1

Technologies of Revolution and the Inaccomodable Feminine in Colonial and Postcolonial Bengal
Samrat Sengupta, Assistant Professor of English, Kharagpur College

journal of humanities and social sciences, Number 8, July 2011

Technologies1 of Revolution and the Inaccomodable Feminine in Colonial and Postcolonial Bengal

In Tagores novel Char Adhyay (Four Chapters) Ela, the educated and emancipated protagonist, the archetype of new woman in colonial Bengal felt oppressed and agitated by her mothers blind following of rituals and rules, those meant to be observed by a chaste Hindu women. She asks her father, who has a foreign degree in Psychology why so many rituals are meant for women which doesnt have connection with the heart and are to be mechanically followed. In answer to this her fathers reply was:

Womens mind is handcuffed for thousand years; they will obey and not ask questions,--this has fetched them rewards from society-lord, therefore more blind the obedience more valued it is2

Ironically, if we concentrate on the novel we can realize that Ela was set in motion by the same structure of patriarchy which she attempted to question. May be the freedom to ask question is already moulded by the technologies of the self. Ela the new woman of modernity joins a group of freedom fighters and is used by the leader Indranath, the British educated new man, the fireband nationalist to keep the revolutionaries united by virtue of Elas charm and beauty. It is interesting to note how he manages the group of revolutionary men and women by controlling over their sexuality by dictating marriage to women if they were in love and the situation was going out of hand and asking men whom he thought unfit for the serious task of revolution to get married. It is even more interesting to note how the same technique articulates Elas own self-management abstinence from love and personal relationship. She repeatedly resists Atins every attempt to unite with her. Her revolutionary self is moulded by the

journal of humanities and social sciences, Number 8, July 2011

3 patriarchal ideology of sacrifice and idealism. She desperately wants to come out of her feminine self and wants to follow the greatness of men. But through this absolute negation of femininity patriarchy gets reinstated the patriarchy which has imagined femininity as a mode of negation an absence of positive virtue and nature without culture. So the charm of femininity is used to hold the revolutionaries together, yet it is negated by its denial of final fulfilment. It is used as a presence the negation of which can never be completed unless it is properly staged and relegated to absence. Ideology is not simply a false consciousness it is not merely rituals like those which Elas mother wanted her to follow. It has to be internalized with which the self engages into a dialogue. It is like culture becoming nature the reverse movement which however justifies itself to be otherwise. When a teenage boy Akhil wanted a leave from his teacher Ela to build up cage for his rabbits and Ela pointed out there are no rabbits left, Atin remarks: It is enough to imagine rabbits, the main thing is to build up a cage. Man is temporal, comes and goes but from lord Manu to the latest avatar of Manu all have taken up the charge of making their cage. They are really fond of this.3 Reference to Manu, the ancient Indian law-maker is obvious he was the pioneer in creating the code of conduct for women who must always be under control, under the guidance of men father at childhood, husband at youth and son at old age. But the more important question is - what is a cage is it nature or culture? The point is it is the natural fondness of man to create cages and also to imagine pets within the possibility of pets within that is what creates the cage the natural possibility of cage that is the cage for human species that is culture which is nature and which also becomes nature a vicious cycle of movements.

(II)

