Introduction

The motivation of my dissertation steins from a serious consideration

of the failure of responsibility in Europe that has occupied some of the most
prominent thinkers of this century. Where does one search in one's effort to
(re)gain an ethical vindication for all action in life in the aftermath of
countless wars whose damage on the human psyche as well as on ecology has
been unparalleled in human history? My search is premised on synthesizing
a comprehensive ethical perspective by engaging the vision of a fivethousand year old philosophical tradition, the Indian Darshna, in which
Death does not exist at both the ontological and conceptual levels. As a

consequence, the framework of dharmic-elbics that I highlight enables an

ethical understanding of human action that does not essentialize the Other. I
initiate a dialogue between the Western ontology of the Self/Other and the
Indian ontology of the ethical sodality of the Self. The dharmic-ethical
framework gives the lie to the Western category of the "singularity" of an
individual: singularity as a function of death, as an essential aspect of the
otherness of the other's death. It is my view that the very philosophical
foundation enabling singularity needs to be re-examined in any discussion of
ethical responsibility as the twentieth-century draws to a close.

In my first chapter, I take up the question of Dftarmic-ethics vis vis

some current investigations carried out by Western thinkers into the notion

of ethics and responsibility. I consider Jacques Demda's recent inquiry into

personal versus absolute responsibility in The Gift of Death. The title of his
book is itself indicative of a certain measure of incommensurability between
thinking responsibility and ethics through death and thinking and, more

precisely, living dharmic-ethics. Derrida's recent work has been curiously

occupied with coming to terms with an orisnary moment for ethics and
responsibility. Derrida's intellectual preoccupation with responsibility signals
both a fatigue with and response to the perennial detractors of his
deconstructive philosophy, detractors whom Demda presents as accusing
him with the following plaint "Ce que vous elites n'est pas vrai puisque vous
questionnez la verity aliens, vous etes un sceptique, un relativiste, un
niluliste, vous n'stes pas un philosophe serieux!" (17-18). The trajectory on

which I launch my discussion of Dhannic-ethics, which starts with Derrida,

traces a path through the crucial biblical event of Isaac's sacrifice by Abraham.
It is against this "originaryt'event that I set up the yapa performed by A q u a
at the behest of Krishna, a y p a whose dharmic-ethical scope is the subject of

the Bhagvada Gita.

The Bhagvada Gita serves as my primary philosophical text. This text,

which crystallizes the essence of Indian philosophy, is a chapter in the great

Indian epic, the Mahabharafa. As an indicator of the quality and nature of

dharmic-ethics, of darshana and dharma, it is notable that the most important

texts convey their revelation in poetic form. The Gita, as representative of
Indian darshana/dharm (philosophy/religion), gives the lie to Emmanuel

Levinas's distrust of all tropic language as unethical. Levinas's philosophy of

ethics is pointedly concerned with the experience of "Auschwitz," yet
conceptualizes the "birth" of ethics only to couch it in the violence of a

confrontation. In opposition to Levinasian ethics, I consider the dynamics of

a maternal ethics as discussed by Cynthia Willett in Maternal Ethics and Slave

Moralities. Willett proposes the reconceptualization of the ethical moment
in the maternal caress as music and dance; while she does gesture in the

direction of dharmic-ethics, she remains within the confines of a Self/Other

dialectic which arrests her thinking. Her work does, however, help me clarify
the nature of dharmic-ethics as also the ethical sodality of the Self. Next, I
consider the philosophical project of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in
Anti-Oedipus which, in my view, is an instance of thinking's becomingIndian. I conclude my first chapter with an invocation of Friedrich Nietzsche

and Mahatma Gandhi, as I share their concern for the technological

"progress" in recent history.

In the second chapter, I elaborate the contours of a dhamic-ethics

against some of the primary concerns in the academic fields of postmodernism and post-colonialism. A major thrust in my dissertation, entitled
Dharmic-Etfa'cs: the Ethical Sociality of the Self in Post-colonialism and Postmodernism, is to read and apply dhamic-ethics in twentieth century postcolonial and post-modem literatures. The often-times dazzling theoretical
sophistication of critical discourse in both fields seems again and again to
elide the significance of ethical motivation in human action. I ask the
following questions of literary criticism as it functions in American academia
at the end of the nullenium: What is the relationship between literature and
dfcarm ic-ethics? What is the rela tionship between literature, criticism, and

dftarmic-ethics? What is the value of focusing on dharmic-ethics in literary

criticism? What are the dharmic-ethical motivations of the text at hand?
What is lost in current debates that ignore the issue of d h i c - e t h i c s at the
expense of post-structuralist language discourse? And, finally, what is the
nature of the dftarmic-ethical investment of a critic vis-a-vis his or her

criticism? 1 explore these questions in the context of two prominent fields of

discourse in late twentieth century academia: post-mode-m

coloni&m-

and post-

At a pMamphid level, 1 attempt to synthesize a

compr&emive ethical perspective through the injection of dhamic-ethics

into the domain of literary &ticism. To focus my argument, 1 investigate the
nafure of the academic divide ktweert post-modedm and postcolonidism. Both disciplines acquire their theoretical tools horn poststructuralist thought, yet both are considered as distinct and separate fields of

inquiry. In my d h a r m i c e ~ c dconsideration of these two fields and their

theories*I engage the ideas of F~edericJmesun, Homi Bhabha, &if Dirlik,
Robert Young, and Gayatri Spivak among others.
Having introduced some of thte parmeters and the necessity for a
dharmic-ethical revaluation of action, be it social, political, economic,
academic, or critical, 1 turn my attention to the dhamic-ethical dynamics
within fow literary texts, namely, Drazdpadi, a short story by Mahasweta Devi,
Waiting fur the Barba~ans,by J.M. Coetzee, me M Q ~Last
S Sigh, by S a h a n
Rushdie, and Grauityrs Rainbow, by Thomas Ppchan. 1 have chosen these
texts for their prominent status in post-colonid m d post-modem studiesDragipadi is a powerful account of the abuse of power by the police
authorities against the armed Naxalite insurgents in Eastern India. The story
ends with a post-htenoga~onDopdi, rapedt tom and bleeding, who in her
nakedness appears victorious, and strikes hcomprehaible fear into the
unperturbable police chief, Senanayak. Spivak, who has translated the stoq,
reads the moment through a feminist, decommc~vistfilter whose
Eurocentrism blinds her m d binds her to the politics of blame: in this case,
man and male patriarchy. In contrast, my interpretation of the same

moment, which 1 discuss as one of atman-yapa or self--sacrifice,a b w s for an

m d e r s t m b g of Dopdi's actions beyond the rhetoric of blame and

deconstruction.

Torture and the ethical crisis it admits recur as primary concerns in the
South African writer Coetzee's novelBWaitifig fur the Barbarians. The
magistrate, as first-person narrator of the events, shows a sensitivity for
semiotics h his quest for a reconciliation with and justification for the events
that turn his tranquil outpost in the empire upsidedom. Against the
p r e d o a m f l y d h c o w - h a t e d criticism that this novel has generated?1
propose that the actions in the novel lead to a specific and univocal message
about the nature of dhumie-eWcs in the world. This allows me to get

beyond the discursive impasse of paradox and contradiction that defies my

analysis based solely on the operations of discourse. My reading allows for an
mderstmdhg and mativation for action in the very face of the fact that there
is an essential and unknowable mystery in the novel. Coetzee's novel

mobilizes a stark universe in which the ma@stratets only recourse, dharmicethicai in naturef is depicted through the Gandhim concepts of a h i m s ~@onviolence) a d satyapaha (passive resistance).
S a h m Rushdie nee&

no introduction. His latest novel? The Muurfs

Last Sighf provides a complex inte&glhg

of races and cultures d s -

crossed with a weave of multi-national capitalist concern which leaves its

protagonist, also a first-person narratorr befbddleci for the most part* The
novel begins at the end of Moraes Zogoibytsstory, whof while recounting a
carhsing saga, searches for an ethical vindication of the events in his
turbulent history. h tracing out the dharmic-ethical trajectory of Moraes'
talef 1 suggest that this novel crysta.&es

Rushdie's creative geniusBnamely,

the competition between two ontological determinations of selfhood, of

being: the Indian ontology of the Self and the Western ontology of the

SeE/Other. In dosingt 1&cuss the inorhate attention given to painting in

this novel, and engage Merleau-Ponv's aesthetics to put in relief Rushdie's

dkarm ic-ethical vision.

Gravity8sRainbowt Thomas Pynchon's much celebrated postmodern

text, serves fittingly as the last novel in a scheme of increasing complexityD
Arguing that death does not exist in the urtiverse presented by Gravity's

Rainbow, 1 discuss that the impersonality of the novel combined with its
explosion of ego-bound desire give the novel a tndy dhgmic-eWca1

character. Two major cosmo~ogieswhich confiunt each other in the novel

are h e Western and that of the Herera tribe. It is deax that the novel is
critical of Chistian hypocrisyt and pointedly attacks the related histories of

colonizafion; in spite of this, a characteristic stzertgth of the novel lies in its

refusal to perform any s b ~ g h ~ o m binary
a d flip-flop that ends up simply

va10rizhg the hitherto suppressed, catonizedt or marginalized. 1 discuss the

novelts imbrication of ted-motogy and nature through a dharmicee~cal

perspective, arguing that there is nothing new or dim afoot in its universe. 1
read Gravity's b i n b o w as a y a g ~ ~ celebration
ic
of the ever unpresentable and

unknowable in the universe.

Chapter 1

No Other for Abraham, but Brahman

As a first step in the direction of re-engziging ethics in the fields of post-

modemism and post-coio~&mf I will consider Jacques krrida's recent and

enigmatic discussion in The Gift of Death. Uemda paintedIy organizes his
analysis of responsibility, ethics and duty around the r ' ~ e o l o @ c o - p o ~ ~ c d l
domain (pre)scribed by the religions of the Bmk, i.ef Judaismf C?uisti~ty,

and Idam. R h d a finds it appropriate to hyphenate the three into one entity?
'~Judaeo~hi~timo-~sldc.~~
'I'hough this unification reflects their
belonwpess to the t'Bookf"it is inacmate insofar as it d o w s him to
presume Islam within the fabric of Judaism md Christianity; after aIl, o d y
the latter two are under his scrutiny. Isaac is notf for examplef Abraham's

*'odybeloved sunt' (68) if one takes into account the Ishail of the QoranThis presumption on Demda's part is significant in that it prefigures his later
ex&apolatiom where he forces his Bookish view on all humanity, even for
that portion of the world whose very ontologies are constituted properly
other-wise. Given that Derridats trenchant dissection of the "failuretfof
European responsibility is founded on the iteration of God as the absolute
Other, as absolute alterity?and on the Selfs as well as the Other's irreplaceable

singularity, 1 find his enthusiasm as spokesperson-at-lage for all humanity

dangerously misinformed and thus mcomcionable:
Isaac's sacrifice conhues every day. Countless machines of death wage
a war that has no front. There is no front between responsibitily and
irresponsibility but only between different a p p r o p ~ a ~ o of
n sthe same
sacrifice, dgferent orders of responsibility~different other orders: the

religious and the ethical, the religious and ethico-politicalf the

theo1cigicd and the political, the &eolo@cepoEticd,the theocratic and
the eWcepofiticd, mci so an; the secret and the publicf the profane
and the sacred, the specific and the generic, the human and the nono
human. Sacrifiad war rages not only among the refigions of the Book
and the races of Abrakimthat qressIy rder to the sacrifice of Isaacf
Abraham, or brahimf but between them and the rest of the starving
and even those
worldf within the immense majority of hm-d
living ...who don't belong to the people of Abraham or firahim, all
those others to whom the names of Abraham and firahhn have never
meant anything because such names don't conform or correspond to
mything. (70; see a h 79)

Is Derrida's text here not just another instance of h e indwionary

violence of Western logocentrisrn? If notf then how can one justify that in
spite of recognizing the existence of non-conforming traditions and cultures
Brrida conforms them-"the rest of the starving world-within a SeU/Other
ontology? Perhaps k m d a has presaged my perplexed response when he says
that, "I am sacrificing and betraying at every moment d my other
obligations: my obligations to the other others whom 1 know or don't how,
the billions of my fellows..my fellows who are dying of starvation or
sicknesstt(69). And then again, perhaps notf for his disclaimer is not a
sufficient response to my concern: that in at least one non-monoaeb~cand
non-Book refison-fid&m-concepts

of respomib*~, duty, ethics,

sacrifice, and death are founded though a metaphysics and a cosmo~ogythat

is irreconcilable with that of the Book The question of the moment becomes,

why continue to address the issues of duty and of respomibZv with a wilful1
blindness to any non-European conceptions of the same? One the one hand,
Derrida admits that "modem civilization1'inasmuch as it is European
"suffer[s] fiom ignorance of its history, from a failure to assume its
resp~nsibiIity*~
(GD 4). 0x1the other hand, he displays a stubbornness, at least

an inflexibility, in his persistence not only to keep reading the European Book
for a solutionf but also-and this is perp1exirtg-to make the book speak for the

condition of all the others, all those billions, starving and otherwise, all the
world. If we are to speak for the universal concerns of all people on this
planet, then why remain so firmly entrenched in the tradition of the Book
whose human failure-a European failureis all too evident in the name of
"Auschwitz?@'
Can one, should one, must one not speak for all humanity
other-wise? There is hope in Derrida's belief that Europe awaits a truer
Christianity that is yet to be thought; my suggestion, which appears to be
patently more practical, is to first consider the thought of a non-European
tradition, Hinduism, with its ontology and cosmology in which no Other
exists, in which death does not exist, and whose conception of dhamic-ethics

provides a philosophical tradition with a five thousand year history of what

Judaeo-Christian Europe has opted not to think.
As a preliminary address, as a brief suspension of suspense, and as a

suspended beginning, a few words about Death. The Bhagvada Gita, the

Hindu "Book" through which I will crystallize my understanding of the

(ttarmic-ethics, unequivocally states that death does not exist. That which
exists, exists; that which does not exist does not exist. There is no passage
from that which does not exist to that which exists, and vice-versa: nasato

vidyizte bhavo / nabhavo uidyate satah... it is found that there is no coming to

be of the non-existent; It is found that the not non-existent constitutes the

real...(a16,WBG 101). The importance of this conceptualization of the eternal

nature of consciouness and of the transitory-transfornative nature of all
bodies, of all manifestations of matter in the cosmos, cannot be overemphasized. For here begins an incommensurable difference from the

religions of the Book which threatens to nullify all discourses formulated

around the preparation, the anticipation, and the "gift" of death. It is no
accident that I begin with death and the lack of death, and with the eternal

consciousness; for Demda's discussion invokes the conscious self as much as

it does death, the conscious self living in the face of death, that is, the
conscious self living the ethical, the responsible life.1 For this text shows

more than any other a spiritual Derrida struggling with that one "essential
interiority" which will not deconstruct: the conscious self. And in his
attempt to binarize, perhaps, death occupies a similar slot as that which is
equally unique and non-substitutable: "Death is very much that which
nobody else can undergo or confront in my place. My irreplaceability is
therefore conferred, delivered, "given," one can say, by death" (GD41). The
conscious self and death, which one makes me me, which one makes me
responsible? Derrida privileges death, and this one can say is the privilege
accorded by the Book. But one can also privilege the conscious self, the

atman, and instead of limiting sacrifice to examples of dying-"dying for God,

dying for the homeland, dying to save one's children or loved one" (42, italics

m i n e ) ~ n ecan conceive of y a p a as all work or human action (karma)

performed in the right spirit: "What ever thou doest, whatever thou eatest,
whatever thou offerest, whatever thou givest, whatever austerities thou
perfonnest, Son of Kunti; That do as an offering to Mef'(IX27, BG WBG 403)?
It will be a propos to clarify karma, as it is a word that has worked its
way into the popular media culture and has resultanfly had its signficance
dispersed. Literally, karma means action. All karma, all action, is triple in its
nature as it belongs in part to the past, to the present, and to the future. The

consequence of an action or karma is inseparable from the karma itself,

Qhis is a good moment for me to introduce a tenninologicat clarification. The
conscious self in Hinduism is denoted by the word i'afrnan" In common
parlance, the Hindu a t m a n and the Western "soul" are often used interchangeably, and erroneously so. In the rest of this dissertation, the word
'self," when used in a Hindu context, refers to the a t m a n .
at or a discussion of yagna sunatanam or the eternal sacrifice as the cause of
the universe, see my introduction, pages 1-8.

"hence, all things are linked together indissolubly, woven and interwoven
inseparably; nothing occurs which is not linked to the past and to the future"
flbshi 109). At no point does this mean that one is "fated" by one's karma, nor
that one is helpless because of accumulated karma. The analogy of a sailor on
the seas is apt here: one can choose to be tossed by the waves and tides and be

transported in any direction whatsoever, or one may choose to be an active

navigator in the same circumstances. Joshi emphasizes that "karma is not a
finished thing awaiting us, but a constant becoming, in which the future is

not only shaped by the past but is being modified by the present" (116). Here,
the analogy of an archer with an arrow already on its way makes for an apt

Instead of the gift of death, the gift of life and the atman, the conscious

self in its eternal aspect. What are the contours of such an ethics? What is to
be gained from such a comparison, from such a comparative study? For one
thing, debilitating relativism can be combatted by bringing an Eastern

philosophy to bear on a Western domain which has been saturated by the

infinitely generative and self-reflexive discourses of language, power and
knowledge, and which, in its saturation, has forgotten the essential mystery of
life. It heartens one to see Demda broach this mystery as he grapples with the

gift of death; it does not surprise, on the other hand, that Derrida dares not to
confront the conscious self. In the revision I propose, the atman, the
conscious self, and the essential mystery of life are in the forefront-for death
does not exist. Everything is at stake here, inasmuch as such a revision is
3 ~ h e r e are three kinds of arrows, each representing a different type of karma.
Prarabdhan is the karma which already awaits and cannot be avoided. Only
living through it will exhaust it. Sannchira Karma is the accumulated karma
of the past, and determines the "character" of the agent. Varramdna karma is
the one that is shaping the future ti venir; it is the arrow already on its way.
At any moment, there is an arrow always already on its way.

necessary, for Derrida himself has underlined the importance of his project in
no uncertain terms:
The question of whether this discourse on the gift and on the gift of
death is or is not a discourse on the sacrifice and on dying /or the other
is something that we must now analyze. Especially since this
investigation into the secret of responsibility is eminently historical
and political. It concerns the very essence or future of European
politics. (33, bold emphasis mine)
At the end of the millenium, if we are concerned with the future of

Europe, we are equally concerned with the future of the world; and equally, if
we are concerned, as Demda obviously is, with the so-called "failure of

responsibility" tainting Europe's past unto its present, we are also concerned
with its historical impact throughout the globe-not least the history and
legacy of Imperial colonization. Following the suggestion in Jan Patocka's

Heretical essays on the Philosophy of History, that "the Europe to come will

no longer be Greek, Greco-Roman, or even Roman [and hence will be truly

"Christiari'r', Derrida wonders "what would be the secret of a Europe

emancipated from both Athens and Rome?" (GD52). W.B. Yeats wondered
about this too and his vision in "The Second Coining" has intriguing echoes
with this text: "...somewhere in the sands of the desert / A shape with lion
body and the head of a man, / A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, / Is

moving its slow thighs...And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, /
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?//" (1.13-22). The point being, of

course, that the Second Coming needs to be other than Judaeo-Christian,

Yeats's poem, it would seem, prefigures Derrida's discussion of the failure of

responsibility ailing Europe?

*lt

is also significant, with regard to my discussion, that Yeatsts attempt in

Wheels to imagine a viable alternative cosmology, mystical and cyclical, has

distinct similarities with Hindu philosophical thought.

In Demdafsenigmatic and slippery discussion where one is ofien hard

put to differentiate his voice from Patocka's, and in which Abr&amPs story,
which motivates the discussion of r ~ u d a e w ~ s t i ~ eethics,
k ~ ~isc "
Mated to indude Kerkegaard's musings in Fear m d Trmbting along with
the '*sacredr'biblical textsf Demda undertakes a critique of the "disease of
hespomibaw" of Western civilization. Demdars text launches itself from
Patocka's hereticd essays about the Mure of responsibility in the Christian
tradition and about the yet-to-come true Christianity, one which would begin
to be reached once one began to think the nature of the Person who gazes

without being seen. Patodca argues that individud singularityfwhich in its

exteriorkitable functions is used to represent cornmmal ethicsf hides the
mystery contained in the interior of h e unique person. He is concerned with
the ascendance of the being of quantifiable power at the cost of the

"authentict' unique personf one who hciions with an interiorized secret- It

is the discourse of ethics as interiorized individual responsibility which has
been found wanting i
n the technological discourses of posmodedsm.

tkmda's reading of Abrahaxnlssacrifice enables him to discuss the

"instantr*of ethics as *'inespomib~ation/that is, "as an insoluble and
paradoxica1 contradiction between responsibility irz genera1 and absolzite
responsibilityr'(61). Respomibiuv in general refers to the kind due to others

in one's community, whereas absolute responsibility is that due to God. The

paradox lies in the fact that once entrusted by God with the task of s a d i c e ,
Abraham c a ~ odisclose
t
it, c o m h c a t e it to othersf he must keep it secretf
one's
even though ethics consists in answering for oneselff c o m m i c a ~ g
intentions before the others. Paradoxically then, the unique hdividua1 who
interiorizes responsibility towards God in secret becomes irresponsible in the

realm of public ethics. By Gadf Derricia finally understands an essential

interiority which is the principle structui.~gJ u d a e ~ M t i m e k l d c

Gad is the name of the possibility I have of keeping a secret that is

visible from the interior but not &om the exterior. Once such a
strucfue of conscience exists...once 1 have within me, t h n k to the
in~sibleword as suchr a witness that others c a ~ osee,
t and who is
therefore at the same time other than me and mure intimate with me
than myse5 once I have a secret relationship with myself and not tell
everything, once there is secrecy and secret witnessing in me, then
what I call God exists...God is in me, he is the absolute "meFr
or
Frse1f"...(108-9;
bald emphasis mine)
It is intezesting to note that in limiting himself exclusively to the religions of
the Book, Judaism, Christianityrand Islamf and in daposhg the ailment of a
European culture that is yet to think through to its "true1'Christianity,
Derrida patently ends up strangely adjacent to precepts of the polytheistic

religion of Hinduism. Adjacent but also always parallelr for here the history
of God which is the history of secrecy, remains the story of the indiuidzial's
"desire and power to render absolutely invisible and to constitute within
oneself a witness to that invisibility" (109). The lfindividual''according to
Derrida: the unique person with his or her own absolute singularity.
With a view to reading responsible md ethical action in the twentieth
century texts and in the act of reading itself, it becomes necessary here to
introduce, against the Judaeeektim-hl&c

histoire being recounted by

Derrida, some of the definitive precepts of Hinduism. And as Derrida frames

his discussion with the story of the Sacrifice of Isaac by Abrham, 1 will kame

my discussion with the story of Arjuna's impending sacrifice in the

Mahabharata, which is the occasion and also the instant of the discawse of
the Bhapada Gita, the Song Celestial, by Kihhna revealed to Arjua.
The moment that the Gita records is that which takes place before the
climactic war, the Mahabharata?is engaged. Two armies face each other across

the battlefield K u r ~ k s h e t r aa~ d kjuna, the King of the Pandava m y f has a

crisis faced with the task of massacre that awaits him and given the fact that

the "enemy" is none other than his kith and kin, the Kauravas who are also
his cousinsf Arjma cannot justify his impending action- The system of ethics

and responsibility that has guided his Iife until this point fails to sanction his
engagement in the ixmnhent war. He drops his weapons and tells K k i s h ,
who has agreed to be A.rjuna's charioter for the war,that he wiU not fight

0 Madhwuciana, when teachers, fathers, sons, gran&aihersf m a t e d

uncles, fathers-in-Iaw, grandsons, brothers-in-law and other relatives
are ready to give up their lives and properties and are standing before
me, why should 1 wish to kill them, even though they might otherwise
kcill me? 0 maintainer of all living entities, I am not prepared to fight
with them even in exchange for the three worlds, let done this eaxth.
(I.32-35;PBG 61)h response to this incapacity and confusionf Krishna the god-hcmate
provides Arjuna with a series of dharmic-darshanic reasons for engaging the
battlef for Idling all his kith and kin. h what is arguab1y a q s m a t i o n of
the h d m e n t d precepts of Hinduism, W h n a discourses on the necessifies

of adhering to an absolute ethics beyond the r e a h of worldly ethics and

according to whichf all human action must be performed as a yaps or

sacrifice to the etemd Self residing within the comcious seIf of all beings in
the universe.

h Hindu terns, specifically in the revelation of the Bhapadu Gituf it is

the mutable egoistic self-the atman laden with ukamkara (I-rnahg)--wK&,

through a series of y u p i c actions, begins to witness the secret of the

immutable Self, Pztr~sha.Parusha begins to be revealed and realized only
through y a p i c sacrifices which need to be performed without desire, whether
it be material, sexual, or spiritual. An important stage in the realization of
the Pzvusha is the howledge that the atman or self in others is an identical

atmm, one governed by the t h e e p n a s or qualities. Properly speaking, the

other is never really Other: "With the self [ a ~ ~ mpresent
z]
in all beings, And
a l l beings present in the selfgthe self of him who is disciplined by Yoga sees

the same (sew at a l l times" (W.29, WBG 300)-5 The impact ofthis
formulation is far-reaching for it contradicts the privilege given to Mterity
and Otherness which forms the unquestioned base for most of Western

philosophy. As we shall see, the justification for ethical action is premised

neither on the existence of God as absolute Other, nor on the inter-face of self
with the other, that is, the encounter with the absolute Mterity of the Other.

For the sake of simpIificationf it can be said that the system of dhamic-ethics

and responsibility as it is delineated in the Gita applies if there is but uric

conscious self anywhere in the universe or on the pimetg for its justifkation
is not founded on the Other, but on Purgsha and Prakriti.
It can be said that Arjuna performs a y a p , the ultimate sacrifice on
the battiefield of the Kumkshetra. The Gitiz is the doctrine justifying that

y a p a r that karma or action which is violence and slaughter of warf and

which must be offered up by hjuna. Three aspects must be set up here as

they are in fundamental opposition to the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. First?

Abraham's action is a call for faith, a faith which remains b h d as it is
substantiated neither by revelation nor by hawledge. Abraham is never told
why he must sacrifice his son Isaac, the sacrifice is commanded of Abraham

in the following words: "God did tempt Abrahamgand said unto himt
5 ~ h ebracketed (self) in this quotation results from the difficulty of
translating the Sanskrit word Samada rsana. Sargeant directs us to Ramanuja's
explanation for this term: "A persan who has brought his atmaa [soul] into
Yoga, will see similarity in all mmurzs when separated from Prukriti (material
nature); he will see that all beings are in his own iztmarz; in other words he
wifl see that his own amaR has the same form as the atmaas of all other
beings and contrariwise, so that he has seen all that is arman when he has
seen one arman'' (WBG 300n.)

Abraham: and he said, behold0here 1 am. h d he said Take now thy sonp
thine only son lkaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah;

and oEer him there for a bumt offering upon one of the mountains which 1
will tell thee of' (KJV 21-2). This absolute cornand leads to the secrecy and
titus to the paradox, "the aporia of r e ~ o m i b (61)
~ ~that
" Demda discusses
as being imperative to maintaining the absolute singularity of the ethical

person- At the momat of divine htewentionOthe "instant" at which

Abraham has dl but committed the act, it is notable that not God (as Demda
has mistakenly written on page 71) but the "angelof the Lard communicates:
'*Andthe angel of the LORD called unto him out of heaven and said,

Abraham, Abraham: and he said Here atn I. And he said, lay not thine hand
upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him for now I know that thou
fearest God, seeing thou has not witheld thy son, thine only son, from metr
(Gen.2211-12).6 At this moment0God is vindicated as the fearsome Other

who gazes irt judgment from the distance- In contrast, w u n a receives

hawledge, gpm,from W h n a the Divine teacher and auatar. The concept
of Avatarhood as exemplified by fiishna demonstrates yet again that Gad is

not a fearsome, inscrutable and inaccessible entity: ''Mtlwugh 1 am birthless

and my self imperishable, dhough I am h e lord of all beings0Yet, by

6 ~ h eambiguity of the term "angel of the Lordst is significant in terms of
deciphering the meaning of this originary (for Derrida, at least) moment.
Though the teem "angel of the Lord" is an epithet for God in the Jahwehite
Writer's tradition, it is usually used to indicate a degree of remove from God.
This remove is motivated by respect for and fear of the powerful nature of God.
However, the rest of the text indicates quite clearly that God is "calling" to
Abraham at this moment, and not appearing to him- This seems to suggest that
the epithet angel is quite unnecessary as the remove is semantically signaled
as it is. Of course, due to the nature of the Bible and its combination of the four
Writerly traditions, it is impossible to go back to the source; our only recourse
is to conjecture why "angel of the Lord" was used at that moment by the
Jahwehite Writer--assuming all the time that it is indeed himithem, and not
the Priestly writer's whimsy at hand. For an excellent discussion in this
regard see Victor P. Hamilton's The 800k of Genesis, William B. Eerdmans
Publishing Ca, Grand Rapids, MI, 1990, especially pp. 1-75.

controlling m y own material nature, I come into being by my own

supernatural power" (TV.6, WBG 206). The theme of divine descent for
humanity's sake is not unfamiliar to the Judaeo-Christian tradition; there is,
however, a peculiarly Hindu possibility of achieving avatarhood by human

ascent, by realizing the Purusha in the atman, the Self in self, through a
movement obnadbhmam agatah. Ignoring this double aspect of Avatarhood
is to miss the purport of the Gitafs teaching, and Aurobindo is adamant about

this: "Other wise the Avatar idea would be only a dogma, a popular
superstition, or an imaginative or mystic deification of historical or legendary
supermen" (EG 140). k j u n a is not tested for his faith nor for his fear of God,

but is taught, directly by the Avatar, to recognize and love the principle of
Brahman as firusha or Self in his atman or soul, and having acceded to the
Self, to commit all karma as y a p a , all works as sacrifice.
Second, Arjuna's knowledge is complete, complemented by action in
the battlefield. After Krishna's discourse, Arjuna engages the War, the

Mahabharata, vanquishes and kills his enemies which are also his kith and
kin. This is the bloody y a p a which he must perform and which he does
perform, uniting the knowledge (eyaan) and the works (karma) and devotion
(Bhakfi). In contrast. Abraham's sacrifice does not actually take place. The

moment in which he is ready to use the blade on his son is the moment or
"instant" in which he has passed the test, and when a goat is provided in
Isaac's stead.
Third, Arjuna accedes, through his yagna or sacrifice done without

desire or motive for gain, to the spiriti of Brahman in himself, that which is
also present in all manifest reality. The Karma and the yagna, the action and
the sacrifice, are not justified by conventional ethics, but by the surrender of
the self to the Brahman. The action and sacrifice performed by Arjuna is not

only performed after the renunciation of desire but also with the knowledge
that he is not the doer of the works, but that the works are the operation of
the active, unequal, mutable universal Force of Nature, or Prakriti. Arjuna
realizes that the supreme firusha, Purushottma, governs Prakrifi, and the
atman or conscious self is a partial manifestation of the Purushottma. All
works in the being and becoming of the universe have the one cosmic cause,
Pitrushoffama (or Braman), which generates both Purusha, as Self, and

Prakriti; as Nature. The conception here is monistic-ultimately, there is no

qualitative difference between Purnshoftama and atman or self, it is a case of
reciprocal containing; whereas, in Abraham's case, there remains a
fundamental separation between the nature, quality, and being of God and
that of his own self. The "instant" in which Abraham has decided to murder
his son, to consummate the sacrifice, the "instant" that Derrida finds decisive
in terms of its commitment to murder, is the moment of divine intervention

when the angel appears to provide a sacrificial lamb. Abraham is not

reasoned with. Abraham's god exists in a "dissymetrical alliance" with
Abraham, for God says to Abraham that "Ican see right away [d I'instanf] that
you have understood what absolute duty towards the unique one means, that
it means responding where there is no reason to be asked for or given"

(GD

72, emphasis mine). Derrida's dicussion demonstrates an incongruity

between responsibility and duty to the absolute and responsibility towards the
family, the human species, the generality of the ethical (73). It can be said that

this split, between the absolute ethical and the mundane ethical, exists also in
the discourse of the B h a m a Gita but with a crucial difference. A realization
of the Divine, the order of the absolute in Derridean terms, teaches first and

foremost that the "unique" "singular"person is a hoax, that the ego is

delusion, and that the atman or self must realize that it is not the doer of

action: "it is Prakriti, it is Nature, it is the great Force with its three modes of
action that works through him, and he must learn to see that it is not he who
does the work. Therefore the right action is an idea which is only valid so
long as we are still under the illusion of being the doer...all pragmatic egoism,
whether of the claim to fruits or of the right to action, is then at an end" (EG
33).

Finally, in Hindu terms, the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham demonstrates

the first of "three great steps by which action rises out of the human into the
divine plane leaving the bondage of the lower for the liberty of a higher law"

(34).

In the first step, man is the doer of the yapa (sacrifice) performed to a

Deity who is the supreme and only Self, though not yet realized in the being
of the doer: "this first step is Karmayuga, the selfless sacrifice of works and
here the Gita's insistence is on action" (35). Abraham's sacrifice can be seen as
a partial fulfillment of Karmyoga. In the second step, Jnanayoga, the sacrifice

of works continues but with the self-realization that is the loss of self and
knoweldge of "all works as simply the operation of universal Force, of the
Nature-Soul, of Prakriti, the unequal, active, mutable power" (34). And lastly,
in the third step, Bhaktiyoga, sacrifice of works, yagnic karma, continues but

with the added element of devotion to the principle governing Prukriti, "of

whom the [conscious self] in Nature [Prukriti] is a partial manifestation, by

whom all works are directed" (34). It is emphatically stressed that the three
modes co-exist in a triune way of works, knowledge and devotion.
A pause must be made here in order to make explicit the interest in

introducing aspects of Hindu d h a r m and darshana, a tradition which

Demda pointedly avoids in his discussion of the European (*responsibility.

The interest lies principally in the cause of a comparative approach which

will allow a genuine move in the direction of providing a "positive

orientationr' to the movement of history its&.

Against the dominant

Western (Ewopean) experience in the twentieth centuryf with its "failure of

resp~mibfiy,~'
with its "AuschM&,'*
with its postmodem r e c o & ~ a t i o m of
lived experience, with its ascendant technological culturef it becomes urgent
to think a revaluation kom the very foundations of ontology, cosmology, and
metaphysics. If the Western desc~ptionhas proven catastrophic, it is time to
consider another description which is different and which is not ndLified by
hmmo-temporal events. Clearlyf for me, I-Endu thought provides such an
ontology, cosmology, and d h a m i c e ~ c adescription;
l
and is seeing,
especially, Demda's insistence to not only remain within the Western
"Book but to speak for all humani& through it, that 1 am motivated to begin

introducing the scope of dhannic-ethics.

k m d a asks some h d m e n t d questions abaut how we Iive our lives

in a responsible manner. h c i having set up, in good Demdem fashion, the

"ap~riaof respomibsv," he is faced with the paradoxicd inevitability that
being responsibIe to the one means failing his respansibiIity to the other.

This means that "I can never justify the fact that 1 prefer or sacrifice m y one
( m y other) to the other" (70).This declaration is what instigates Demda's
musings as to how we can justify in the name of responsibility one*svery
existence when at every step in life, at every responsible and sacrificial
moment in life, we are being irresponsible to the other others perishing at
every moment for want of our attention. At fixst glance this idea seems farfetched; however, Derrida himself has stretched the thought to its M t :

"Howwould you ever justiv the fact that you sacrifice all the cats in the
world to the cat that you feed at home every mo&g

for years, whereas other

cats die of hunger at every instant? Not to mention people?" (71)- Yet, this

s h p h t i c and exagerated question is also the most profound for the issue at
hand, the issue of ethics and dhamic-ethics; it must be addressed.
b m d a has made a couple of questionable judgments. He has assumed
the

event of an orighary moment in which the c d to responsibility OCCWS,

and, additionally, it is a moment in which one (Abraham) has the choice to

refuse the caIl to responsibility. For b m d a , the response "Here 1 a m " is
optional even as it, and perhaps, espeady as it sign& the madgesture

which defines the system of S h N ~ v - ~

~~ep r e s m t a t i oofnthe "Here 1

am,"here I stand finally defined as an individual, a singular being in the

system of ethics:
'Were I ams': the first and only possible response to the c d by the other
[why not '*Thereyou are"?] the uri@nary moment of responsibility
such as it exposes me to the singulm othex, the one who appeals to me.
"Here I am" is the only seU-presmta~onpresumed by every form of
r e q o m i b s ~ I: am ready to respond, I reply that I am ready to respond"
(71, italics mine).

Why does he miss the logic of the story? The logic of the biblical story is not
that Abraham is a good guy because he "ch~oses'~
to do what God commands
him to do without giving hkn any reason for it. To the contraryf the logic is
to show that the biblical God cannot be asked to justify his waysf that the
Divine is beyond the human economy of question and answer, that therefore

faith must be blind and God must be feared. This is the moral of the storyf
and Derrida errs when he interprets the moral along the following k e s :
"God leaves him free ta refuse-and that is the test" (72). That is not the test,

especially for an Abraham who has already lived the better part of his life in
responsible fdfihnent of the word of God, for an A b r h m who is
circumcised in compfimce with the Covenant and who is over a hundred

years old (Gen 171-26).

