probable that Hamlet was a victim of ethical objection to personal revenge and was unaware of the cause of his repugnance, Jones points out the improbability of the inability of a philosophical mind to indulge in introspection.

Jones's psychoanalytic stance opines that man practices self deception to repress his inner motives. Jones grounds his statement of a specific 'aboulia' in Hamlet upon Sir James Paget's observation that ,"Hamlet's advocates say he cannot do his duty, his detractors say he will not when the truth is that he cannot will." Jones seeks the hidden source of the conflict in his theory that the Oedipus complex is a universal, biological, normal, unavoidable inheritance of the human race. It is clear that an innate desire to kill one's father and possess one's mother runs contrary to the very fabric of our society. The difference between the innate urge and the demands of our civilization is mediated by repression and sublimation.
Jones accounts for Hamlet's source of internal conflict in the incestuous passion Hamlet had repressed under filial piety and educative influences. In reality, his uncle incorporates the deeper and repressed part of Hamlet's personality and caught between the twin crimes of incest and parricide, the sphinx of modern literature remains unsolved.

Creative Writing and Day dreaming

In his text, "Creative writers and Day-dreaming", Sigmund Freud explores the psychoanalytic interpretations of literature and attempts to trace the close structural and functional relationship between the processes of creative writing and day dreaming. The most rational method to study the processes of the mind is to trace the motives of activities akin to the human mental process. A clear perception of the actions of the self and those of others is by reaching the fact that similar actions involve similar motives, desires and beliefs. Freud describes the theoretical value of the dream as that of a "paradigm" as "the first member" of a class of phenomena including " hysterical phobias, obsessions and delusions."

With regard to its speculative nature, Freudian Criticism is broadly concerned with the quest, discovery and analysis of connections between the artist and his work of art. Undertaking a Freudian interpretation, it is possible to relate the mental process of the creative writer and the dream process of a daydreamer. The unconscious like the literary artifact?(poem, novel or play) makes indirect expressions of repressed emotions through images, symbols and metaphors.

The source of creative energy is too mysterious to be explained in direct, explicit and concrete terms. The only means of finding an explanation would be to trace the source of a similar pattern of activity. Since every unit of the human race has the capacity to indulge in imagination but only a few have the gift to express it, the process of discovering a common link would be to explore the collective imagination

The child at play is the elemental linkage to creative activity. The adult dreamer differs in the manifestation of his activity because he separates wish fulfilling dream from wish denying reality by repressing the conscious and relegating the unconscious. This reluctance is based on the active participation of the super ego of the adult dreamer.  Freud arrives at the hypothesis that every neurosis is the hidden fantasy of every healthy mind.

The creative writer according to Freud, is analogous to the day dreamer. Applying his dream model to the creative process, Freud arrives at the fact  that a work of art is the wish fulfillment of the artist. Freud applies the time schema to the creative process of the artist in order to reveal the analogy between creative writing and day dreaming. Just as a wish fulfilling day dream is born out of the dreamer's provocative present through linkages with an infantile past; the writer's work of art is the wish fulfillment born out of the writer's inspirational present through linkage with the infantile memory.

Thus any work of art reveals the influence of the present inspiring moment and the past infantile memory. Freud concludes that just as a day dreamer substitutes the play of childhood, the creative writer of art too is the surrogate for the child's play.The contrast between a daydreamer and a creative artist is seen in the latter's capacity to make his fantasy a source of pleasure and liberate deeper pleasure of the human psyche by formal and aesthetic techniques. Freud equates the creative writer and the daydreamer by implying that while creative writing imposes the pattern of desire, belief and action;day-dreaming follows the pattern of motive, wish and dream.

Whither is the Asylum?