journal of humanities and social sciences, Number 8, July 2011

4 However it is undeniable that Ela, who possibly passed the-then standard age of marriage posed a threat to the organization. She is the object of desire which has the potential for both uniting and disuniting men. In another novel Chaturanga by Tagore the idealism of Sachish gets unsettled twice by the presence of a woman first by Nanibala who was carrying the illegitimate child of his elder brother and refused marriage by him, then by Damini the widow at Lilananda Swamis group. Lost in the idealism of a staunch materialist and utilitarian Jyathamoshai first and in the trance of spiritual devotion of a Guru Sachish was twice brought back to consciousness by these women. Desire, child birth, cravings of the body could not be avoided they come back like ghosts to haunt and unsettle any idealism born at the cost of the creation of its material other where that materiality is denied. The mind-matter binary is often inscribed over the gender binary. From Socrates and Plato till Kant, from Vedas and Manu till Bankimchandra subjectivity is always by definition male mostly women are seen as baby-making apparatus machines of reproduction. Here there is a forgetting of the technologies involved in the formation of gendered subjective which as a result is thought to be rooted in the material reality of sexual difference. The production of biological sexual identity can be related to Foucauldian notion of bio-power which relegates sexuality to the realm of the private which however is incessantly shaped by governmental policies. Womens sexuality then becomes regulated by reproductive ideals of care, motherhood and domesticity defined and confined within a heteronormative family. Outside the structure of family it is thought to be a potential threat in public sphere as we see in case of Ela. One way of negotiating with this anxiety it to reproduce structures of domesticity within public life where like Ela women are normalized to take up caring and nursing job denying her sexuality (which is produced as a category by bio-power whose aim is to preserve the healthy life of people and perpetuate it across generation) even in

journal of humanities and social sciences, Number 8, July 2011

5 their revolutionary activist way of life. Entire drama is then played around the production of biological sexual identity in terms of gender difference. But can we think of sexual difference beyond gender beyond its ideological determinants? The answer is both yes and no. It might not be so simple as to think sex being embodied by ideology of gender but also gender being set in motion by sex sexual difference the difference ideologically determined but having the capacity for going beyond by its power and spirit of negation. Elizabeth Grosz in an interesting essay talks about Irigarays idea that real sexual difference has never taken place:

This is because, as Irigaray has argued, the differences between the sexes have never taken place. Here she is not claiming unique experiences that one sex has which the other does not: rather, she is arguing that there has never been a space in culture for women as women. Women have only ever been represented as a lack, the opposite, the same as, or the complement of the one subject, the unique human subject.4 For Grosz no easy deconstructive reading of women as an absence can be adequate. It would rather be interesting to observe how the denial of subjectivity to women has produced them as subjects. How the ideological negations can possibly go beyond itself should be our object of study. So it wont be enough to read the patriarchal ideological determinations affecting the revolutionary women it would also be important to see how those determinations are overcome by materiality of the moments of those determinations. It also wont be enough to read women in revolution as outside the male-centric discourse it would only be important to understand how the (dis)embodied female subject [(dis)embodied as the female self is ascribed the status of a body in the mind-body binary and so can be thought of as a body without subjectivity but at the same time this very idea of a body without subjectivity is an ideology which is embodied in the self which gives the female subject her sense of self-hood.] could not be contained within the

journal of humanities and social sciences, Number 8, July 2011

6 schema of that discourse which places her in terms of negation (that means womens role are not meant for activism but for service to men). The position of women with respect to movement politics, nationalism and in a larger way any form of idealism can be chiefly of two distinguishable types. Firstly, they must play the role of ideal mothers and wives at home and provide support to men in the domain of private sphere so that the latter can participate in political life, activism and various idealist as well as intellectual practices. Secondly, they might pose a threat to idealism and must be kept outside the sphere of idealism for their essential weakness of character and capacity to entice and misdirect men from achieving their higher goals. When women actively participate in political activities then that is often perceived as an extension of the first position mentioned above. It is as if not enough to provide support at home but to come out in the sphere of the public in periods of dire necessity. Tanika Sarkar in an interesting essay 5 shows how during nationalist revolutionary movements like those organized by Gandhi the women were expected to practice celibacy and abstinence from sexual activities even within marriage. This was thought necessary to increase the moral courage to face the world of men fortified by their impregnable chastity. The other side of this we have seen in Char Adhyay (Four Chapters) where the charm and beauty of Ela was used to keep together young men in a militant nationalist organization though no possibility of a relationship or conjugality was entertained. We already see how in the lines of Foucaults thought sexuality (particularly that of women as they are more associated with bodily acts and physicality because of child-bearing and breast-feeding) started getting narrativized, defined, determined and therefore controlled since 19th century which became essential for the formation of a sovereign democracy that would foreground and assume commonness amongst people on the basis of which the state would negotiate with its people. Tanika Sarkar points out