In fact, I find it p u z h g that both Kerkegaard (in Fear grid Trembling)

and Demda, centuries apart, give averarching p r o d a c e to Abr&amls
sacrifice as constitutive of the individual's shgdaxity and choice. Consider,

for instance, the fact that Abraham struck not one but two covenants with
God prior to his act of sacrifice (Abrm becomes Abraham. during the
contracting of the second covenant, see Genesis 17). During the compacting of
the first covenant, a freewheeling and dealing Abram is asked to sacrifice

anim& in a riualistic manner which demands that they be sliced in half,

whereupon both the parties making the covenant with each other are made
to walk in between the halves. This is a symbolic gesture which signifies that,

should they fail in their h U e n t of the covenmt, a similar fate as that of

the animals awaits them.'

Abram, after he has sliced the anhtds, is visited in a "deep sleep" by a

"deep and terrifying darkness:" ''As h e s u n was going down, a deep deep
[eksiasis] feu upon Abram and a deep and terrifying darkness [phobos]
descended upon himrr(Gen 15:12). This deep darkness is customary for the
visitation of God in his immediacy (see Moses in Exodw 19:9). As the sign of

the forging of the first covenant, a mixadous act takes place: ' m e n the sun
had gone down and it was dark*a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed

between these pieces'' (Ga15:17).8

Abram is on h e way to becoming

Abraham, an Abraham who has witnessed in the miracle of the covenant the

power-disyme~cal, as Demda emphasizes-of God.

his is an ancient near-Eastern Hittite tradition, and is a custom described in

Jeremiah 34: 18-19.
8 ~ h epieces refer tat eh split open pieces of the animals that were prepared by
Abcaham for the covenant. Note the resonance here with the pillar of smoke
and the pillar of fire with which God led the children of Israel out of Egypt in
Exodus.

Abraham's cataclysmic experience with God occurs in 15~12,which is

the only instance in which God visits Abraham with the first intimation of
the covenant.9 Demda's emphasis on the dynamics of the later sacrifice

elides the point of a sacred, bibilical story-we already know that the twice
contracted Abraham is going to respond. What we don't know is what divine

Wade awaits his action this time.io The story of the sacrifice of Isaac,

h d y , is a story about the awesome nature of Abr&axnPsGod, of his God as

the absolute m e r e
As long as we are in the economy of the Other, absolute responsibility
is in contradiction with public respomibSy-a Demda has well shown.

the economy of the

Self, however, a different story is being told. What does

W h n a tell Axjuna

propus of the sacrifice, the yaps that Arjma must

perfom? CmaaUy, that there is no existace outside of responding- Lile is

the combination of a process of Prizkriti wiih its gzinas rumhg through

everythbg that is Prakriti and of the comdmce of self, which is an aspect of

Purziska and a. h a p e n t of the cosmic consciousness, witnessing Prafiti- In

such a process everything is already a response, there is rzu originmy mumeat

zuhen respondi~gbegins, when one is given he choice of whether or
enter the economy of respomib*v.

to

1 see myself and my Self in all Nature.

9 f ' ~ the
s sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abrarn, and a deep and
terrifying darkness descended upon him.'* This descent is presumably that of
God, who then speaks to Abraham of the Cuvenant* It is interesting to note that
the Greek variant for sleep is Ekstasis, which is closer to the EngIish trance or
dream-like state.
I01 get the impression that the very command of being asked to sacrifice one's
son seems to defy Kierkegaard's imagination. However, in the times that that
bibiical laws were being forged, the practice of child-sacrifice seems to have
been not so out of the ordinary. In Levictus 20~2-5,far example, God tells Moses
the foIlowing: nAny of the people of Isme!, or of the aliens, who give any of
their offspring to MoIech shall be put to death." It was customary to offer
meis offspring as burnt-sacrifice; to state the obvious here: it is because the
practice exists (seems rampant? by the sound of it) that a Iaw is being rather
vehemently stated against it.

This absolute ethics in the Gita is based on the fact that everything is already

in process, that everything is a manifestation of divine energy. What matters

it that you call the energy divine or not? For energy exists. The conception of

the universe in the Gita is not unlike that of modem-day particle physics;
David Bohm offers the following proposition in Wholeness and Implicate
Order: "The totality of existence is enfolded within each region of space (and
time). So whatever part, element or aspect we may abstract in thought, this
still enfolds the whole [172]"(WBG 11). We find in modem physics not the
discourse of the Other but of the Self. But the story of physics, of course, is
half the story of the gzinas, as only the energy of Prakriti or Nature. The
gunas refer also to the qualities of Prakriti or Nature-all energy has quality.

Furthermore, the gunas are complemented by the inherent potential of t&

One Consciousness, which Aurobindo calls Purushottama. And this
combination of the Purusha as Selfand Prakriti as Nature as manifestations
in the universe with the one originary cause means that the dhamic-ethical

nature of responsibility in Hinduism, is conceived without any recourse to the

Other. It becomes curious horn a Hindu darshanic viewpoint, in fact, that so

much in Western thinking can be based on the Other.

The answer to Demda's cat question, then, from the Hindu viewpoint
of the Gita is dear: I am always already responsible for all of existence, for my

Self is present in all. When I feed my cat I perform a y a p , a sacrifice to the

Self, upholding the Dharm of existence, and this Self includes me, my cat, all

the cats, and everyone else in addition. And when, to the contrary, I propose
that, "What binds me to singularities, to this one or that one, male of female,

rather than that one or this one, remains finally unjustifiable (this is
Abraham's hyper-ethical sacrifice), as unjustifiable as the infinite sacrifice I

make at each moment" (71) I should realize that this formulation is nothing

other than the rule of Maya. Maya is a complex concept which has come to be
trivialized in popular glogal culture as merely "illusion." In its ancient
d w s h i c conception, m a y refers to two levels of organization. At one level,

mya is the principle which facilitates the creation of reality for the temporal
and phenomenolo@cd being in the universe. In a universe of eternal,
infinite being and becoming, "to settle upon a fixed truth or order of truths

and build a world in conformity with that which is fixed, demands a selective
faculty of knowledge commissioned to shape finite appearance out of the
infinite reality" (Sourcebook 596); maya is the name given to this selective
faculty. At another level, maya is the illusion of reality become real, it is that

which abets an idea of singularity, of a monad and separate ego, of

making: "muya persuades each that he is in all but not all in him and that he
is in all as a separated being, not as a being always inseparably one with the

rest of existence" (596). It is keeping these both levels in mind that the idea of
tearing the veil of maya must be understood, a tearing which realizes the
truth of maya, "where the "each" and the "all" coexist in the inseparable
unity of the one truth and multiple symbol" (597).

In a dharmic-ethical universe there is ultimately no separable or

essenatial "singularity," no individual in the Western sense, nor is there an
Absolute Other who Gazes in judgment without being seen-for this is in
direct opposition to the conception of firushottam or Brahman who is the

most intimate Self in my atman or conscious self, your self and all other selfs.

The Divine Soul, Narayana, co-exists with the human soul, Nara. It is the
duty of the human soul to tear the veil, often referred to as Maya, the veil
which keeps man within the world-bound, prey to the material and to the
impulses of an ego, and get behind the ultimate secret, uttamam rahasyam,

which is to awaken to the eternal principle present within and to begin to live

in Brahman. And the emphasis is that this @vhg up of self, of personhood,

of hdividuality is a goal that must be striven for and attained in the living
moment; it is not a reward that lies beyond the threshold of Me. This
ultimate secret is to be attained though gyam or knowledge, and knowledge
itself is to be attained through action, through works or karma, in the
material world. For the secret gives accession to ''livingcomciously in the
Divine and acting from tisat comciousness" (JZG 23). Nowhere is there a
conception of death, of death as being a gift. Justas there is no judging gaze of
the absolutely Other, there is no salvation that lies beyond the threshold of

life- if there is a aosshg-over, it takes place here in Me, it is the crossing of

the veil. And once the consc5ous self gains consaousness of its &vine and
eternal nature, its function is to fulfill the works or kartng as yapcx, as
sacrifice: "For the action must be performed, the world must f W i U its cycles,

and the soul of the hman being must nat tum back in ignormce from the
work it is here to do'' (EG25)- h Arjma's case, this work is slaughter of his
closest relatives in the Great War- That he must engage in the action which
means he must kiU his kith and kin-this is Krishna's divine revelation.

To deny the p r h d significance of the inter-face with the Other, as 1

have suggested above, is aIso to subvert the premise of Levinasian ethics.

That this subversion is intended and necessary for my project should be

apparent, but it must be pointed out that it follows a subtler undermining
that takes place in Demda's text. 'This occws at the level of the "~acredness'~

of a text, specifically, the Bible. Demda seems to give no weight to the fact
that

Abraham's story in the Bible is belongs ta a genre of writing which is

more primary than Kierkegaard's Fear and trembling in terms of originating

the ethics of Judaeo-CMstibv; in his presentation of ethics, Eerkegaard's
exegetical hypotheses function at the same level as that of the BibIical

revelation- Levinas?on the other hmd, has maintained throughout his

career not only reverence for the k m m d m t d possibilities contained in the
ethical structures and characters of the BibIe but also the imperative necessity
of not forgetting the primacy of the Biblical text to dl subsequent and
thezefure secondary philosophies8going so far as to say that "toute pede

pMosopfique repose SIX des eq6riences pr&philowpKques et que la lecture

de la Bible a appartenu chez moi 2 ces exp&imces fondatrices''(I3 14)-

Equally significant is the oppositional emphasis placed by each

philosopher on what constitutes h e core of individual singularity. Demda
locates the essence of subjectivity in the non-emferabGv of death: "Death is
very much that which nobody else can undergo or conf?ont in my place- My
beplaceabSV is therefore conferred, deIivered?"givenr'*one can say, by
dea&...It is from the site of death as the place of my k e p l a c e a b s ~that
, is, of

my shgdarityf that 1 feel cdied to responsibilityt'(GD41). Levinas has

expounded on the concept of the 'texisfer"in Le Temps et Z'autre, arguing that
the subject's singular existence is what constitutes &at which can be
comunicated but never shared: "Je suis tout seuIf c'est donc l' &re en moi,

le fait que j'edte, mon exister?qui constitue 1'616ment absolument

intransitif, queique chose sans intentionafite, sans rapport. O n peut tout
&changerentre &resf sauf l'exister. Je sub monade en tant que je st& [21]"

(51). Where can one find a more succht and direct opposition of the
meaning of life and of death? Levinas locates the c d to responsibility in the
living moment of the face to face with the Other?and this face-off constitutes
the ariginary moment of the call to responsibility. And yet, strangely enough,
this is where death re-enters the Levinasian scene: fur the originary call spells

out the foUawhg c o m m d : "Tu ne tueras point." You are not to killg This

sets up a troubling economy for sociality and ethical individuality.

One of the things that Levinas is womed about is emphasizing the

h c o m a w a b f i v of the inteefacial human experience. IR fact, dl

thinking that ignores the infinite in the human encounter, that wants to

reduce the Other to the Same, and reduce difkrence to equality is a sign of
absolute system, of Totaiity. It is against this that he projects his vision of the
face of the Mer. k v i ~ doesnet
s
shy away kom critiquing the entire

tradition of Western pMosophy which he interprets as the search for a

universal synthesis, a reduction of all experience, of d that belongs to the
sensibIe, to a totaIity in which conscience embraces the world, leaves nothing
ather outside itself, and thus becomes absolute thinking. The conscience of

self becomes at the same time the cunsaence of id (85). In other words?the
totahtarian philosophy that Levinas is wary of occurs at that moment within
the Western ontology of the Self/CMer when the Other is demy~tified~
and
absorbed by the Self, as monad, as individud?as singular, in a uniformed
description* Levinas's wariness against the latent?impending, or patent
tyranny of the totalizing Western Self is well taken. It is as a stratagem

against this tyranity that he stresses the irreducibility of the properly Other,
the mysterious message of the face of the Other. When the Western

conscience Levinas speaks of embraces the world, art operation of reduction

and tyranny is perfumed. The self as individual, as subject, as monad in

command of its h t e n t i o n a h v - ~Western %If's conscience embraces the

world only in a gesture that reinforces its uniqueness against the world it
occupies m d inhabits. And in such a reinforcement it reduces the difference
of the Other's conscience to a version of itself?leaving no place far difference

to assert itself except a a suborhated and distanced term.

The "universal synthesis" that Levinas warm against is an operation of

this

kind. But in taking up anxu for the reconcepmakation of ethics and

responsible philosophy in the experience of the m

e
r and the face of the
Otherr Levinas can only get so far. 'I'he problem lies where Levinas is
urtwib~gto look-in the Western (and Levinasian) perpetuation of the

unique Self and unique O&w. We must remind owselves here that Levirtas

does not think beyond the confining ontdogy of the %lf/Oiher itseIf' which

is inbinsic to that very tradition and its ~ c o n t ~ ~ - ' * A u ~ w

to iname
~,'*
h e obvious-that he is wary of.

The Indian ontology t e k a different story. Heref the atman, the

conscious self's embrace of the universe results in a loss of aU ego-sensef of alI

ahamkaram or "I"-making. The attainment of freedomr of bliss, of At~anda

which results born this surrender is a consequence of realizing h e conscious

principle of the cosmosf B r h m , hidden in the atman or WE

' t R e h q u k h gegotismf force, arrogancef desire, anger and possession of

property; unseifish, tranquil, one is fit for oneness with B r h m ' * (XVDI-53,

WBG 714).

Why does Levinas want tor need to Iocate rn h c o m e w u a b f i ~in

the human encounter, and more importantly, why is death given such a
praminent role? Againf why is not the encounter a call to love, why is not
the founding experience of the ethical a possibility of the celebration of life?
Levinas' experience as a Jew in the Stalag during World War II must be

brought to bear on his phenomenolo@cal desire to constitute the

foundational ethical experience as a non-reciprocalr non-symmetric
assmption of responsibility in the face-to-face encounter. His first original
treatise entitled De l'existmce

1'existant was written during his confinement

in a stalag during WWI. It broaches the "il y d* as a profoundly terrifying

i n b a t i o n of "there being." The i2 y a, Levhas insistsFis that impersonal and
horrible tiers excZzt the excluded third of nothingness and beingf and

occupies the absolute emptiness before creation its& (3&39). A child passing

a wakefd night and an insomniac whose conscience is ~person-ed

by the

inability to master sleep are used by Levinas as ready examples of the

frightening experience of the if y a. Nights in the stalag not withstanding, it is
dear that L,evi.nasr universe has the possibility of a feasfd and lurking
violence in the 2 y a. The il y a cannot be thought of as loving, nurturing,
nor caring. As such it signifies Levinas' loss of faith in a moral universe.
And it can be said that his subsequent efforts have tried to resurrect an ethics

which would not result in the irthmm failure of the Nazi experience. It is
to this end that Levinasim subjectivity conditions itself in response to the
Other and its rule becomes not simply revomibZq to the Other but
responsibility for the Other's responsibsv. Levinas is unequivocai about
this: "je suis responsabIe des pers6scutions que je subis. Mais seulement

moi! ...Puisque je suis respomable meme de la responsabilit6 d r a u W *(95-96).

1 find that this mo&odox formdation brings him yet again adjacent to the

domain of h d u thought. But here the distance is great not only because the

Hindu seLf's responsibility is always to the absolute Self present in me and all
others, but because the i2 y u doesn't exist in the m d u universe, it is
Brahman that does, with its principle of sad-chit-ananda, existence-

comciousness-bliss.
The il y a is the antipode of sociality. The experience of the i2 y a relies
0x1 singularity

in terms of isolation. The I2 y a is the anti-matter to creativity,

to creativity as poetry and art. Levinas' distrust of tropic language can be

traced back to the immanent black hole of the il y a which threatens to reduce

all osciliations to the flat-he of its homble signal. h the Levinasian

economy, the 2 y a exists before sociality, it in fact motors sociality; it is to get

away from the il y a that the isolated I is forced to forge the bond of sociality

with the Other. Yet, the il y a also is the figment of a male imagination which

tries desperately to prioritize and locate the originaxy moment for ethics;

paradoxically, Levinas distrusts tropic language, for such language forefronts

the impossibility of systematizing from any origin or originary moment.
Levinas distrust of tropic language has been related to the necessity of

his rnasculinist ethical vision by Cynthia Willett in her important discussion

of Maternal Ethics and Slave Moralities. hi a compelling feminist critique of
Levinasfethics as privileging the fraternal and as the iteration of the

"masculinized metaphoric of the warrior" (551, Willett links poetry with the
"rnamae~e,~'
that which has been disparaged or ignored by all rational
philosophies and patriarchal politics. Willett seeks to relocate the originary
moment of the social bond in the joyous moment of sociality, one that is pre-

discursive as well as pre-intersubjective: the tactile sensuality between

nurturer and child (42). She critiques Levinas for his conception of ethics as a
response to the face in the visual register, and instead brings to the fore the
importance of tactile contact which is at the base of a sociality that is also
always erotic.
Willett points out that Levinasian ethics repeats the mistake of man's
creation ex nihilo, according to which myth "men give birth to themselves,
they are fully self-responsible...these self-created men participate in an
ideology of freedom that mystifies their interdependencies upon feminized
dimensions of the self' (80). At one level, what Willett is saying and where
she is taking the question of ethics is clear: after all, the Levinasian self at the
moment of encountering the other is, quite obviously, not a two month old

child but an adult, preferably male. The simple question is how did he get
there? Willett's work answers that very question-he got to the point where
he can see the face of the other only after having lived through the erotic

caress and nurture of his mother or caregiver. She reminds us that Western
creation stories share the same missing element-the mother. In a bold and
refreshing move that marks the general tone of her work, she "mothers"

Levinas's it y a:
..already in the uterus, the fetus experiences rhythmic changes in
energy levels that come over the mother. The horizon of existing, the
pure il y a that precedes the categorization of the world, the elemental
climate, is not the airy nothing of patriarchal mythology but the
temperament of the mother. Nor is the i7 y a of existence, as Levinas
assumes, neutral in its genealogy. It varies with the diffuse moods and
directed attitudes of the mother. (78)
Willett's attempt to counter the history of a male pathology that has divorced
the body from the mind and then ignored the former is centered around the
bodily and tactile origins of the experience of sociality. Upholding Iragaray's
argument that "the hierarchies of the visual register of experience-are
complidt in the patterns of oppression that define modernist social
structures" (39), Willett highlights the precedence of tactile sensuality to the
discursive realm in a parent-child relationship which is forged on nondiscursive expressions of the touch, the sounds, and the movements
(mamaese): "the infant reciprocates parental overtures with its own score of
movements. The ethical bond begins with an attunement that is musicality

and dance" (43). Willett's relocation of the origination of ethics is salutary

not only as it exposes the blind-spot of the Western tradition but also because
it is formulated such that ethics becomes the experience of erotic joy and
nurture whose motivation confounds Hegelian recognition. This is a far cry
from the Levinasian "tu ne tueras point, you are not to W*!
But this feminist relocation insofar as it also seeks an origin to ethics,

an originary moment, begs the following questions: Why sociality? Where

does the mother or caregiver get her ethics from? The force of Willett's

feminist appropriation of o r i e a r y ethics lies in the fact that it brings us in

contact with the moment in which one is constantly faced with the sweet
mystery of life and the eternal mystery of creation. Yet, what becomes evident
is that while the desire for sodality is seemingly inborn, its origin is at the

same rime unknowable~indiscussing and proposing ethics we are always

already in the realm of Faith and Fiction. For any deliberation on originary
ethics relies on speculations that surpass the economy of proof, the methods

of evidence. Ultimately, Ethics is nothing more and nothing less than a

fabrication designed to give ourselves a meaningful experience of Life. What
is important is that the fabrication according to which we build our lives
gives our existence joy where no ultimate answer is to be had.

Broadly

speaking, one can say that all ethical structures assume sociality-this is an
empirical truth. It is also inevitable that in discussing ethics one is always in
the middle ground between religion and philosophy. Hegel recognized this

in his discussion of the Bhagavada Gita : "The basic relation of all religion
and philosophy is first the relation of the spirit in general to nature and then
that of the absolute spirit to the finite spirit" (85). Critiquing the dialectic of

recognition which structures Hegel's master-slave ethics but always agreeing

with the assumption that the desire for recognition from the Other is at the
core of the (Hegelian) self (see Willett 105-119), Willett's feminist endeavor
pinpoints the child-nurturer bond that is sociality as erotic ethics. The force of
Willettfswork is that she has created a space in which Ethics is an act of love
and sociality is born of the caress. In the end, however, she too remains firmly
entrenched in the dichotomy of Self and Other and doesn't escape the
Western problematic of distancing. For as long as one stays within the
fundament of the Self and the Other, there exists a distance between the two

which is traversed only by making difference a quality of identity-the self and

the other are identified in a reflexive simultaneity, a moment in which

identity is founded as being non-identical. There is nothing wrong with this
formulation as it expresses Western thought; however, this neutralizes
Willett's project in so far as she continues thinking the dichotomy of Self and

Other; ultimately, her assertion, that "practices whose genealogy is female

provide the basis for conceptions of subjectivity that cannot be schematized

through the dichotomies that perpetuate the pathologies of Western culture"

(1441, is invalidated-for such pathologies, I am arguing, are built on the Self

and Other as o r i g h q cause (orighary male cause, to be sure; yet, Western
feminism is yet to travel to a point beyond/before this origination).

There are two fundamental models or fabrics that concern me here: the
Judaeo-Christian sociality of the Self and the Other, and, the Hindu sociality
of atman and purusha. the self and the Self. As an instance of the latter, the
Gita tells us that there is no originary moment for ethics because the Self
exists always, before and after birth, and also that the Self exists in all Prakriti

or Nature. There is no originary moment for the beginning or formation of

ethics in a universe which is perpetual process and has as its cause one
principle, the eternal principle of Brahman. This process consists of the twin
principles of Purusha and Prakriti. Purusha is the Cosmic Conscience by
whom all Prakriti exists and by which all karma or works are directed. The

aim of life is to attain the state or condition of dehi, the conscious embodied
soul, through the combination of knowledge and consdent works-ffyaanand

yoga. By gyaan is meant the recognition of the illusion of desire-ridden ego.

By yap is meant "the selfless devotion of all the inner as well as the outer
activities as a ygm, a sacrifice to the Lord of all works,offered to the Eternal
as master of all the soul's energies" (EG 64).

ICrisha's presentation tmubles kjunats mind, whose skepticism

reflects the Westem mind's perplexity at being confronted by a system which
wodd seem, in its advocacy af the impersonal performance of duty8higMy
unethical. That is, there apparently remains no base for respecting and
assuring sociality. But as 1 have already suggested above, this codusion s t e m
from a mind used to assuming its identity as absolute or absoluteiy other-not
to mention the 0therrs identity. A crucial conception without which the
philusophy of the Gita cannot be apprehended in the right spirit is Dharma.
The Sanskrit root of Dharma is dhr which means "to hold." Dhgrma quite
literally means that which holds things together, "the Iaw, the normf the d e
of nature, action, and lifer' (EG23). Dhama is the Sanskrit word that comes
closest to the Western '*refigion? it is?however, the religion of dharmicethics as sociality of the Self. It is a conception that a ~ o w l e d g e the
s entire

network of existence and energy and c m o t at any point be limited simply to

a h u m - t w h m a n or even h u m - t o - m d scale of response and

respomibsq. Aurabindo explains the threefold nature of Dharma as

Dharma in the Indian conception is not merely the good, the rightf
morality and justice* ethics; it is the whole government of all the
relations of man with other beings? with nature, with God, considered
from the point of view of a divine principle working itself out in forms
and laws of action, f o m of the inner and the outer life8orderings of
relations of every kind in the world. Dhama is both that which we
hold to and that which holds together our h e r and outer
ac~vities
...Secondlyf there is the divine nature [the Sew which has to
develop and manifest in us, and in this sense Dharma is the law of the
inner workings by which that grows 21our being. Thirdlyf there is the
law by which we govern our outgoing thought and action and our
relations with each other so as to help best both our own growth and
that of the human race towards the divine ideal. (162-63)
The law of D h a r m as one of oneness in the universe is complex but dsu

p q o is~to miss the point altogether. Hegel is one such reader whof despite

his best intentionsf has entirely missed the sipficmce of the Gitaf and being
thoroughly disgusted with the f'tediousness of the Indian verbosity and
repetitions," seeks repeatedly to codom the philosophy of the Gifa into
something recognizable and palatable for his Western sensibility- He fails to
understand what ''duty as the performance of disinterested actionpicould
possibly mean other than performing the action in ignorance: "the more
senselessly and stupidly an acfion is pmfumed, the greater the involved
indifference towards the succ~s''(47)- He misreads the scope and forms of
yoga, relegating it to a passive and empty &&ed&ess

kom the material

world of action: "in it that kind of reflection ...is at work whichf without
reasoningf through meditation strives after a direct awareness of the tmth as

such'*(311, andf "Yoga is rather a meditation withoat any corztmts, the

abandoning of all attention towards external things...the silence of all
inclinations and passions as also the absence af images, imaginations and
concrete thoughts" (45). That h i s is a blatant misreading of the yoga doctrine
is clear if we look at but one verse of the Gih: "he who performs that ritual
action which is his duty, while renouncing the fruit of actionf is a renouncer
(sanrzyasi) and a yogin; Nut he who is withoat a consecrated fire, a d mko
fails to peflum sdcred rites. (WolfWG272, emphasis mine). Hegel's yogi is
exactly the one who f d to perfom-for the Gifa is a doctrine of performance

and actian in the material world and nothing otherwise.

One must not take Hegel's misreading lightlyf for it does not stop him

from making an all out indictment against hdian dkarma and darshana as
caste-bound and thus unable of providing "any elevation to moral freedom"

(51If where "the work permanently performed by M s h a is the conservation

of caste distinctions1'(55)f and which promotes detachment en posse such

that "he Indian isolation of the soul into emptiness is rather a stupefaction
which...cannot lead to the discovery of true insighis, because it is void of
contents'' (65). Hegel's employment of the word "mdf"a concept whose
metaphysical lineage can be traced back to the Greek pszichi and Platoss

~ 36e), a d signifies
discussion in the Timeus (especidy sections 3 4 to
something very Merent from the conception of atmaw as the conscious self,

is an apt indicator of his blinkered reading. Hegel's Eurocentric righteousness

and atisreading can be forgiven as a product of his times?but the same cannot
be done in good faith for any camcien~ausintellectual or philosopher of our
avowedly global and "multi-dtural" times. 1 wodd in fact argue that
Hegel's misreading, his inability to comprehend the nature of and described

by the Bhapada Gita stems from his reliance on a SeU/O&er dialectic which
is patently absent therein.

h e of Hegel's oversights is that he takes the p n a s to be attitudes and

not the primary qu&~es-aenermof a l l Prakriti or Nature: S a f f ~Rajas,
a ~ and
Tamas?are the modes of world-energy in nature and also of human nature
itself. Briefly, Saftua is the mode of poise, knowledge and satisfaction; Rajas is

the mode of passion, actionf and struggling em~tion;a i d f Tamas is h e mode

of ignorance and inertia. AH three interact with each other as they traverse
both nature and being: "all the attitudes adopted by the human mind towards
the problems of life either derive from the domination of one or other of
these qualities or else from art attempt at balance and harmony between
them" (EG49)But is the Hindu viewpointf as it is seen and described in the Gita,
masmihist? For one cannot deny that its setting is War, its interlocutors are
the ultimate Warrior and the God-as-d~oter.This would seem to put the
discourse of the Gifa firmly within what WUett has described as "male

metaph~ricof the wamior." Yet? the case is not so simple for the very reason
h a t it is not a co&onta~ond philosophy of Self and Other that the Gita
develops. 1would argue that the G i t ~is a philosphy of ethics expressed in the
~anguageof the "rnamaese"-it defies rationality and rational system8always

forefronting the natural forces and the unknowable mystery of creation. A

reflection of this d o w a b z is~ the fact that its doctrine is expressed in

poetic form. It is a mamaese that defies the Leuinasian claim that literature
cannot be ethical. The Gita is written in elegant metered Sanskrit verse

which is meant for pleasurable readins and hearing experience- And it is

consistently the expression of a system of ethics, the description of m ethical
universe. It is also about love?about aeativiv and joy. But it also constantly
reminds LBthat all language is ambiguous and d t h a t e l y only a pointer in
the direction of the eternal mystery.11 It calls for a recognition that must be

made of the one %If h d8

and consequently, for a sociality which is always
already forged; the god is to "perceive the self in the self by the self'' (XIE24)

and realize that the ~ t m mof others is identical with one's own atman:

"Seeing indeed the same Lord established everywhere8he does not injure the
self by the sew' (XE28; WBG 556). In this it takes us beyond or before
feminism8for it tells us that the "diffuse moods and directed attitudes**
of the
mothered i2 t j in that amniotic and primeval space is already traversed by

IOf course, Deconstructive critiques of language have already shown that

language always displaces itself, that ciifferance is the norm. With this in
mind* 1 find Levirtas' distrust of tropic language blinkered, as all discursive
expression is inherently tropic. In terns of ambiguity of language, Sargeantrs
comment about the complicated nature of Sanskrit language is exemplary: "it
may be remarked that Sanskrit is a very ambiguous language in which a
single word may have scores of meanings* sometimes contradictory ones. Thus
the common verb dhu ...can mean put, place, take, bring, remove, direct, fix
upon, resolve upon, destine for, bestow Qn. present, impart* appoint, establish*
constitute, make, generate, produce, create* cause, effect, perform* execute,
seize, take hold of, bear, supportp wear, put on, accept, obtain, conceive* get,
assume, have, possess, show* exhibit, incur, undergo* etc/ (8)!

the essentid modes of nature, the gunas. Soaality is inherent in any

c o ~ c i o u self-the
s
afmm contains the Self and smiles at the world. There is
no originary moment fur ethics and responsibility to begin- Soadity

he

law of the universe, since everything is intercomected and traversed by the

same Self.
This Hindu aspect of sociality is pmmhd on the fact that Life does not

"lack'' mything- This lack of lackRso to speak, &a contradicts the Western
pMos~phicdtradition?going back at least to Plato, where lack has been that
and the Ideal, the hmm and the divine. ConsiderRfor example, the tyranny
of Socrates in the Symposium as he d e h e s love or Ems to Agathon:
S: ...that is, does love desire that something of which love is?
A*. Yes, surely.
S: And daes he possess, or does he not possess that which he loves and

desires?
A: Probably not?I should say.
S: Consider whether '*necessarilyr*
is not rather the world ...instead of
probably. The ~ e r e n c that
e he who deskes something la& it, and
that he does not desire something if he does not lack it? is in my
judgment, Agathon, absutgfeZy and necessmily true. (59, emphases
mine)
If Agathon was weU-versed in the Gita he might have challenged Sacrates
with the assertion that nothing is lacking in the universe which is comprised

everywhere of the Self and the pmas; that sensual desire is motivated by
seme-ga~ficationand marks the reign of the fake ego, and that spiritual
desire is for the recognition of the Self seated in the heart of all afmms or
conscious selfs. In this regard, that desire is nowhere a lack? the anti-oedipal
work of Delewe and Guattari, their critique of Western knowledge and their
reconcep~afiza~on
of desire as desiring production provides some
interesting resonances with Hindu pkdosophy and d e s e ~ e ssome attention.

Deleuze and Guattari's critique of capitalism and schizophrenia in

their anti-Oedipal argument brings together in one interactive economy the
discourses of philosophy, psychoanalysis, capitalism, geography, and
anthropology. The repressive ideology shared by modem disciplines is laid
bare by Deleuze and Guattari through their emphasis on the simultaneity of
semiotic regimes and the reconceptualization of human agency as a
schizophrenic urge for "desiring-production." In their formulation, the
subject is always a "residue" effect of the processes of social production. Such
a subject is never truly representable in terms of a unified ego, and even less
so in terms of the repressive and normalizing Oedipal triangulation. Their
claim that the myth of Oedipus as it has been employed in Western
psychoanalysis has no truth value other than the fact that it takes part "in the

work of bourgeois repression at its most far-reaching level, that is to say,

keeping European humanity harnessed to the yoke of daddy-mommy" ( A 0
SO), is representative of what Foucault sees as the anti-fascist nature of their

project. The alternative offered by them is one that challenges the entire
tradition of Western metaphysics, at least all the way back to Plato, where

desire has mistakenly been assigned to acquisition and not to production. As

a result, the history of desire has been &written as the story of a "lack,"

whereas, in anti-oedipal schema, desire is first and foremost the energy of

production. Hence: desiring-preduction.
The consequences of desiring-production are far-reaching. All activity
in the world becomes the interaction of binary machines that are always

connected to each other linearly. For example, the breast is a machine that
produces milk, and the mouth is a machine coupled to it, and in turn, the
mouth is also coupled to the stomach as machine. Though this series extends
infinitely, it is never simply a binary series for a third term is always being

produced which is the body without organs (BwO). This B w O is the surface
upon which all production is recorded, and from whose recording surface all
production seems to emanate. The BwO is, however, unproductive, sterile,

unengendered, and unconsumable. For example, Capital is the BwO of the

capitalist being. The "subject" is that which wanders above the B w O and
exists peripherally to the desiring machines, having no fixed identity and
coming into being only as it consumes various states made available through
the recording surface of the BwO. Such a subject can situate itself only in
terms of the disjunctions of a recording surface and is born and reborn with
each new state it consumes.

It is worth making note here that the system offered by Deleuze and
Guattari always exceeds binary enclosures. Desire, which is what causes the
"current" to flow between machines, always flowing itself and breaking flows,
leads to three types of production. The first is the production of production

and its energy is the Libido. Labor is the sign of this process. Here, the
synthesis is one of connection. A part of the energy of the libido becomes the

energy of the recording process, Numen, and this leads to the production of
recording. This takes place on the BwO, or capital, and the synthesis here is
one of disjunction. The energy of the Numen leaves a residual energy of
Voluptas which is the energy of consummation. This leads to the production
of consumption. It is at this juncture that the subject is formed, through
consuming, and through the conjunctive synthesis. The anti-Oedipal
universe describes a domain of perpetual processes without beginning and

without end, of energies traversing all partial objects which are continuously

engaged in machinic operations of conjunctions, disjunctions, productions,

etc. This world-view parallels the Hindu world-view of interconnectedness

of all phenomena and consciousness: "each finite working of force is an act of

infinite Force and not of a limited separate self-existent energy labouring in

its own underived strength" (EG 144).
Deleuze and Guattari's anti-Oedipal critique of normalizing and
oedipalizing structures in Western life is based on the compelling argument
that the Western civilization with its tyranny of a psychoanalyzable subject is

constituted on the repression of desiring production, on repressing desire

because "desire is revolutionary in its essence" (116). Desire threatens Laws,
hierarchies, established orders, and therefore, desire has been conformed to

the something of a Lack-in contemporary Western society, this has meant

crystallizing desire on the consumption of material goods-where desiringproduction has been transformed into desiring products; of normalizing and
advertising desires through the ubiquitous influence of modem media; and

finally, on essentializing the other as Other as an incentive for submitting to

the Law. There are numerous resonances between the anti-oedipal scheme

and the Hindu philosophy of the Gita, the complete lay-out of which is
beyond the scope of this dissertation. However a couple of elements can be

mentioned in passing.
The Hindu self can be seen as a "detachablepartial-object" instead of

complete objects detached (Phallus). The partial object doesn't allow the
formation of the subject but instead is propelled by d r i v e s ~ s ? - and
connects with a multiplicity of other partial objects: its sole subject is "not an
"ego," but the drive that forms the desiring-maclune along with it, and that

enters into relationships of connection, disjunction, and conjunction with

other partial objects" (60). Furthermore, when Deleuze and Guattari state
that, "the three errors concerning desire are called lack, law, and siemfier

[whichdrag] their theological cortege behind-insufficiency of being, guilt,

signification" (Ill), it is evident that the theology being referred to is that of

the Book- Clearly, in Hinduismf desire is conceived of as a positivity, the ego

is dways on the verge of deperwn&a~on with the discovery of the &lff and

echoes the s c h i z o p ~ process

c
which R.D. M

g described as a "voyage of

hitiation, a wwcendmtd experience of the loss of the Ego, which causes the

subject to remark: ''1had existed since the very be-g---kom

f o m of Ue-..to the present

the lowest

The Hindu afmm or conscious self is

always on the way to overcoming the mayu of becoriing a "global person''

who exists after fhe repressive sructures of the state have been internalized
along with a corresponding creation of the subjugated subject. The atmanf on
the contrary, comprised of the quditative merm-&ves of the gunas, seeks
the g y a m or knowledge for a realization of purusha in afmanf that is, of the
self in the self.

Dedeuze and Guattari's discourse reveals an intriguing comection

with the philosophy of the Bhapada Gita, especially in terns of the

reincamatory character of the subject of consuxrunation. As Deleuze and

Guattari define itf the anti-oedipal subject
[is]produced as a residuum dongside the machine, as an a p p a d k r or
as a spare part adjmcent to the m a W e p w w s through a l l depees of
the circle?and passes from one d e l e to another. This subject itself is
not at the centerf which is occupied by the machine, but on the
periphery, with no fixed identity, forever decentered?defined by the
states through which it passes. (20)

Reconceived thus, subject fornation is a secondary or residual aspect of the

natural processes of desiring machines. This subject c m o t be said irt anyway
to be a bourgeois monad or to possess an interior and essential ego-the
bourgeois monad with its anomie is nothing more than the result of
repressive apparatii enforced on the subject in one stage of its becoming* The
nomalization of the bourgeois is myth sedimented as realityr the
"individual" and the "rightsitof the individual are products of the power of

Kera&a~on. Against &isf Deleuze and Guattarirsproject aims at a de-

hdi~du&ation

though active dispersal and reconstitutionpthrough

multiplication and displacement, and though iemtori&aGon and de*

territo~aka~on.
The anti-oedipd subject that is being born and reborn along side the
various states of the deskhg-ma&es

in the same neighborhood as the

Pzlr~tshaor Self and Prdcriti or Nature. Here Prabiti with its thee modes
takes the place of desag-production. The ego or individual subject is an
illusion of the seIf as long as it is believe:

2 is the doer of h e action.