 What is madness?Is madness a construct of society defined in the inability to seek the highest point of intelligence on a scientific scale? If Intelligence is perceived as a relative term, then what about the highest points of normality or for that matter abnormality? Different people transgress social norms but why is it that a mad man is necessarily the one enclosed within a mental institution? If abnormality is defined as transgression from socially accepted norms of normality, then what about revolutionaries, radical philosophers or to be more succinct the many attempts of artists to project a post-postmodern readings of the world. Is one who deviates from social norms mad or rebellious or simply disobedient?And  is it possible to understand abnormality and normality as exclusive concepts? Can reason be free of the presence of fancy?The human mind essentially visualizes and visualization involves a definite element of imagination.  Why is fear used both to discipline a child making its formal entry into society and to exercise the power of the medical gaze?What explains the relative limits within which the medical gaze may state the return to normality after the psychoanalytical couch?

Bureaucracy or Colonial legacy?

The bureaucracy as a system bears an uncanny resemblance to the colonial administrative structure. Hence it has not made a radical break with the past however the bureaucracy is being articulated into a democratic set up by the nation state.The democratic process demanded service to the masses but the bureaucracy paradoxically works through the Janus faced administration through a nation sate which has been largely modelled upon the colonial predecessor and other colonial structures. But the violence that followed freedom partition movements laid a necessity to make bureaucracy work through the colonial model since as a critic observes," Given the rising tide of communal violence, the government needed a system it could rely on-one that could enforce law and order". But perhaps as Shashi Tharoor Former UN diplomat, noted ,'Bureaucracy is [...] simultaneously the most crippling of Indian diseases and the highest of Indian art-forms'. Continuity was the watchword and the civil service continued in the tradition of the colonial governance. Perhaps among the many factors that ail the system one cannot dismiss the unbroken continuity between colonial structures of the past and their shadows upon the political/bureaucratic structures of the nation-state.

Sexuality and Power

The strategies of social control that seek to control aspects of female sexuality and gender identity through a notion of normality are strategies that are produced and identifiable within the transformative narrative of an independent nation-state. However, these normalizing discourses and disciplinary strategies are challenged by women who internalize, reproduce, and challenge these strategies of social control.. The discourse of sexuality fashions individuals into genders and creates divisions to enforce order. Any sort of a resistance or transgression is contained by fashioning the transgressors through an act of normalization. The complexity of the power-relations of the discourse of sexuality lies in the way power establishes itself in terms of the subversion, which it produces. The narrative of sexuality affirms itself as a political act when it reinforces the power of the periphery to subvert the power of the center. Repression is not monolithic, and that sexual norms and public life are closely interrelated. The shame that keeps women under a male system of control results in creating the tension between power and subversion. The code of Shame, which the patriarchal discourse produces as the code of normalization, controls the transgressive code of Shamelessness. However it is not the power of patriarchy by itself that successfully controls ‘Shameless’ women, but rather it is the discourse of female sexuality which by virtue of its submission to honor as the code of normalization that permits the existence of the power of patriarchy. Moreover power of patriarchy can exist only in relation to subversion because the Shame a woman feels pertains not only to her sense of honor but also to the family honor which in turn includes the honor and thereby the Shame of the male members.The nation-state can produce hegemonic narratives of sexuality and reinforce normalizing and regulating codes of sexuality through state sponsored sex education materials. The complexity of the power-relations of the discourse of sexuality lies in the way power establishes itself in terms of the subversion, which it produces.

Playing With History and Fiction

The interpretative imagination is ignored by the traditional historicists. The interpretative imagination cannot be free from the capacity to ‘construct’ or ‘make’ history. The literary text and the historical text are products of the interpretative imagination. Words are vested with meaning to decipher worlds. But meaning is arbitrary. In attempting to interpret the past, the historian lives within it (the past) and outside it. But in both positions, communication between the past and the historian remains mobilized. However, the coherence present in the historian’s discourse does not equal or reflect the coherence of the past. Language in the historian’s discourse ‘gives’ coherence to the past and in no way mirrors that coherence.But the arbitrary nature of language makes it difficult to mirror the past. It is through language that the imagination‘re’- constructs the past. The real of the past cannot be reduced to a single monolith. So historical writing does not or cannot refer to the actual reality of the past because history mediates through language. Language plays a major role in the articulation of social practices. Society is a product of ideology and situated in culture which is akin to the literary text in its endless play of signs and difference in meaning.