journal of humanities and social sciences, Number 8, July 2011

7 how in India the question of womens liberation is related to various anti-colonial movements which restrained but at the same time provided space for their participation in public sphere thereby opening up possibilities for arguing their interests. 6 Therefore femininity has always been under formation which negotiates itself with the discourse of idealism and activism predominantly patriarchal in nature. In the rigour of defining the femininity or womanhood as such there is the inaccomodable feminine which goes beyond the established structures of thinking though related to them. It is not a fixed essence but an excess constantly shifting its horizons and changing shape. It exists in the in-between and overlapping space of tradition and modernity, subjugation and revolution, not to be understood as binary opposites but as factors separate yet constantly shaping and transforming each other. Not only that the above mentioned binaries can be shown as co-constituted but often the boundaries between the two becomes porous, each may be justified as well as undercut by the logic of the other. The association of femininity with body and masculinity with mind though is a production of patriarchal discourse, the potential of the feminine-bodily self is often pushed to the margins negated and discarded in the celebratory euphoria of revolution, activism and sacrifice or appropriated by the same discourse (as celebrating the tolerance and sacrifice of women in satyagraha for example). The logic of the domesticity, care, softness, tolerance, passivity, fluidity and other characteristics associated with the feminine reproduces itself in new forms even when constantly appropriated by the order of patriarchal logic.

(III) The problem of a traditional orthodox Marxist position is that it thinks of the materiality involved in social change and revolution in absolute idealist terms thereby transforming the

journal of humanities and social sciences, Number 8, July 2011

8 materiality itself into an idea. Reading revolution this way would lead us towards the Hegelian trap of thinking movement and social change as a fulfilment of a higher idea. But the precise question then would be if revolutionary logic is already predetermined by the idea of the perfection of an idea then how it can be perceived as an unexpected break in human history. Althusser in an excellent theoretical turn has tried to read Marxian materialist dialectics in terms of contradictions in the material base which determines as well as gets determined by the ideological, superstructural realm which it governs. This Althusser calls overdetermination.7 So the material practices cannot simply be reduced to an idea anymore. They are heterogeneous, contradictory, but at the same time effected by a governing idea with which they are into a dialectical relationship. To address the woman question vis-a-vis revolution therefore it is important to consider how the logic of revolution gets already determined by the existing patriarchal ideology i.e., though the revolutionaries attempt to learn how to transform the society out of the material practices their reading of such materiality is already determined by a certain hegemonic structure which is a part of the same formation they seek to overturn. It is also important at the same time to show how the heterogeneity of material practices has the potential to transform the realm of ideology in the very process of its practicability to those practices. Just as the revolutionary rhetoric of idealism is operated by a certain materiality which mediates as well as is mediated by a certain ideological framework to which however it cannot totally be reduced, the women associated with body and reproduction where a certain materiality is operative is charged by certain ideas thrust upon by the patriarchal modes of power to which however it never gets reduced fully. Rather that materiality has a transformative role for that ideological framework that is unexpected and undecidable. The ideology governing the material practices of birth control, monogamy, small family required for the bourgeois capitalist society

journal of humanities and social sciences, Number 8, July 2011

9 to flourish penetrates and mediates Marxist practices as well. Even if women were to come out of their domesticity and participate in revolution that was supposed to happen either by negating their body or putting it to particular use (as we see the use of Elas charm to keep men together in the organization). But ironically in both the cases the womans body is operated by the patriarchal ideology that overdetermines it whether in denial (as women supposedly dont have control over their bodies) or in use (where her body is used by the male leaders in ways which confirms the conceptualization of womans body under patriarchy i.e., by using her charm or her feminine care). This ideology of control, use or denial of womans body or body as such (as femininity or even female selfhood is characterized more by the body as masculinity or maleness is characterized by the mind which can control, use, deny or negate the body) effects the radical Marxist movement of Naxalbari which attempted to overturn the existing social structure by initiating a proletariat revolution in the 60s and 70s. Srila Roy comments in an article:

in the political upheaval that characterised the 1960s world, and certainly predating it, ordinary women, too, left the sphere of the everyday, going underground to lead fugitive lives, participating in the highly male culture of the New Left. They led exalted lives of courage and adventure while still performing the everyday labour of care and feminised domesticity. The banal vulnerabilities of daily life continued to constitute the unseen, often unspoken, backgrounds of such a heroic life.8 Here there is a double move. On one hand often engaging into the political struggle was owing to the desire from freedom out of a social structure that not only marginalizes the peasants and laborers but also hegemonizes the women within a patriarchal household and on the other hand the movement through which this revolution is to be brought was operated by the same structure which they were trying to dismantle. The question of gendered discrimination and oppression through either coercion or consent is structurally related to the class oppression. The ideology of domination and hierarchy is self-legitimized in both these systems which can be thought of as a journal of humanities and social sciences, Number 8, July 2011

10 part of the same structure. The consideration of one without the other creates the possibility of the sustenance and perpetuation of this structure, the knowledge of which however remains inaccessible to the revolutionaries attempting to overturn the structure. However it certainly does not mean it cannot bring any change in the structure. There is a double-bind the same movement which acts upon the structure is also acted upon by it. For example, Supriya Sanyal in her autobiographical write up on her experiences as a Naxalite activist narrates how from the childhood she experienced discrimination in her family being a woman which actually probed her to think of doing something out of the way: The amount of beating I used to get from my mother was because of my unwomanly movements and activitiesMother scolded me and exclaimed-when she goes to her husband she will be humiliated to no ends. Then I was only 9/10 years old. When I grew up more in case my mother used to fell ill I had to cook for the family of seven. Out of hesitation I couldnt do it properly for long though I tried my level best. Then I used to mutter in my mind that everyone can do this sort of work. I will do something different so that my mother will not feel frustrated with me anymore.9 Then we see how this desire for doing something different takes her to get engaged to the task of helping the poor people which eventually probed her to join the naxalite movement directed towards the turning of power structure and empowering the proletariat. However the same patriarchal presupposition about women followed even in the movement which continued to see women in similar hierarchical, rigid, predefined logic. Tasks of helpmate or duties of household management or using their feminine charm to extract information were roles assigned to women. More often than not they were looked upon as wives or lovers of men in the party. Moreover following the Marxist trajectory of staying in a proletariat household to learn from the classless class the revolutionary women often realized the same structure of patriarchy domination of men, male-gaze, objectification and oppression of women by men from whom they are supposed to learn. Like a total unconcern for the womens subjugated position there was an indifference journal of humanities and social sciences, Number 8, July 2011

11 towards the bodily self in the revolutionary euphoria of idealism and sacrifice. When Supriya Sanyal in her narrative explains how she was assigned the task of nursing a man suffering from bullet wounds who would spend his day participating in the labour process and not taking care of his ailing body the very act of nursing seemed to be a futile task just as the dream for complete overturning of power structure within a patriarchal hegemonic set up is. 10 The problem is whatever positive is attempted to be posited it is always already charged with an unrealized negativity. To speak against the structure is not to go outside it. It is important to understand therefore the structure within the outside and an outside within the structure. The denials of bodily needs were to be controlled and sacrificed even within the chores of personal relationships which became complicated. Krishna Bandyopadhyay in her autobiographical narrative discussing her life as a revolutionary states how her lover who was an activist denied physical intimacy to her. Her lover Dron instead at the moment of arousal and excitement in order not to give in to individual desireto prioritise the revolution urged her to read together Chiner Krishaker Sreni Bishleshon (Class Analysis of the Chinese Peasantry).11 The question that harps on her mind is Does one really have to stifle ones natural sexual desires in order to effect a revolution? The answer can be sought in Foucault when he writes in History of Sexuality: An Introduction:

Something that smacks of revolt, of promised freedom, of the coming age of a different law, slips easily into this discourse on sexual oppression. Some of the ancient functions of prophecy are reactivated therein. Tomorrow sex will be good againit appears to me that the essential thing israther the existence in our era of a discourse in which sex, the revelation of truth, the overturning of global laws, the proclamation of a new day to come, and the promise of a certain felicity are linked together. Today it is sex that serves as a support for the ancient formso familiar and important in the westof preaching.12

journal of humanities and social sciences, Number 8, July 2011

12 When revolutionaries were trying to break free all forms of social control they were already appropriated by the technologies of self management which was essentially gendered and negated the materiality of the body. However revolution is not simply a repetition of the existing order, it is charged with performativity. As a feminist activist even while making a critique of gender insensitivity and patriarchal biases in the gamut of revolution Krishna Bandyopadhyay affirms: I had embraced Naxalbari politics in my early youth: and in my mature years today, I still feel no regret for having done so. This politics has instilled in me the courage to call a spade a spade.13 The title of the autobiographical piece of Supriya Sanyal is called Biplober Sondhane Ek Sadharon Meye or An Ordinary Girl in Search of Revolution. However after going through her narrative we can see she doesnt remain ordinary any more. The experience of revolutionary activities, going outside the confines of home and family, living with urban and rural poor, staying and working with male comrades all these transforms both the women I discussed in this essay. Gender being an act of becoming and stylization we see how the course of revolution transforms what it means to be a woman. However, asserting total positivity to this transformation would seem that the logic of becoming shall always take an affirmative direction. It would then lead to the same trap of the promise of a better future devoid of all negativities. Derrida comments in a seminar:

In the classical theorization of speech acts, a performative must rely upon conventions. So thats why one cannot be confident of the category of performatives in this case, because there can be no performative if there is no law, if there is no convention which guarantees the efficiency, the pertinence of any performative.14

journal of humanities and social sciences, Number 8, July 2011

13 However contrary to what many of the feminist deconstructivist assert the very act of becoming, the very notion of performativity or stylization might not be positive it might not be a liberating principle. The act of inscribing meaning upon the body or transforming the realm of meaning by immediate material presence the immediacy of which however is always already mediated might fail to perform itself at certain moment. The possibility of the undecidable is also its impossibility it doesnt suggest the possibility of a movement towards a radical futurity unknown to us but also suggests that such futurity might simply mean annihilation it not only suggest the possibility of becoming but also of unbecoming. The impossibility of the body the archetype of exclusion to negotiate with the world of meaning might not result simply in the excess of its becoming but also a short-circuit an explosion.

In the post-revolutionary consumerist Euphoria the body returns with much force and enterprise where women are displaced from the position of producers to consumers. There is a celebration of a bodily culture worldwide as if the utopic moment of liberating the body from the constraints of a meaning making machinery is arrived at. But this body is always already charged by ideology with which it has to negotiate. The realm of ideas, idealisms gets however negated through an ironic reversal. The world after great peace has cultivated the techniques of selfmanagement to its fullest rigour. The dominant literary representations of Naxalbari movement in its aftermath depicts it as a bleak end, unorganized failure the traces of which as if disappeared, erased permanently and which left grieving mothers and wives and crippled children. The politics of such representation vis--vis the idealism cultivated around revolution during that period I have discussed in details in another article. But it wont be out of context to remind off two female characters of Mahasweta Devis Mother of 108415 Sujata and Nandini the mother and the beloved of the dead revolutionary Brati who was killed by the police and given the name journal of humanities and social sciences, Number 8, July 2011