Once the self realizes that it is the forces of Prabiti that are responsible for

actionf the self then loses its illusion of a pragmatic or intentiond ego. All
action continues to course through the self but a self that is properly detached:
in this sense?then,the Hindu self/%lf can be said to be a body without

organsf a surface of recording and detachments.

Foucault is correct in seeing the anti-oedipal pcoject as profoundIy one
of ethics: "1would say that A~ti-Oedipzis...is a book of ethics?the first book of
ethics to be written in France in quite a

long b e 1 *(xii); howeverf here is a

moment where the anti-eodipal machine reaches a limit or point of

redundancy. At this pointf its ethics fly outf or escape through the h e s of
flight? the detemiodakatiom. Anti-Oedipus remains, in my view, the only
p o s t - s m c ~ & s tapproach that effectively injects the consideration of

prapatics into m y discussion of semiotic systemsf and is properly extradisciplinary as it is not M t e d by categories. It is this very quality which leads
them to an embrace of the dispersal of ethical intentionality down the path of
a delirious " h e of flight." Useful as the concept of detenitorhation appears

in aiding a critique of literary theories which privilege the commcte&ess of

language along with its inherent decomtructive aspects?it ends up in a dead

end by not being able to impart to the det&tofi&d

subject a c o w of

ethical action that is more meanhgfid than the de@ous escape through

"linesof fight." h fact, d e t e ~ t o ~ & a ~ of

o nthis kind seems nothing more
than yet another ethically empty ritual of the kind that Ashis Nandy,

speaking born a WE-avowedGadhian perspective#d e c I W : "it has become

more and more apparent that genocides, eco-disasters and ethnocides are but
s
to
the underside of corrupt sciences and psychopathic t e ~ o l o g i e wedded
new secular hierarchies which have reduced major civilizations to the status
of a set ofempty rituals'' (XI.The anti-Oedipal line of flight seeins to be one

such empty ritual, even though it takes off &om a terrain of proWerations

and disjunctions which is the very opposite of structures grounded in

pyramidal (and secular) hierarchies.
There is a striking resemblance between desiring production-wK& is
the condition of a machine without beginning and without end, a machine

which proliferates to infinity, and Prukfiti-w&& is driven by the three gt~nas

and fdfiUs the will of the Divine through endless and chaotic cycles of

creation and destruction. Desiring production is fundamentally a religious

conception but not one that is of the Book. The dosest Western andogue for
the anti-Oedipal system can be found in the Nietzschean concept of the Will
to Power and of the Eternal Retum#both of which exceed the restrictive
economy of Self and Other. But why should desmg-prduction exist at all?

For while Prukriti as a process is conjoined with Brahmanic consciouness as

its cause and witness, d e s ~ g - p r o d u c ~ oinn,its efforts to undermine the

individual and cohesive subject of intentionality, relegates subjectivity to the

status of a by-product. It unleashes the unconscious and its positive energies
of desiring production at the cost of the Conscious. In doing so, it makes the
mistake of displacing if not erasing altogether the gtman or conscious self of

the person; the entire m a M c edifice becomes a process without a witness-

h this regard it remains hcomp1ete when compared to the Hindu conception

of life as flowing from the one eternal causef B&anf

whose materid

m e e s t a ~ o mh the universe carry the potential for the realization of atman

and pz~rz~sha.In his ontologyf perpehd drives inherent in P r a ~ t lead

i
to
processes of creation and destruction h which the sum totd of aU energy is
always conse~ed.Brahman is the one cause of consciousness and material
processes? so that a l l processes in the universe are interconnected with the
same threads of quaties-asenerw, the gzmas of rajasfsatmar and tamas "in

every f'inite working of wilI and howledge we can discoverf supporting it, an
act of the infinite &will and &-howledge'' (EiG 144). Anti-Oedipus is

ethical as it exposes the various kinds of "fascism1'hidden and operative in

the construction of a nunnative Western reality but it spirals out on its own

line of fight without being able to providef by definition almost?an ethical

alternative. It may be a p e d that this is perhaps on purposef that perhaps
&is is altogether the pointf but do so wodd be to miss the point of my

discussion of the dhamic-ethical sociality of the seU/Self based on the

concept of Brahmanf the eternal principle of the miverse. There is,

however, a proximityf a "neighbodgt' to LEX a Heidegerian termf between

the Indian ontology and the anti-Oedipal framework, and 1 propose that a
dharmic-ethical base would provide a positive orientation for all

In closingf 1 wodd like to turn briefly tu the pMosophica1 work of

Friedrich Nietzsche and Mahatma Gmdhi. To pair them within the same
rubric may seem somewhat erroneous if one understands Nietzsehe's oeuvre

as the meditation towards a supremacist wamor-like Overman driven by an

asocial Will to Power and Gandhi's work as the pacifist d u c h e of a religious

man who preferred to amid conflict and violence at all costs* These
gaer&atiom ase gross as they are fdse but they serve the purpose of
indicating the general and enaneous regard in which the two men are held.
The convergence between Nietzsche and Gan& exists a t the level of reorg&hg

an ethical imperative within the context of a rapidly transforming

world in which technoIo@cd "progress" was b e c o m g h e standard of

measure for a fdfilled experience of Life. Both W e r s foresaw the
pathologies of violencef racismf and exploitation whi& have been the
insufficiently chdenged norm of the twentieth century- A little
juxtaposition is enlightening:
And perhaps a great day will come when a people...will exclaim
of its o m fiee will, "We break the sword,"..-the so-called m e d
peace, as it now exists in all countriesf is the absence of peace of
mind. One trusts neither oneself nor one's neighbor andf half from
hatxedf half from fea, does not lay down arms. Rather perish than
hate and fearf and twice rather perish than make onesdf hated and
feared-&
must someday become the highest maxim for every
single c o m o n w e a l ~too.
, (inK a h m 178)

Wherein is courage required-h blowing others to pieces from

behind a cannonf or with a smiling face to approach a cannon and
be blown to pieces?...Believe me that a man devoid of courage and
manhood can never be a passive res&ter...Passive resistance is an
all-sided sword, it can be used anyhow, it blesses him who uses it
and him against whom it is used. Without drawing a drop of blood
it produces far reaching resd&...One who is free from hatred
requires no sword. ( h P W 248)
This is only one instance of the numerous and striking resonances between
the philosaphies of Nietzsche md Gm&.

Both thinkers expound radical

critiques of a "modem" civilization seemingly destined to ovemhelming

te~o~ogical

Both are wary of the accompanying evanescence of

ethical codes which were rapidly becoming outmoded. And where Nietzsche
undertakes a revaluation of morals through a philosophy of seU<verco&gf

aimed not least against the ascendant German Reich, Gandhi mobilizes a
revolution whose impetus is derived from self-sacrifice and self-suffering,
age-old Indian tenets against which the armed might of the British empire
proved inadequate.
It is of paramount importance to keep in mind that both philosophers

insist on the centrality of practical and courageous action that reaches for
truth. In this regard, Nietzsche tells us: "Iwould praise any skqsis to which I

am permitted to reply: "Let us try it!" But I do not want to hear anything any
more of all the things and questions that do not permit of experiment-for
there courage has lost its rights" (M51).And likewise, Gandhi: "Science is
essentially one of those things in which theory alone is of no value
whatsoever-unless you have practical knowledge and conduct practical
experiments...If you go in for science in the right spirit then I know that there
is nothing so great or so valuable for making us accurate in thought and

accurate in action" (MPW 313). Both Gandhi and Nietzsche practiced the
"scientific experiments" they saw as fundamental to our ethical well-being; in

fact, it is hard not to see Gandhi fulfilling to the fullest Nietzche's description
of the overman (Sbermensch).12
Mahatma Gandhi's work reflects a twentieth century instance in which
the philosophy of Hinduism has been reinterpreted and dynamized in an
ethical form to defeat the colonial enterprise. His lessons regarding self-

'

I think that Gandhi's categories of uhimsa and satyagraha. supplemented by

Nietzsche concept of selbstiiberwindung. can make for a productive
application in the field of literary criticism. Though Gandhi's lessons
regarding self-sacrifice and self-realization through passive resistance and
truth-attainment are invaluable in mobilizing a project offering to infuse
much needed ethical stakes in the field of literary criticism, his views
regarding the zealous suppression of desire are unproductive and need the
revision offered by Nietzsche's philosophy of self-overcoming. Striking as it
may seem, Nietzsche's thinking is anticipatory in this regard and incorporates
Gandhi's urge for moral discipline while also allowing for the creative
productivity of desire.

sacrifice and self-realization through passive resistance and truth-attainment

are invaluable in mobilizing projects aimed at renegotiating the value and

function of the human being vis 2 vis the technological culture, that is, of
reinvesting value in the spiritual facet of existence. Gandhi uses India as a
model culture in which there exists a brand of ethnic universalism that has
long since learned to assimilate foreign influences. These influences range

from different world-views, ontologically speaking, to the events and

structure made possible by the technological progress of modem civilization.
Whatever the compelling force, of colonialism for instance, Gandhi
emphasizes the idea that "India is not nonoWest; it is India-the ordinary

Indian has no reason to see himself as the counterplayer or anti-thesis of

Western man" (Nandy 73); even in Gandhi,a dismissal of the Other. In his

vision, fulfilling human action must always continue to follow the ethical
paths of ahimsa and safyavaha. By ahimsa, Gandhi means abstention horn
hostility in thought, speech, or action, and by satyapaha Gandhi espouses the
notion of a t m a n - y w or self-sacrifice for the sake of truth.

An dhannfc-ethicalInjection
for Post-colonialism and Post-modernism

In a recent panel chaired by J.F. Lyotard at Emory University (April 18,

1993, the somewhat belabored theme of 'literature as Estrangement" was

discussed. Summing up the day's proceedings, Lyotard observed and agreed

with the panelists's presupposition that estrangement ontologically resides or

dwells in language itself, and that this language or tongue (langue) is already
divided from itself. The function of literary work, then, is to intervene in

this divide or fissure and "extract through its passage from the secreta of the
tongue a new idiom; literature is a "paroxysm" between the locuteur and the
language or tongue." This formulation prompted Lyotard's suggestion that
'one constant" exists in all literatures, namely, that literature contains a
"mystery" which must be approached but always missed by the writing. He
implied a "mysticism"in the writing of literature, by which "the writing

must always respect the unknowable mystery and treat it not with devotion
but with modest reverence."

Why make this ever unknowable "mystery" the cause of an

estrangement in literature? Why not let it be the cause of a celebration, that
is, why not celebrate this "mystery" which seems suspiciously dose to the

eternal mystery of Life. It is ever unknowable, it resides in our very language

or tongue-but instead of harboring an estrangement through language's
inability to capture, or express, or even "solve" the mystery, why not conceive

of it and receive it as a site of celebration of the ever unknowable? Why not

m affirmationf why a negation? In Hindu terms? thenf a conception of bath

the literary composition and reception as work performed as a yaps or

sacrifice to the divine Self and the eternal mystery. Literature as Yoga or
Works and not Literature as Estrangement; let literature performed as yqpza
be the site of pleasure and joy instead of estrmgemertk engagement wtth the

spirit of the eternal secret of Me.

The panel was non-plussed by this Hindu formulation, primarily
because they could not conceive of "sacrifice" as anything outside of the
violence of dying* We had reached an impasse. It is of greatest import that
death does not exist in Hinduism, a truth suc&ctly expressed in the
Bhapada Gita: that which exists, exists; that which does not existf does not
exist--rzasatu uidyizte bhavi~/ nabham aidyate safah..*It is f o n d that there is
no coming to be of the noneistent; It is found that the uut nan-existent
constitutes the red..*(II-16f WBG 101)- The negation and effacement of death
carries over to an inevitable negation and effacement of the Other.
The panel's reactionf and the consequent end of didopepindicate a
two-fold operation that structures the parameters of howledge-pws~ttoday
in those arenas in which the "post" marker is employed. The first consists of
the very necessary operation of exposing the fiction of all Western epistemic

certitude. This exposition depends h d m e n t d y on resistingf challenging,

and supplemenmg the rationality which is at the heart of both the
tedmo~ogicd''progress'*and the globally transfornative processes of the
history and legacy of European Imperialism. The second?as a consequence of
the first?concern the resulting inability to replace with a cohesive formation
that which has been exploded: chieflyf the p o s t d g h t e m e n t individual or
subjectf but also the certitude of projects based on transparent methods and

aims that hope to grasp completely the essence of their objects- These objects
diverse domain of howIedge, the problem today is reconcile the tremendous
impact of recent techn01ogies on the lived experience of h u m beings with a
determination of ethics, a justification of Me in ethical terms.14
Nowhere are these operations more in evidence than in the various

projects of past-c010nid and post-modern studies. With a rapidly spreading

homoge&aaon of gIobal d t u r e s through the media and the information
highways, inquiries in both fields have centered on processing h e newty
emergent d t u d environments without having the solace of what Lyotard

has called the narratives of emanciption.1~P o s t - s m a & t philosophy is a

narrative engendered by this failure of the narratives of emancipation. h

this regard, and h a m u c h as post-modedm finds its expression through

post-smcaaEst thought, p o s t - c o l o ~ a mas a fieid of inquiry in academia is
the bastard child of post-modemm. Post-coIonia1 theory is predominantly

p o s t - s m c ~ a b t - H o h Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Robert Young, to name a

I%ach object defies mastery; nonetheless, an immense amount of financial,
scientific, and human resources are expended towards attaining an ever more
complex composition regarding the particular knowledge of the object being
"mastered." As Lyotard has stated in The Postmodern Conditiuav the criteria for
measuring the value of a11 new knowledge today has become a function use:
what use is it to me? (see pages 48-57. especially)
I41n this respect* 1 recommend John Caputo's Againsr Ethics. His
deconstructive rhetoric is packaged in an easy to read* entertaining language
which relies on the performance of narrative knowledge. Though he is
against an originary ethics--"I have already owned up to being cut off from
wigins and beginnings. I am always too late for origins. 1 never arrive in
timeir (7)--he remains firmly within the deconstructive eesystem" of language
from which he posits the final unknawability of ethics; there is, ultimately,
no practical solution living 'eethically" in the midst of an ethical crisis. It is
perhaps for this reason that he remains wary of the etHegelian eagle" which
awaits to swallow him, Derrida, Lyotard, Levinas. into the "System" (43).
1 5 ~ y o t a r dmentions the following as examples of the grand narratives of
emancipation: "the progressive emancipation of reason and freedom, the
progressive or catastrophic emancipation of labor (source of alienated value
in capitalism), the enrichment of a11 humanity through the progress of
capitalist technoscience ...Hegel's philosophy ..." (PE 18).

few-and yetr this means that it is unable to, or co-opted horn being able to,
make an original or different c~ntribution:in espousing p o s t - s m ~ & m , it
espouses a h a &tinct Western ontology. Post-colod&sm needs to dismpt
the economy of Western discouse of which it is a part but to which it owes

the responsibility of making a breach by taking up the option -todiscover,

reclaim, and assert its ncm-Western ontologies.
A k s t step in any such dismption would be to rethink texfziality in the

name of ethics?and for my project, in the name of dhamic-ethics- The

'fsystem'twith which 1 intend to effect this ethical injection is, as I have
discussed in the previous chapter, conceph&ed through m Indian ontology

in which &ere is no Other. In adopting this "nativisttV

approach, I must make
two things dear. Firstf it is as e q u d y vaIid as a l l other Western approaches
founded on the Seif/Other dichotomyFand is perhaps more urgent Z one
agrees that the Western universe is in crisis. Hopefullyf in this end-ofrn3Ienn.i~
juncture of rndti-cuhxual receptivity in the academia, my
nativist voice can be heard in a ciamain aheady inundated by "native" pastcolonial voices that continue espouse the Western ontology of the Self/Oher.

Second? my approach is not motivated nor akin to the supposeci~y

comrnonp1ace nativist position Robert Young describes in White

Mytkolugies:
those who evoke the '*nativist1*
position through a nostalgia for a lost
or repressed culture idealize the possibility of that lost origin being
recoverable in a l l its former plenitude without dowing for the fact
that the figure of the lost o r i N r the other that the colonizer has
repressed, has itself been constructed in terms of the cofonizer's o m
self-image. (WM 168).
Young's statement demonstrates the impossibility in his thought of being
able to conceive a position that is not founded in a Western ontoIogy. 1 must
assert to h e contrary that my "nativist" pasitian which embraces a dhamic-

ethical ontoIogy, and employs the philosophicd vision contained in the

Indian tradition of darshu~a,is not marked by nostdgia for a lost d m e .

Indeed, the processing of the events of the Imperial colonization of India

though a dhumic-ethicd hamework needs no recotuse whatsoever to the

kind of philasophical. thinking that lies behind Young's statement above.

The much belabored concept of the "ofhm,'*

for examplef does not exist in the
domain of darshizrza. A primary thrust of my dissertation is chalImge the
unquestioned hegemony of a Western ontology which defines the terms of
all so-called "post-colonial" inquiries; a regurgitation of Western poststructuralist pMosophies must not remain a sufficient cause and exercise in
post-cobniaIt and even postmadem, studies today.
It WU
be instructive here to turn to Ashis Nmdyls "alternative
~*~
rnythography of history which denies and defies the values of h i ~ t o r yin

The Intimate Enmy.

Nandy makes an important contribution against the

predammtly Western bias informing most if not all of post-colonial

discourse in academia by tuning to hdia, where the "non-modem" tradition
of ethnic universalism has remained vibrant beforef duringf and after the

experience of Imperial colonization, hdia, Nmdy emphasizes throughout, is

not "non-West; it is India." Granting the bwfomation in culture and being

that 'lmimics'tWestern structures and attitudes#Nandy reminds us that this

"modem1*
section of India represents a small rnhority compared to the
"ordinary h d i a n [who] has no reason to see h s e I f as a counterplayer or an
antithesis of the Western man" (73). Textual critics of the Spivdcian trend
will, of course#focus on the status of '*ordinaryt'and have a decomtmctive

field day, but more importantly for the argument at hand, Nmdy claims that
the precolonial hdia has neither been lost nor repressed but has always

existed in its own peculiar indigenow fashion of a c c o m o d a ~ o nand

adjustment:
'Ibis is the underside of non-madern India's ethnic tmiversdism. it is
a ~ v e r s ~ wrhin
ch takes into account the colonid experience,

including the immense sdering colonidism brought, and builds out

of it a maturergmore contemporary, more seU-critical version of Indian
badi~om
...hdia has tried to capture the differential of the West Gthin
its own dtwd domain, not merely on the basis of a view of the West
as politicdy intrusive or as d W y iderior, but as a subculture
meaningful in itselfgthou* not aIl-important in the Indian context.
(75-76)

I am ~

~ of course,
g that, the reason this ethnic tmivers&m exists and

operates as Nandy describes it is due to the nature of a culture whose

traditional self-definition has not been premised on the t y r m y of the Other
but on the delight of Brahman as the eternal principle-this is the Indian
context. In my efEort to mobfie an "indigenous theory,'? 1 must also state
that I

find problematic Spivaks dismissal of the U e with her statement that,

"1 c m o t understand what indigenous theory there might be that can ignore
the reality

of nineteenth century history... To cmstrz~ctindigenous theories

one must i p a r e the last few centuries of historical involvementtf(PC69,

emphasis a e ) . Spivak's belief that indigenous theory would need to be
*'constructed'fis perplexing given the vast and extant heoretico-p~losopfica~
texts within the Indian tradition of darsbana. Are we to believe that they are
de fact0 inadequate to explain the meaning of events in the 1 s t four hundred
years of the experience of h p e r i d colonization? Or worse yet, in what seems
implicit in Spivak's remark above, are we to believe that there has been such
a radical schism in our constitutive beings that a fivehornand year old
philosophical tradition with a strikingly different ontological conception of
the universe than exists in the West must be silenced, forgotten, ignored?
Certainly not, 1 assert, especially in h e &exmath of the mprecedented

violence and ethical failure in the ~ a t i e 6 ~ whose

c m ~enabling
condition has been the t e ~ o l o g i c df*progxesst*
ushered in by an idea of

modernity that is the product of a purely Western conception of Me,of a

sounds a waming
singularly Western ontology. The name of *'A~chwitz'~
s i p d with regard to the inherent fdwe that a Self/Ckher untology can and

has resulted h. Fur ''Aus&wit.z8" then, if for no other reason, an invitation

to dharmic-ethics

?'he nature of Spivak's d ~ ~ sresides

a l in her vdorization of textual

practices which inform the various narratives of our subjecthood. Her

project signals the urgency for initiating strategies of decomtructive resistance
against all resultant systems whose proclivity is absolutism of one kind or
another. The texts which she investigates, without ever forgetting the textual
momeqt of her o m engagement itself, cross over not only the boundaries of
history, Marxism8Western philosophy, literature, feminism, m d
imperialism and coloniaLism, but are part of a "network or "weave"-

f ' p o ~ ~ c o - p s y c h ~ ~ x u dyou
~ s oname
~ o , it1*-whosefabric is not simply
language but which is the textual inescapability of our reality: "that notion
that we are effects within a much larger text/asue/weave of which the ends
are not accessible to us is very different from s a w g that everything is

Impage'' (PC 25)- But what is the h e a d of the weave? 1 argue that it must
be reconceived in t e r n of d k ~ r m i c e ~ as
c sthe primary soaafity of the Self,
mci further, that one cannot in good faith continue to ignore dharmic-ethics
at the expense of post-smcmakt textual discourses.

Am I grossIy mistaken? Consider8for instance, the fact that Spivdc is

held in high regard by her cofleagues for being "one of the few inteIlectuals
actually carrying out the suggestians made by the post-Wghtement ethical
movement associated with Demda and E m m u e l Levinas*'(SR 9). 1 find

myself agreeing? in fact, with Landry and Maclean's statement; what I disagree
with (see m y first chapter) is the sole privilege given to the Western path of

ethical inquiry in the Derridean and kvinasian manner insofax as postcolonid studies is concerned. In other words, with regard to Spivak's
itinerary?it is the hvers&ation

of the decomtructive project? of

deconstruction as the dominant or recommcied mode of critique in postcolonial studies that I find tragically limited in m d e r s t m h g the "truth,"

truth as a constructionf of our ontolo@caIbeing. &commdon is a Western

phenomenon born of a Western tradition; its application allows the
statement that "ethics is the experience of the impossib~e"to be meaningfully
representative of the aporia (aporific?) nature of all our discursive certitudes,
laws, systems, and experiences. Not to say hat this representation can be

expressed across aU cultures that have discursive realities. But the aporia and
absence that deconstruction uncovers k e and time again is nothing other
than another form of "the mystery"

which Lyotard addressed in his tak.

What becomes obvious is that there are vaxious form and disguises for the
eternal return of this Mystery. It makes contra&ctions, aporias, paradoxest

and moral dilemmas abound. But above all this Mystery is? I will reiterate,
the Eternal mystery of Me whose dh~mic-ethicalconception is through the
preciiscmive ethical sociality of the Self. Here, we find ourselves in a
radically different ontological determination where dkarmic-ethical sociality
is the fabric of an interconnected material and conscious reality. Dkarmicethical sociality flows horn the eternal and single principle of the universef
Brahman, and it exists properly speaking, au-del& de la Zangzie.
Perhaps the foI.lowing claim can be excused its boldness for the sake of

bringing home my point: discourses priviieghg discourse as the site of ethics

are unethical. In various more or less intelligible statemen&-su& as

"Puuuoir-Sau~iris the onto-ph~ommolo@cdtruth of ethics, to the very

extent that it is its contradiction in subjectingt' (Spivak, SR 154)-they point to
the fact that there i s an absence at the beginning and, equally, that the

beginning is absent. The question is what to da with this absence since times
immemorid, and we are faced with at least two different ontulo@cal
traditions: the (Western) Self and Othert and, the Indian self and Self. The
tradition, d t u r e , and history of the Self and Other has led ultimately to an
enterprise called Decommc~onwhich incessantly forefkonts the
unknowable mystery#albeit in disguise, in every construction; on the other
handt we have the tradition, culturef and history based on an ontology of the
self and &If, which keeps the owa able mystery at the forefront of all its
constructions. A fhdamental difference.

To say aU this is not to make an ouMght dismissal of a l l Westem

discourse. It is rather to signal a redundancy in the operation of the critical
enterprise within a certain sector of academia. In particular, I am expressing
dksa&fac~onover the fact that there seem to be an exponential
proliferation of engagement invested in playing Impage games armed with
the tools of deconstruction within the domain of post-colonial and post-

modem studies. Each fieldf individually, has undergone extensive and often
rigorous ~ e o r e ~ c k a e o n sOn
. the side of the post-colonial, theoretical
positions have been articulated in a domain that has provided the security of
its immanent marealization, whether in socio-economic, politicohistoricalf or identiiy-racial terms. This fact has enabled the post-colonial
enterprise to adopt a self-righteous attitude vis a vis questions that address
the overlap between it and the post-modern. Indeed, the following
statement, which serves as an introduction to a recent selection of essays
addressing the Post-colo~al/Pos~odem
issue in The Post-colonid2 Readerf is

symptomatic of a certain type of criticd sleightaf-hmd: *'Forin fhefinal

analysis8 the problems af rqresentation in the post-colonial texf asszme a
political dimension very diferenf from the radical pro~isionali& now
accepted as findamental tu postmudemism

(117). Such a formulation

harbors a prejudice which sigmfies two diffidties. First, The "problems of

representationRtin the postcolonial assume their political dimension by

rights, that is, by the right of historical contingency. This m e w fhat all
heratwe in that area of the world referred to as the "ThirdWorH" must be
informed by its Colonial past, and must confront at various level($) its
National present. The textual engagement with concepts of representation,
(National) identity formation, and self-definition automatically attain a
t'politicd"urgency, and entail a critical reading that is above and beyond
relativistic or ambivalent redactions of the postmodernist kind. This
prohibition functions due to a paradoxical reversal-even though the '*Third
Worldt' is criticized for being a pejorative (neo)hperiaI label as it "both
sipfies m d blurs the functioning of an economicr political, and imaginary
geography able to unite vast and vastly differentiated areas of the world into a

single "mderdevelopefl terrainrt(143)?and presents that which must be

erased?it is its very preservation that unifies the postc~~onial
crifical
discourse under one rubric. In his sense, thenr it can be argued that the Postcolonial enterprise is r e a c t i o ~ a yin its most findamen tal compunent.
Secondr the postmodem is credited with a "radical provisionality" that
strips its textual message of any power for "actionfttor for "change," according
to a specific yet spurious h e of reasoning which assumes that the
pastmodem enterprise-"the d e c ~ n s ~ c t i oofn the centralized logocentric
master narratives of European culture" (117)wis content simply with h e

kgNigh&g of fissure, fragmentationrambivalence, and does not extend its

deconstruction to m y rneaningfid poiiticd agenda. It is thus that we come

across opinions such as Diana Brydon's which attach onto pos&odemsm
the stigma of New Criticism: * * ~ o s ~ d e d supdates
m ] the ambiguity so

favored by the New Criticsgshifting their formal mdysis of the text's unity
into a psy&omdysk of its fissures, and their isolation of text horn world into
a worldhess that cynically discounts the effectiveness of any action for social
change-" (137). h p l i a t i
n this view of the postmodem is the functioning of

the label "First World:' also impliat is the belief that the post-colonial
e n t e ~ r i s eis not similarly debilitated by the cynical discounting endemic to
post-m0de-m.

Being First-World productsgpostmodem texts end up being

radic&y provisional since they are articulated in a zone of socio-politicoeconomic superiority, a zone that remains "First WorIdl' regadess of the
alternatives suggested by the postrnodem, since neither of these alternatives
seeks to undermine the hegemony of the d o h a n t power base that is the
"First World." It can be argued that according to this viewpoint the
postm~dern eaterprise is cofisemafiue in its most findamental cumponefit.

However, this assertion of fimdamentd difference erases the enabling

condition that is common to both post-madedm and post-colo~a~srn.
Even in the Post-Colonial Reader, which represents a sustained dismissal of
we, are told that the
post-modefism in favor of p o s t ~ o l o ~ a h m
postrnodem, "the cieeomtruction of the centralized, logocentric master
narratives of European culture," is "very similarf'to the post-colonial, "[the]
project of dismantling the Cen&e/Mar@ binarism of Imperial discourse-"
(117). Similar, but for some inexplicable reason, not identical. For what else
is the logocentric master narrative if not the Ca&e/Ma@ binarism of

Imperial discourse? And isn't " d e c o m ~ c ~ o being

n l ' opposed per force to

which allows a reading of postmodem fldeconstruction"

" d i s m a n ~ g * ' That
?

and that which allows a reading of postcolonial "dismantling" employ the

same philosophico-theoretical machinery: Post-Structuralism. Indeed, the
leading postmodern as well as the leading postcolonial critics rely heavily on
the conceptual positions played out by the post-structuralist philosophers.

How is it, then, that the prevalent viewpoint supports the idea of an apolitical
ambivalent flux, on the postmodern hand, and simultaneously supports
political univalent blocks, on the postcolonial hand? What are "the problems
of representation" in the post-colonial texts? Who determines them, what
readings are encouraged? Why is it "accepted and by whom, that
postmodern texts are apolitical and provisional? But more importantly, what
is the socio-political nature and the hidden academic agenda or impetus of

such criticism that reduces, as we have seen, the post-structuralist machine

itself into a machine capable of producing only the conservative postmodern
or the reactionary postcolonial?l6

The answer I propose addresses two intertwined concerns; one deals

with ethics, the other with the nature of the discipline called "postcolonialism" within academia. I propose, further, that the operations within
the two fields are indicative of a containment operation within academia

which seeks to neutralize the disruptive potential that is the proper charge

generated by the post-structuralist critique. The academic sanction issued for

16see Kumkum Sangari's "The Politics of the Possible" for a sensitive reading
of G.G. Marquez's fiction within a "marvellous realismw context which is not
identical with the postmodernist project of the West. Sangari seems wary of a
postmodernism which wants to swallow-up the differences of post-colonial
literatures into a version Western self-negation: "postmodernism appears to be
a maneuver based on a series of negations, and self-negations through which
the West reconstrues its identity as a "play of projections, doublings,
idealizations, and rejections of a complex, shifting otherness"" ( 185). Who
these postmodernists are is unclear in her work; to be sure, her postmodernists
apparently have none of the Nietzschean affirmation that is characteristic of
the postmodernism that Deleuze and Guattari project in Ami-Oedipus and A
Thousand Plateaus.

interdisciplinary "post" discourses abets the elision of ethics and does so for

the specific purpose of a containment that is the sign of a last-ditch

conservatism. This elision at one end serves the reinforcement and
prolongation of outmoded turn-of-the-twentieth-century structures and
categories of knowledge, whose principle, by definition almost, is
compartmentalization. And while the "post" disciplines have exploded
compartments of all sorts, they have been allowed to do so at the cost of

burying ethics under the resultant rubble. As a result, the open field has
become one without a cohesive direction in sight since there is no ethical
imperative or motive. As a result, "post" criticism has become a cannibalistic
reflection onto itself, becoming the insatiable consumer of its own text and
textuality, feeding on itself and regurgitating its material ad infinitum.
Meanwhile, the power-knowledge base is held intact, patting itself on the back
behind the scenes for having had and still having a sound ethical raison
d 'etre.

This somewhat paranoiac description is meant to suggest conspiracy;

but the powers-that-be, I feel, do conspire and collude together against
deterritorializing transformations. Transformation is always a process of
inter and extra-disdplinary operations; transformation is also the rule of the
universe. But as a witness to transformation, one must first and foremost be
grounded ethically-a Hindu agent, for example, is always already a part of the
network of the sociality of the Self; as a participant in the perpetual processes
of transformation one must base one's actions-criticism is an action-in
accordance with those ethics, or dharmic-ethics.
Here, a short exposition of the function of the ksetra or "Zone" and the
ksetraeya or "knower of the Zone" is essential for my discussion. At one
level it helps reinforce the conception of an Other-less universe which is the

sum of the processes + witness, Prakriti + Purusha, Nature + Consciousness.

At an another level, it aids my endeavor of fore-fronting a dharmic ethical
consideration to the field of literary criticism in general, and the fields of postcolonialism and post-modernism in specific. In simple terms, "the Gita
explains the ksetram, Zone, by saying that it is this body which is called the
Zone of the spirit, and in this body there is someone who takes cognizance of
the Zone, Ksefrasya, the knower of Nature" (EG 398). The Gita teaches that
true knowledge is knowledge of both the Zone and the knower of the Zone,

the ksetra and the ksetrasya. The Zone or body is comprised of the following
elements: "The great elements, the consciousness of "I,"the intelligence and
the urunanifest, the senses, ten and one, and the five Zones of action of the

senses, Desire, aversion, pain, the organic whole, consciousness, steadfastness,

This briefly is described as the Zone with its modifications" (Xin:5-6; WBG
534-35).17 In such a ksetra, the ksetrasya must strive to attain true knowledge,

which is "constancy in knowledge of the Supreme [Self],observing the goal of

the knowledge of truth" (XIII:11; WBG 539). It is interesting that the object of

knowledge, as it is declared by Krishna to Arjuna, is a non-rational

proposition which defies dualism and exceeds binarism, and sounds
suspiciously like a deconstructive principle: "That which is the object of
knowledge, I shall declare, knowing which, one attains immortality; it is the
begmless supreme Brahman which is said to be neither existent nor nonexistent" (XHI:12; WBG 540). Finally, sodality is reaffirmed as the primary

condition of all existence: "Any being whatever, standing still or moving,

l'l^he "great elements" are: ether, air. fire, water and earth. The
"consciousness of the "I"" is the translation of the Sanskrit ahamkarus, which
also means consciousness of self and of self-making. The ten senses refer to
the eye, ear, skin, tongue, nose, and the five organs of action, the hand, foot,
mouth, anus, and genital organ. The "one" sense is the mind, and finally, the
five fields of action of the senses are sound, touch, color, taste and smell.
Sargeant reminds us that these are all Sankhya concepts.

hasmuch as it is born? Arises fiom the union of the ketra and the ksetragya"

(MIE26; WBG 5%); I have insisted on calling this union sociality since t h i ~
union of Zone and atnzm-z or self is traversed throughout by the same

parasha or Self.
Tme knowledge, thenr begins when the knower of the ksetra or Zoner

the ksetrizg-ya,supplements knowledge of the Zone itself by turning into

herself to learn of hexself within the Zone. Knowledge of either one aspect is
insufficient mci incomplete; it is the simdtmeous engagement of both

aspects of knowledge and their d c a ~ o into

n a celebration of B r h a n

which is true knowIedgef that isf *'itis the knowledge at once of the Zone and
its knower...a united and even unified seU-howledge and worid-howledge?

which i s the red Uumhation and the only wisdomtt (EG 400). The
inMguing question of the moment becomes to what extent does the Literary

crific, the post-colonial or the post-modem theorist, perhaps even h e poststructuralist philasopher, fulfill the condition of knowing not only the Zone

but knowing also his or her o m self within the Zone? It seems dear that
o d y one half of the equation is W e d by &cawsep~vae@g knowers;

and if any claim can be made that such a bower is aware of his or her
complicity or implication within the Zonef 1 hold it to be an insufficient
process to properly h l f i h g the dharmic-ethical condition of seu-howledge
because it means only that the knower is aware at a discursive level.18 The
problem is that the discursive reign tells only half the story, and discourse
criticism-or hawledge of the Zone as dbcouse-dupbcates the conditions of

18~sychiatricand psychoanalytic studies may be held up here as a

contradiction to my argument, but 1 find them also to be a function of
discourse. The schizoanalysis project envisioned in Arzfi-Oedipus is perhaps
closer to reaching a truth about the field and the knower of the field, but as 1
proposed in my previous chapter, it erases the Witness, the Conscience, and is
ultimately also an incomplete model.

a scientific knowledge akin to physics, mathematics, and the like. Here

Lyotardvsciisibction between scientific knowledge and narrative howledge

is useful. It can be said that the theorist or critic as betragya or knower of the
Zone has fden prey to the institutional iegiihation of knowledge at a local
level. To add what is missing in Lyotaxd's discourse, it can be said that the

petif*r&cifsare the signal of a knowledge in which knowledge of the ksetrapja

or knower of the Zone has been covered over, that their IeGbation purely
through the fdfihnent of their pedomative fimction is telling of a world in

which discourse is pureiy scientific and masquerades as the t ~ ~ t hWhat

. is
needed to fidfill the dkarmice~calcondition of the knowledge of the
knower of the Zone is very much the non-dismsive and predismsive
reality of the primary sociahty of ethics, of existence, of being. For f&eGita

says that the object of knowledge which is Brahman is beyond logicf

rationality, and comprehension: ltOutsideand inside beings, hose that are
moving and not moving, becmise of its subtlety this is not to be

cumprehe~ded...remote and dso near. Undivided yet remaining as if divided

in aIl beings, And the sustainer of beings, this is the abject of knowledgef their
devourer and creator1'(XIEl5-16; WBG 544, emphasis mine). Knowledge of

the knower of the Zone must combine with knowledge of the Zone itself to
reach its llsubtlellobject of non-comprehemion-gnij~qam:not to be knownF
not to be understood, not to be cornprdmded. M y such a unified
knowledge can impart a d h a r m i c - e ~ c dmeaning to action in the world,
n the action of critiei~rn.~~
including the action of ~ e o r e G & a ~ oor

1 9 ~ as consequence of my discussion, an intriguing corollary, so to speak,

presents itself. Only narrative knowledge* in this sense, can be ethical,
whereas all systematic discourse which manage to suppress in one form or
another the pre and nan discursive conditions of the knowledge of the knower
of the field are ips0 fact0 unethical and non-dharmic. This takes us to the
opposite end of the claim made by Levinas regarding the unethical nature of

My project seek not only to &ect a transformation h the nature of

htibtion&ed

post-colonial

course, but insofar as post-colod&m

is

intimately imbricated with post-modemm, it aisns at centralizing ethics

without detracting fiom or negating the value of discourse criticism. In other
words, if I do indeed wish to suggest and perform a bansfomation in the
action of criticism,this transformation is an additive process, one of
completiw and complemata~on. Not just the Zone henceforth, but also
always the knower of the Zone. Not just discourse and t e x W t y , but also
always non-discursive (as wen as discursive) dhamic-ethics. Not just
redundant reflections of the legitimized institutional terms of engagement
sanctioned by the establishment, but also an expIosion of ethical and
universd difference onto reductive dots that try to "containr' postcolonialism as well as post-mode~sm.
t ~its~ c s
Symptomatic of this espausal of ~ c o w s e ~ ~ o uand
meaningless relativism is the contribution of the eminent post-colonial critic
Hami K. Bhabha in his essay entitled "The C o m t m e n t to Theory." It is by
intervening in Bhabha's argument that the urgency of a reinvestment in
ethical positioning is revealed. Though at times incisive and provocative,
Bhabhais thinking finds itself time and again unable to anchor itself to any

ethical gomd from which it could then a y s t d k e a reading beyond the easy
conceptual impasse offered up by his brand of post-smcm&st rhetoric. This
is why Bhabha fomulates his commitment &us: "I want to take my stmd on

the shifting margins of cultural dkplacement- at confomds any profound

or "authentictrsense of a "national" cdture or an "organic'r hteUeaa1-md
ask what fhe h c t i o n of a committed theoretical perspective might be, once
-

-- -

- -

tropic language. A strong argumem presents itself in my account here for the
unethical nature of a11 language that suppresses its tropic nature--for all
language, is after a11, trope.

the d t u r d and historical hybridity of the postcolonid world is taken as the

paradigmatic point of departure1'(LC21).Bhabha conscio~lypositions

himself in the fluctual and kmfomative moment of migration. Notably,

this position is played out entirely in the realm of academic discourse, nay,
more so in the r e a h made available by the indubitable conceptual space
between the si@er

and signified-in the "vicissitudesof the movement of

the signifierff(23). From such a vantage point, Bhabha subordinates poIiticd

action and the possibility of social e-foma~on

to the apparently

efiarating "discursive ambivalence [in rhetoric and writing] which makes

the political possible'' (24). It is clear that Bhabha as the knower of his
discursive Zone is ignorant of the non-discursive reality i n f o d g him as

ksetrag-ya,as knower within the Zone and enabling the "discursive

ambivalence" he so cherishes.

h constructing his theoretical commitment Bhabha attempts to break

down the bharism of theory versus politics? a relationship in which dearly0
for him? "critical theory" ftmctions as the "Other." As always byal to the
post-smmaEst wont, Bhabha focuses on the "language of political
ec~nomy,'~
on the scene of "writing''politics, and proceeds to discuss the
ramifications of analyzing the discursive structures informing geo-pditical
artidations. This process conveniently allows for him to disavow himself
from providing a putative "object" to his commitment. Answering his own
question0"comxniment to what?", Bhabha can be glib in saying that "I do not
want to identi9 any specific "object" of political aUe@mce...It is a sign uf
political maturity to accept that there are many forms of political writing
whose different aspects are obscured when they are divided between the
"theorist1'and the "activist"" (21). Really? k not Bhabha's rhetoric rather a
sign of political escapism in the name of discourse? Is it not rather a sign of

pohticd immaturity to suppase that by locating himself in the interstitid

hm y
space between theory and politicsghe can "internme ideo1o@cagyqf

meaningful manner, that isginfIuence or effect the processes of "social

k w f o m a ~ o n ? I fBhabhafsproject seems no more than a subservient
accomodation to the institutionai delimitations of what may be said by the

''rna.r@Ucritic; for what Bhabha is in effect saying is that everything is

m a r e or boundary! A pleasing exexcise in discourse perhaps but if there is a

co-tment

in his theory it is one that aims to postpone

any substantive

change in the power nexus of academic discowse.