History is a linguistic construct couched and reconstructed within the socio-cultural codes. Similarly a literary text is a cultural and social product whose efforts to see the past are conditioned by linguistic limits. History in the postmodern world is problematized and its truth and objectivity are called into question. The arbitrary relationship between words and worlds and the inevitability of cultural relativism problematize the capacity of history to mirror reality. Further, history becomes mere distortion when it employs metaphors to describe events since metaphors describe the relative quality of an event.

Literature as a text is only one variant among other social practices involved in the production of meaning. The cultural nature of language makes it impossible for meaning to be contained within the structures of the text. Literature is an active agent in the construction of a culture’s reality as well as in the participation of its historical processes. Literature is in itself an ideological product of the culture and shaped by it. Literature constructs a culture’s reality by using a language that reflects the moral, political and social concerns of that culture. Meaning is conferred upon a historical ‘event’ by the linguistic energy enforced by the author. The possibility/availability of multiple interpretations to a single historical event attests to the arbitrary nature of language.
Metaphorical description of events in the literary text as in the history text is induced by personal prejudices as well as the socio-cultural and political ideology of the present. The “truth” of the past can be proved in history only by relying upon linguistic evidences of the present. Metaphorical descriptions allow the either/or premise upon which the history and the literary texts pursue the truth.

The language of the people of the partition sounds different in our context. We, at the present moment experience communal riots which are only a consequence of the partition. The partition of the past could be called the cause of a communal riot of the present but the reverse does not hold. A communal riot today can help illuminate the impact of the partition. Hence the partition cannot be lived; it can only be reconstructed through a vocabulary that exerts pressure on the interpretative imagination, a vocabulary that is alien to the present since the past is a foreign country and a country of the mind.    

From Illusions to Impressions: The Urban-Rural Schism

The schism existing between the rural and the urban is chiefly ideology. Ideology is employed here not in the sense of contrived distortions foisted upon an innocent rural populace by a corrupt and cynical urban group. On the contrary, the ideology the city perpetuates through the medium of the films is consciously assimilated by the rural psyche in its search for the materialization of economic and social aspirations.The city as space for living is only a carrier of ideology and not its creator. The ideological schism of the urban-rural division speaks itself out in the mode the city urbanizes the rural psyche through the import of Indian cinema. The Cinema is an opiate of the rural people which the city uses to make the rural relegate the oppressive social order.The cinema is one among other “ideological state apparatuses” which endeavor to circulate and mobilize the urban-rural encounter. The cinema serves to represent and reproduce dominant myths and beliefs to induce the psyche to inculcate consent. This mobilization of consent is a major reason that accounts for the circular movement from the rural to the urban and back to the rural. The Indian cinema becomes the effective pulse of imagination for the poorest Indian men and women.The rural individual faces subjectivity when his/her psyche is convinced of the pervasive ideology of the urban. In the gap formed by the rural-urban division, one can locate the unconscious psyche of the rural masses subject to impression formation.

The rural psyche mobilizes itself into the city in the faith of economic betterment as they witness it materializing on the silver screen. With the discovery of their concretized dreams and desires in the film, the rural psyche translates the clean image of the hero of the tinsel world unto its entry into the political sphere. But when the hero is identified as part of the establishment the adulation in the rural psyche temporarily fades until the return of the hero as the crusader of evil on the silver screen. So it is a subjectivity that the rural psyche is conscious of because the impression formation of the actor as hero does not alter. It is only when the hero is cast against the established institution that the psyche loses its thrill of the city. So subjectivity is consciously lived by the rural psyche in its awareness of the ideology created by the state apparatuses. Moreover, with the entry of the hero from the tinsel into the political, the rural masses meet with the conflict of illusion and reality with their first impressions dominating their perception. But when the rural psyche experiences an inner conflict with the urban it foregrounds the creators of ideology in the city. Therefore urbanized ideology does not shape rural constituents into a forced subjectivity.