14 of 1084th dead body. Nandini who was also a comrade in revolution lost her vision because of torture under police custody. Blindness is here the negative performance of the double marginalization first as a woman and then as a revolutionary fighting against the exploits of the state. Her becoming is the very site of her unbecoming. Unlike the repeated references of blindness as a metaphor of acquiring a new vision of wisdom in several narratives of western culture here it is moving towards a position of non-knowledge not only knowing differently but the very blindness of human machine to understand the limits of both meaning and the body and also the negotiation between the two. The denied selfhood through the experience of revolution comes face to face with itself. The desire for freedom can only expose the lack of it. In most of the memoirs of naxalite movement by people involved in it once there is this lacuna of failing to negotiate between the revolutionary past and post-revolutionary present the subject cathecated to both the histories often impossible to be resolved dialectically. Nandini without eyes is different from other woman she asserts she cannot have a normal vision of the world anymore. At the end of the novel Sujata the mother falls and dies when a party is at full swing celebrated by other members of her family who are deliberately forgetful about the martyr Brati. It is discovered that her appendix which was already overgrown has burst. All revolutions perhaps have this possibility of overgrown appendix the vestigial organ confirming against the economy of use it is a machine that cannot be used. For the woman who bears the child and then looses it in revolution, the appendix is the dead surrogate of the child which is impossible to bear it is the inaccomodable of the ideology which cannot be completely embodied within the social body. If motherhood holds the possibility of the positive performance of a womans body her becoming then it also suggests an alternative possibility of negative becoming when the child is already dead the possibility is already made impossible and there can be a negative

journal of humanities and social sciences, Number 8, July 2011

15 performative. The question is what happens to mothers, daughters, sisters, wives when the revolutions are over the question is what happens to ideas when they are forgotten and are of no use to this world of nascent globalism. Do bodies and beings come together to re-create each other or they confront like matter and anti-matter as polar opposites waiting for an explosion? If child for mother suggests possibility of growth denial of that possibility transforms it into an over-grown appendix waiting for an explosion. We dont know how to place it. The techniques of self-management might fail to come to terms with such negative performances.

Notes and References: Here the word Technologies is used in the sense Foucault used in his essay Technologies of the Self in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michael Foucault edited by L H Martin, H Gutman and P H Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 16-49 to refer various, multiple processes through which the idea of the self came into being. Here it refers to multiple techniques through which a notion of revolution is formed. Technology in this title does not belong to the science of engineering to refer to a prior planning according to which a machine is formed but various techniques of normalization through which human culture and its values are formed. Unlike engineering therefore there is always a possibility of going beyond an idea, any idea as it is always characterized by an excess and is under formation.
2 1

Rabindranath Tagore, Char Adhyay in Upannyas Samagra (Part 1), (Kolkata: Sahityam, 2003), 732. Translated by me from Bangla. Tagore, Char Adhyay, 750. Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (New Zealand: Allen and Unwin, 2005), 174.

Tanika Sarkar, Political Women: An Overview of Modern Indian Developments in Women of India: Colonial and Post-Colonial Periods edited by Bharati Ray, (New Delhi: Centre for Studies in Civilizations, 2005), 541-563.
6

Ibid.

Louis Althusser, Contradiction and Overdetermination in For Marx, (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1969), 101.

Srila Roy, The Everyday Life of the Revolution: Gender, Violence and Memory in South Asia Research 2007 Vol. 27 (2), downloaded from http://sar.sagepub.com at ROOSEVELT UNIV LIBRARY on June 30, 2009, 188.

journal of humanities and social sciences, Number 8, July 2011

16

Supriya Sanyal, Biplaber Sandhane Ek Sadharan Meye (An Ordinary Girl in Search of Revolution) in Manthan Patrika, No. November-December, 2001, 14.

Supriya Sanyal, Biplaber Sandhane Ek Sadharan Meye (An Ordinary Girl in Search of Revolution) in Manthan Patrika, No. November-December, 2001, 12-20.
11

10

Krishna Bandyopadhyay, Naxalbari Politics: A Feminist Narrative in Economic and Political Weekly, April 5, 2008, 56.

Michel Foucault, Histpry of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 7.
13

12

Krishna Bandyopadhyay, Naxalbari Politics: A Feminist Narrative in Economic and Political Weekly, April 5, 2008, 52.

14

Jacques Derrida, Women in the Beehive: A seminar with Jacques Derrida in Men in Feminism edited by Alice Jardine & Paul Smith (New York and London: Routledge, 1987), 201.

Mahasweta Devi, Mother of 1084, translated and introduced by Samik Bandyopadhyay, (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1997)

15

journal of humanities and social sciences, Number 8, July 2011