A bdmentai problem lies in the valorization of the bharisrn of

theory and politics. h 13habha1sdiscussiont **pofitics"
slides into the slot
traditionally occupied by "praxis." A probable reason for this sleight of hand
is that in using the tern 'lpofiticsi'Bhabha is able to distance himself more

easily &om ethics than he wadd be if he was to remain in the domain of

praxis. Indeed, it is hard to replace the word ''po~tical"with "practical" in the
following statements: "the political subject-as indeed the subject of politicsis a discursive event...*' (23)?md, ' m a t the attention to rhetoric and writing

reveals is the discursive ambivalence that makes the 'rpulitical"possiblef1(24)*

The erasure of praxis is further complicated by the absence of an ethical basis

for his own writing. Having done away with the need of committing his
theoretical engagement to any objectt Bhabha is content to uncover the
"abstract free play of the s i w e r " that reveals "an ambivalence at the point
of the enunciation of a politics" (24-25). Employing the discursive

transcriptions of Foucauldian power/howledge and the iterative slippages of

Derridean difkrance, Bhabha digs himself into a hole he is satisfied to call the
"space of translation" and from which he constructs the non-object of his
theoretical commitment: "a political object that is newt neither the m e nor

the other, properly alienating] our political expectations, and chang[ing,] as it

must, the very forms of our recognition of the moment of politics" (25

emphasis original). I would go so far as saying that Bhabha's new object is

neither the one nor the other nor anything at all. What I would ask of

Bhabha is that he climb out of the "space of translation" and survey the
actuality of Zones where concrete and non-discursive objects exist, where

knowledge must take into account of both the ksetra and the ksetragya, the
zone and the knower of the zone, where the first step is a dhamic-ethical
assumption of an ultimate unknowability in all rational and linguistic
systems, and where, nonetheless, action in the world must follow a path of
affirmation through yagna.
A further problem arises when we are led to believe that history

properly happens only in this space of translation made available in theory by

a critique engag&. This then allows for the conception of a "discursive

temporality" in which a true "negotiation" between existing power structures

and emergent ones is possible, a negotiation which is happily oblivious to the

necessity of looking beyond its theoretical moment to any teleological or

transcendent History, to any future as such. Instead, it is a moment of such
radical import that it even "destroy[s] those negative polarities between
knowledge and its objects, and between theory and practical-political reason"
(25); and it is a space in which Bhabha can wholesomely assert that "there is
no given community or body of the people whose inherent, radical historicity

emits the right signs" (27 emphasis original).

This is well and good in the realm of Derridean discourse, but in the
realm of social praxis it difficult to see how activism and struggles for social
transformation are to benefit by putting their objectives under erasure: "Each
objective is constructed on the trace of that perspective that it puts under

erasure; each political object is determined in relation to the other, and

displaced in that critical act" (26). Again, this is a masterful deconstructive if
not obfuscatory way of saying that life exists in a vast interconnected network
fueled by absence and without beginning. But Bhabha's statement is also
redundant for it basks in its discourse without engaging the dftarmic-ethical
conditions in which the "displacing," the "erasure," the "trace," etc. operate.

In the case of the Naxalite struggle in India, for example, it makes little sense
to adopt a commitment which urges reflection on the textual determinations
for a group of people who live the unique and abysmal poverty of the Indian
dispossessed and whose existential lives are always already informed by ethics
and are certainly not the resulting object of reflexive theory or writing; in fact,
their espousal of a Maoist-Leninist ideology is theorizable only through and

after the existential violence of their commitment to social revolution. This

commitment is not discursive but ethical. The point I am making is that
events in history are precipitous and are always on the other side of the space

of translation which Bhabha valorizes. Bhabha makes the Derridean zone of

theory a primordial locus for understanding the constructedness, differential

and deferential, of all structures; in this zone, however, ethics can be ignored

or subordinated to discursive effects-a dangerous and irresponsible

maneuver. It is on the other side, the pragmatic side where objects and
subjects exist, where they are interpellated through various structures, and
most importantly, where they are animated only in ksetras or Zones whose
constitutive threads carry the bond of a dharmic-educs that the theorist needs
to make his or her commitment. Bhabha's is a case of misplaced emphasis,

then: the problem is not that one needs a Derridean commitment to theory
but that theory needs a commitment to ethics. And such a commitment,
finally, is impossible in the space of "the translation of theory."

There are two additional intme1ated concern which need to be taken

up here. The fist deals with the difference between ' ' d t w a l differenceV'and
"4-d

divezsity," the second with the "ThirdSpace of enunciation."

Though Bhabharscd for a rdocatian of the demands made of theoretical

work h the Zone of d t u d difference is sdubrious, his immediate m d
constant will to assert the hybridization of the practice of language at the site
of its enunciation negates theorySspossibility of an e ~ c d - p r a p a t i cproject

or h s t - By valorizing the splitting effect of the enunciative process, a

splitting between "a stable system of reference" and *'thenecessary negation of
the certitude in the articulation of new demands" (351, Bhabha glorifies the

p o s t - s m c ~ dspace, the "zone of o c d t instability9'where formations such

as authority, resistance, tradition, d t u r e are '*neitherthe one nor the other."

I do not take issue with the post-structural deconstruction of terms that

are invested with the sanction of le@&a~on; what is problematic in

Bhabha's "location1'is the fact that he uses the p o s t ~ s ~ c ~ a took
l i s t to

remain m

y q u a w e d in the space, or more precisely the moment, of the

instability, of the ~'vi&situdesl~

of the s i p . h doing so, he fixates on the
"Third space" in the semiotic structure of signification inspired by Saussurian
and Lacanian p ~ a p l e s :
The pact of interpretation is never simply an act of communication
between the 1 and the You designated in the statement. The
production of meaning requires that these two places be mobilized in
the passage though a Third space, which represents both the general
conditions of language and the specific implication of the utterance in a
perfornative and institutionid strategy of which it cannot "in itself'' be
conscious. What this mconscious relation introduces is an
ambivalence in the act of interpretation. (36)
Apart horn providing a useful if veiled s

q of fhe founding principles

of semiotics in the second section of his essay on the commitment to theory,

Bhabha does not instantiate my productive reorientation in the exercise of

interpretation. By prioritking the third space, the perfunctory ambivalence

in any act of enunciation, the u n c o ~ ~ o tenah

us
of utterance, Bhabha shirks
away from taking a stand, one that is situated in the domain of pragmatics

and one that is ethicdy situated in the world of concrete events. In making
statements such as, "the meaning of the utterance is quite literally neither the

one nor the other" (361,Bhabha only provides an affirmative answer to the
very question he consciously wishes to negate-"Ts the language of theory
merely another power ploy of the culturally privileged Western elite to
s o m power-howledge
produce a discourse of the Other that r e ~ o r c e its
equation?" (20-21). Bhabhais third space seems just such a ploy.
But Where is Bhabha located? Needless to say, the site of Bhabha's
production is titat temtory marked by the overlap between the disciplines of
post~modefismand post-colod&m.

It is a territory wheref dismsively

speaking the subject is split, legitimation and authority are never whole, and
ambivalence mocks the certitude of aIl enterprise. But more importantlyf it is
a terrain in which the critic as Bhabha divests respomibzy by playing the

differance game of infinite deferrak without having to present any ethical

referrals to or for his enterprise. To his credit, Bhabha is M y a master sans

pared in the Zone of theoretical obfuscation, that is, "in the substitution of

post-smcbrafist lin@stic manipulation for historical and social

explanation'' (Dirlik 333). In brieff then, I am criticizing Bhabhafsbrand of
post-colonial theory for Iacking a firm ethical foundation that is committed to
mobilizing a cohesive political actionf or indeedf a project of social
transformation. It must be noted here that J3habhais commitment to theory,
thoughf is not expliatly presented in the trappings of post-colonial discourseit is seU-co~uawlya post-smcm&t statement inserted in, as fhe tide of

his book The Location of C~ltztresuggestsf theoretical debates informing

mIturd studies in general. As

SU&~ ib

co&mat

is purely Western i
n its

implicit and often explicit espousd of the Sel.f/Other &&otorny as

b d m e n t d structuring principle.
Robert Young's White Mythofopks provides an excellent account of
the Hegefian reign of the Self and Other dialectic in Western metaphysiar
and also locates some key problems in Bhabha's discourse, specifically his
of mimicry, hybridity?etc., which succeed
recourse to the "static c~ncepts'~
each other without artidating any reIationship or continuity between each
other. Young finds Bhabha's concepts " d o u s l y m h o p o m o ~ m e dso that
they possess their own desire?with no reference to the k t o r i c d provenance
of the theoretical material horn which such concepts are drawn, or to the
theoretical narrative of Bhabha's own work, or to that of the cultures to

which they are addressed" (146). As a resultf a considerable portion of

Young's energy in this essay is devoted to retrieving Bhabha's "theoreticist
anarchism" in a positive light, by lauding its strate@ refusal to re*

mastery?

and seeing his eclectic use of theory as an ironic and self-comcious "colonid
mockery:@'''A teasing mimicry of certain Western theorisis and discourses
that is like, but not quite?'@
(155). Though Young makes an important
contribution to ~ d e r s t a n some
~ g of the key discursive processes that have
gone into "Writing history and the West,'' his critique itself remains limited
by the range of possibilities dictated by the pervasive Western Self and Ckher

outside of
dialectic, and is unable to conceptuaUze a positive @'~versalityi'

the Self and Other structure. Consequently, he applauds both Foucault and
Lyotard for their quest to foregamd singdarity over universality (lO)* His
statement?"this quest for the singularf the contingent event which by
definition refuses a l l concepmakation b2re we find ourselves
contemplawg the eternal non-dkmsive mystery!] can dearly be related to

the project of constructing a firm of howledge that respects the other

without absorbing it info the same1*(10, emphasis mine), indicates a

symptomatic Western imaginative failure to conceive a form of knowledge

which does away with the Other altogether and ushers in a knowledge of the
Self based on a non-Western ontology. To Yomg et a2 I say that the standard
of measure doesn't h u e to be the d e of the Self and Other. kt this respect, I

find it useful to reiterate Cixous's discontent with the W e r (thaugh in doing

so

i give it an unintended twist) in the The Newly Born Womaa:

What is the Other? If it is t d y the '*other:' there is nothing to say, it
cannot be theorized. The "other" escapes me. It is elsewhere, outside:
absolutely other. it doesn't settle down. But in History, of course, what
is called the "othert1is an alterity that does settle down, that fds into
the dialectical circle. It is the other in a hierarchically organized
relationship in which the same is what rules, names, defines, and
assigns "itstfother [70-711.(in Young 2)

Cixous' comp1aht is powerful and resonates with my critique, for it exposes

the absolute fiction of the Self and Other dialectic as the necessary condition
for explaining lop-sided Western relationships and projects such as

Imperialism and Nazism, to naxne but a couple. Let us remember in counterpoint here Nandy's assertion that the ozdinary hdianrsethnic universaI.isrn
remained impervious to the colonizer's %If and Other chicanery.
i can now retum to the earlier discussion regarding the status of md

false divide between post-colo~ahmand post-modedsm. And it is with a

view of reinvesting ethics into not only an appraisal of the Zone but also into

an appraisal of the knower of the Zone. ''his task must begin with the
reconcephakation of the unique individual whose constitution henceforth
must not be viewed simply as through and within the structures of a
techol~@callytransformed ksetra or Zone but also through the continuous
definition of the consciousness of the appraiser of the Zone, the ksetraaa. At

this point it is necessary- to emphasize that it is the absence of an ethically

responsible position that deprives Bhabha's text a geopolitical thrust and a

meaningful political agency. E%sdiscourse as post-colonial tiiscourse is

exemplary in demonstrating the h d of "dubious spatiality'' and
''problematic temporality" that invalidates theory and criticism falling under
the category of 'fpost-colonid" (Shohat). Although I W h a t Shohat is
right in suggesting the deployment of the t e r n " n e o - c o l u ~ ~ sand
r n ~''post~
independence1'against the debilitating ambivalences of h e term "postcolonial" as terms that axe more stringently defined to the on-going processes
of political and dturd negotiations which are affected by the legacy m d
history of Imperial colo&ation-md

are under the insidious attack of the

New World hegemony as defined by the United States-the answer to her

a c i d question lies first and foremost in the domain of ethics: "Who is

mobilizing what in the artidation of [post-colo~dcriticism], deploying

what identities, identifications and represmtatiom, and in the name of what
political vision and goals" ( l l O ) ?

Arif DirU has undertaken the task of responding to another important

question posed by Shohat, "when exactly...does the post-colo~albegin?", by
aligning the conditions of the emergence of the post-colonial as a social
practice and d ~ h t i o n a h e dinquiry with the moment, however extended

and fragmented, of the emergace of global capitalism. Accordbgiy, the

pustcc~~onial
critic speaks from a position of ''newfound power" within the

of
fabric of transnational societies propelled to l o c ~ e recuperations
d

meaning. There is a certain sense of hypocrisy, however, in fhe articulations

made by such a post-colonial critic located within the Western academy:
here is usud1y no a h o w l e d w e n t of the fact that it is the ubiquitous
processes of capitalism, experienced today in its late or global or transnationai

stage, which is the enabling condition of the post-colonial discourse (which is

vying, if it has not already done so, to supersede the older categories of the

Third World and of the three words theory), and more concretely, of the
institutionalized post in academia for the post-colonial critic. This means
that the "newfound power" lacks an ethical and dhamic-ethicd agency and
therefore remains compartmentalized in spite of all its aspirations towards
effecting deconstruction.
A fundamental criterion which fuels post-colonial discourse is the

invalidation of the Nation as the hegemonic "global unit of political

organization," especially for the migrant post-colonial critic situated at the
spatio-temporal "in-between." It thus not by accident that both the content
addressed and the strategies adopted by the post-colonial critic resonate with
"the conceptual needs presented by transformations in global relationships
caused by changes within the capitalist world economy" (331). Having
centralized the importance of global capitalism as the structuring principle of
culture today, a move that necessarily erases the distinction between the

enterprises of postmodernism and postcolonialism, Dirlik pointedly suggests

that "if a crisis in historical consciousness, with all its implications for

national and individual identity is a basic theme of postcoloniality, then the

First World itself is postcolonial" (337, emphasis mine).

The conceptual framework dealing with the death of the postEnlightenment metanarratives has, of course, been explored at greater length
by Lyotard in his discussion of the postmodern condition. In the postmodern
age of perfonnative societies, legitimation occurs through petit-rtfcits at the
institutions. In such a condition, one can see how the postcolonial critic is

performing nothing beyond the truth of the possibility of postcolonial

discourse. Put another way, the postcolonial critic is yet another mask in the

series af roles written by the processes of a global capitalist economy whose

only impetus is towards maximking the efieimcy of its productionconsumption ratio on the globe. The role played by the postcoionid critic is
to act as an antagonist to Eurocmtric ideology, to suppress his or her own

c~nditionsof birth in the power-nexus of the material relationships of global

capitalism, and finally, to avert attention &om the fact that global capitalism
is rapidly recuzxfimg the gee-pofitical map of the planet through a
movement of national and irttza-national h a w a t a t i o n along the lines of
flight of transnational capital.
What is a viable resistance that can be offered up in the face of such a
relentless and speedy process? Or, to raise the question with which Dirm
closes his statement, '*thecpestion,then is... whether, in recognition of its a m
class-position in global capitalism, ["this global

can generate a

&oroughgohg criticism of its own ideology and fomdate practices of

resistance against the system of which it is a producttt(356). The resistance
against any contemporary ideological apparatus must consist in t a b 8 up
options which have been covered up or devalued in the ma& of mademity

and teholo@cal progress during at least the twentieth century- My general

argument, of course, seeks to revalue a discourse of ethical action and orient
it towards both the theory and the d b e that is structured according to the
textual and d t u r a l logic of late capitalism*

This logic has been interrogated at length by Fredric Jameson, who in

his study rightly links postmodem culture with America, as the exemplary
post-hduskial society whose global cdtual domination is a sign of the
power of media and also the "internal and superstructural expression of a
whole new wave of h e r i c a n military and economic domination1*(5)-

Jameson is also quick to employ the "swface/depWt model to account for the

interpeflation of the postmadem subject in a wor1d of simulacra. This

subjects akin to the B a u M u & m subject of jouissan~e~
fincis itself without
the succor of interiorizable justification or morality; that is?it is no longer the

centered?bourgeois monad capable of feeling modemist anxiety of the type

emblema&ed by Edward Munch's The Scream. This subject is no longer a

container of affet but a euphoric surface for the bombardment of fiee-floating

signifiers.

Having set up this model for the postmodem subject, Jameson is

content to conchde that moralistic criticism of Me as the experience of he
hyperreality of postmodem space is a "category mistake,"since as a historical
phenomenon postmodernity has already exposed the fictionality of any
coUective project or progressive Utopianism. The only viable option for the
cultural critic or moralist, thenf is to embrace a liberating materialist dialectic
proposed by Ma=# one that is able to ''mthe dmal evolution of late

capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and progress ail together" (47).

There are?however, a couple of fundmental problems in the way that
Jameson, as a representative postmodemist for the post-coIaniabf construes

his subject. Firstf by categoricaUy denying my presence of depth in his subject

he reiterates the prevalent h m d e r s t m d h g of what De~da-afier-Patocka
calls the conception of the "unique self."The individuahm of technological
civilization is related to the mask, to roleplayingf in other words to
Jmesonian surfacesf and has effectively obfuscated the mystery of the unique
person "whose secret remain hidden behind the social mask" (GI3 36). Such

an kdividualism is lived precisely in its relation to a metaphysics of force:

"Force has become the modem figure of being. Being has allowed itself to be
determined as a calculable force, and man instead of relating to the being that
is h i d d e ~z d e r this figure of force, represents himself as quantifiable power"

(GD37')- Although premised on an arighary authenticity, his criticism of the

tehoIo@cd individual holds merit for the purposes of interrogating the
contours of m ethics which is not &abIed as it were in the confusion in

which "individualism becomes soaalism or collectivism [and]s h d a t e s an

ethics or puIitics of singularity" {GD36).
A second and related problem emerges once we juxtapose

p o s t c o l o d ~ awith
~ p a s m o d e h v . As seen above, the postcolo~dis
properly a global reflection of the processes of late capitalism. Though the
signifier ' t p o s t c o l o ~ d is
~ 'temporally
r
belated a5 opposed to the term
" p o s m o d e ~ ~in' 'gaining cunmcy in World-systems discourses, once
activated it is arguably a term which enables an analysis of global capitalism
that is M y more '*global'' than the more restricted posmodeMm. This is
to say that Jameson's culturd critique relies on a nmawly defined terrainone which wes Gibson's cyberpunk and Portmm's Bmaventure Hotel as
examples to conceive of the subject as surface, fragmentation, and so on.

Obviouslypan analysis restricted by such post-tebolo@cd pxametexs cannot

be extended in any m e ~ g way
W to reflect the d t u r a i pxocesses in other
territories which are not ody those outside the United States but also those
outside the narrow band of cyberpunkism and bonaventurid lack of
conceptual mapping within the United States itself. That this is a short-

coming of Jameson's discourse is evident considering that the pathways of

globd capitalism, by his o m admission even, intersect and network across
the entire planet today.

Why does Jameson base his understanding of posmodedsm on such

a local and mepresmtative temtory? Because, it is only on this space that
he can convince himself that the postmodem subject is beyond the category of
depth. Not only does Jameson's thinking do away completely with the

category of the subject that is respomibie but it demonstrates the primacy of

the Self and Other dichotomy as the structuring principle for his AmericaEurocentric &course.

h his somewhat infmous intervention in the arena

of post-colo~&rn in "Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational

Capitalism,'' the Self/Other relationship is recast in the guise of a First
World/Thkd World binary. Under such a configuration, JamesonSsgesture

can be seen principally as stemming from the sympathetic desire of

ii

privileged member of the First World community to listen to the

marginalized difference of a distanced and homogenized Third-World Other.
It is this reductive approach from a Mgn Fixst-worldly Father which leads to

h e conscriptive and &empowekg formulation of his thesis:

All third world texts are necessarily, I want to argue, allegoricali and in
a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call ~atiunal
dleguries8even when, or perhaps 1 shodd say p~cularlywhen their
forms develop out of predominantly western machineries of
representation, such as the novel. (69)

The Fkst WoridiThird World binary is also compatibie with Jameson's

Pos~odeWsm/Nation&m b h q 8 for the First World's logic of late
capitalism has supposedly made obsolete the forms of representation, such as
realism and naturalism8which still abide in the nations of the Third World.
Aijaz b a d , who has exposed the many prejudices which a r m s c r i b e the

limited scope of Jmeson's conception of the W d World, is right on the

money when he shows the theoreticali historical, and cultural inadequacy of

the First and Third worlds b ~ c a t i o nand
8 urges instead a model that
considers not three but one world stmctuxed everywhere by the processes of
transnationd capitalism, "by the global operation of a single mode of
productioni namely the capitalist one8and the global resistance to this mode,
a resistance which is itself unevenly developed in different parts of the globe*'

(103)* h a d ' s model is certainly closer to the truth than Jamesonlsfthough

his general critique of the hmpomibfiq of past-smw&t theories and
post-modedt discourse, effixted by his socialist leaning, remains within the
trappings of a M d t narrative of manapation, and camequently, within a
Western ontolagicd kamework.
An interesting moment occurs in h a d ' s text as he underlines the

ambiguity-operative in Jmeson's employment of the First and Third worlds

divide (106-110). The First World refers variously to p o s m o d e d y , to the
capitalist mode of production, and even to the 'lGmec~Judaiclr
entirety of
Western civilization; there is a similar sIippage and inflation of the category
of the Third World. This d+ncompashg proMeration leads h a d to
"the damning feeling that the Bkapada-Gifaf the edicts of Mmu, and the
Qur'an itself are perhaps Third World texts" (106). Whereas Jameson's

categories are slippery in an effort to mystify the connivance of his text with a
reiteration of the privileged enmuatozmy position of h e ~ c o - E u o c e n & m
within Academia, h a d ' s critique remains trapped within the conceptuai

confines of Self and Other, with the notable exception of proposing capitalism
as a global process (and he also hints at an h t e ~ m e e a t i o nof the purported

seE m d other when he points to the Judaic elements in the Qur*mand fhe
Graeco-hdic elements of ancient Hamapan art). The ethical motive for
Ahmad's project comes horn his Mawt-sou-t

philosophy, but this only

prompts his situating himself and his cause as the suppressed Other of

is critique stops short of suggesting an alternative for effecting

capitalism. H
substantive change in academic power structures, but it does have the merit
of r e d d i n g

US

to be vigilant against the tendency of p o s t - s m c ~ d s t

appfications to faU into an endlessly reflexive language game at the expense of

losing sight of any effective horizon for the application its knowledge- Ws

discourse remains as equally limited as Jameson's as the demonstration of a

knowledgeable exposition of the ksetra or Zone at the expense of ignoring
completely knowledge of the ksetragya or knower of the Zone. As knowers

only of their Zones, then, Jmeson and Ahmad truly remain comrades-inarms. Though this is not the moment to begin explicating the ramifications
of adding knowledge of the knower of the Zone in the equation of true
Knowledge to invest criticism and theory with a dharmic-ethical thrust

(which I intend to do in my subsequent chapters as I read selected twentienth

century fiction), I must point out that to do so means a necessary erasure of
the First World/Third World binarism which is as a concept is ethically
sanctioned by what Derrida has called the religions of the Book, religions that
describe an ethical universe premised on an unequal binarism, on God as the

Absolute Other.
Both Ella Shohat and Arif DirUk are right in noting that the sigiufier
"postcolonial" has gained acceptance and circulation in academic discourse
because of its ambivdence~asopposed to more stringent terms such as neocolonialism, neo-Imperialism, and even Third World-and because of its
mystification of agency:

the term mystifies both politically and methodologically a situation

that represents not the abolition but the reconfiguration of earlier
forms of domination. The complicity of postcolonial in hegemony lies
in postcolonialism's diversion of attention from contemporary
problems of social, political, and cultural domination, and in its
obfuscation of its own relationship to what is but a condition of its
emergence, that is, to global capitalism that, however fragmented in
appearance, serves as the structuring principle of global relations.
(DirUk 331).
Neither of them,however, extends their critique to constructing an
alternative discourse which would not only combat this complicity-for to
signal is a preamble to cornbathbut would also reorient the post-colonial

project to effectively transgress its compartmentalization. As such, then, both

Shohat and DirUk remain firmly within the parameters of the postcoloniality;
theirs is an exemplary post-colonial discourse which strains against the

bounds of its own compartment without breaking through and getting

'outside," and without effecting a reconfiguration or reshaping. There are

moments in Dirlik's writing that would lead him to such a reshaping but
they are not pursued. First, why is it that post-colonial discourse and
intellectuals gained validity and respectability in the 198OPs,that is,
concurrently with Reaganomics in the United States and Thatcherism in the
United Kingdom? My immediate answer as hasty gloss is because this is
when the ethical as base was erased from the function of capitalist expansion,
when politics overtly ceased to be "responsible," and when, therefore,
postcolonial discourse could begin to speak itself without disturbing the
emergent New World order. Second, even though it may be true that
postcolonial discourse, far from being a representation of the agony of loss

and displacement, is an expression of "newfound power" for the migrant

intellectual, it is a power that is already stripped of any agency for effecting
meaningful social change or transformation. It is a discourse severed from

the ethical reality of non-discursive life, a discourse-symptomizing all the ills

of post-modernism- that is unable in its very constitutive structures to
address the world outside its textual Western tower. In this respect, Spivak's
'catachresis," for all its good intentions, accomplishes nothing if it simply
reverses, displaces, and seizes "the apparatus of value-coding," for this
apparatus which allows itself to be seized is a Western apparatus-it keeps
post-colonialism furiously running in the same place.
An excellent example of the fact that, without thinking about the non-

discursive ethical reality present in and informing all actions, all critiques

remain firmly ensconced in reiterating the power structures that make postmodernist and post-coloniaht artidations within acadernia possible? is tu be
found in Arun Mukherji's highly problematic article entitled '7ivhose PostColonidism and Whose P~smode&m?~'. There is one instance when the

nun-discursive is mentioned?but never can it become an important point in

Mukherji's thinking that seeks a sofution without &an@g the rules of the

game. This occurs when she cites Come1 WesiSsreminder of a readity which
cannot be h o w discursively: "a reality that one cannut h u m . The ragged
edges of the Red, of Necessify, of not being able to eat, not having shelter, not
having health care-.." (5). West's emphasis on the lived experience is
invoked by Mulcherji as rn example of that which is elided in
l ' p a s ~ o d e ~ meternal
r s fascination with languagels imperfect access to the

" r e C (45). But the space which is opened up for a reflection on the nondiscursive as it pertains to post-colonial and post-modem projects is promptly
closed up by Mukherji in the name of discourse, here faulting posmadedsts
for their supposedly eclectic discursive b~~oiage-'~pos~ode&t
texts that
"use and abuse1'everything" (5)-and their s h d t m e o u s amnesia, their
"forget[ting] that literary discourse is deeply impficated with a l l other
discowes current in societyi1(5). How can posmode-rn

use and abuse all

discourses and at the same h e forget that aU these d i s c o m s are impIicated

with one another? Another problem exists at the level of definition:

Mukherji makes a divide between "lived history1'and l'justl'Iiterary or

culhrd movements. The post-colonial project is a coming to terms with the

painful experience of Imperial colonizationr whereas, according to Mukherji?

posmodemm i s at best literary parody. An Indian attitude towards Indian
literatures, she teUs usF"is nut that of parody but respect for their equalitarian

and committed vision'' (4). Perhaps it would not be a waste of space here to
remind Mdcherji that posmode&m

is not "justf' postmodern parody.

This bhkered appraisal of p o s m o d e d m is emblematic of the

generd u w i b p e s s w i t h post-colod&m to think in a global manner.
Pos~-co~o~&s&
ii la Mdcherji will object here that such glababm is a ploy by
the "white European maler1culture to homogenize important differences
within the various cultures around the globe; however, if we only keep in
mind Deleuze and Guattari's anti-oedipal philosophy, which is certainly as
postmodern as thinking gets in the twentieth century, we can see that
posmodehsm is precisely the expiosion of differences onto a well-bounded
terrain whose demarcations remained unquestioned and mproblema&ed
~ o u g h o u the
t reign of modemism. Internalking modemist parameters for
the critical appreciation of post-colonid texts certainly does not provide a

meaningful refutation to the scope af posmode&m.

It is interesting to

note hiit while Mukherji is uncomfortable about "the assimiIationist and

homogenizing tendencies of postmodemist theory'' (I), her discussion takes
place without ever presenting even a brief synopsis of the theories or
theorists that are making her uncomfortable. W e asserting on the one
hand that 'lpos&ode~smis largely a white European cultural
phenomenon" (3), Mukherji uses, on the other hand, Said's question about
deconstruction in her argument against p o s ~ o d e d s m : "the question, in
Edward Said's words, "of what there is to be done afier deconstruction is well
under way, after the idea of deconstruction no longer represents elaborate
inte11ectua.l audacity" (Said 193)*'(4). Demda is deconstruction. Derrida is
also an Agerim-born Jewish immigrant L v i ~ gin France. 1 do not think one
can call Derrida a "white European male:

to do so would be to completely

ignore his Melong critique of Westen logocentrism.

Contrary to her stated intention, Mulcherji's article in fact provides an

exemplary instantiation of the conservative justification for maintaining a
divide between past-colo~&m and post-modeam" h her effort to
polarize one against the other, Mukherji requisitions definitions of postmodemism which in their reductive formulation simpIy contradict the
~ t e p e n e b a ~ of
o ndiscourses and events she holds as factual truth for both
post-modedv mci for post<olo~ahV. h other words?p o s m o d e d m is
variousIy d e h e d as having "a White European male genesisf'' as being
"largely a white European cultural phenomenon," of having " a s s W a ~ o d t
and h o m o g e h g tendenciess' when "it refers to the texts of non-Euopems

in the company of texts of E u e h e f i c m as though no racial, cultural,

historical, political, epktemolo@cd and ontological differences separated
themt'(3)- Clearly?posmad&m

for Artm Muherji has to be severed

horn the global processes of transnational capitalismf from the history and
legacy of hperialism, as if the White European male came up with the idea
all by himself! m a t we see happening in Mukhezji's text is an act of

p o s m o d e ~ s m - h her definition of it-in its defense of post-colo~akm:

post-colofiafism becomes a complex weave of discursive and historical
events and a heterogeneous Zone, whereas post-modeam becomes an
insular homogedzhg mistake.
Having set-up some of my concern in post-mode~smand postcolonidi~xn~
I will now turn to a reading of some contemporary fictionsf that
belung to either cine or both the academic Zones, in order exempw the h d
of dharmic-eihical criticism which 1 see as m urgent task and which 1 have

been setting up in these two chapters. Specifically, the fictions which I

examine through my hamework have been chosen for heir prominent
status in recent post-colonial and post-modem discussions and include:

Gravity's Rainbow (Pynchon), The Muor's Last Sigh (Rushdie), Waiting fur
the Barba~ans(Coet~ee)~
and Draupadi (Mahmweta Devi). 1 &cuss

individual commitment to ethics and

concentrate an the prouerating

technologies which impact subject determination and being in cantemporary

cultures and societies. As such, my investigation is both textual a d dharmicethicalf for 1 believe that only in unison will the two generate an alternative
understanding of the ethical domains of the various actions and individuals
represented in the fictions, and dso of the various critical actions performed

on those fictions, incluhg mine.

In conclusion, 1 would like to make explicit the prime motivation for

this project:

that

in my personal experience 1 have experienced a d b e

whose ontological determinationf that isf heir conception of being and

becoming in tihe physical and conscious universef consistent and plastic even
as it partakes in and enjoys the global processes of capitalism and technology; 1
refer specifically to the culture of modem hdia today. It is a culture which
has two competing traditions, one which embraces modem civilization and
its technological forcesf the other which has been and continues to remain
non-modem in its e t h i c universalism: Arguably, this latter is a tradition

which is not in crisis, and its civilization is not weighed down by the failure
of responsibility in any sense similar to the one Demda analyzes. But what

about the West? Axe there competing traditionsf or has the drive towaxd
technology won out as J.F. Lyotad maintains? Has faith in meta-impages
really ebbed to the extent that the only legitimation in post-modem
h
and petittechnocratic d t u r e s is to be found locally, ~ o u g institutions
rgcits? Taking the onto1ogicaIly unique Indian experience of dharmic-ethical

action marks a provocative site for entry into a discussion of ethics within the
fields of post-colo~afismand post-madeam.

Chapter 3

Of the four Mahasweta Devi stories recently transIated by Gayatri

Spivak, Draupadi provides an exceuent starting point for a discussion of the

way in which a5tical scho1arship of the p o s t - s m ~ & s tpost-coIoni&t

brand, i.e. SpivaKs, interacts with literary texts &om the ex-colonies. Spivak's
efforts to translate hta English the Bengali originals is an admirable instance
of promotion by an outstanding scholar. Indeed, what better heavyweight

could Mahasweta Devi hope to find in order to communicate her literature,

which specificaUy addresses the oubide+f-Ksto~status and the
downtrodden nature of the tribal pupulations suffering in ignorance in
"modemtsIndia, to a global readership? Mahaswetarsprose is powerful, and
one realizes upon reading her stories that they have been written by an
individual deeply committed to knowing and ~epresentingthe invisible
tribals of hdia to the literate segment of Bengal-and by extension and

translation,of hdia and of the world-and to arousing political awareness of

the situation in dire need of remedy through meanin@

and organized

action.