Urumi: Review

 

A lot of hype is made of the movie urumi. Any work of art till seen cannot be analyzed/criticized in the true sense.

But still I wonder what made the artists behind it work on it. Nehru in his" Discovery of India" says " A foreign conquest with all its evils, has one advantage. It widens the mental horizon of the people and compels men to look out of their shells. They realize the world is much bigger and a more variegated place than they had imagined". One of the latest biographers on Vasco da gama states that The Portuguese explorer has been sucked into treacherous controversy even after 500 years. Now, recalling Salman Rushdie's provocative Portuguese portrayal in "The moor's last sigh", is Urumi too a form of resistance of  a colonial burden? Are we resisting still by portraying what we believe disturbed the sub continent/sub condiment. And is it because reality was otherwise, that the sense of revenge so pervades the script? Are the makers driven only by their quest of artistic vision or are they just the archetypes of the colonized burden of a memory? Perhaps the smell of pepper corns was less tantalizing than the need to resist and Vasco who sought the pepper still is a power to resist through fantasy if not in the real. A urumi as the masters say is a lethal weapon taught last to the martial artist because it is equally dangerous to the wielder.

The Margins of the Mainstream

Gandhiji encouraged the active participation of women in the nationalist campaign but conferred on them the image of traditional womanhood. The ideological framework draws a parallel structure in the Defence forces where women are encouraged into the central systems of the nation-state but are assigned a peripheral role in the mainstream activity. The woman has a virtual, marginalized centre under the protective guidance of the patriarchy. Inequality generates itself through socio-political attitudes and cultural institutions. In the nationalist discourse, the attribution of motherhood to the nation serves to construct the reproductive role of woman. Employment opportunities in the defence sector in India are a clear indicator of the sexual discrimination between men and women. The depiction of women in the armed forces of the nation is a reflection of the position women hold in Indian Society. The military system of the nation-state is an authentic platform to articulate the Indian woman’s identity. Discrimination of women in the forces is functionally defined by socio-cultural attitudes. In the exclusion of women from specific spheres such as combat unlike the American counterparts, the male construct evades being challenged. In contemporary politics too, the presence of few women MPs helps the male to marginalize women.

The Indian Defence Review article “Women in the Armed Forces: misconceptions and facts”(Vol 25.1 Jan-Mar 2010) states that the induction of women can be “disastrous” to the nation. The article further contains a reference to the idea that granting SSC to women has “achieved nothing except increase the load on maternity wards of military hospitals.” This implication of the reproductive role has denied access to an unbiased realization of women’s potential and prowess. Women are not allowed to transgress this male ideological construct. The dismissal of a woman officer after her charges of sexual harassment by male superior officers and the suicide of another female officer is an instance of how resistance is contained within the ideology of power. The question remains if it is the army that is still to cope with women as officers or the male ideological constructs. Amidst a lot of activists’ protests a male official withdrew his statement of not ‘needing’ female officers for the system. The construction of a woman’s identity is essentially a male construct and thereby a cultural construct.

Are reservation bills, preferential verdict all couched reassurances of a culturally instituted ideology that also practices combat exclusions? Perhaps the couched ideology gains visibility in the Indian navy tradition where women experience the virtual ‘centre’ as warships are named in feminine names. Further it is a woman who by tradition inaugurates the naming and commissioning of an Indian warship. Every woman who embarks an Indian naval warship is saluted but no woman is allowed on board a warship except on occasions like Families’ Day when identity as the spouse of a male officer permits her presence.