In "The Author in Conversation," we are given a glimpse into the life

and career of a remarkable activist whose efforts-poli~cd, journalistic, and

literary-toward the betterment of the tribals' lives has been ongoing for more

than three decades. Here are some of the salient revelations communicated
by her: that there exists an inhastructural nothingness in so f a r as facilities
and utilities-constitutionally and practically supplied by the Indian
government to the rest of its "non-tribal" population-are concerned; that
this lack is compounded in post-Independence India by the systematic

"modem" exploitation of both the tribal forest lands and the tribal peoples
(the latter through a perpetual bonded-wage labor system); that the
devastation of these peoples' ecologically motivated life has robbed them of
their sustenance, for "they underst[and] ecology and the environment in a
way we cannot yet imagine" (x). That, broadly speaking, the tribals have not

been a part of the decolonization of India even as they have paid the price.
That the lip-service attention paid to the tribais by the government of India

has not succeeded in providing them with the merest of modem facilities,

that the monies disbursed for their cause is swallowed up by corrupt

executive parties. That, for the tribals, there is no education, no health

facilities, no way of earning income. That in the prevalent attitude amongst

those Indians who thrive on the relentless exploitation of the tribals, their
status is lower

than the status of chattel such as oxen-according to at least

some of the exploitative upper-caste landowners, tribals are regarded as an

expendable and easily replaced species ranking below the husbandry animals.
That, in spite of all this, they have retained their unique culture and oral
traditions and that they deserve to be recognized and honored by the rest of
India.

Mahasweta Devi's stories enact disturbing moments in the lives of

tribals, conveying a sense of their desperate predicaments through skillfully
describing the interpenetration of the tribal and non-tribal universes. In The

Hunt, miscegenated tribal Mary Oraon's brutal massacre of a tiresome city

contractor, on the occasion of a women's-day-out-in-the-forest ritual hunt,
provides the unexpected by inverting the stereotypical outcome of rape and
sexual exploitation of the hapless tribal woman at the hands of the non-tribal
merchant class. Properly speaking, however, it must be noted that Mary's
actions are not those of a tribal as she is twice an outsider: by blood, of an

Australian father, and by special status given to her by the rest of the tribal
community, as a result of which social custom as religious prohibition does
not apply to her-so that she can consider marrying a Muslim vegetable
vendor without inciting her tribe.
Doulotf, in Dodoti the Bountiful, is not to have any of Mary's fortune.
As the result of a dubious transaction which is represented as "marriage" by

the Brahman Paramananda, poser godman and merciless pimp, to her fellow
Nagesia tribals but which in practical terms forsakes her in the flesh trade,
Douloti finds herself condemned to being a lifelong indentured whore in
Paramananda's whorehouse. Her story offers no redemption; in the imagistic

end she lies diseased and dead in the map of India which has been freshly
painted for the celebration of Independence day: "filling the entire Indian
peninsula from the oceans to the Himalayas, here lies bonded labor spreadeagled, kaxniya whore Douloti Nagesia's tormented corpse, putrefied with
venereal disease, having vomited up all the blood in its desiccated lungs"
(93). Hers is a shocking story which reveals at once the complete

governmental neglect and complicity of the societal system in which Douloti

can be possible, in which Douloti the Kamiya-whore can happen.

No reader can dismiss the import of Mahasweta's observations, least of
all self-professed "expatriate critic" Gayatri Spivak. She denounces the
complicity of the migrant academic who reduces the potentialities opened up

by her special trail into American culture by "museumizing" the culture they
left behind: "...Cultural Studies in the United States today is also fed by the

migrant academic's desire to rnuseumize a culture left behind, gaining thus

an alibi for the profound Eurocentrism of academic migrancy" (xxiv). For
Spivak, hoisting the flag of deconstruction is more than sufficient to
counterbalance the trend toward espousing "the myth of pure difference"
(xxiv). As is Spivak's wont, she reminds her reader about Derridean

diffkrance and its salutary effects when applied to claims of untheorized

essence or transparence. In this particular instance, she goes on to poke fun at

the "East is east and West is west and never the twain shall meet" idea. Yet,

the discourse on the subaltern seems curiously dose to an attempt in

thinking of modem India reconceptualized as West to a tribal or subaltern

East.

Draupadi provides an excellent point of departure for a discussion of

the moral vacuum amidst which an unhealthily large portion of postcolonial and post-modem theory and criticism is taking place within
academia today. The absence of an ethical code manifests itself as and when
literature gets analyzed and interpreted more with a view to supporting one
theoretical framework against another, and less with a view to exploring
themes which can help in an understanding of the ethical nature of human
interaction with and within a complex end-of-millennium world. In the
academic realm of high theory it has become more important to elaborate
structures of power and knowledge based on the inherent constructedness of
all discourse than to discuss the pre-dominantly extra-discursive ethical
aspects that continue to inform human action.

Draupadi is a short yet complex story whose range of signification is

enriched by references to Hochhuths The Deputy, David Morell's First Blood,

Antonioni's films, the god Pan,Shakespeare and Prospero, to Sankhya

Philosophy, Archimedes, and Gandhi. The population depicted in the story is

also multicultural and reflects the cultural diversity of the Indian population:
we have Bengali (Senanayak), Sikh (Arjan Singh), the Santals, the larger
group of the Austro-Asiatic Munda tribes, the untouchables, and even the
influence of American soldiers who fathered Dopdi's betrayers; in terms of
languages, we have Bengali, its dialects, English, Mundari language, the
dialect of Maldah. In terms of its politics, the story presents a violent world of
tribal cleansing by the Indian Army, of landowner killings by the insurgent

tribals, a world in which left-politics, fascism, the Indian constitution and the
Indian village system the Panehayat are mentioned, in which "the young

gentlemen" represent an educated left-wing sector inciting the tribals to

armed insurgency, in which the system of landless peasant bonded-labor akin
to slavery is normative thanks to a seeming collusion between the
government and the landowner. Thus Dulna exclaims at the moment before
he kills the landowner Sqa Sahu, "my great-grandfather took a bit of paddy

from him, and I still give him free labor to repay that debt" (OW 192).
These are some of the elements of the ksetra or field described by
Draupadi. It is a ksetra of combat, violence, and war. The universe we see

represented involves police and army operations, exploitation of bonded and

tribal laborers by the landowners, and the counter or terrorist actions of the

insurgent rebels led by the "young gentlemen." While the landowners

motivation for the exploitation of peasant laborers is maximizing profit in a
capitalist economy, the police/armyls motivation is not similarly profit- as
an armed force, it is fulfilling its political, economic, and moral function of

engaging in armed combat with the enemy-in this story, the revolutionaries
represented by Dopdi. They act in opposition to the army, and their language

coinades with that of the anny; if anything, Arijitts rhetoric which is couched
in an unspecified c o m ~ s agenda
t
&o signifies art equal investment in

warmgames as that of the armed force.

Spivak's admonition to readers of texts in transIation, to beware of
categorizing the narrative as 'rredistic,'' needs to be equally extended to
hmlators-Spiv& included. In her Essay on Sfafiudayini,she points out that
"Mahasweta's prose is art extraordinary melange of street slang, the dialect of
East Bmgal, the everyday howehold language of f d y and servant, and the
occasionai gravity of elegant Bengali" (267'). Spivak is well aware that this
polyglot aspect to literatures written in Indian languages removes it from
f a d e and reductive "realism:' h a mdti-lingual culture such as India's,
literatures inevitably engage a polyglot textual world in which "bi.nguages
throw light on one another: one language can, after all,see itself only in the
light of another hnguagel' (B&W 12). In contradiction to this essential
feature of Indian literature is the vast body of English kansiations in which
the multiple planes of representation are subsumed wiih the view of making

the textud presentaiion convivial with the dominant style of continental

nineteenth century realism.20 Spivak as translator is sensitive to both the

language and the structure of Devi's story in Ben@; however, Spivak as

critic perfoms a sophisticated reading which, th~ughcompelling in its

attempt to reveal the subjugated subaltern in an economy of differential

sexuality governed by the patriarchal, effectively amomts to no more ihan an
inversion of h e binary terms in the stoy-%nmayak/Dopdi and
subjugator/subjugated, and all this at the level of discursive semantics.

*OFOF an exceIlent post-structuralist discussion o f the colcmial enterprise of

transiation, its underpinnings and its consequences, see Tejaswini Niranjana's
Citing Transiutiun.

h the broadest sense, Dragpadi engages issues of nation, revolution,

(fenthhity,) and violace. h naming her character after the polyan&ous
wife of the five Pandava brothers in the Makabh~rata,Mahasweta Devi has
created a palimpsest tale which re-enacis the public stripping of the epic
Draupadi; while in the epic Draupadi's prayer to Krishna is answered by the

& a d o u s infiniteness of her sa~+(a garment) sa that she cannot be

h-ated

in the royal court, in Devi's story Draupadi h d s herself the

victim of multiple rape by none other than the Palice force. D r a ~ p a d i

provides a condemnation of the glaring lack of ethical imperative in the

constitution of the State's executive organ as represented by the police force,

and it seem to me that any d t i c d appreciation of the story must begin by

a c h o w l e d e g the crucial centrality of the issue of ethical action in this aspect
of contemporary h&m culture. Spivak's sophisticated interpretation,

however, completely ignores this issue in favor of appropriating the story to

support her deconstructive theories of post-colofi&m in her ongoing
academic debates abaut femininity, "sexual differential," "disclosure of
c~rnplicities,~'
and the like.

This is signified not least by what little interpretation Spivak provides

of the Mahabharata itself. This lengthy epic which measures over ninety
thousand verses collected over an indetem-iinable period of centuries
represents the multifarious dimemions of Indian experience and the
ontological plurality of the Indian imagination. An ageless epic, the
Mahabharata is neither influenced by the history of Imperial colonialism nor
constituted in response to pressures of making it an O m R ; as a portion of
Indian civilization, it contains structures of cosmo1ogica1 determination and
ontological plurality which have, arguably, s u ~ i v e dmore or less unchanged
for the past four thousand years. And it is art-one that does not necessarily

represent historical personages. In brief, the Mahabharafa needs to be

understood primarily in the Indian context and in hdim termsf and only
secondarily in the Western context and by Western term-and here I mean
colonial and post-coIonid.
It is d o r t u n a t e that Spivak's understanding is entrenched only in the
secondary consideration. She regards the epic primarily in its ' * c o I o ~ ~ t
function in the interest of the so-called Aryan invaders of India'' (183)- She
happily attributes to h e epic h u p a d i a hcaniart llshguiarity,"and
consequently steers her discussion into the terrifjmg domain of the Phallus
where, dearlyf "no a h o w l e d p a t of patemity can secure the Name of the
Father far the child of such a mother [one married to five hwbands]" (183)Spivak outdoes Lacan himself in resouceWess-whereas he went across the
Atimtic and back a century to &cover Foe's ''Purloined Letterr1in support of

his post-Freudian and linguistic concept of the systemic &placement of the

signifier and its deteminative function in the mconsciawpshe has gone all
the way to India and taken the largest extant epic in the world to similarly

support Lacanian schema: "In the epic, Draupadits legitimized piwaiization

(as a wife among husbands) in singdarity [read Lacanian] is used to
demonstrate snde gloryr'(183). Such a co-optation precludes any
mderstmdhg of the Mahabharata through Indian value systems in which
the traditional concept of Narifua (the female principle of the cosmos) holds
"the beiief in a closer conjunction between powerf activism, and femininity
than between powerf aciivism, and masculinity,'' as it does "the belief that the

feminine principle is a more powerful, dangerous and uncontrolIable

principle in the cosmos than the male principlei1(Nandy 53-54).

To say the leastf Spivak's Lacanian approach considers the epic

absoiutely out of context. It ignores the important cosmological and

theologica1 implications which i d o m the Mababharafa. It ignores the

folio-g report made by Nf EKiltebeiteI, who took the trouble of i n t e ~ r e h g

the epic event of Draupadi's dkxobing in the royal court by researching not
Lacan but classical In&m sources:

...the epic Draupadi is akeady an image of the goddess in her

whom she expIiatly hcamates, but
totality: not only as Sri-&mi,
as Bhudevi ( h e gaddess Earth), Kalaratri (the "Night of Time"),
Mda-Prakrti (primid matter), and with intimations of Durga and
Kali; in her relations to V k h u - f i s h a and to figures W e d with
Siva; in her role with respect to the turn of h e y q p and the
relieving of the Earth's burden; in relation to the Earth's potential
dessication (it is the solar Kama who orders Draupacli stripped);..*
and in connection with symbob that portray the M e r potential
for the munixing and unleashing of alI the e l e m e n b e e , water,
fie, airf and ether-that is prelude to the find dissolution or prakrta
pralaya with its ''unbraidhg"of the ''strands" or gunas of matter.
(42111)
Spivak is seemingly oblivious to such complexity in the Mahabharata,

and often her critical statements exernpl* ludicrow reductionism:

"Draupa&-wri~en into the patriarchal and authoritative sacred text as proof

of male power1'

and0"She [the epic Draupadi] provides the occasion for

a violent transaction hetween menf the efficient cause of the crucial battle"

(183).!

me t e r n "patriarchal," "authoritativefl*and "male power" all

resonate nicely within the discourse of Western feminist theory but come
across as patently misinformed if one a d y keeps in mind Hiltebeitel's
analysis. h an.epic whose world-view espouses he feminine principle as
that of power and whose narrative consistently intertwines its "hmanl' and
"divine" actors, it is hard to see where and how the very need could arise that
would necessitate Rraupadi's inciusion to "prove" male power. Indeed,

Spivakrsstatement insults the ontological complexity of the Mahabharata by

limiting its purpose to the redundant theme of proving male superiority-

Furthermore, her idea h

t Draupadi is

"the efficient cause of the

meid battlef'ignores the potent history of a w e s that leads up to the great

war in the Mahabhffrata. Most strikingly, it ignores the heologica1 and

philosophical discourse contained in the chapter prior to the engagement of

the great battle, the chapter popularly entitled Bhapada Gita or song
celestid- The occasion for this discourse is prompted by A.rjrnls (Draupacii's
first husband) refusal to kill his kin, for after a l l the great war opposes fixst
c o u s of
~ the same dynasty. The G t a or song refers to the god Krishna's
response to Arjunarslack of mativatiun, and provides reason after reason

why it is Axjuna's duty to engage in battle and kill his c o u s ~That

.
Krisha's
song provides a crystallization of Hindu thought has been discussed in my
fkst two chapters; more importantly, for this discussion, not once does
W h a indicate Draupadilsdisrobing as the dhching cause for the

engagement of the battle.

It is symptomatic of the functioning of the academic realm of Paste
colonial studies that Spivaks simplistic and inaccurate interpretation of the

Mahabh~rafaand of the epic baupadi gains easy acceptance; afier all, it does
l
discourse, and
employ the correct jargon of French s t m ~ apsy&omdy~c

thus, it does lead to an interpretation of Mahaweta's Draapiadi which fits

within the parameters of theoretical feminist discaurse. The grave oversight

that this kind of exercise perpetuates is the elision of broaching the essential

quality of ethical action. h the present case, this allows Spivak to read the
cmcial moment in Mahaswetarsstory as an indictment against male
authority and man's history. Man the scapegoat may, perhaps, be pleasing to
the Western feminist ear but in this instance it sounds Like a tired theme

caught in h e flmitless flip-flap of binaxism.

Let us consider the political climate in which Draupadi is situated. The

story is set in 1971 West Bengal. Spivak reminds us that the date is significant

because it marks the occasion for the Indo-PakistanWar;what astounds is

that she asserts that India's participation in the war was simply the result of
India's sudden discovery of cooperation between the Naxalites of West

Bengal (the properly Indian State) and the forces of East Bengal (what is today
known as Bangladesh): "at a crucial moment in the struggle, the armed forces
of the government of India were deployed, seemingly because there were
alliances between the Naxalites of West Bengal and the freedom fighters of
East Bengal" (182). This generalization is so completely off the mark that it
necessitates a brief detour here for the discussion of the geo-political context
of this war.

The impending disaster that was to strike the constitution of East and
West Pakistan, putatively one country united by Islam but realistically two
very different cultures speaking different languages and separated by more

than a thousand mile stretch of India, came to a head in 1970 when Sheikh
Mujibur R e b a . of the East won an overwhelming victory in the National
Assembly election of December 17. This meant that the Bengalis of the East

would effectively form the government and wield power over the Punjabis of
the West, the traditional power-brokers. That this was unacceptable was
finally confirmed when a martial regime in the West took affairs in its own

hands and deployed general Yahya Khan in East Pakistan with an intent of

inflicting terror on its population (and the descriptions of the inhuman

operations carried out at his orders are not unlike the ethnic cleansing that
has taken place more recently in Yugoslavia). The Indian government aided
the undermanned and ill-equipped Bangladeshi Resistance movement,

Mukti Bahini, by providing arms, ammunition and training across the border

in West Bengal. As the conflict escalated, more than six million refugees

poured across the borders into West Bengal. Finally, executing an operation
that had been in the works for almost a year, the Indian Armed forces
engaged in War with the Pakistani armed forces, with the intent of aiding
Bangladesh's liberation. That the objective was accomplished in twelve days
is a remarkable modem day military achievement: "the Indian armed forces

executed, within the brief period of 12 days, the most decisive liberation
campaign in military history-giving a nation of 75 million people its
independence in one lightning strike" (Palit 17). Clearly, the Indo-Pak war of
1971 constitutes a political event far larger in scope than Spivak's assertion of

the purported alliance between the Bangladeshi Mukti Bahini, who were

being trained and armed in India by the Indian Army, and the Naxalite rebels.
Historical simplification aside, a central problem with Spivak's reading
is that it ignores the structural play in Draupadi which disperses not only any

"realistic" representation but also any interpretation that seeks a response in

kind to the aggressive, male world represented by Senanayak. In paying close

attention to the language, Spivak has critically ignored the story's dissipation

of conventional narrative strategy as also of the putative "subject" with a

"bonded" identity and cohesive intentionality. When this structural
dissipation is combined with the content of the story one can reconcile this
strategy with its meaning only through a recourse to the ramifications of an
ethical nature that does not rely absolutely on a bonded subject. Such an
ethical consideration is more appropriate and, I feel, more productive than
premising all interpretation on the cohesive subject of the "subaltern" in

Draupadi.
There is a deliberate ambiguity in section 1in the manner in which the

narrative voice functions throughout the story. The story more or less begins

with a dramatic dialogue between two "liveried uniforms" to be followed by

the documentative "dossier" section which begins by stating what is

apparently the summary of the official take on the Dopdi/Dulna case.
However, this objective tone is undermined by the insertion of a humorous

and subjective description of the architect of Bakuli, w a n Singh, "whose

blood-sugar rose at once...diabetes has twelve husbands, among them
anxiety." (OW 187). The narrative then proceeds with an omniscient
narrator's voice which soon asserts itself in the first person. This little trip
into the narratorial "I" becomes intriguing as it is graphically merged with
Senanayak's "I": "All will come dear, he says. I have almost deciphered
Dopdi's song" (190). This vocal superimposition complicates not only the
manner in which the reader's sympathies are to be engaged and deployed but
also the meaning in the third and find section of the story, in the latter half
of which there is no direct speech, be it Draupadi's, Senanayak's, or even the

guard's; the use of quotations, which signals distinct speaking-subjects, is

abandoned altogether.
Army jargon is employed by both parties, Senanayak's and Arijit's. As

employed by Arijit, its use signifies the inadequacy of the revolutionary

movement to exceed or transgress its allotted spaceon of officially
sanctioned resistance to the system. The army jargon as a unit serves another
purpose: it acts as a territorial stake in counterpoint to the latent threat of the
nomadological counter-signifying semiotic of the tribal forest.21 The forest,
2 1 1 think that it is necessary here to invoke Deleuze and Guattari's anti-oedipal
argument which brings together in one interactive economy the discourses of
philosophy, psychoanalysis, capitalism, geography, and anthropology.
They
lay bare the repressive ideology shared by modern disciplines through their
emphasis on the simultaneity of semiotic regimes and the reconceptualization
of human agency as a schizophrenic urge for "desiring-production." It is, in
my view, the only post-structural approach that effectively injects the
consideration of pragmatics into any discussion of semiotic systems. Their
thinking is properly extra-disciplinary as it is not limited by categories;

with its otherly coded flows, exists in topographical counterpoint to the

striated space inhabited by Senanayak's army. The early Draupadi and her

gang are differentiated from the "poor harvest workers" and the "tribals"of
the "primitive forest," and are thus inhabitants of Senanayak's kse f ra,

inasmuch as they may take to the forest for cover-they are and behave like
the enemy. Here the (narrator) tells us quite dearly that Draupadi's
operations are as manual-oriented as Senanayak who lives by such
knowledge as prescribed by the Army handbook (188) and the "anti-fascist
paperback copy of The Deputy" (190): "The ones who remain [Draupadi] have
lived a long time in the primitive world of the forest-They must have
forgotten book-learning. Perhaps they are orienting their book-learning to
the soil they live on and learning new combat and survival techniques."
(191). However, the fact that Draupadi is apprehended tells us that her group
has failed to forget the book; her capture is possible because she continues to
behave and think in the manner prescribed for the enemy. In this way she
remains within the Senanayak's signifying regime and justifies his strategy:
'In order to destroy the enemy, become one. Thus he understood them by

(theoretically) becoming one." (189). In this he, too, remains well within the
purview of the State semiotic, which is what creates the space within which
the "enemy"can exist to begin with.

In this context, then, it is hardly surprising that Senanayak has all their
actions measured. except for the climactic last one by Dopdi. When Dopdi is
captured, Senanayak's reaction is one of triumph and elation but also
despondency and unhappiness. His theoretical savvy of anticipating the
however, it is this very quality which leads them to embrace a dispersal of
individual intentionality down the path of a delirious "line of flight." In
chapter 1, I suggested that the Deleuzian/Guattarian critique takes us to the
point where the necessity of a dharmic-ethical recuperation of moral action
becomes all-important.

"enemy's moves has been confinned yet again in practice:

"if you want to

destroy the enemy, become oneA long as six years ago he could anticipate

their every move. He still can. Therefore he is elated (OW 194). He is

unhappy not only because the enemy behaves predictably but also because he
sympathizes with the peasant's cause; his sympathy for Dopdi and her cause
is, however, of no practical consequence since Dopdi is also the enemy and

will receive the treatment an enemy deserves: "he supported this struggle
from the point of view of the field hands. Dopdi is a field hand. Veteran
fighter. Search and destroy. Dopdi Mejhen is about to be apprehended. Will
be destroyed. Regret" (OW 194). Of course, Senanayak makes no ethical
reflection on the fact of his assigning the role of enemy to Dopdi. This lack
on Senmayak's part is part of the reason of his fear at the climactic end of the
story.
The smooth space of the forest has its own language, a "savage
tongue," (188) which interestingly enough, is foreign to the State's.
Senmayak's "tribal-specialist types" (189) are unable to translate Dulna's

dying cry, "Ma-ho." and have to rely on the interpretation given by Chamru,
the lowly water-carrier in the camp. It is evident that this event can be read
as paradigmatic of the colonial enterprise in general, one which published
with certitude facts about indigenous cultures, forgetting that these facts relied
not only on the contamination of translation but on the wiles of a native
translator; the humorous if not farcical endeavor of the specialists flown in
by the Defense Department is further accentuated by the irony of their having

to consult dictionaries put together by European scholars in the by-gone

Imperial era, "by worthies such as Hoffman-Jeffer and Golden-Palmer" (189).

(Sadly enough, it is also typical of Spivak's scholarship as reflected in her

essay on Draupadi; her understanding of the Naxalite movement in West

Bengal is substantiated by the work of none other than an "ex-Maoist French

"New PhilosophertfBernard-He& Levy.) But the more intriguing aspect of
the Chamru episode is that it highlights the tramsemiotic aspect of

semiology-due to the surplus value generated by overcoding; at no point can

one decisively present any one particular semiotic regime as
unproblematicdy dominant. Instead, we see that Senanayak's State semiotic,
C h a m ' s semiotic, and the Maldah semiotic (if Chamru is to be believed) are
simultaneously operative; and transformational statements such as "Ma-Hot'
signal the way in which the State's signifying semiotic "translates for its own
purposes a statement originating elsewhere [from the Santals of Maldah], and
in so doing diverts it [by reinscribing into the terrorist code a statement

originating in the Gandhian era], leaving untransfonnable residues [Dulna's

corpse] and actively resisting the inverse transformation" (MP 136).

The fact that the media reified State language is communicated in

English in a Bengali text points significantly to the standardization of the
Nation-State as the globally dominant and normative model for the socius
today. In section two, for example, Devi makes interesting use of italics for
representing that which is media disseminated information (newspaper:
Killed by police encoun terunknow male...age twen ty-two... (192); and,
"

when employing army jargon for all military maneuvers (Cordon up, round
the clock, cordite, close canal approach (193), Veteran fighter, Search and

Destroy (194)). This authorial strategy highlights the functioning of a State

apparatus that is bent on the elimination of insurgent elements detrimental
to the upkeep of the State's dominant regime of signification. Competing

semiotics are always present; and in pointing out that "the fighting words on
both sides are in English" Spivak ignores the war-call "Ma-ho,"which the
texts clearly tells us was used by the Santals of Maldah "when they began

fighting at the time of King Gandhi! It's a battle cry" (189). Spivak chooses
not to hear this cry perhaps to aid her in concluding that 'Nation-state

politics combined with multinational economies produce war." This glib

formula is motivated more by Spivak's post-Marxist intellectual make-up

than by the effective arena of the story, where the appropriation of fighting
English on the rebel side supplements the pre-existing tribal war language
suggested by "Ma-ho." This tribal fighting language is further complicated by
the association with Gandhi's struggle of Nan-violence made by Chamru; it
becomes uncertain as to whether the Santals of Maldah "fought"with or
against "King Gandhi." Perhaps it signifies C h a m ' s understanding of the
Gancihian effort as "battle" and "fighting" that marks the power inherent in

the ethic of non-violence and passive resistance. Whatever the answers may

be, what remains clear is that the w e of English army jargon describes the
confrontation in one semiotic regime, and that one should be careful not to
extrapolate from this a transcendent semiotic realization, such as "NationState economies combined with multinational economies produce war"
(Spivak 185)!
At the level of the &once, Draupadi's body becomes the instance of a
"terror" statement that reifies the dominant signifying regime. The terror
manifests itself as and when Draupadi and her troop engage in acts of
retribution-it is easily seen that her land of violence merely mirrors the
violence heralded by the figure of Senmayak-and as and when the figure of
Draupadi is "countered" with rape, torture, and humiliation: both circles of
violence are equally terroristic. In terms of effecting a "discursive
displacement," then, Draupadi's violence is all for naught (Spivak calls
function changes in sign systems "discursive displacements"). Though
Spivak would like to see Draupadi as the properly insurgent or subaltern

f i v e , in whom the agency of change is Iocated-a f i p e able to effect change

thxough the violent force of a aisk-the violence of her terrorism remains

within the bounds of what the State machinery can bath produce and contah
as Spivak t e k us, "the men easily succeed in stripping Dopdi-in the

narrative it is the d m h a t i o n of her political p-hent

by the

repremta~vesaf the hwIr(185).

As s i p , bath k a n a y a k and Draupadi refer to the supreme signifier,
the State, which presents itself both as lack-signaled by his feu, and her taunt

at the end-and as excess-the evident suppression of Draupadi as enemy of

the State. Draupadi, he^ partner D b a f her group of Naxdites, form no more
than the "~ounterbody'~
to the body of the State-as-god: *'.-.thebody of the

condemned [wo]man; [s]hef toof has her] Iegd status; [slhe gives rise to her]

own ceremonial...in order to code the lack of power with which those
subjected to punishment are marked. h the darkest region of the political
field the condemned [wo]man outIines the ~yxrunetricd~
inverted figure of
the kg'' (MP 116). In the light of this state coding, Spivak's foUowixtg
contention regarding Draupadi's self-insistent nakedness appears as a
somewhat hasty gloss: "Once Dopdi entersf h the h d section of the story,

l
she is in a place where
the postcript area of lunarflux and s e x ~ adiflerence,
she will finally act FOR herself in NOT "acting," h challenging the man to
(en)counter her as unrecorded or misrecorded objective historical
monument." (184). ParaduGcdy, this statement relies on the essentiality of
sex (%nmayak=mm=mde)as it tries to assert the deconstructive potential of

sexuality (Dopdi=comtered=&own).

Further, though Dopdi does not

"act" in accordance with what is prescribedf to what extent is she acting for
herself if her gesture is to act as "counter" to Senmayak's enterprise and
expectations?

It is basically here that Spivak betrays the Orientafi~tunderpinnings of

her enterprise, one which dictates the artidation of the subaltern as
ultimately no more than the political artidation of the identical:

My point is?of course, that through a l l of these heterogmeous

examples of temtoriality and the comund mode of power? the
figure of the woman? [moving from dm to clan and f d y to
family as dau&ter/sbter and de/mother,] syntaxes patriarchal
cuntinuity even as she herself is drained of proper identity. In this
particular area, the continuity of community ur history, for
subaltern and histo~analike, is produced on...the dissimulation of
her discontinuity, an the repeated emptying of her meaning as
instrument. (231)

If, on one hand, the subdtem (or historian) is an essential instmment for the
upkeep and maintenance of the patriarchal or state machine, then how, on
the other hand, can she be drained of her "proper" identity? A n immediate
conceptual problem here is that Dapdi or the subdtem is conceived of as

"A machine may be defined as a system of interruptions or breaks

(coupwes)...e v e v machine, in the fist place, is related to a continud material

flow (hy16)**(A0 36)- As machines, we are connected in multiple couphgs,

all of which traverse our bodies simdtaneously and variously. This

reconcepbabza~on,the functioning of the agent as machine and not as tool,

is crucial to getting beyond the metaphysics of historical representation and

into an analysis proper of the possibilities of revolutionary b m f o m a ~ o n . 2 2

Aided by her best deconshctive intentions, Spivak ends up privileging the
3
cannot be an
J u d e e C M t i m conception of History and ~ e i n ~ . 2Dopdi
221n A n t i - O e d t p u s : "Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines.
For every organ-machine* and energy-machine: a11 the time* flows and
interruptions." (1 1; also, "Oedipus presupposes a fantastic repression o f
desiring-machines'' ( 2 ) .
23 In Anti-Oedipus: "the idea primitive societies have no history, that they are
dominated by archetypes and their repetition, is especially weak and
inadequate. This idea was nat conceived by ethnoLogists but by ideol~gists in

mecorded or &recorded historical monummt if she is at once the

subaltern " h m m t ' *
driving official History; to the contrary?the histmy-

machine and the Dop&-mame exist here in a harmo~ousconjunctivedisjunctive synthesis. h d just as the officid History machine is not the only
kstov-ma%@, the "subdtemf*is conceivably engaged in the productian of
its awn history 'W what is called &tory i s a dynamic and open social reality,

in a state of hmtiond *qflbfim,

or an o

~ equilibrimr
~ g

...comprising not only M ~ h ~ a n & e conflicts

d
but conflicts that generate
changes...then prixnitive societies are U y inside history..." (A0 150). And in

this point especially Spivak's fomda~on- at the subdiem cannot speak-is

wrong.

h t e r n of the p n a s of nature, the f o ~ ~ w can

h g be said about the two
of them: Senmayak's nature is primarily rajasic with a slight satfzuic streak.

The sattzuic impulse shows itself in the firm belief Senmayak has in the
principles, such as those in the Army Handbook, &at inform the course of
desirable actions in Smanaydc's hefm or field. He demonstrates a certain
mount of technical reflection on his activity and desires to c o m h c a t e his

knowledge to other h m m - h this too, he demonstrates a sattzuic tendency.

The problem, of course, is that Senmayak's knowledge and reflection is

exc~usive~y
about the k e f m and not its fietragya or h~wer-i.e.-~
himself.
The littie insight we have into his thoughts are focused entirely around his

metier, never on himself. His WE-sa&factian with his station and b c t i o n

in life hints at a sutttuic paise, but ultimately one sees that the rajasic

proclivity d o h a t e s his nature, especially in his arrogance at his awn

expertise at being an accomplished general who out-thinks his enemy.

the service of a tragic Judaeo-Christian c~nsciousness that they wished to

credit with he '*inventiont*of history" (150).

Senmayak reflects the rajasic man who "flings himself into the baffle and

attempts to tse the struggle of forces for his own egoistic benefitt*@G 49).
Dopdi's natural makeup in the story is more complex. She has
presumably overcome a famasic inertia that dominated her name until she
rebeued and now is primarily motivated by rajas. Indeed, we see that Dopfls
actions in the betra are impelled by a passionate necessity for action and that
her emotional state is in turmoil. Having become an outlaw and being
wanted "dead or alive'' at all costs by the government powers, Dopdi
participates in organized guerrilla warfare, and shares the ultimate idealistic
goal stated by Dulxsa regardhg the point of their "work" around the Jharkani
belt, that 'flandownerand moneylender and poficmm might one day be
wiped out!" (193). She acts primarily as an informant, always on the move

from one village to assother. There is no kseiric refledon in Dopdi as to the

purport of her agency other than slaying the enemy; if any cohesive idedogy
informs her actions, then it comes from the leadership of the '*young
gentlemen" revolution~ies,whose ideology is not specified beyond the
hinted Marxism.
It is interesting that Dopdi's knowledge of the field is from immediate

and lived experience, which in this aspect is opposed to %mayak's

knowledge supplemented by research and literature on the field. It is perhaps
because of this that her howledge of the field is coupled by a striving to seek
knowledge of herself as the Gefragya or knower of her field. The insight we
are shown into Dopdi's mind reveals that she is still confused about the
recent events in her life. Her ruminations about her own existential make-

up lead to a recall of he purity of her ancestral h e and pride in the ethical

loyalty of her forefathers: "Nowshe thought there was no shame as a Santal
-

in Shomai and Budhna's treachery. Dopdik blood was the pure

unadulterated blood of a m p a b h W . - - D o p & felt proud of her forefathers.

They stood p a r d over fheir woments blmd in black ~IT~XCX''
(193). The ethical

principle of loydty is figured in the foUowing image: "crow wodd eat emwrs
flesh before S a n d wouid betray Santal" (193). h important indicator of her

sutkuic countenance is seen in her decision that her Me is worth sacrificing

for the revolutionary cause. She is certain that she will not betray her team by

giving out any infomation, and has reached a suttwic degree of selfdetachment from the strife and violent world-energy of which she is a part.

This is evident in her reply to Mwhai's wife's question, "Can't yau run
away?? 'No. Tell me? how many times can 1 run away? What will they do if
they catch me? They will counter me- Let themff(192). %on thereafter! she is
being pursued and resolves to say nothing under tortme and/or capture: "I
swear by my Me. By my Me, Dub? by my We. Nothing must be told" (193).
Her reaction shows Dopdi to have reached a degree of detachment
from her body and from her involvement within the ksetra, even though she
will continue her actions as terrorist and idomant. Her commitment to

self-sacrifice reflects an inkling towards the Gan&an system of passiveresistance or sa&apaha- Gmdhi is adamant about the power and effectivity
of passive-resbtmce and the virtue of seu-sacrifice: "Sa&agraha is referred to

in English as passive resistance. Passive resistance is a method of securing

rights by personal suffering?it is the reverse of resistance by arms" (245). This
resolution shows Dopdi's incipient t ~ p ~ a t i t a - b e hbeyond
g
the gunas of
nature-which become evident at the climactic ending.
The third and climatic section of h e story begins with a mention of

Dopdi's formal interrogation which lasts an how and during which no one
touches her. The details of this interrogation remain unstated in the storyf

which is interesting considering the attention accorded to Dopdi's self-

Ill
preparation for action in the eventuality of an interrogation-that she will not
reveal any information even if it means her death. What the interrogation
shows is that information-retrieval is at best a secondary motive of her

capture; it may be argued that there isn't much she can tell Senanayak which
he doesn't already know or cannot already divine about the enemy. The
story also ends without imparting any information regarding this matter.
What is certain, however, is the fact that rape as torture is very much the
point of capturing Dopdi; in this her expectations are not deceived-she is
indeed "countered" by the police force in a dose approximation of the way

she envisaged such a counter: "When they counter you, your hands are tied
behind you [in her case, she is spread-eagled and tied to posts]. All your bones
are crushed, your sex is a terrible wound" (OW 192). Though Dopdi's vision
of a counter here is based on what happened to a male prisoner, it is
significant that her own horrific experience as a female prisoner is not far
removed: She too is tied down, spread-eagled and to posts, and as a
consequence of gang-rape she too finds her sex to be a terrible wound:
"Something sticky under her ass and waist-she senses her vagina is
bleeding...her breasts are bitten raw, the nipples tom" (OW 195). This
'making" of the prisoner-Senanayak's casual and parting command to begin
the procedure: "Make her. Do the needfil."-is quite literally the unmaking

of the dignity of a human being, be it a female Dopdi or a male Rana. What I

am saying here may offend feminist sensibilities, for I am ,after all, equating
the suffering and humiliating experience of a woman's rape as equal to the
suffering and humiliating experience of a man's torture (with or without the
added possibility of homosexual rape). However, I think that I must make
the claim that both males and females can be equally humiliated, tortured,

and "unmade," that is, made to lose their human dignity. This loss signals

the failure of and absolute violence against an ethical code. It is certainly

against all dharmic-ethics, an act that must be condemned. As an adhannic

act, it is one that has lost all sense of the uniting Self, and thus unnaturally

worships satisfaction of the self and perpetrates an Asuric willful doing of

injury to others; it indicates a world "with Desire for its cause and seed and
governing force and law...a world devoid of just relation and linked Karma, a
world without God, not true, not founded in Truth" (EG 457).
What then, is a tortured, bleeding, unmade Dopdi to do in her
situation? How is she to react to her unmaking? The reactions expected from
her are not described by the story, though we can surmise at the very least that
she is expected to behave docilely, cover her body and wounds with her doth
or sari and be escorted to her next interrogation. The way in which Dopdi
does react, however, is absolutely against what is expected from someone who
has been raped and unmade. The first signal that she gives of her defiance

happens when she tears the cloth or sari thrown at her by the guard and
when she spills the pot of water on the ground-refusing to satiate her
ravaging thirst and of washing her wounds.
These actions demonstrate that Dopdi is willfully accepting further selfsuffering and that she is prepared for self-sacrifice; clearly, she has not been
unmade. Her action here and subsequent defiance of Senanayak spell out the

Gandhian ethic of Satyagraha: "When I refuse to do a thing that is repugnant

to my conscience, I use soul-force...If I do not obey the law and accept the

penalty for its breach, I use soul-force. It involves sacrifice of self" (245). And
in these terms, one can see that Dopdi has undergone a transformation, from

being a terrorist to being a s a t y a p h i ; whereas earlier her defiance of the law

depended on the guerrilla tactics of surprise attacks, killings, and evasion, her
present defiance constitutes an unarmed confrontation with the law with the

knowledge that she will endure further pain, torture, or death. This
transformation is evident from her willingness for self-sadce and
continued personal suffering. Draupadi as tezrosist could see violence as the
ody option to fight against *may&-*at

Draupadi was effectively

"countered-" Draupadi as satyag~uhi,on ihe other handr rejoins poEtics and

religion and begins to pedom "every one of her] actions in the light of
299). Dopas ~ ~ r e o ~ e n t a ies osuch
n that it can
ethical p ~ c i p l e s (Gandhi
"

said to exceed the codes of the Army Handbook (something which she cannot
said to have done at any earlier point in the stmy); thus the flummoxed guard
who "doesn't know what to do if the prisoner behaves heomprehemibly"
(OW 196). And when a naked and bleeding h p d i confronts Senmayak, he

too cannot understand the meaning of her behavior/ and particularly of her
"hdomitable laughter." What kind of laughter is this? Clearly, it is not a
demented or depraved laughter, since such a reaction would be very much
within the parameters of the official expectation. It is most likely this

impetus of passive resistance which prompts her to offer herself up for

further seE-sdfedg and puts the fear of god in Senmayak.

h the context of remaking the self, 1 would like to consider Kavita

Panjabi's article, "Physical Torture and Modes of Creative Expression: A Study
of "Cambio de h a s " and "Dra~padi"~
which provides an attempt to invest
a creative charge to the re-making process.

makes two si@cant

In doing so,however, Panjabi

errors. She takes it for granted that the re-making is

going to be new and creative, and not simply dictated by the power-smcmes
which were responsible for the unm&g

(and the original made-self) in the

first place. The second error o c m s when she reiies on an identify that is kept
constant in the un-making and re-making processes. The following excerpt is
problematic and serves to illustrate both points:

And in bath stories the dialectics of the loss of Dower versus the desire
to control one's o m existence leads to a proce& of regaining agency in

which each woman's subjectivity is recodified though creative

It is hard to guess what, if anything, the italicized portion signifies. What

makes the rebuilding process creative? How can it be creative if it depends on
the identity that has been m a d e ? h d how can an m a d e identity still
perform as itself and shdtmeowly as a restorative force? As long as it is
''subjectivity" that is being "re~ociified~"
how can this lead to a different
subjecthood? And finallyr to address an implicit assumption of her text, what

m&es this process unique to a f a d e victim? h other words, what is the

transition between m-g-forced

by a rnde ideology and power-

structure-and the creative remaking attributed to woman? There is no

substantiation provided in answer to these important questions that are
nonetheless raised by Pmjabi's text. The answer, 1 feelf lies beyond the
exigencies of discursive flip-flop and in the redm of the dhamic-ethical
processes animating all human inter-actions. In Dopdi's caser for example,
we see intimations of a saffwicsurge even before she geis captured and
refer to the her insights about self-sacrifice). Without
undergoes her ordeal (I
this sizttwic awakening, her defiant response after the ordeal would not have

held any force of conviction. Thus, Panjabi's feminist bid to force a male
female axis on the orientation of her interpretation is superficial and
inaccurate; the truth of the matter is far removed from the following
statement: "Draupadi derives the power of agency from the strength of her
identityf her identity as a woman &&en@g a male oppressive act'' (93).
One sees instead that Dopdi as a hum= agent derives her force from

espousing self-sacrificeand self-suffering as she resists to become a player or

counter-player in an inhmm system bereft of ethicd values. Panjabi's
claimf that "Ikaupadiregains mer agency] in the use of her own bodyf the
victim of the attack, as t~ weapon of attaclf (94If emphasis mine), misses the
project of the story entirely, and does so because her inteqretive approach is
sold an the Western binary of Self and Otherf whish in this case is recast as

the oppressive m a l e / ~ c W e dfemale. In the flip-flop that leads nowheref

Panjabi sees the female reversing roIes. So that in Panjabi's end, h a n a y & is
afraid when Ropdi pushes him with her two mang1d breasts because those
breasts are 'rweaponsof attadc"! This interpretation is simplistic, and reduces

the ethical import of the story.

Panjabi is not done in forcing the urgency of a feminist reading upon
the text. Spivak sees the project of the story to '%re& this bonded identity

[man'sapparently self-adequate identityf which sustains his theory-practice

juggling act] with the wedge of an -SONABLE

feart'-as apposed to

*'reasonablet'fear, I suppose-(179). The fear refaed to i s one felt by

Senanayak at the end of the story when a naked, torn and bleeding Dopdi mbs
her breasts against him in the courtyardf challenging him to "co~nter~"
her-

"come on, counter me-come on, counter me-?"(196). Structurallyf however,

the text suggests that Senmayak's identity isf at this point, no more or less

bonded than Dopdi's, or the pard's, or even the naxrator's. What the story
tells us supports Spivak's assertion; however, the manner in which it is told
suggests that the subject-posi~omhave been dis-closed in a way that makes
Spivak's reading inaccurate. In fact, it can be said in Spivakian terms itself
that the story (t5nonc6) takes us to the brink of (but not beyond) a discursive
displacement horn militancy to differential sexualify, whereas the text as

statement (&onciation) perforxis a translation from the discourse of dialectic

into that of detemton&a~oa24
The fobwing question arises here: if the subaltern reveals herself in
direct contradiction to patriax&d hegemony and thereby makes her voice

heard only as the shout of a hitherto silenced term in the Binary, what is the
effective strength of her ethical subject position? Spivak's suggestion that the

project of the story is "to break [Senmayak's] bonded identity with the wedge
of an measonable fear'' (185)does nothing to represent the "subdtem*'as a
viable alternative subject and voice; on the contrary, her suggestion is yet
another instance in which the name of the subaltern is sublated to the higher
requirement of patronpy. In fact? no effective ''&a.nslation" is shown to
have taken place; that is, It is ironic, then, that when Spivak Ends in

Senamyak "theclosest appro-ation

to the First-World scholar in search of

the third worlds*(OW 1759,not only does she admittedly find herself?but I
would argue that she finds herself as a First World Chientalist capable only of
reproducing the terns of enlightenment, of Western hmanist discome.

The moment when Draupadi begins to figure as the d e t e m t o ~ a b e d

body without organs occurs just before her find "engagement" with
Senanayak:
[Senmayak] sees Rraupadi, naked?waking toward him in the bright
sunlight with her head held high. The nervous guards trail behind.
What is this,he is about to cry?but stops.
Draupadi stands before him?naked. Thigh mci pubic hair matted
with dry blood. Two breasts, two wounds- (OW 196)

2 4 ~refer to her statement regarding S z a a d u y h i : "At this point, if, therefore,

the story (&nonce) se1ls us of the failure of a translation or discursive
displacement from religion to militancy, the text as statement (6nonciation)
participates in such a translation...from the discourse of religion into that of
politicat critique." (266)

Senmayak's siIence heralds the advent of kaupadi's body without organs

which announces the transformative movement &om one semiotic into

another?specifically from the si-g

semiotic, in which ''overcoding is

fully effectuated by the sipifier, and by the State apparatus that emits it," into
khe p o s t s i m g semiotic, "inwhich a sign or a padcet of s i p detaches

fiom the irradiating c5nm.k~

network and sets to work on its own account,
starts running a straight line, as though swept into a narrow, open passage*"
(W 121?135). As a body without organs, Draupadi has become the s&o

deliberately scrambling the codes of hanayak's signfiying regime: "the

s&o

has [her] own system of coordinates for situating [herlself at [her]

disposal-..she has at her disposal her very o m recording codef which dues not
coincide with the soaal code.--" (A015).

So it is that the signifier "manf'used by Draupadi in her address and

taunt-"you can strip me?but how can you dothe me again?are you a man?"

(196)- is not so much the indictment of mmz's self-adequate identity , as

Spivak would have it?but of a gmdered and repressive historical State
itself is emptied of meaning as it is tom
apparatus. At this moment "manf1

from its circle of si@mce

detemtofi&ation.

and plunged into the r e a h of a delirious

h ihe end? the find moment of the stov-"Draupadi

pushes Senanayak with her two mangled breasts, and for the first time

Senanayak is afraid to stand before an unarmed target, terribly afraid." (196)shows Dopdi victorious at having effected a transsemiotic fissure.

The anti-Oedipal framework brings us closer than Spivaks

deconstruction with a feminist bias to the "truih"of the story* But what good
is a transsemiotic fissure if it is not accompanied with m agenda or a
meaningful course of action, or, an ethical justification? The moment when
the naked and bleeding Draupadi c ~ ~ o nSenmayak
ts
isf as we have seenf

the moment of detemtorialization. Useful as the concept of

detemtorialization appears in aiding a critique of literary theories which

privilege the constructedness of language along with its inherent

deconstructive aspects, it ends up in a dead end by not being able to impart to
the deterritorialized object a course of action that is more meaningful than
the delirious and almost psychopathological escape through "lines of flight."

In fact, detemtorialization of this land seems nothing more than yet another
ethically empty ritual of the kind that Ashis Nandy, speaking from a selfavowed Gandtuan perspective, declaims: "it has become more and more
apparent that genocides, eco-disasters and ethnocides are but the underside of
corrupt sciences and psychopathic technologies wedded to new secular
hierarchies which have reduced major aviteations to the status of a set of
empty rituals" (x).
Clearly, Draupadi in her mangled and violated condition represents
extreme suffering. At this point, her message to Senanayak can be
understood only by recalling the imperatives of dhamic-ethical action as
outlined in the Gita. It is interesting that the third section shows only the
exterior of Draupadi-no inner thoughts, no insight to what's going on in her
mind. This supports my claim that we are dealing primarily with forces and
processes of Nature and the Self, and secondarily with identifiable "subjects;"

our interpretive recourse is solely to the external actions performed by Dopdi.

Her actions can be seen as a sattwic sacrifice performed for the sake of a higher
truth, an ethical failure that she has suffered through and that she must

contest. Her contestation, as it is depicted, becomes an instance of "Work

done with a disinterested religious faith or selflessly for humanity or
impersonally from devotion to the Right or the Truth" (EG 471). Dopdi's
behavior is not predicated on the motive of revenge, as Spivak has

erroneously concluded in a more recent introduction to the story: "In

Draupadi, what is represented is an erotic object transformed into an object of
torture and revenge where the line between (hetero)sexuality and gender
violence begins to waver" (BS vii). It must be said here that Spivak's
erotichation of Dopdi is unwarranted by the thematic and structural economy
of the story. Spivak's assignation of "revenge" to the story is also equally
inappropriate. Punishment not revenge is that which motivates Dopdirs rape

and torture by the police; when Dopdi pushes Senanayak with her mangled
breasts, it is hard to see how her act "does hurt or harm to another in return
for wrong or injury suffered" (OED). Senanayak suffers neither injury nor
pain from Dopdi's action but fear. And as I have argued above, it is fear of the
unknown, precisely the fear of ksetrajnic ignorance, a realization of the

inhuman lack of adhamic-ethical basis for his ksetric dispensations.

Senanayak's mute and fearful reaction is the reaction of an Asuric official
confronted by the superior power of the Deuasic Dopdi. Senanayak's fear is
occasioned by Dopdi's superior knowledge that has combined the knowledge
of both the ksetra and the Ksetragya. At this moment, Dopdi offers a sattwic
sacrifice, her action is done without a personal motive, certainly not revenge,
and as there is no personal action there is likewise no personal fruit that she

seeks. hi sum, Dopdi's sattwic action is "done impersonally, universally, for

the good of the world, for the fulfillment of the divine will in the universe"
(EG 471).

It is thus not at the deconstructive, nor feminist, nor solely deterritorial

planes that the story makes its impact but at the dharmic-ethical plane. This
is not to say that Spivak's criticism is unethical but it comes close in its

obeisance to the discursive GOD. It is Spivak's deconstructive framework

which allows her to conceive of and discuss "ethical singularity" as a "secret

encounter" demonstrated by the "impossibility of "love" in the one-on-one

way for each human being"(xxv); it is through the ethical moment so
conceived that she makes the following claim: "Thisis why ethics is the
experience of the impossible" (xxv). Spivak's claim makes perfect sense in
the world of the displaced and displacing signifiers, which admittedly is an

irrepressible deconstructive feature of all signification; pragmatically

speaking, however, her statement is meaningless and does blatant disservice
to the work of such an author/activist as Mahasweta Devi. The lived reality
of ethics, and of (ftarmic-ethics in particular, makes no claim to a

significatory self-sufficiencynor to a logical rationality; to the contrary,

dftarmic-ethics signals the non-discursive interconnection between the self

and Self which is the inescapable quality of the fabric of being and existence.
Spivak comes curiously dose to broaching this non-discursive truth, in
her introduction to the Breast Stories, at the moment when she briefly
discusses maternal ethics in the moment of breast-feeding:
The infant has one object with which to begin to construct the systems
of truth (meaning)and goodness (responsibility) which will make it
human. This object is its source of nourishment, deprivation, and
sensuality-usually the breast. At weaning and before, the breast-and,
secondarily, other part objects-become "symbolized" and recognized as
whole persons. (BS xv).
What this formulation belies is Spivak's own attachment to the breast of

discourse. It is replete with problems, all of which center around her

blinkered viewpoint which sees nothing apart from the discursive
possibilities of a breast-feeding situation. To say that the infant has but one
object of the breast to begin constructing its truths and responsibilities can

make sense only if this Spivakian breast-feeding takes place in an

environment of absolute sensory deprivation of any other kind of stimulus!
For it ignores nine of the "ten senses and one" outlined in Gita: the eye, ear,

skin, tongue, nose, and the organs of action, the hand, foot, mouth, anus, and

genital organ, and the mind (I have discussed these in my second chapter).
The experience of breast-feeding is but a minor part in the experiential realm

of the child. Clearly, Spivak's infant sucks in the vacuum of discourse. In

assuming a symbolizing function to the child's activity, she again forces it

into a discursive realm and attributes a subjectivity to the child's actions.

How is a child, if indeed a dean slate of sorts, to assimilate "partial" objects as

'symbols"for "whole" persons? In this regard, I refer the reader to Cynthia

Willett's discussion of maternal ethics, who at the onset acknowledges the
importance of her personal motherhood experience in her text, and does so as

she is aware that the mother child relationship is a primary sodality between
a ore-subject and a subject, that the tactile experience of caress is all-important
in the development of this sodality, and that the social bond is music and

dance. Spivak's short-sighted and erroneous claims are useful in

demonstrating the inadequacy of discourse worship, especially when it conies
to the question of formative ethics and of dharmic-ethics. It leads to the selfdeluded tamasic satisfaction of stating that "ethics is the experience of the
impossible."

That we should obey laws, whether good

or bad is a new fangled notion..& is contrary
to out selfhood if we obey laws repugnant
to our conscience. Such teaching is opposed
to religion and means slavery.
The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi.

Chapter 4

Men like Us: Waiting/or the Barbarians

Waiting for the Barbarians stands out in Coetzee's swore as the novel

most directly concerned with the nature of ethical responsibility and its
intimate contact with the extra-discursive "unteachablef'core of human

being. The evocation of the non-discursive agency of ethics as primary

sociality is figured through the many mysterious gestures depicted in
Coetzee's lyrical and allegorical novel. This figuration importantly exceeds
the bounds of discourse-fixated engagement which is a commonplace critical

attribute of Coetzeefsauthorial intentionality; exemplary, in this regard, are

the following statements:

In Waiting for the Barbarians one finds a point at which history, in

failing to transform the terms of discourse, becomes objectified as the
myth of history, or History; with teleology thus undermined, the
discursive nature of history is thrown into relief." (Atwell 14)
In W a i w for the Barbarians, allegory is thematised as a means of
articulating the liberal humanist crisis of interpretation, while at the
same time allegory is employed as a structural device in order to imply

the inevitable imbrication of the novel's own discourse with the

discourses it deconstructs. (Dovey, CPC 141)
Both Atwell and Dovey are sensitive to the permutations of a post-structural
analysis, and are right in finding in Barbarians some of the major elements
that inform post-modem and post-colonial critiques, such as "History,"

"humanist crisis of interpretation," and self-reflexive strategy. The power of

the novel, however, is dependent not only on its intellectual discursive
strategies but ultimately in its homage to true knowledge, that is, a knowledge
which combines the knowledge of the ksefra or field with the knowledge of

the Ksefragya or knower of the field. The narrative is mobilized in the first
person of the magistrate, who is an acute observer of the ksetra but also of the
nature of his ethical responsibility as a Ksetraeya. Waiting for the Barbarians,
then, is a novel that investigates the nature of dharmic-ethics and in doing so

acknowledges the need for a revision which forefronts the unknowable

eternal mystery of life.
The arrival under emergency powers of colonel Joll of the Third
Bureau of the "Empire" sets off the chain of events in Waiting for the
Barbarians. The magistrate finds his tranquil and tamasic existence shattered

b y Joll's single-minded pursuit of investigating a purported barbarian revolt

against the Empire. As Joll conducts torture interrogations upon his
prisoners, the magistrate finds himself repulsed, angered, and confused. The
magistrate's ethical principles make him abhor everything that Joll
represents, not least the Empire of which he, too, is a representative. After
Joll's departure, the magistrate takes in a young barbarian girl who has been

deformed and partially blinded by Joll's torture. Their relationship is

indicative of the magistrate's need to repair an ethical breach, figured not
least by his ambiguous desires towards her. He decides, finally, to return the

barbarian girl to her people, and sets off on a perilous expedition to do so.
Upon his return, he is incarcerated as a traitor to Empire, and undergoes a
long process of humiliation and torture. His incarceration forces him out
into the open, so to speak, about his absolute opposition to the activities of
the Third Bureau. He risks sacrificing his life for his principles. At the end of

the novel, the Third Bureau meets with defeat (and not so much with the

Barbarians) and leaves the frontier town in a state of devastation and exodus,
wherein the magistrate resumes his official functions and awaits an uncertain

future.
Waitins for the Barbarians hinges upon torture and the ethical crisis
produced by it. Susan GaUagher, in "The Novelist and Torture," has
addressed the South African background which relates to the deployment of
torture in Coetzee's novel. Specifically, the Soweto uprising of June 1976 led
to a sixteen-month period of social unrest and unconscionable Police

brutality. The volatile state of affairs reached a dangerous point with the
death of Stephen Biko, the charismatic leader of the Black People's
Convention, under mysterious circumstances after spending a month in
detention with the Security Police (112-118). These events were among the
inexorable consequences of the apartheid policies sanctioned by the National
Party which gained control of South African policy-making in 1948. Though
rumors of state-sponsored torture existed aplenty since then, the events
culminating in Biko's death had important repercussions, not least at the
global level: "the issue of South Africa filled public discourse of all kindsfrom government reports to protest poems, from United Nations declarations
to novels" (112).
Coetzee's response in Barbarians to the issue of state oppression and to
torture, in particular, consciously avoids historical specificity of any kind

except for the menfion of m d e h ~ o n e sunglasses

d
and guns which wodd
place the narrative anywhere after the ~ e m - c m * .

Certain South-

African critics have viewed the allegorical approach as insufficiertfly political

and thus escapist, blaming Coetzee for his avoidance of addressing the
material and historical determinants of Imperialismf the economic processes

of capitalismf the contmpormeom political struggle in South-eta, and for

his seeming lack of an ideolo@cdp v o w f i e s s . This leads to dissatisfied
claims such asf "Coetzeefsfictional h g u a g e can say next to nothing outside
the modality of its o m racial-historical didectic" ( V a ~ g h mandf
) ~ Barbaria~s
shows the lack of a moral courage "as it ultimately challenges nothingf"

providing no more than "the mnocous malediction of an idealistic

humanism finding itself in alien temtory" (in Penner 23-29). These critical
responses to Coetzee's aesthetic effort failf most importantly, to appreciate the
significmce of an ethical inquiry into the justification of all action in the
various fields of politics, capitalism, historicismf Imperialismf and so on. In

devaluing the scope and power of ethical revisioning in the medium of artf
these critics obey the laws of rational discourse and support its reign-md its
ultimate haax-of language. Tisat isf they share a belief in the inescapable
textuality of all events and actions, whether their stance be post or anti

modernist, past or anti colonialistf pro or con Coetzee. Huggan and Watson,

who rightly condemn the skeptical m t i c s for being entrenched in a binatism

of po~tics/aestheticswhich approaches the crudeness and reductiveness of
racial thinkingf'(CPC 3)f are themselves unable to posit the step beyond the
textual when they ask about the nature of the "space elsewhere" and the
"margin of fkeedom" that Cwtzeefsfiction creates- In the jaded gesture of
discourse a c c o ~ o d a t i o nthey
f
refer to the customary Yhid" space between

binarism, the space in the m a w as they begin to seek an explanation and

meaning for the fact that Coetzee's fiction remainst in the final analysis,
mysterious as it refuses to provide answers after having dissolved eitherlor
categories "into a n ~ f i e n
elaborate-play of paradox and contradiction'' (7)*

But what is paradox if not the moment of the unmashg of dl discursive

certitude? Paradox is the ephemeral glimpse into the infinite in whose

domain it is that discourse signifies. Paradox is the reminder of the etemd

mystery of life which rational discourse, in its dep10yment of objectivity and
certitudes, tries to cover up. Paradox, h d l y , is the explosion of the Self's
Other. It is in the necessity to silence paradox#then, that most Western
academic critics leave untouched the universal binary and didectic of Self

and Other.
It is the crucial investigation of the self Iaunched by the act of tortme in
Barbarians that at once exposes the k i t s of binary dideetic and of language,

undoing the Self/Oher dichotomy as well as the recourse to ephtemolo@cal

certitude. Coetzee,, in a&owled@g

that B a r b ~ ~ a nissa novel "about the

impact of the torture chamber on the life of a man of comdence," proposes

two reasons for the fact that to-e

exerts a "dark fascination" for (South

African) writers. First, torture provides "a metaphor, bare and extreme#for
relations between a u t h o ~ t a d ~ sand
m its victims" @I?

363). The barbarian

girl as well as the magistrate are victimized by the Third Bureau of EmpireCoIonel JoU wields a power sanction that is unopposable in me-terms. The
resistance to JoU, then, takes place in the form of a Gandhian ahimsa or nonviolence and sawapaha or truth-espousal (though the concept of tmth is one
that is problematized by the novel, and will be &cussed below) which is

evinced not only by the magistrate but is also reflected in the attitude of the
girl towards JoU and the experience of torture, and in the aftermath of her life
in her relationship with the magistrate who is unable not to echo the role of

inquisitor. Coetzee's second reason for the writer's dark fascination relates to
the torture room and its experience, which provide that which is inaccessible
to language, through the pain and destruction of the victim's self-digpity*
The writer, as the magistrate and as Coetzee, hces the &aUenge and the need
to represent and understand the event as it affects its partiupants. Of coursef
the magistrate is a direct participant as victim of torturef but this does not

help him in any way to find expression to his experience, to give meaning to
it in words, as is shorn by his repeated Mure to write his own history, to
document his pain.
But for Coetzee the author, the fact of torture produces two moral
dilemmas* Coetzee's admission of being faced with such dilemmas is

extremely significant not only as it describes the context of the magistrate's

actions in Barbarians?but because it sign& paradox and contradiction as the

conceptual base for the ethical inquiry undertaken by him, by Coetzee as

author, and by the magistrate as failed author in the story. It is notable here
that Coetzee, as opposed to the magistratef has managed to record a d o m e n t
which indicts an Empire in which torture i s sanctioned. But in doing so in an

ethical way which exceeds the bounds of contained response sanctioned by the
State's sigmfjhg reghnes, Coetzee has perforce written his work as a gesture
to the inexpressible truth, the eternal mystery,

which lies au-dela du discuzm

and fkom which the fact of ethics as primary sociality stemsf both as spiritual
reality and a condition of faith.
Coetzee describes the two moral dilemmas for the writer as foUows.
The first arises from the effort to resist the urge to make the "vile mysteriesi'

of the '*darkfforbidden &amberttof torture the occasion of fantasy (DP364)Since torture is conducted by the State in secrecy, it is an obscenity enveloped

in mystery and thus "creates the preconditions for the novel to set about its

work of repremtation" (364). Coetzee sees the dilemma0then, as one

proposed by the state itself, namely to ipore its obscenities or eke to produce
r e p r a a b ~ o mof it0so that "the true chdengewbecomes '%ow not to play
the game by the rules of the stater how to establish one's own authoriv, how
n
(364). Coetzeet 1 fed,
to imagine torture and death on one's ~ w termsf'

meets this cbUmge in Barbarians by mobilizing an &+fare fminin or

feminine writing that exposes the knits of rational discourse and hearkens to

relationship. The second dilemma concerns the person of the tamer-"how

is the writer to represent the torturer?" The problem here concern avoiding

the trivialhation of the experience of torture through the use of the various
clich&sthat abound in describing the torturer as evil incamate. To s a t h e
the torturer is to avoid responsibility in the system which sanctions torture

and this saps the writing of any ethical farce. Coetzeelsfictional torturer Joll
is shown to be inscrutable, but his (in)hmanity is approached time and time

again as the magistrate finds the distance between himself and his torturers
collapsing. In the endf of course, the magistrate reaIizes that what makes him
different from JoU is the fact that he cannot reconcile his participation h the

(m)etJxicsof Joll's regime and is willing to pay with his life for his refusal to
participate. To make this realization the magistrate follows not a line of
reasoningf nor of rationalizing, but of eras for the Self of dl human lifeCoetzeevsnovel is an attempt to negotiate a movement towards
a time when humanity will be restored across the face of society, and
therefore when all human acts, including the flogging of an animal,
will be retuned to the ambit of moral j u d p m t ....W e n the choice is
no longer limited to either looking on in horrified fascination as the
blows fall or turning one's eyes awayf then the novel can once again
take as its province the whole of lifet and even the torture chamber can
be accorded a place in the design. (DI?
368).

The reaction that Coetzeers novel instantiates is an ethical sods

~ by ~a human
g
being implicated in the system which sanctions tortwe

of the Other- Gallagher notes that Cwtzee combines the allegorical form with
a text emphasizing gaps and uncertainties to show, through '*thepersona of a
weak and wondering man who continually f i ~ d that
s words f d him'' (Ul),
the failure of authority, of pen and penis, and of Impage. The result of the
magistrate's ethicd seu-eqlora~unis not a failure but a bredsdown or
destruction of the Self md Other dialectic which serves as the structural

foundation of Empire and validates its various conquests This dialectic is

recast in the bin&=

of mpke/colany, master/slave, man/wornan,

b h h e s s /sight, law/b=b&mr

e q e d i a q / e (Penner),
~ ~
bat Watson

misreads the failure of the dialectic that Coetzee orchestrates in Barbczriiz~s:

"so much of Coetzeetswork can be viewed as a failed dialectic, a world in

which there is no synthesisf in which the very possibility of a synthesis seems

to have been permanently excluded" (382). The failure of dialectic represents

not the failure of a possibility of synthesis, but takes us beyond the scope of
dialectical synthesis itself. Indeed, the force of Coetzeetsethical vision can be
understood only if we are wilhg to accept the inadequacy and fictive
certitude of the Imperial dialectic which Others the othersf and instead
perfarm, as does the magistrate, a revaluation of our ethical determinants in
the light of a self/%lf universalism. But to do so means to diminish our
obeisance to D ~ S C Oand
W ~its~run of didectier binarismst and
d e c o m ~ c t i o mand
f to ground the unknowable, the eternal mystery of lifethat is everywhere hidden in the gapsf absmcesr aporias of textuality-not

with a view to acquisition but to celebration. Such a revaluation is dharmicethical in nature and is realized by the magistrate when he intercedes in the

cruelest Imperial moment at the risk of his We, with the acceptance of selfs a d i c e for his ethical belief.

In this respectf Barbara Ecksiein's conclusion that the magistrate's

experience teaches him that knowledge from language is less certain than
knowledge oflfrom pain approaches the ethical message of the novel- Her
Foucauldian reading of the novel is heavily influenced by Elaine %arryrs
invaluable study on torturef 7?ze Body in Pain. S c q rightly claims that the
god of t o m e f espeaally in its s t a t e s m ~ o n e dm m t i e * - c m q

form, is

nowhere the extraction of truth but the destruction of the self-hood of the
tortured subject whose expression of pain, rn indisputable yet
k c o m d c a b l e qualityf validates the metaphysics of presence on which the
totalitarian regime depends; in other wordsf **tartureproduces the truth for it
produces painf and pain is certain presencef'*@&stein 87, mdf in SC~XTY@S
wordsf "physical pain is so incontestably red that it seems to confer its quality
reality" on that power that has brought it into being. It isf of
of @'incontestable
coursef precisely because the reality of that power is so highly contestablef the
regime so unstable, that torture is being usedTf(90).
These statements accurately reflect the designs that inform JoUfs
character and Jd's Empire; they do not, howeverf justxfy Eckstein'~claims
xegarding the nature of the tortured Barbarians and barbarian girl- In fact,
Eckstein misreads or reads into the novel that which is absent when she
asserts that JoU "destroy[s] the world, the civilization, of his prisoners- pain
and his voice make them baxbarians, people who live only on the level of

sentience'' (80). Though the barbarians do fill the role of the Other in the
Empire's economy of seu-dewtion, the magistrate's account provides no
information that would validate any reciprocity in the relationship; both

barbarian ontology and epistemokqig remain an absolute mystery, and this

fact is in keeping with the motif of ' % ~ ~ w

~hic
sh sp e' ~~a d e sihe
magistrate's account- The *'civihaiionr'of the nomadic barbarians is never
represented by the ma@bateneiha their language nor their culture- The
closest infomation we get as to their mentality or intention comes through
when the magistrate addresses the new officeresquestion, "what are these
b a b d a n s dissatisfied about? what do they want hom us?" (50). His answer is
that the barbarians consider ihe Empire a transient and xnhidormed
nuisance trying to impose its will on a desert land fated to remain wild: "they

still think of us as visitors, transients...At this very moment they are saying to
themselves, "Be patientFone of these days their aops will start withering
from the saltf they will not be able to f e d themselves, they will have to go.''
That is what they are thinking. That they will outlast ust' (51). This
evaluation shows on the one hand that the Empire is regarded as an
enterprise that is doomed by the very territory it needs to domesticate as proof
of its colonid conquestf and on the other hand, that the barbarians have not
in any significant manner been Co10&edF perhaps as a necessary coroUary of

their contiwing nomadic life. Lronicdy, Ecksteids &representation of the

effect of the JoU experience an the barbarianis being-that Joll destroys the
barbarian's civilizationf reflects her imposition of an ontology where there
isn't any (least of all a Self/Other) and thus unwittingly allies her with the
colonial barbarity she elsewhere decries: "Coetzee indicts colonial barbarity,
indeedf all interpretation of "barbarians"by bmbarow authority and its
ideology of othernessft(Eckstein 88). If anythingf the barbarians that are
captured and tortured by Jollseem dueless victims of the procedure; the
Empire exists monolo@ticdy in the territory it has annexed, it has no
dialogue of any kind with whatever civilization the Barbarians comprise.

At the base of the barbarian world-view that is proHered by the

magistrate lies the only indicator suggesting that the barbarian ontologyf
whatever eke it may be, is a function of cyclical and seasonal h e ; their
nomadic Eves and migrations born the flat lands to the mountains and
beyond and back are dictated by the change in seasons and the interdependence of l i v e s i d and vegetation. It would be no exaggeration ta assert
that the cyclicaf barbarian time represents a f

e alternative to the

masadhe cosmoIogy of Empire?the latter arguably being psychopathic in its

severance from and need to impose its will on Nature. The magistrate?
whose actions in the ksefra demonstrate the rejection of the Self/Mer
dialectic?condemns the h e a r and teleolo@caltime of Empue and its
virulent History:
What has made it impossible for us to five in time like fish inwater,
like birds in air?like childxen? It is the fadt of Empire! Empire has
mated the time of histary. Empire has located its existence not in the
smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the season but in the
jagged time of rise and f d 8 of beginning and end, of catastrophe.
Empire d o o m itself to live in history and plot against history. One
thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to
end, how not to die, how to prolong its era (133).
Colonel JoU's mission under emergency powers seems no more than just
such a panic ploy of pro1ongation.

The novel's time is carefully set-up to undo the totalizing and hear
h e of Imperial history* The narrative is framed within one seasonal cycle:
Jo1I1sadvent upon the scene is concomitant with winter8 the ma@batets

expeditian to return the girl to the barbarians takes place at the cusp of spring

and the first sighting of the barbarian horsemen occurs on the first spring day-''warmer air, dearer skies, a gentle windtt(681,the period of his incarceration
and torture coincides with the most mcodortable part of a scorching
summer?JoKs h a 1 exodus marks an attempt to outride the onset of winter,

and the novel ends with the onset of a new winter which indthe magistrate
feehg confused about We in general. The attention paid by the magistrate to
the cyclical time of natural events Imds a mytholo@cd aspect to his story, and

supports his anti-imperial desire: '7 wanted to Eve outside history. 1 wanted
to live outside the histov that h p i r e imposes on its subjects, even its lost
subjects- 1 never wished it for the barbarians that they should have the
history of Empire Iaid on them'' (1%).

Considering the eventual fdure of

JoU's enterprise to subdue the b a r b ~ a n sand the barbarians' trimph is

retaining their nomadic invisibility, it can be said that the novel ceiebrates the
victoq of cyclical time. The magistrate's tale is a postmodem allegory that
u s noncenfxdizes the h e t i o n of storytehg as a s e l f ~ o n s u ~ and
authoritative discourse and, as Susan Gallagher suggests, the "ability to tell
stories, stories that contain unheard voices and work on an emotional and
evocative level, provides one way to battle the monophonic and autocratic
discourses of historytf(48). Linear history is subordinated to the cyclical time

of eternal recurrence, as is evident in the magistrate's s d s e , among f&e

ancient ruins, that history is repetitive and not telecdogical:

Perhaps ten f e t below the floor lie the ruins of mother fort, razed by
the b a r b ~ a n speop1ed
,
with the banes of folk who thought they would
find safety b e h d the high wak. Perhaps when 1 stand on the floor of
the courthouse, if that is what it is, 1stand over the head of a magistrate
like myself, mother gray-haired servant of Empire who fell in the
arena of his authority, face to face with the last Barbarian? How will 1
ever h o w ? (15-16)
The novel's deconstruction of historical ceriitude is most strongIy

expressed in the mobilization of various semiotic system with an intent of

exposing the arbitrariness of aIl sipdication. Most important amongst these
are the slips of poplar wood that the magistrate has discovered amongst the

ruins. The magistrate has recognized what seem to be four hundred

characters of an unknown &ptf which he has ~ u c c e s s t~rieyd for yeass

to decode. h fact, he is not even sure if the characters represent elements h a

*'syllab~,''
they might even be a pictorial representation "whose outline
would leap at me if 1 struck on the right arrangmenk a map of the land of
the barbaxians in older times, or a representation of a lost panthean" (16)-h a
later momentf the current h p e r i d enterprise of mapping is shown to be
inaccurate as the magistrate's expedition finds out that what appears to be a
lake-bed is not so: "we have not left the lake behind, we now realize: it
stretches beneath us heref soznetirnes under a cover many feet deep?
sometimes a mere parchment of brittle salt" (60)*=
The poplar slips figure in the semiotic c3i.m~
of the novel?a scene in

which Colonel Joll questions the magistrater at this stage an accused traitor
and barbarian conspiratorf regarding their meaning. The magistrate's
interpretations are p q o s e f d l y ironic and mock the epistemolo@cal

certitude of JolI's Empire. Joll draws the "reasonable iderencettthat the slips
contain i'messages'tpassed between the magistrate and barbarian parties.
Despite his initial reaction?"I do not even how whether to read from right
to left or &om left to r i g h t J have no idea what they stand forti(llO)? the

magistrate plays dong and '*reads8'

out a message which conforms with JoUts
expectationsfa message horn a barbarian father who sends his love to his
daughter. He then picks out another slip and reads a si.rniJar message?and
another in which he deliberately exposes the fictive status of his reading, by

citing one of the earliest "accidents1'of Joll's torture hvestiga~on:"We went

* s ~ e r e , the two dimensional map praves incommensurate with the threedimensional reality of the land in space-time. It is reminiscent of Jorge Luis
Barges's story, "The Map of Empire," about the perfect map which literally
covers the entire temtory to be mapped, and thus exists on a perfect 1:I scale
with that which it represents. Even such a map, in the context of the layered
invisibility of Coetzee's landscape, would prove to be inaccurate and
incompLete.

to fetch your brother yesterday. They showed us into a room where he lay on

a table sewn up in a sheet" (111). Subsequently, he works his way through

other slips, making each sign the site of a multivalent messages; his
manipulation of the signs, then, signals his disaffection with the rule of

Empire by evoking the atrocities against ethical standards committed by Joll

and by, quite literally, flipping on its head the exercise of ascertaining the
truth through the process of significatory systems: "It is the barbarian

character war, but it has other senses too. It can stand for vengeance, and, if
you turn it upside down like this, it can be made to read justice. There is no

knowing which sense is intended (112).