The nationalist concept of motherland as opposed to the fatherland of Europe has only served to construct the reproductive role of woman. Woman’s intellectual freedom and potential still remains chained to the male dominated discourse. Education is fundamentally perceived as an entry into advanced sectors of social and political life. But the educated woman still carries the ideological burden of the woman of the past. A woman‘s world is still determined by a patriarchal authoritative society. Even within the nationalist discourse, the woman holds a peripheral identity. Do women who defy male constructs and enter certain spheres pose a threat to man?

Will the male gaze continue to prevail on less rewarding insights even if women are intellectually stimulating equals. Nehru’s observation, “You can tell the condition of a nation by looking at the status of its women” reminds us further that the defence system as a mirror image and microcosm of the nation-state needs to examine the ideological framework that decides preferential treatment. Are women denied autonomous access and equal opportunities because they are born unequal or culturally constructed unequal?

Education, Ethics and the Private Player

Recently there was a huge uproar that a political voice had forgotten postcolonial sense by inviting foreign private universities and by purging many an Indian private university. But are we not already enslaved by our native masters to be anxious about the return of colonial legacies? Commercialization has already monopolized the field of education in India. The entry of private players created a playground out of what was once a respected arena of the society and the nation-state. The advent of private universities (deemed and deemed to be) has ensured the exit of academic ethics and the blooming of a new ‘business’, education as business. Apart from the market stakes of education as business are the ethics and integrity of intellectuals in universities reduced to objects of mere market value? In spite of commercialization offering greener pastures as a strategy of economy, it has also converted a respected area into a market place.

 Teaching faculty have become marginalized, docile bodies and ethically silenced in the race for recognition, for upgradation and approval. We have regulatory bodies to govern the recognition, upgradation of stars, and approval of courses. However do we have an established regulatory body that makes private players accountable to ethical issues of faculty and students? If education is eroded in terms of ethics and values then it shall ultimately affect the quality of the citizens. Have intellectuals become pawns in the hands of a powerful few? The power could rest in vested interests; it could rest in ex-politicians who still can access systems of the nation-state from the coveted margins or the sideburns. Has academic freedom become the victim of a private system of funding and authority? Have private players reduced teaching, research and academia into objects of market value?

A revered, socially upheld value ridden institution of education that ensures future citizenship of the state has become a business organization run more by management methods than by intellectual, educational visions. If higher education run by private players is cross examined, are management techniques being applied to malign the ethical moral fiber of a dignified profession? Is the power source of private players locatable within themselves or within the malfunctioning of institutionalized systems? At most times the top position is held by someone whose genealogy is traceable to the political arena. How far are private players transparent in their intake, treatment and systematized procedures of teaching faculty? How many list doctorates for recognition and upgradation but houses its faculty in impoverished working areas and residential quarters? In the unrestricted intake, it is academic standards that are compromised in numbered appointments to match student teacher ratio. Do the infrastructure of private players upgrade the living conditions of faculty along with the upgradation to many a stars by various coveted committees? Are faculty valued beyond the returns of their market value? Are academicians of merit retained for merit or for recognition? Do private players work within ethical murkiness? If  for instance the scales weigh merit and the requirements for an inspection, do we have a system to see that merit does not get opaque under the application of management techniques?

Even if dynamic private players envision that the economic growth of the nation-state is sustained, the question remains if it is economic profit that is shared by a privileged few. Have private players, faculty and students become functionally owners, producer/laborers and consumers? The application of a market culture will deplete ethical accountability which is a significant element in higher education. The call of the hour is not panic attacks at the entry of foreign private players, but the native sons of the soil need to rethink the dangers that lurk in juxtaposing business and education as two sides of the same coin. The voices of intellectuals down the ages have been honored and constitute a major check upon the ethical framework of the nation-state. So if the power resources of knowledge are being allowed to perish as objects of market value in a playground of business players then what ails the ethical responsibility of the Indian Nation state that is still young and hungry for advancement?