There are, of course, other moments where the insufficiency of signsystems undo the dominance of one particular semiotic regime, and show the
innately misleading desire to "read" certifiable meaning or truth into signs.

In competition with the semiotic regime of Empire, with its ledger of History
and its Self/Other polarity, exist other domains and sites of signification, all of
which prove equally inefficacious in imparting certainty of any kind. The
magistrate regrets not having learnt the barbarian language when he has to

rely on the girl's interpretation of the barbarian chiefs speech at the moment
of her return; having naively asked her to tell them the "truth," he catches
part of their conversation but "cannot make out a word" (71). In his ritual

washing of the girl, he inspects and re-inspects the scars on her body, the
marks of Empire's torture, with the hope of deciphering some truth "with his
blind fingertips" about the event but remains unable to do so (45). He returns
to the torture room after the first series of torture and examines it thoroughly

for signs of any kind and finding only "a mark the size of [his] hand where
soot has been rubbed into the wall" (35). Later, when he is imprisoned as a
torture-victim in the very same room, he hopes that his gaze, if intent

enough, will reveal "the imprint of all the pain and degradation," and that
his hearing, if attuned finely enough, will detect "that infinitely faint level at

which the cries of all who suffered here must still beat from wall to wall"(7980). Later, in the same room, he notices three specks on the wall and

wonders for the thousandth time, "why are t h y in a row? Who put them
there? Do they stand for anything?" (84).
What becomes dear from these various expositions of the arbitrariness
of semiotic systems is their inadequacy to signify the "truth." The truth that
is sought by the magistrate is one that will recuperate ethics from the

inhuman abyss of a torture sanctioned by the Imperial regime of Self and

Otherness. Early in the narrative, the magistrate shows his aversion to
torture and his interest in the notion of truth. In his systematic torture of the
prisoners, Joll tries to extract the "truth." The magistrate finds out that Joll's
truth depends not on the extraction of information per se but on the
hammering out of the right "tone." The first torture sequence involves an
elderly man and his grandson, who are not barbarians but belong to the
fisherfolk who do not even share the same barbarian language. Joll ignores
the magistrate's plea that the couple's ignorance with regard to the purported

barbarian revolt against Empire is a foregone conclusion, and instead assures

him that he will sound out the "tone of truth:." "I am probing for the truth, in

which I have to exert pressure to find it. First I get lies, you see-this is what
happens-first lies, then pressure, then more lies, then more pressure, then
the break, then more pressure, then the truth. That is how you get the truth"

(5). In a realization that echoes Elaine Scany's discussion (above), the

magistrate realizes that "Pain is truth. All else is subject to doubt" (5). Penner

does a disservice to the barbarians when he suggests that "these actions reveal
-

Joll's barbarian character" (77), for there is no evidence in the novel to suggest

that the barbarians in any way ernploy a JoEan philusophy of truth, nor does
the accepted definition of '%arbariadrconvey any sense of Statesmctioned
and organized tortwe; Jell is the devil-&Id of the State as Empire and his
crimes against the ethical sanctity of human relationships i s in no way
"barbarian." What may safely be asserted with regard to JoWs actions is that
he "is ethically b h d , as is the empire he represents" (77).
Dick P m e r has likened the magistrate's incessant g u - q u e s ~ o ~
and
g
h p e r c o M o w awareness of his o m contexts to what ''Prince M y s W of

The Idiot c~s...l'doubl~~ought,*'

literally, *'a doubling back of thought."
This double&ought is compIemented by an over-riding will to the truth
wihuui which the magistrate would remain paralyzed and unable to
htewene at the risk of his Me against the cruelty of the Empire. Cruaal in
the magistrate's search for the

truth is the realization he makes as to the

possibility that the ''truth" he searches for, the truth that would reconcile his
Me and his ethics with the inhuman aspects represented by JuUrs regime of
torturegis most Uely beyond rationalization and beyond language* h a
moment which invokes the nun-discursive as the domain of truth and livedexperience as that which exceeds language, the magistrate experiences the
dissipation of linguistic meaning:
"or perhaps whatever can be articulated is falsely put." 1 think My lips
move silently, composing and recornpasing the words. "Or perhaps it
is the case that o d y that which has not been articulated has to be lived
through." I stare at this last proposition without detecting my
answering movement in myself toward assent or dissent. The words
grow mare and more opaque before me; won they have lost ali
meaning. (6465)
David Atwell refers to Kermodefsperipetei~to suggest that what stares the
magistrate in the face--"There has been something staring me in the facegand
still I do not see it" (155)-is "history itseM, history as something brute,

impenetrable, and ultimately m e p m s e n ~ b l esomething

~
that wiU not be
possessed by his efforts to produce a historical discoursett(76-77)-261 wodd
argue that it is not simply history but &cowse's b c o m a u r a b f i v to

contain and represent experience and also the invisible ''truth" of the ethicd
suciality of the Self that stares at the magistrate.

The theme of sight and blindness also serves to unde-e

the

%&Other dialectic, for the final implication is that the vision of a l l

characters is identically distorted. This is reflected in the moments when the
magistrate stares into the basbarian girl's eyes, only to find in them his own
gaze: ''I take her face between my hands and stare into the dead centres of her
eyes, fiom which tmin reflections of myseZf stare solemnly back" (41, my
emphasis). In a later momatr after he has yet again searched her blank face
for an answer to his inchoate obsession with hert he makes the horrific
reahation that '?theanswer that has been waiting d
l the time offer[s] itself to

me in the image of a face masked by two black glassy insect eyes fium which
there comes no reciprocal gaze bat only my doubled image cast buck at metr
(Ufmy emphasis). In the economy of this reflection, the magistrate doubles

as the inquisitor as J~llrhe doubles too as the girl as tortured victirn staring

back at herself in the lens of the torturer, and, importantly, the girl too
doubles as the inscrutable torturer as JoU; the girl's blinded eyes are a version

of JoIIfsdark-glasses reflective eyes, and so she too mirrors the inquisitor- All
thxee share the same problematic of vision, and the one doubhg that

remains absentf that of Joll doubling as the victimf is figured near the end,
when JoU makes a pit-stop at the garrison before fleeing back to the Center-

2 6 ~ e eFrank Kennode in The Seme of GTZ Eading. Peripeteia is "the equivalent

in narrative, of irony in rhetoric," where naive expectations of closure aredisconfirmed, leading to more complex, if unresolved, versions of the "truth"
U8)F

This t h e , it is JoKs eyes that are naked and his mien vulnerable?and he
remains enclosed in the dative safety of his carriage. The relationship here
is properly inverted-it is he who tries to read the magistrate: "he looks out at

me?his eyes searching m y face. The dark lenses are gone" (146)The T o m e r / t o m e d dialectic, then, is dismantled by this strategic and
visionary doubling that defies reductive and static bharism. This destruction
is an essential aspect of the ethical force of Coetzee's narrative and the

magistrate's self-revision that refuses h e Imperial mistake and peril of

Othering.
Our access to the h e t m or field is through the magistrate's being.

What is the Prakriti or Name that traverses the magistrate's being? To

answer this question, we need to consider the Gunas or qualities that inform
his natural constitution, and then, both the contours of the knowledge the

magistrate has of his ksetm or field and the knowiecige he has of himself as

Ksefragya or knower of the field. At the onset of the story, the magistrate has
a prepondermce of Tamas with a quickening saftwic inchation. Through

the course of his actions, he develops and subsequently foUows a Sattwic path

in which he is able to effectuate an ethically viable response to the events of

torture. The end of the novel leaves the magistrate back where he began?

with a tamask anxiousness towards the uncertain hture. Let us consider

below some of the indices of the magistrate's Prakritic constit~tion.2~

The magistrate's proclivity is towards maintaining the status quo; he

has lived for thuty years in the remote outpost of empire?has become a slave

2 7 ~ u r o b i n d otells us that the three qualitative modes of Nature are

inextricably intertwined in all cosmic existence; "On their psychuIogiea1 side
the three qualities may be defined, Turnas as Mature's power of nescience, Rajas
as her power o f active seeking ignorance enlightened by desire and
impulsion, Sartwa as her power of possessing and harmonizing know1edge" (EG
413). For an extended discussi~a*see chapter 1.

to habitf a.1~3
doesn't welcome the idea of any change or disruption to his
routine, least of all the m m b r m c e of Colond JoLi's visit. His initid
reaction to the fact of unjustified torture is couched in ignorance and
escapism: he regrets the fact that his "easy years," when he codd f'sleepwith a
k m q d heaxt bowing that with a nudge here and a nudge there the world
would stay steady on its coursef'' are corning to an end; he wonders if he
should not do the "wise thing" by escaping to his 'Iunting and hawking and
placid concupiscence wMe waiting for the provocations to cease'' (9). He
more or less hopes h t Joll is a nighmare that will saon go awayf and that
everything will xeturrt to what it once was- This tamasic desire, of wishing
for a retum to a past state of affairs, is perhaps the most significant trait of the
magistrate's Prafitic being, and dictates h e course of his relationship with
the barbarian girl, who appeaxs on the scene immediately after his resolution
"to restore the prisoners to

their former lives as soon as possible as far as

possibletr(25). He is unable to comprehend that his partiapation in the web

of events is a foregone condusion; in an ironic moment, a guard he questions

regarding the treatment the barbarian girl received at the hands of her
torturers echoes his wisM denid of complicity: *'Therewas nothing I could
do, I did not want to become involved in a matter 1 did not understand!'" (37)-

The magistrate feels f'relievedttat JoKs temporav absence from the fort; that
Joll has gone out on the hunt for more prisoners seems not to impinge on the
magistrate's conscience or Tamas-having seen off Joll,he rides back "relieved
of my burden and happy to be done again in a world I know and
understand-..I believe in peace, perhaps even peace at any pricefr(14). The
price he pays for his tamasic indulgence is announced by the return of Joll

and his fresh batch of river people-and not even barbarians-as prisoners. At
this point, the magistrate demonstrates a streak of rajas-he gets angered at

J o b callous brutality, anci finds himself aroused to indipant action: "I write

an angry letter to the Third Bureauf ~ I e e p h guardian

g
of the Empire,
d e n o m ~ the
g incompetence of one of its agents" (20)f and wonders if he can
sneak out the prisoners without drawing attention to himself. Of course, in
keeping witti the dictates of his dominant Tamas?he ''wiselyrttears up the
letter anci subdues the urge for action-"But 1do nothingft(20). His tamasic
streak persists to dominate his desires even as he returns from his expedition
to reunite the barbarian girl with her people; when the fort becomes visible in
the horizon?he yearm for "the f d a r routine of @xis]duties, the
approaching summer?the long dreamy siestas?conversations with
friends...with boys b ~ g h teaand
g
the eIigible girls in twos and threes
promenading before us on the squaxe in their finery1'(75). In the first
movement of the book which culminates with his reception as traitor to the
Empire, we are shown a magistrate who refuses to acknowledge the fact that
the "familiar world'' has been transformed and needs for him to adapt if he is
to find ethical justification for his life.

There has, of course, been a sattwic idding asserting itself throughout

the course of the magistrate's actions in the ksetra, signaled by the fact that he
can neither escape in placid concupiscence nor ignore the goings-on initiated

by JoIl. Faced with JoWs interrogation, his sizftwic nature struggles against his
habitual Turnas as he firtds his eqtdibrim disturbed. He finds himself
unable to simp1y ignore the cries of pain and escape on a hunting trip.
Instead?he is compelIed to action which he h u w s is an interference on JoUs
work; however, in *'@espasshg
...on what has become holy or unholy gromd?
if here is my differencef preserve of the mysteries of the State" (6),he shows
a desire to attain howledge of what is happening in an effort to regain his

peace of mind, his fading equanimity. Once he takes up the lantern and goes

to investigate first-hand the scene and victims of torture, a satfmic rise against
his tamasic turpitude is declenched, that is, "the principle of understanding,
knowledge and of according assimilation, measure and equilibrium" takes up
its struggle against "the forces of inertia and nescience" (EG414).
As a result of examining the torture victims, one a young boy with a hundred

knife scars, the other an old man who is dead as a result of his experience, the
magistrate realizes that he cannot condone Joll's regime: "I know somewhat
too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems
to be no recovering. I ought never to have taken my lantern to see what was
going on in the granary. On the other hand, there was no way, once I had
picked up the lantern, for me to put it down againi' (21).
His ambiguous relationship with the barbarian girl is prompted by his
search for a knowledge that will provide an ethical justification for his life

and, as noted earlier, by his misconstrued desire to restore things-and in this

case her body-to their condition before the torture experience. It is clear that
torture represents a crime against humanity and the magistrate seeks to
recreate an ethical and/or social bond that has been annihilated by Toll's

efforts. The ethical crisis in his life manifests itself even at the level of the
hunt; whereas he once could hunt with rajasic satisfaction, feeling "enabled
to live again all the strength and swiftness of [his] manhood [feeling] a pure

exhilaration" (39), he now has the sense that the hunt "has become no longer
a morning's hunting but an occasion on which either the proud ram bleeds to

death on the ice or the old hunter misses his aim" (39-40). The hunt as ritual
has lost all its meaning as rite or "formal procedure or act in a religious or

other solemn observance" (OED). It is not surprising, therefore, that he

initiates a new ritual for himself, one that entails the ministration of caress

on the barbarian girl.

The magistrate's relationship with the girl marks the site where
discourse proves insufficient for meaning and for generating the "truth;"
additionally, the relationship shows the efforts the magistrate makes to
reinvest his actions with an ethical imperative. Though most critics have

taken the relationship to circulate around the ambiguous sexual desires of the
magistrate, I think that the ritual of "purification" carried out by the
magistrate concords not with a lover-beloved bond, however perverse, but
with a mother or caregiver-child bond. This revaluation explains the

inchoate desire of the magistrate's actions, which in the final analysis are not
the yearnings of a libidinal sexual drive but the restoration of sociality as

primary ethics through the extra-discursive and erotic gestures of the caress.
The magistrate's experience with the girl is both erotic and sensual, and yet it
is marked by the repeated failure of discourse and sexual desire. The entire

episode is an enactment of the regeneration of the originary caregiver-child

social bond that has been mutilated by Joll's regime of torture, and this

originary social bonding is achieved properly in the domain of kinesthetics

(touch, smell, sound).28 In this respect, I take issue with Doveyfsjudgment
that "the magistrate's ritual of washing the girl's feet implies the fetishising
of the suffering victim in liberal humanist novelistic discourse" (CPC144);
indeed, one of my primary arguments is that the novel takes us beyond the

^MY discussion of the mother-child bond is influenced by Cynthia Willett's

important feminist contribution to the philosophical discussion of originary
ethics. I do. however, feel that she limits the impact of her argument by
remaining uncritical of the Self/Other dichotomy. For instance, she proposes
that "the infant is neither identified with the Other in an anonymous or
collective existence nor alienated from the Other in the abstract constructions
of a private subjectivity but is always oriented toward the Other through
kinesthetics..." (16). As I have argued in chapter 1, the Self/Other model does
not account for the urge towards sociality, that is always already there. The
Hindu ethics of the self/Self encapsulates and explains both maternal ethics
and social ethics.

Western ramifications of such discourse by performing a self/Self ethical

revision which celebrates the truth of the eternal mystery.
The barbarian girl, who has been deformed in her encounter with JoU,
is found begging on the streets by the magistrate. He offersand nearly coerces

her to serve as a concubine and domestic in his house. As soon as she is

installed in his room, he makes the sattwic realization that "the distance
between myself and her torturer, I realize, is negligible; I shudder" (28), as a
consequence of which he never allows himself to hate the emissaries of the
Third Bureau as satanic and inhuman Others and tries to understand the

defective constitution of their ethical being. He, then, is also searching after
the "truth," though of a different kind, and it would seem that he first
attempts to do so by looking for it in the scars of her experience. He has her
unwrap the bandages on her feet, and examines her ankles: ""Doesit hurt?" I
say. I pass my finger along the line, feeling nothing. "Not anymore. It has

healed"" (28), the girl replies.

Her response shows importantly that she is not suffering at the
moment. Here, Dovey again misreads the magistrate-girl relationship when
she asserts that the magistrate represents the liberal writer who attempts to
give meaning to the suffering of the victim: "in bearing witness to the other's
suffering, and ultimately claiming an equivalent suffering for him/herself,
the writer casts him/herself in the role of the seer, truth-teller, blameless one,

and perhaps even tragic hero or scapegoat" (CPC 144). To the contrary, the
magistrate feels equally victimized by the experience of the Third Bureau, and
as victims what both of them suffer is no longer, as the girl makes explicit,

physical pain but, arguably, the outrage and incomprehensibility of Joll's

torture and its contradiction to ethical being.

The magistrate's ritual of washing her is an action that is rhythmic,

caressivef and f i b Jxis being with "an intense pleasure" and '*ab h ~ f d
giddiness" and a "rapturef of a kind'' (28-29). What begins as a foot wash soon
turns into the caress and washing of her entire b d y , and the magisfmiters

description of the ritual suggests nothing other &an a cae@ver-Md bond,

an intense and rejuvenating eroticism that is in no way linked with a

libidinal sex drive:

First comes h e ritual of washingf for which she is now naked. I wash
her fet, as beforef her legs, her butt&. My soapy hand travels
between her thighsf irtcuriouslyf 1 h d . She raises her m s while I was
her armpits. I wash her M y f her breasts. I push her hair aside and
wash her neck, her throat. She is patient. I rinse and dry her.
She lies on the bed and 1rub her body with almond oil. I dose
my eyes and lose myself in the rhythm of the ~ b b i n g . ~ .
1feel no desire to enter this stocky little body glistening by now
in the firelight. It is a week since words have passed between us. (30).
The magistrate and the girl participate in a n o n 4 k m i v e ritual of rhythmic
caresses. Try as he willf the magistrate cannot find a conscious reason for his
actions and for the intense pleasure he derives from it. This is because he as
caregiver and the girl as infant participate at the most fundamental level of
comtmication, that of the erotic maternal caress. The ritual demonstrates
Willett's assertion that "our most fundamental level of c o m d c a t i o n is,
like artistic expressionf beyond intentionalityf causal explanation, or any
literalistic verbal account. We express much more than we codd ever sayrf
(91). The ritual rejuvenates for the magistrate the ethical bond severed by

Jo1l1storture, and inasmuch as his caresses succeed in getting a response from

the girl, in terms of a c c o m o d a ~ o nand adjustment to his touch (what
WiUett c d s "dance") we can say that she, tmf is replenished.

Finally, the magistrate's maternal action in its unique specificity

demonstrates his satfwic-famasic qualities. The sattwic component manifests

itself in the fact that he seeks knowledge from his actions and that he enjoys

his act of pursuit of his knowledge. It is most significant in this respect that
he foregoes discourse in his search and becomes intent on the information
provided primarily by tactile exploration. This search polarizes his other
search-one which desperately seeks to subsume truth as a h e t i o n of
semiotic signification ( m s e d below). The tactile search as maternal ethics
of the %If exists in counterpoint to the semiotic search as Imperial ethics of
the %lf/Other. The experience witkt the girl shows us a magistrate who is
urtdeaded about which system beckons his actions?not least because the truth
of the tactile pursuit remains a Thdc"b to him and is visible only in its
silence throughout the text-it is h t which figures the mystery that the
magistrate is yet unable to comprehend. Finallyf the magistrate is stdl in the
grip of Tamas as an equally complemmtq effect and desired goal of his
ritualf his oblivious deep being the prime example: "often in the very act of
caressing her 1 a m overcome with sleep as if poleaxed?fa into oblivion
sprawled upon her bodyft(31).
The barbarian girl's behavior as described by the magistrate points to a

sattwic-rajasic character. She seem reconded to her experience in life?and

performs her duties to the best of her abilities; the magiskate can't help being
s v r i s e d by seeing her vibrant? tahtive and happy in the company of other
domestics as she helps with work in the kitchen. She expresses a rajasic

maxim when confronted by the magistrate's f d w e in the hunt: "If you want
to do something, you do it..if you had wanted to do it, you wodd have done
itf'' and even chastises the magistrate for his tireless and empty flow of words-""You wmt to tak all the timert' she comp1ainsf'(40). Pemer remarks quite
correctly that the barbarian girl is not s u b s e ~ e n tand
? "stoicid" in her

reaction to We around her-giving "no sign of rejoicing'' when Wormed that

she will be taken back to her people. Furthermore, Pemer concludes,
in her physical blindness, she retains her manner of seeing: she is
direct, m c o m p l a g , independent even in s e ~ t u d productive,
e~
stoicd, convivial, and above all, accepting of things as they a t r e
torturers and lovers, pain and p ~ e s ~ ~judgment~ ~ o Asu Jane
i
fiaxner aptly obsemk, She $dds to everythini wihaut yielding
herself. (79)
"

The barbarian girl's P r a ~ t i constitution,

c
it can be argued, exemplifies the
state of being that has managed to reconcile itself to an existence above the
lower Pramti, nature with the bondage of its Gunas. The following
description by Awabinda of a person having achieved the state of tripnatita
or mgdbhaua in action resonates t e h g l y with the nature of the barbarian

girl:
The sign [of such a person] is that inwady [slhe regards happiness and
sfiering alike...[she] initiates no action, but leaves all works to be done
by the Ggnta5 of Nature* S a t m Rajas
~ ~ or Tamas may rise or cease in
[her] outer mentality and her] physical movements with their resdts
of d g h t e m e n t , or impulsion to work or of inaction-..but [she] does
not rejoice when this comes or that ceases, nor on the other hand does
she abhor or shrink from the operation or h e cessation of these things(419).
The magistrate's encounter with her is &o crucial to his movement towards
attaining a similm state; alreadyf in her presence, he gets the intimation of the

etemd mystery of life or uttammam rahaysam, the highest secret, which is all
important and which cart never be known: "1feel a dry pity for them [the
torfurers]: how natural a mistake to believe that you can burn or tear or hack
your way into the secret body of the other" (43). Without this satfwic
knowledgef the magistrate would not be able to perfom his act of self-sacrifice
later in the story
It is surprising that none of the critics have addressed the empowering
aspects of the re1ati~nsh.i~
between the magistrate and the barbarian

Attenfiat has mostly been paid to the magistrate*^ desire to read the scars on
her body, but her body is aka the site of eras as is their relationship+The act
of washing, anointing, massaging, and caressing the girl's body b described by
the magistrate as a blissful experience; as I have axwed abovef this points to

the rejuvenation of primary sociality thxough the tactile registers of the

maternal caress. This consideration is &-important to the celebration of
"xnamaese'*hom which Coetzee's novel ultimately draws its strength. Susan
Gallagher makes a c ~ c i point
d
whm she suggests that "the magistrate's
nmative voice again is "femininet' in its focus un the language of the body
and its inclusion of uncertainty and b l ~ e s s ("124). Broadly speakingf
Waiting fur the Barba~ansdramatizes the cruelty and ethical failure of a
world governed by the rationalist discouses and actions of Empiref and
against it evokes and celebrates the all important experience of that which lies
beyond discourse, beyond rational and ephtmalo@cal certitude, that is, ethics

as primary sociality of the %If.

In two words, mamaese recuperates the

failure of papaese. The concern of the moment thenf becomes the

reinvestment of ethical '@truth''
to the domain of the mamaex. Cynthia
Willett's exploration with regard to redefking ethics in the prehguistic
significations between mother and W d echoes Chetzee's inquiry in Waiting
fur the Barbarians:

This redefinition of the self as social and participatory rather than as

private and self-generated is, moreoverf critical for feminist ethics. As
Adrienne rich explainsf often enough history has mandated that the
"identity, the very personalityf of the man depends on power? the
consequence is a society that values technical skills over social skills
and that allows "the spectacle...of bloody struggles for power..., [with]
their impliat sacrifice of human relationships and emotional values in
the quest for dominance.'' (24)
Though Coetzee's novel critiques the technologies of masculine selfdefinition through a poetic narrative that is a mapping of blanksf his

"marnaeserfis visionary rnamaese in the

sense that what he effects here

surpasses h e SeIf/'Wer rhetoric which remains central to f

fomtdations such as WiUett's.

The magistrate finds himself Iiberated when he becomes a prisuner of

the Empire. His reaction is one of endtation and elation-his "false

fimdship with the Bureau," his *'a&a.nce with h e pardim of the Empire is
over'' (78-79). His iricarceratian provokes a sa@apahic reflection about the
ethical nature of

his duties- He realizes that there is nothing heroic in his

opposition and that the 'Tkeedorntthe enjoyed recently as magistrate was

bereft of purposive duty; in conthu.ing to disburse his office with the
knowledge of J o b torture meant that his continuing participation condoned

and succwnbed to the Law of the Empire as represented by the Tltird Bureau.

The Third Bureau's law transgresses the h u m d t legal process which

defines the magistrate's human ethicality: "they will use the law against me
as f a r as it serves them, then they will tun to other methods. That is the

bureau's way. Tu people who do not operate under statute, iegd process is
simply one instrument m a n g many" (84).He c m o t morally remain an
accomplice to such a system: "from the oppression of such heedom who
would not welcome the liberation of confinement?" (78)- His oppositian to
the Empire echoes Mahatma Gandhi's sentiment that? "we are sunk so low

that we fancy that it is our duty and our refigion to do what the law lays

down. If man will only realize that it is u n m d y to obey laws that are unjustg
no mads tyranny wiI1 emlave h i d ' (247).

More importantlyf the magistrate adopts the way of passive-resktmce

as his means of opposition. The latter half of the novel shows his pointed

r e h a 1 to blame JoKs re@eq'whaiever it was that had happened...1 was to

bime for it1' (95), his reconciliation with death and his quest for an ethical

knowledge as Ksetragya-'T. truly believe I am not afraid of death. What I

shrink from,I believe, is the shame of dying as stupid and befuddled as I am"
(94). To this end, the statement he makes at the moment of his (ultimately

faked) lynching is a soul-searching request for his "torturer" Mandel to

address the issue of ethical sociality as eros: "I[would] appreciate a few words
from you. So that I can come to understand why you devote yourself to this
work, and can hear what you feel towards me, whom you have hurt a great
deal and now seem to be proposing to kill" (118), and later, his question is
more pointed, "How do you find it possible to eat afterwards, after you have
been...working with people?" (126).

Joll is supervising a public beating of the barbarian prisoners with

whom he has just returned from his expedition. The magistrate watches the
horrific show with a sense of defeat and wonders time and again whether it
would not have been better for him. not to witness this cruel act, whether he
should do best to return to his cell. But when Joll brandishes a hammer as a

sign of the torture to ensue, the magistrate renounces his role as mute
spectator and unwilling participant, and intercedes with the cry, "Look!" I
shout. We are the great miracle of creation! But from some blows this
miraculous body cannot repair itself! How-! Words fail me. "Look at these
men!" I recommence. "Men!" (107, emphases mine). This is a decisive action
performed by the usually vacillating magistrate, and it shows him at his

Sattwic best, having at least for the moment, shed his tamsic stupor. It is
important to remember here that the magistrate undergoes torture of his own
person as a consequence of his interference, but he interferes regardless of the
consequences he knows await his action.
Without this moment of ahimsa and satyapaha on the part of the
-

magistrate, the novel would remain mired in the pessimism of the failure of

a moral universe. To the contrary, then, the magistrate's story carries a

powerful and hopeful ethical message, but it is one that does not make its
meaning felt in discourse.

The failure of discourse that the magistrate encounters here reinforces

the dharmic-ethical emphasis of his exclamations. He directly invokes the

miracle of creation, "the miraculous body," in other words, as "a marvelous

event occurring within human experience, which cannot have been brought
about by human power or the operation of any natural agency, and must
therefore be ascribed to the special intervention of the Deity or of some
supernatural being" (OED). The fact that at this point he is all but unable to
articulate, to put into words, into discourse and logic the ethical implications
of such a miracle shows that dharmic-ethics lie beyond the realm of words,
and in the realm of faith and spirituality, both of which rely principally on
diminishing the distance between the Ksetragya and the divine mystery. This
rapprochement is effected beyond words, for it is not the (biblical) Word that
is at the beginning but the (Hindu) self/Self.

This leads us to the other important dharmic-ethical moment, one

reflected in the magistrate's use of the first-person plural nominative
pronoun "We." By equating himself with the barbarians, he points out that
the Other for Empire is dearly not so for his self. This self-address destroys

the &&/Other dialectic and in doing so invalidates all ethical action that is
premised on the ethical standards of the religions of the Book in which ethics
derives in response to the judging gaze of the Other as God (see Chapter 1).
Arguably, if the Empire in barbarians relies on the dialectic of the Self and

Other, then its justification as Imperial enterprise echoes historical Imperial

colonization and proceeds from the principles (albeit misread) of the Book.
The magistrate's horror at the brutal Othering of his fellow humans-the

b m b ~ m - c m o tbe expIained simply in terns of a traditional EberaI

humanism, for such a conditioning still relies on the Western postEdghtement suppositions of the superiority of rationality and its coherent
subject or individual marching dawn the road of eivikational progress.
Rovey is partially correct in suggesting that the magistrate's sto4ryaddresses
two major areas of failure in liberal hum-t

&course: "first of all its failure

to interpret and of%kr resistance to the militarized totaIitarian phase of

colonization and, secondly, its failure to interpret mci artidate the history of
the colo&edP*(CPC141). The magistratersactions in the ksetra or field
demonstrate both an interpretation and a resistance against JoH's
t o t & m m but not in tern of a binaristic opposition; that is, the power
distribution informing the dialectic or binary of coIa&er/colo~ed,
tomer/tomed, d m e d l b a r b a ~ m
is not reversed in a meaningless flipflop. Elis actions reflect a refusal uf & such dialecticism that relies on the

essentiality of the difference of the Other, and tries ta comprehend the events

through what is dtimately a d h a m i c - e ~ c dhamework, in which neither

the girlf nor JoU, nor the barbarianf nor the magistrate himself occupy the slut

of the Other, but are different aspects of the Prakriti or Nature and Pztrzisha or

Witness of existence and being, and in which the magistrate as witness

searches for and succeeds in finding an ethical justification for his Me. This
quest is not pursued in the r e a h of rational judgment but in the spiritual
domain of ethical sociality. Coetzeets novel, then, allegorical and self-

reflexive as it may be, makes a post-modem statement that recuperates a

potent ethical message against ~ e n ~ e ~ e c foms
e n wof Othering humanity

and its criminal consequences.

Chapter 5

Indian Tension: Salman RushdietsThe Moor's Last Sigh

S a h a n Rushdie's ueunre provides an intriguing instance of the

function of aesthetic negotiation within a world whose primary human

condition seem to be that of mipmcy in both the post-modem and postcolonial senses of the tern. As postmodem narrative, Rushdie's work is

often jubilant as xnetafictive k t o ~ a p p h y and

, exposes as provisional any

claims to central authority by revealing the contamination of the pure, the

contradictions of the unequivocal, the mythology of History, and the
difference at the heart of identity. & post-colonid narrative, his work
additionally negotiates the formations of nationhmd, of intrinsic hybridity, of
consensual collectivity, and of immigrant sensibility* A case in point, of
course, is Rushdiets "blasphemous" Satanic Verses and its much publicized
political consequences. Rushdie himself views the novel as an attempt to
negotiate through the uprooted, disjunctive, and metamorphic nature of the
migrant condition a '*metaphorfor a l l h w h w ' '

394). h fact, Rushdie

emphasizes that '*TheSatanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity,

intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected

combinations of human beings, dtures, ideasf politics, movies, songs* It

rejoices in monpebaGon and fears the absolutism of the pure" (394).

It is worth remembering here that India was the first country to ban the
Satanic Versesf in response to a vitriolic candmation of the book's antik 1 M c sentiment made by

ii

M u s h Opposition member of parliament, Syed

Shahabuddirt, who proudy asserted the fact that he had not yet read the bookf
that to read such a text would be

an act of b1aspherny.D Eight yeas later, The

Moor's b
f Sigh was &o banned in India, but this t h e because of its

mockery of Hindu sentiments, and the call for a ban was restricted to the state
of Maharashtra* Specifically, it is its mockery of the '*HitlerianCr
figure of Bal

Thadceray, the most militantly vocal leader of the so-called h d m e n t - t

Hindu parties, that drew the ire of the Thadseray loyalistsf and amusingly

enough, Thackeray himself. h w h g - b e c a w e it is ironic that Rushdie's

caricature of Thackeray, as an oversized ' ' M h d u M or frog? should end up

being read htunor1essly by the ex-caricaturist and lmpoanist himself(Hindu Indian society, perhaps) which demonstrates the fundamental nature

of the papulation's psychef one that is aptly described by Moraes Zogoiby, the
first person narrator of The Moor's Lasf Sigh, as he describes a facet of the
beatings he meted out in his Rajasic phase:
We had given much thought to the matter of our masks, finally
rejecting the idea of using the faces of BaUywood stars of the time in
favour of the more historic Indian folk-tradition of bahrupi traveling
players, in m i x n i q of whom we gave ourselves the heads of from and
tigers and bears. It proved a good decisionf enabling us to enter the
strikers' comuousness as my*olo@cd avengers. (306)
2 9 ~ 0 ran excellent discussion of the poIitica1 motives behind Sbahabuddin's
engagernen[ with Rushdiets novel, see Vijay Mishra1s "Diaspuric Narratives af
Salman Rushdie,'* pp. 32-39. Mishra dissects the substance of Shahabuddin's
argument for the banning of the Saranic Verses into three strands based on
the Islamic faith, the Indian legal codes, and Islamic tolerance.

Outside the novel and in the "real" worldf it is Tbckeray who has exploited
the Indian propensity for proxy-god worship to such an extent that wMe the

hror over the Safmic Vwses was centered around its blasphemous
irreverence, the seemingly h o c e n t The Moor's Last Sigh has been deemed
blasphemous enough by the militant Hindu right-wing for its mockery of an
ascendant political figure. The move for a ban in this lattet case accelerates
the m y ~ o l o @ a ~ oof
n the figure of BaI Thackeray; it is a double move in

which the ban is justified because the political Thackeray represents the
rightfd though rightist sentiments of the m - R a j y & b while at the same
fime it is the ban itself which vindicates Thackeray's aspirations towa~ds

avatar-like status. The matter is welI reflected in a recent article by Tony

Cliftonf wriiing for Nmsweek (12/11/95): 'Nobody elected Thaclseray, aged
t
admires HitIer. He is, as he saysf the
6gf a former newspaper c a r t ~ n i swho
"remote controI" manipdating the coalition of Hindu zealots who took

power in Bombay and surrounding Maharashtra State in EIections last

March." The article discwses Thackeraylsmaniacal '%an1'on the Pakistani
Cricket t e r n from playing in Bombay. In this contextf the following
description of *'Mainduck's*'political philosophy resonates with an eerie

ofntruth-fiction that can best be called what else but

hte~enewa~o
Rushdiesque: "In his bizarre conception of cricket as a h d m e n t a U y
commtmaIist gamef essentially Hindu but with its Hindu-ness constantly
under h e a t from the counhyfs otherf treacherous communities, lay the

origins of his pobtical philosophy..."(231).

The sign par exceZZence of this kind of world is "blasphemy.'* The
potential for being blasphemous is not relegated simply to the world of
religion?as seen above. h the shifting context of newly forged alliances and
Loyalties, whether they be of race, religionf sexf nationf capitalismpthe

common denominator remains the sacrosanctity of the Absolute, which

parades varhwly under the guise of dturd tradition, dmaL supremacy, or
even pluralist homogeneity, and the fearsome suppressionf if only because
fearful, of the interstitid, of that culturally migrant "in-between". Homi
Bhabha argues, in the context of the Satanic Verses, that "Blasphemy is not
merely a &represaia~on of ihe sacred by the sedar; it is a moment when
the subject-maiter or the content of a dtwd tradition is being
overwhelmed, or alienated, in the act of translation" (225)- The Shiva Sena
effort to label The Moor's Last Sigh as blasphemous, then, indicates the
political agenda of legithizing a W t m t version of Hinduism by appealing
to the sensibilities of the Hindu population though the exposure of an

already vulnerable and weakened?and much attacked Hindu tradition.

Moraes Zogoiby's h a r a d e h a ~ o nof Ramm 'iMainduck" Fielding
leaves little doubt about the thrust of Rushdie's critique in his latest novel.
The various intolemces which were inadvertently mubiiized 0x1 a globa1

scale by the Satanic Verses are also part of the machinery which dyr~amhes
events in The Moor's Last Sigh. The inter-racial and inter-religious themes
are ovexshadowed by the competing and often warring concerns of capitalist

corruption and nationaht fanaticism. These latter two concerns are

polarized though the figures of ''MainducY Fielding and Moraesr father,
Abraham "Mogambo" Zogoiby, through h e ever-imminent war af the
worlds between the pro-Hindu h d m a t & t i'Mumbai Axis" and the pro(black) market "Scar-Zogoiby Axisft: "...Abraham would be a formidable
antagonist in the coming war of the worlds, Under versus Over, sacred versus

profme, god versus rnamtnonf past versus future?gutter versus sky: that
struggle between two layers of power in which I...and Bombay, and even India
itself would find ourselves trapped?like dust between coats of paintt@(318).

The Bombay part of the novel ends with the portrayal of a city rent apart by
the explosive, brutal, and meaningless destruction of property and life, as the
two axes collide all too haphazardly for supremacy. And as both Mainduck
and Abraham fall casualties, Moraes' impression as he watches Bombay bum
from the glass of his airplane suggests that one version of history, of truth,
the comforting one in all likelihood, has been permanently snuffed out: "As

my aeroplane banked over the city I could see columns of smoke rising.
There was nothing holding me to Bombay any more. It was no longer my
Bombay, no longer special, no longer the city of mixed-up, mongrel joy.
Something had ended (the world?) and what remained, I didn't know" (376).

It is this lingering and often pervasive sense of tragic confusion that

marks off Rushdie's latest book from the others. Gone is the magical
exuberance of Midnight's Children. Gone, also, is the irrepressibly comic and
tongue-in-cheek volubility of the Satanic Verses. Though it would be an
exaggeration to assert that The Moor's Last Sigh is more personal than
Rushdie's earlier novels, it can be argued that this novel performs a crucial
task more fully than the previous novels. Through the indictment of
religious and extra-religious bigotry, and the face-off between capitalist
corruption and nationalist zeal, it forefronts the nature of ethical justification

and ethical action. Moraes' confusion in his-story, as he negotiates the events

of his life, stems not so much from the position of an (exiled) migrant with a
home-less world as it does from his inability to discover and understand the
ethical import of his tale. If there is a tragic element in his-story, then, it lies
in the fact that, having described a new world order world in which the

bigotry is ascendant, in which "the reality of our being is that so many covert
truths exist behind Maya-veils of unknowing and illusion" (334), and in

which "the truth is almost always exceptional, freakish, improbable, and

almost never normative" (331), Moraes is unable to vindicate his life from a
moral point of view.
What, we are forced to ask, is the moral of his story? The Moor's
incapacity steins from being caught up in a struggle that is the hallmark of
Rushdie's creative genius, namely, the competition between two ontological
determinations of selfhood, of being: The Indian ontology of the self/Self and
the Western ontology of the Self/Other. These competing and contrasting
world-views with their irreconcilable ethical systems sound the pulse of
Rushdie's creativity. The Moor's Last Sigh is a departure from Rushdie's
earlier works in which the multi-vdency of "truth" dynamizes a highspirited celebration of life, of writing, and of migrancy. This is not to say that
Rushdie's latest writing is prosaic-consider, for instance, the typical Rushdie
word-play, for example, the lexical innovation of Vasco Miranda, the
"mistakes and the hittakes, the misfortunes and the hitfortunes," and even
the hybrid Indish, such as "I-tho." The difference that makes Rushdie's latest
novel intriguing is that the concern of ethics has come to the very fore of the
novel, and is engaged through the befuddlement of Moraes in his first-person
narrative. In recounting a violent family saga that is embroiled in the
national politics of a newly independent India, Moraes finds himself
powerless to comprehend the moral dynamics of his story.
Rushdie's journey has been that of a migrant writer who has been able
to criticize while at the same time escape the confinement of the world under
his critique, since he is like his principal characters-whether a Saleem Sinai,

an Omar, a Saladin or a Gibreel, or a Moraes Zogoiby-a migrant, on the

move, not anchored to the traditional or normative grounds of belonging; if

anything, he clearly admits himself into belonging to the "new type" of

human being he describes in "The Location of Brazil":

The effect of mass migrations has been the creation of radically new
types of human being-, people who root themselves in ideas rather than
places, in memories as much as in material things; people who have
been obliged to define themselves~becausethey have been so defined
by others-by their otherness; people in whose deepest selves strange
fusions occur, unprecedented unions between what they were and
where they find themselves. The migrant suspects reality: having
experienced several ways of being, he understands their illusory
nature. To see things plainly, you have to cross a frontier. (M 124-125,
emphases mine)
This provocative description of the "new" being does injustice to the

population that is settled, has not migrated, or at least, has not migrated in
recent times. Are we to understand that the non-migrant population roots
itself predominantly or exclusively in place and in "material things?" And
when Rushdie says "otherness," it is obvious that he refers to and abets a
sense of Western homogeneity which has been premised against the essential
otherness of the Other. So when the migrants have come in and defined
themselves according the otherness defined by their others-properly
speaking, the Western non-migrant population-all they have done is dressed
themselves up in the preexisting garb of the Other and played out the
preassigned role of non-belonging. In such a case, it is not dear how a "new
type" of human being has been created. What, then, can be the "strange

fusions" that occur in their deepest selves? What is meant by the

"unprecedented unions" between what they were~non-nugrantswith a
complete sense of belonging-with where they find themselves~excluded

from the Same by playing the role of the Other? In calling this a
transformation worthy of undivided attention, Rushdie-among others-is
seduced into sounding the trumpet of the Same through the mouth of the
SelfIOther dialectic. What occurs in such a case of homogenization, that is, of
*

occupying the prescribed slot for the "migrant," is not really a "fusion" nor a
"union" but a decapitation, in all senses of the word.
The problem here, of course, is that Rushdie's rhetoric engages the
Self/Other dialectic. It would be no exaggeration to state that his work is
pretty much sold on this Self/Other dialectic as he tries to negotiate the
migrant experience. What makes his aesthetic endeavor interesting,
however, is that there is a nagging tension, an Indian tension one might say,
that comes from the elements of an Indian ontology, one which is
incommensurate with the Western dialectic of the Self/Other. Of course, in
keeping with my dissertation's central thesis, I must say that the rhetoric of

migrancy, especially in its current academic circuit, ignores the fact of

dhrmic-ethical being, which does not undergo a radical transformation at
the moment of dislocation or migration. Or if there is a transformation in
the practical sense, it is one at the level of ontological determination, a

transformation signaled by the switch from an espousal of the self/Self to that

of the Self/Other. If such is the case, that is, a movement that others the self,

then it must be added that the transformation signals a fall into the illusion
of Maya, which is the condition of determining being and action through
misleading polarities and binarisms. It is notable that with regard to the trope

of the fall, Kathryn H u e , even though she too is uncritical of the Self/Other
dialectic, points out a central thematic of Rushdietswork:
If, as Rushdie concludes, humans have no core capable of guaranteeing
continuity, then this fear of disintegration is the logical anxiety for us
to expect in his fiction, and Rushdie projects such a fear through his
symbolism. A duster of images embodies threats of dissolution, chief
among these being void, hole, mouth, and vortex into which the self is
sucked or explodes or falls-and downward plunges are very prominent
in Rushdie's fiction...Rushdie's characters have been plunging in one
fashion and another for some timewsucha fall betokens the anxiety
one experiences when facing the lack of a personal center...(215,
emphasis mine)

Though Hume's' point about the motif of falling is well taken, I would not be

hasty to assert that Rushdie or his readers may conclude the absence of an
essential self. In fact, it is this very tension-between an essential dhamicethical self and a miiyasic-illusory Self/Other which motivates Rushdie's
fiction. From the purview of dharmic-ethics, the essence of being lies not in
its transitory, impermanent body, nor in its cultural location but in the three
Gunas or qualities of Prakriti (Nature) which inform and traverse our being

regardless of where we are or where we go. The Gunas are complemented by

the conscious self as witness and as the partial manifestation of the universal
and eternal Self. Granted, there occurs in the migrant world a dislocation and
an estrangement of habitual being. This does not mean, however, that being

itself undergoes transformation. In the dharmic context, the selfs ethical

imperatives remain constant, and the goal of all action is prescribed as the
holding together all human action as an inexorable march towards
'embracing a Vedantic unity by which the soul sees all in itself and itself in
all and makes itself one with all beings":

Dharma in the Indian conception is not merely the good, the right,
morality and justice, ethics; it is the whole government of all the
relations of man with other beings, with Nature, with God, considered
from the point of view of a divine principle working itself out in forms
and laws of action, forms of the inner and the outer life, orderings of
relations of every kind in the world. Dharma is both that which we
hold to and that which holds together our inner and outer
activities-there is the divine nature which has to develop and
manifest in us, and in this sense Dharma is the law of the inner
workings by which that grows in our being. (Aurobindo 162-63).
In this dharmic light, Rushdie's creative work reveals itself as the site in

which a world-view of Indian determination-which forefronts the spiritual

mystery of life itself-is constantly challenged by and embroiled with the
exigencies of a twentieth century life with its techno-rational dictate. Perhaps
it would be closer to the truth to say that the Indian, properly speaking, in

Rushdie's texts is that which challenges and destabilizes the operations taking
place within the pale of a Self/Other universe with its techno-rational pulse.
Predominantly, Rushdie criticism is mired in seeing and reading his
world through the Self/Other dialectic, and the resulting discourse ignores
that radical charge of Rushdie's work which is generated by a struggle

between a spiritual (Hindu)ethics, through the discourse of the mamaese,

and a technological ethics, whose discourse represents a rational papaese

dominion. This tension comes to the fore in his latest novel, The Moor's

Last Sigh, in which Moraes "Moor" Zogoiby finds himself non-plussed by the
events in his life, and is finally unable to latch on to an ethical vindication;
Moraes does, however, leave a testament of his life, a writing which can be
seen as a yagna or sacrifice performed in the face of the life which remains a
mystery and whose secret he is ultimately unable to decipher.
The movement in Moraes' story runs almost contrary to Rushdie's
description of the migrant above. Moraes is the first-person narrator, a
putatively decentered being who seeks to discover the meaning of his life by

writing his-story. The narrative unfolds from the end, where as readers we
find Moraes resting in a shady spot within sight of the Ahambra in Spain,

and in reading the ensuing pages we figuratively trace the route prescribed by

his having nailed the sheets of his story at various spots-"a story I've been
crucifying upon a gate, a fence, an olivetree," a self-conscious reference to
Martin Luther's act in Wittenberg- and are led to the "treasure" of his self (3),
whose value is ensconced in the fatalistic assertion that the map of his
journey, the story of his life and actions could be no other than what they are
for who Moraes is: "When my pursuers have followed the trail they'll find
me waiting, uncomplaining, out of breath, ready. Here I stand. Couldn't've
done it differently" (3).

As readers, then, we are engaged in a treasure hunt whose object is

known-the Moor-but whose value remains to be ascertained. But there are
two readers of Moraes' story that precede us, though their journey ends before
ours be*.

They provide starkly contrasting reader-responses of the story

being written by Moraes. There is Vasco Miranda, Moraes' imprisoner and

on whose command Moraes begins to write his-story as a postponement of
his execution: ""Let the last Zogoiby recount their sinful saga." Everyday, after

that, he brought me pencil and paper. He had made a Scherezade of me. As

long as my tale held his interest he would let me live" (421). There is also,
and more importantly so for the ethical import of his-story, the Japanese lady
named Aoi Ue, whose name "wasa miracle of vowelsth five enabling
sounds of language..."ow+ oo-ay"" (423), his fellow-prisoner in the tower of
Little Alhambra. Between the two of them they rejuvenate an ethics of

primary sodality through tactility in an effort to defeat the dehumanizing

conditions of their captivity: "thus,we dung to humanity, and refused to
allow our captivity to define us...often, without any sexual motive, we would
hold each other. Sometimes she would let herself shake, and weep, and I

would let her, let her. More often she performed this service for me" (424). It
is this "formidably contained woman" with her routine, discipline, and self-

possession that become Moraes' mainstay, his "nourishment by day and [his]
pillow by night" (423). It is this self-same woman, however, whose
composure is destroyed by reading the Moor's tale:
What did scare Aoi Ue? Reader, I did. It was me. Not by my
appearance, or by my deeds. She was frightened by my words, by what I
set down on paper-Reading what I wrote before Vasco spirited it away,
learning the hill truth about the story in which she was so unfairly
trapped, she trembled. Her horror at what we had done to one another
down the ages was the greater because it showed her what we were
capable of doing still; to ourselves, and to her. (427)

W e Wanda's seeks solely for entertainment valuef Aoi Ue ends up being

horrified by the ethical violatiom in the Me. Two readers and two
contrasting r e q o e s ; the question of the moment is what kind of reader
does the text d m m d of us? Stated otherwise, the necessary task at hand is
the determination of the nature and vdue of the treasure? of Moraes Zogoiby

and his story.

The themtic of migration itself is given a new twist in The Moor's
Last Sigh- The arena of the story indudes Spain and India, md the characters'

ethnic backgrounds are informed variowly by Judaism?Islamf Christianity,

and Hinduism, ar a mongekafion thereof* Moraes the Moor's saga is
shown to originate in the fifteenth century in Moorish Sp& at the time of
the moor Abu A b d ~ a h ' sexpulsion, the last of the Nasricis

and h o r n as

Boabdil el zoguzhj (the misfortunate)rby the Catholic conquests in 1492. In a

climactic moment when Abrahm, Moraes' fatherf codionts his mother with

his desire to marry the Catholic Aurora Da Gma, it is revealed that his
heage goes back to the 'r&cegmation'' between the Arab Moor babciil and
an ejected Spanish Jew. The i m p ~ ~ 5 of
t y the Indian Jewish population is

even traced back by Abraham to the first Jewish migrationf the "Black jewst*
who escaped from Jemsdem fleeing "from Nebudahezza's armies five
hundred and eighty-seven years before the Chistian era'*(711,and who
intermarried with the locals.
There isf in addition to this beme of the contamination of *'pure"
migancy, h a t of a (eternal) return, one which provides a mythoIogical flavor
to The Muor's

Lasf Sigh and to Moraes' history. The beginning of the tale

begins at the moment which is the end of Moraes' storyf and the end of his
story finds him where it all began-in Spain. The proper end of the novel,

then, h d s Moraes the Moor posturing as Boabdil the Moor, whose

dkpos=ssion from Alhmbra by the Spanish Catholic reconquests marks the

launching point of both the story and the Iineage that is d h a t e l y Moraes
Zogoiby's ("Zogoiby" which means "misfoftunate" is the epithet attached to

BoabcU after his loss). A sipart of five hundred years separates the two Moors
but apparentIy the song of exile remains unchanged. While Boabciil the Moor

"turned to look for one last time upon his loss?upon the palace and the fertile
plains and all the concluded glory of h d d u s...at which sight b e ] sighed and

hotly weptf' (M), Moraes the Moor looks upon the same AJhambra thinking,
''The AIhmbra...that monument to a lost possibiiity that has nevertheless
gone on standing..&ke a testament*..to o w need forflomiag tugether, for
putting

gn

end to fionfiersFf ~ the

r dropping of the boundaries of the sev ..I

watch it vanish h the tw@ht, and in its fading it brings tears to my eyessr
(433#emphasis mine).

In this thematic of the story, it seems that there is

ultimately no rnigancy that is not also a process of making a cyclical return.

FurthermoreFMoraes' desire to erase frontiers and boundaries? of the self as

much as of culture and geography, indicates an Indian ontological prerogative

whi& does nonetheless remain unfuWed or unachieved in his tale. Thus
the novel ends with the Moraes' desire to f
a asleep "andhope to awaken,

renewed and joyfd, into a better b e t '(434).

What a l l this goes to show is that migrmcy in the Indian context is old
as history itself, and provides an interesting counterpoint to the trope of
mipancy as it is espoused as the privileged paradigm of p o s t c o l o ~ ~ sin
m

he metropolis. Why is it that the heme of migmcy, of migrant sensibility is

given such weightage not only by Rushdie's erstwhile critics but by Rushdie

himself? And what does it mean, in counterpoint, that The Moor's Last Sigh
shows h a t migrancy is not a recent phenomenonFnot a defining condition of
twentieth century Me, but one of the facts of history and a perennial aspect of

existential accomodatiun? h ibis regardf consider W h s w m y ' s

questionf "has the mythology of a t i ~ c provided
y
a pruductive site for pmtcolonial resistance or has it willy-nilly become campfiat with hegemonic
theorizations of power and identity?" (127). One can suggest that the latter
dtemative suggests itself as the compeUhg choice, that keeping the migrant
occupied with playing the role of the 'rsadicaUynew type of beingt1(Rushdie)
and expending his energies in m d e r s t m h g his own "newnesst1perpetuates
his mar@&ation

&om he hegemonic power center, which is and which

remainsf after all, the reserve of the non--gm&.3Q

In the Satanic Verses Rushdie negotiates the meaning of Koranic

injunctions by reworking than in a novelistic context which allows him to
perform "the subversion of its authenticiv through the act of cultural
trm1ationt' (Bhabha 226). This subversion is aided by a Rwhdiesque device
of h e travel in dream sequences: The historic inception of Islam takes place
in the d r e w of Gibreel Farishta a a b i h g London in the 1980's. This

narrative collapse and concentration of various plmes-Kstoricd, hear,

realistic, ontolo@caI-properly complicates the nature of the "rniganttl
experience. In The Mour's h s t Sigh, however, Rushdie's treatment of the
diasporic and migrant space of the present seems at first glance to k the
repetition of a d H m & h g

history. The most telling sign of this

seemingly passive historicity is the palpable lack of renaming. X

n the Satanic
Verses, for example, Mohammed is called "M&ound," and the prostitutes

j o 0 f course, one might ask, what about the political history of Rushdiets
Verses? It did, after ail, have the most dramatic political consequences.
But what is the Iesson one has learnt from the fatwah incident? That the
fundamentalist Is Iamic bigotry and censorship of art is condemnable. The
power structure of the West, of England in this case, has come away unscathed.
The migrant Rushdie has proved to be troublesome to the order of things and
has irked a "third worldn country into proving to the worid at large that it is
intractable with regard to religious tolerance and free intellectual expression.
Satuoic

assume the names of Mohammed's wives- That history has proved

Rushdiets renaming to be a transgressive mis-namhg ( K b m e ~ htwah)

s
does not alter its creative intent "to violate the system of naming is to make
contingent mci hdete-ate

...~e

institutions of naming as the expression

and embodiment of the shmed standpoint of the c 0 m ~ t y its

r traditions of
belief and enquiry'"' (Alisdair Macintzye in Bbbha 225)- 'This act of creative
re-naming is what The Moor's Last Sigh lacks and as a result it fails to

demonsizate "how newness enters the world: "For the migrant*~

survival
depends, as Rushdie put it, on discovering "how newness enters the world".

The focus is OR making Iinlcages through the unstable eIments of literature

and Me*..rather than arriving at ready-made names" (227). The generative
possibility of Rushdie's novel clearIy lies elsewhere than in the pervasiveness
of the ready-made name of the Moor and his inevitable Iast sigh; it lies,
arguably, in the added Indian tension in this t e h g of his tale.

h reading Moraest stmy, we h

c
ithat he is firmly rooted in the places
where his life unfolds; in factf he consciously divides his narrative according
to the foUowing centers: "Cabrd kIa.ridrthe first of

my story's four

sequestered, serpented, E d e d c - ~ e m dprivate universes- (My mother's

Malabar Hill salon was the second; my father's sky-garden, the third; a d
Vasco Mirancia's bizarre redoubt, his "Little Ahambra'' in Benengefi was, is,

and will in W teliing become my last)" (15). In so rooting himself in the

places of his life the Moorf though he migrates, doesn't become a "new type"
of human being at all; in fact, it can be argued that the Moor's Prahitic

constitution remains h d a m e n t a y the same regardless of the location in

which he finds himself-

Rushdie has used an aging device for Moraes Zogoiby: he ages twice as
fast as ordinary human beings. W m e m that he was born four and a half

months after his conception andflconsequeniiy, dedicated his Me to slowkg

d o n "Cursed with speed, 1put on slowness as the Lone Ranger wore a
mask. Determined to decelerate my evolution by the sheer force of my
personality, 1became ever more languid of body, arid my words learned how
to stretch f?temselves out in long sensuai yawns. Slorno... was one of my secret
identitiest' (153). This ttzmasic slant becomes a dominating character trait in

his We, and most likely impedes him fiom any attempt at action to rescue
Aoi Ue when she is about to be shot by Vasco Mirmda. Moraes realizes at
this point that he wants to live and is thus u n w i h g to sacrifice himself to
save another's life; ''how we cling to We" he thinks (431). Elis attachment to

the physical manifestation of life makes him cowardly, a trait which he shares
with his namesake Baiibdil the Moor and which Vasco Mirancia taunts him
wi*

"A true Moor...would attack his lady's assailant even if it meant his

certain cieatL0 false and cowardly Moorr*(431). This fear of death reflects
the confusion that marks Moraes' thoughts throughout the novel; his vain

search for true gU-howledge remains unfuEUed as his tamsic inertia

dictates the movements throughout most of his Me. He is dismayed when he
is cast out of his parent's home Elephanfa and likens his state to a fall into

Pandemonim: "The gates of Paradise were opened...I sturnbled through

them, giddy, disoriented, lost. 1was nobodyFnothing. Nothing l had ever
l a t o r n was of use, nor could 1 any longer say that 1 knew itt' (2?8)* His

intense discomfiture and la& of certitude with regard to his howledge stern
from the fact that his habitual tamsic Life has been forced into an abmpt end.

His attitude here is clearly one h a t we can expect of the tamsic man who
"seeks only somehow to swive?to subsist so long as he may, to shelter
himself in the fortress of m established routine of thought and action in

which he feels himself

to a certain extent protected

from the battle, able to

reject the demand which his higher nature makes upon him" (Aurobindo,
49).

There are three significant moments which prove to be exceptions to

Moraes' Tamos dominated life. The first of these ensues upon his liberation
by Raman "Mainduck" Fielding &om imprisonment at Bombay Central. He
learns that Mainduck's motive in aiding his release is simple: Moraes is to
perform in a team of elite enforcers of the Mumbai Axis, a team he calls
"Hazar&'sXI," whose task is to terrorize and beat into submission those who
are brave enough to dissent from Mainduck's Hindu Ram-Rajya program. At
this point, Moraes exhilarates in the knowledge that he can finally give vent

to his true calling which he has always suspected is associated with his
deformed right hand-a pugilist's dream, a deadly weapon:
Something that had been captive all my life had been released-something
whose captivity had meant that my entire existence up to this point all at
once seemed unfulfilled, reactive, characterised by various kinds of drift; and
whose release burst upon me like my own freedom. I knew at that instant
that I need no longer live a provisional life, a Me-in-waitmg; I need no longer
be what ancestry, breeding and misfortune had decreed, but could enter, at
10% last, into myself-my true self, whose secret was contained in that
deformed limb which I had thrust for too long into the depths of my clothing.
No more! Now I would brandish it with pride. Henceforth I would be my
fist, a Hammer, not a Moor. (295, emphasis mine)
This release marks Moraes's entry into a rajasic living, in which his actions
become dominated by a passionate desire for satisfying his egoistic impulses.

He relishes the bearings he and his team mete out to those who protest and
agitate against Mainduck's cause, and embraces the lifestyle enforced by
Mainduck on all his followers, one which includes late-night semi-nude
drinking and wrestling bouts, culinary delights, and even a host of
"peripheral" women. Moraes realizes that his true nature, his "secret" self,
delights in the pursuit of carnal pleasures: "Can you understand with what
delight I wrapped myself in the simplicity of my new life? For I did; I revelled

in it. At hst, 1told mydfr a iittle s b ~ @ ~ o w ~ h eatslast

; you are what
you were born to bei' (305). But his is the basest mdesiation of the rajasic
nature, one which doesn't have a sattwic indination towads seeking true
~U-h~wledg
and
e ~towards according asshilatian, measure and
e q a b ~ in
w and though all action; whereas in his earlier famasic state

Moraes*paralysis was complemented by a yearning far m d e r s t m h g , in this

rajasic state of s e ~ t u d to
e Raman ''M&du*

Fielding, he gives himself up

to a ''thirst for unpossessed satisfaction [and]is therefore full of w e s t and

fever and lust and greed and excitement, a thing of seeking impulsions''
(Aurabindo 415).

This rajasic phase lasts a decade, at fhe end of which Moraes finds
himelf spent, "whenI turned thirty,my body turned sixty, and not a

particularly y0uMi.d sixty, at that" (311), and relegated to working in

Maindu&s secratariat. It is at this point that he receives a secret note fkom
Abraham which leads to a sequence cxdnhaag A the murder that is h e
pivotal moment of the Moures k t Sigh. Upon finding the note under his

pillow in Mainduck's house, Moraes marvels at "how great [Abr&mfs]

power had grown; m d tenses himself for the inevitable collision of the
Mumbai Axis and the Scar-Zogoiby Axes of power. Upon reuniting with his
father, the prodigal sun retumed is @vat a glimpse of the power-hungry and
corrupt Zogoiby empire which has a hand in, among other things, running a

vast international heroin bade and in technology espionage and funding

activities for the construction of an Islamic Hydrogen bomb in the Arab
world. As Abraham describes the H-bomb project to him, Moraes finds
himself undergoing the second change in his self-he reacts in an
mprecadented and completely unanticipated manner by refixsing to abet or
participate in Abraham's m ~ - h m d t h m
scheme whose sole impetus

seem to be ~ E - a g g m a a e neven
t
at the cost of wreaking destruction and
havoc on a global scale. Abraham's entqxise is deaxly adhamic and a s ~ r i c

in principle; his actions demonstrate the asuric qualities of wrath, greed,

c d g , the wWul injury to othexs, pride md excessive self-esteem.Thus

Abraham thunders upon being confzonted by Moraes: 'We was God in his

paradise and I, his greatest creation, had just put on the forbidden fig-leaf of
shame. "I an a business person," he said. 'What there is to do, I do."
Y W H . 1 am that 1 amf*(336). Awobindofsdescription of the deluded selfaggmdkement of the asaric man rings true of M ~ a h a mZogoiby's Praktic
constitution: "The asuric man becomes the center or instmment of a fiercef
Titanicf violent action, a power of destruction in the worId, a fount of injury
and evilf'(457). Faced with this asaric tyrant, Moraes surprises himself by
f e e k g an h v o I m t q and intense recoil: 'rAt that moment something
changed within me. It was an involmtary alteration, born not of will or
choice but of some deeperf unconscious function of my self" (335). This
response indicates a flash of Satma in an attempt to stand up for the dbamic
law of the universe with its goal of holding together dl of humaniv in a

movement towards harmony and sU-re&ation.

The voice that Moraes

hears-"I heard a voice within me making an absdute, non-negotiable

refusal'' (336)wb the call of Dharma which dictates its primacy over "the

bounds of what was required of b]

by family loydty'' (336).
This sattzuic moment isf unfortunately, short-lived. Moraes succumbs
to the manipulation of his father, who reveals to him that the murderer of
his mother is none other than Raman *'Mainduck FieIdhg. Of the several
murders in the novel, that of Raman ''Mainduck" Fielding by none other
than Moraes Zogoiby is of crucial sigmficance. Moraes bashes Mainduck's

face into a pdpf ostensibly avenging his mother Aurora Zogoibyts murder,

which Abr&m reveals to have been orchestrated by Mainduck in a jilted

lover's rage. It is out of a sense of f d y loydty with revenge as his motive
that Moraes decides to murder Mainduck. He is successfid in his task but his
world literally blows apart. h terms of the dhamic-ethical thematics of the
novel, this explosion signifies that Moraes' act is adhamic, that it tears apart

his world. It is in keeping with the narrative's logic of layered

omatio at ion that Moraes finds out much later, in Spain and in the
company of another one of his motherrsjilted lovers, the pop artist Vasco
Miranda, that the murderer is none other than Abraham Zogoiby himself.
That this last is p~ovedby a tell-tale palimpsest in which Abraham's portrait
is buried under Aurora's Zogoibyvslast and unfinished painting entitled *'The

Moor's Last Sightris yet mother example of the codation and dissolution of
conflicting versions and dissolving verities, a strategy incessantIy at work in
the novel. (31
le-g

the ''truth,'' Muraes regrets "pounding [Mainduck's]

face mtd there was no face there" (4181. In committing the murder, Moraes
acted upon false information received fkom a contamhated source-his faher

Abraham. In the dharmic-ethical economy of the story, then, Muraesf rajasic

act is performed in a famasic ignorance, artci even though he is willing to

sacrifice himself in attaining his god, there is nothing saktzuic in his action: "I
realized with a kind of abstract surprise that I was ready to die, as long as
Rmm Fielding's corpse lay close at hand* !So I had become a murdering

fanatic, tao. (Or a righteous avenger; take your pick.)" (365). The logic of the
story dictates our pi&--Moraes falls into the aspect of nothing other than a
murdering fanatic acting on incomplete and erroneous knowledgeAs such, any stable point of reference in the novel vanishes with the

erasure of Raman Fielding's face. h what seems to be an anti-thematic

movement, whatever anchor to reality and a sane world Moraes has left

hinges on the preservation of Mainduck's faaality. The episode which leaves

Mainduck dead and faceless and which accurs towards the end of the novel is
followed by h e cinematic description of Bombay blowing apart, as seen by
Moraes horn his airplane, and taking with it the lives of dl the major piayers*
The conduding segment of the novel, a brief section of hforaes's visit to
Vasco Mirmda in Bmengeli, Spainf is marked by fuzzy indeterminacy as the
moor finds himself in an unfamiliar culture whose apparent manipulation

of himelf he can o d y belatedy rationalize as either mass conspiracy or

delusiond paranoia.
It isf then, not by chance that the erasure of Mainduck's face triggers the
coUapse of the narrative's center of signifiance. It can be said hat the polar
opposition of the Mumbai h i s and the Scar-Zogoiby Axis acts as the

organizing principle for meaning in the novel, somber as this may be. And at
the very center of these axes, at their intersection can be seen the twin faces of

R a m Fielding and Abraham Zogoibyf Mainduck and Mogmbo. For it is

their t'faci&ty" which allows the sipifjchg s i p to stabilize and emit
unequivocal meaning. Deleuze md Guattds discussion of "faciality" rings
true with regard to this pivotal point in The Moor's Last Sigh:

The face...is a whole body unto itseE it is like the body of the center of
signifimce to which all of the detemtofi&ed s i p affix themselves, and it
marks the Iimit of their d e t e m t o ~ m a ~...
onn e face is the Icon proper to fhe
signdying regimef the retemton&a~on internal to the system...when the
face is effaced, when the faciality traits disappear, we can be sure that we have
entered another regime, other zones infinitely muter and more
hpercep~ble
...(W 115).
This is indeed the general movement of detemto~alkationwhich occurs in
the h a l pages of The Moor's Last Sigh. the Bombay of "mongrel joy," of

poh~co-econohcalliances and allegiances centered around Mainduck and

Magambo is consumed in flames. Moraes zog~ibyrealizes that Me, howeverf

flcontinue and new faces will appear, not Ieast of ail ex-Miss hdia Na&a

Wadia's disfigured hce: "The end of the world is not the end of the world.
My ex-fimcf5e, Na&a Wadia, appeared on television a few days after the
attacks, when the scars across her face were still livid, the permanence of the

&figuration aU too evident" (376). Na&a Wadia's e h e e ~ message

g
b that
"the city will survive. New towers will rise... the future beckons. Hearken to
its caW' (377).
Z'?ze Maur8s Last Sigh indicates Rushdie's

attempt at negotiating an

ethical vindication for the so-called migrant whose cosmo~ogy,or indeedf

ontologicd make-upt is the result of the conflict between an Indian and a
non-Indian universe* The hteqenewa~onand eventual ascadance of the
hdian over the Western is dearly suggested through the musings of

Reverend Oliver D'aeth. Although portrayed as somewhat of a comical

figure, Reverend DraeWs realization in his & e m echoes Moraes Zogoiby's
sentiments at the end of the novel: ""We will never gain our humanity until
we lose our skins." M e n he woke he was not sure whether the dream had
been inspired by his faith in the oneness of mankind, or by the photophobia
that made his ski^ torment so: whether it was a heroic vision or a banality''
(95). Reverend D'aeth also comes to the condusion which will torment

Moraes throughout his Me-that "India was uncertainty. It was deception and
illusian" (95). The events in the novel are framed by h e thematic which pits

Western religion against Indian rekgionf the Biblical theme of the FaU against
the Hindu theme of Ganesha, the West against hdia. With regard to this

pervasive strugglef Francisco Da Gamagstheory of The Transfomati~~al

Fields uf Cunscie~cecrystallizes the scope of the ethical crisis which informs
Moraes's life and actions. The TFC theory cmked up by Francisco is
motivated by Mahatma Gmdhits "insistence on the oneness of aIl of hdia's

widely differing millions" and the search for some "secularist definition of
the spiritual life, of that worn-out word the soul" (20). Though the TFC
theory is shown to be the butt of jokes and the ruination of Frandsco Da
Gama's political career, its emphasis on ethics-"the fields acted ethically, both

defining and being defied by our moral alternatives" (20)-cannot be

underestimated insofar as it concerns our appreciation of the value of the
treasure signified by Moraes Zogoiby. The transformational fields theory,
inspired also by the Theosophical Society, reflects an Indian take on the
matter of ethical being through its conception of a single, interconnected, and
all-pervasive "ethical nexus" within which all existence resides: "these "fields
of conscience" were nothing less than the repositories of the memory-both
practical and moral-of the human speaes, that they were in fact what Joyce's
Stephen had recently spoken of wishing to forge in his soul's smithy" (20). In
its suggestion of a cumulative memory informing all action, the TFC theory

echoes the concept of Karmic balance in Prakriti or Nature as suggested in the

[Will] is created and determined not by its own self-existent action at a given
moment but by our past, our heredity, our training, our environment, the
whole tremendous complex thing we call Karma, which is, behind us, the
whole past action of Nature on us and the world converging in the
individual, determining what he is, determining what his will shall be at a
given moment and detemiiung...even its action at that moment. The ego
associates itself always with this Karma and it says "I did" and "I will"and "I
suffer," but if it looks at itself and sees how it was made, it is obliged to say of
man as of the animal, Nature did this in me, Nature wills this in me..."
(Aurobindo, 211).

Clearly, then, the TFC theory is based on a self/Self ontology in which there is
no space for the Other of the Self/Other dialectic. Rushdie's aesthetic

enterprise is saturated with the Indian experience whose polytheistic culture

has assimilated, through the ages, various immigrant religions with their
"Western" Self /Other dialectic. The illusion and the uncertainty that

characterizes Moraesl experience with India? with his Indian story, stem
horn a cansaence that struggles hcortdusively with the hdim and the

Western conceptions of being, knowing aII dong, as Reverend D'aeth knowsf

that India's "ethnic universalismt' (Nandy) will asimiIate an: '*OliverD'aeth

knew enough to be s u e h i t the frontier between the English enclaves and

the surrounding foreigness had become permeable, was beginning to

dissolve. India wadd redaim it dl" (95).

h The Maarts Last Sigh, Moraes the Moor's world falls to pieces when
he transgresses the ethical injunction against killing other fellow humansf
when acting upon fahe infomatian he pexfoms an act that is adhgmic to
the core. Though the novel is peppered with muders-EpSha Menezes's by

Aurora, Aurora Zogoiby's at the behest of Abrahamf Philomina Zogoiby's

mysterious death which a h implicates Abraham, even Aoi Ue's by Vasco
Wanda-its major theme is dearly that of individual ethical respomibav: it
is the Moor's storyf recounted by the Moorf and its action or denouement

shows quite clearly that his murderous act is not to be condoned, and it gives +
the lie to his seU-jwacation for and trividkzation of his act of murder: "My
assassin mood cannot properly be ascribed to atavism; though inspired by my
mother's deathf this was scarcely a recurrence of characteristics that had
skipped a few generations! It might more accurately be termed a sort af in-

law inheritance'' (364).

The Moor's confusion in the novel a.rises not least from the fact of

being incapable of latching on to an unequivocal ethical determination for his

existence and actions. An aspect of essential Nature infarms his
mderstmdhg of human being and action; md in his attention to secret
identities what is revealed is nothing other than the Gunas or quaiities of
Prizkritic or nature which inform the ''true'' constitution of the various

charactets under his scrutiny. A tiger can't change its stripes but it can hide

them seems to be the maxim that concurs with Moraes's assessment of

humans in general: ''Iff in the matter of Raman Fielding, I took it upon
myseIf to be judge,jury and executioner, it is because! it was in my nafzire to
do st?. Civilization is the sleight of hand that conceals our natures from
ousselvesl' (365, emphasis mine). Rushdie's novel reflecfs the struggle
Moraes ascribes to Kipling's "schizo-stories" in which llhdiannessesl'
struggled with t l b g b b e s s s f in one aspect of the struggle, the hciian
reliance on Gwms as essential quaIities of Prakritic being is processed and

presented through the British (and heze read Western) attention to "secret
identities.'*~lIt is not by hazard, then, that MoraesFinitiation to the d t of
secret identities o c ~ through
s
the murals painted in his childhood room by
Vasco Wanda, m u & which depict an intriguing aspect of the Western

Imagination's obsession with rde-playing and with the superhero:

Who was that maskd man? It was from the walls of my
childhc~odthat I fist leaned about the wedthy socialite Bruce Wayne
and his ward Dick Grayson, beneath whose luxurious residence lurked
the secrets of the Bat-Cavef about d
c
i mannered Clark Kent who was
the s p a c e W g m t Kd-El kom the planet Krypton who was
Supeman, about J o b Jones who was the Martian J'onn Jtonzz and
Diana King who was Wonder Woman the Amazon Queen.--.Leabg
from the Phantom and the Flash, from Green Amow and Batman and
Robin, 1set about devising a secret identity of my very o m . (152)

This obsession with seaet identities will continue to idurn riot only Moraes'
mderstmdhg of his seU-camtih~onbut also his understanding of others3 1 1 would say that Rushdie's Indianness versus Englishness echoes that of E.M.
Furster's? especially ins~faras A Passage ?a M i a is concerned. The most
teIling resonance is at the level of the Indian (Hindu) festival, which remains
mysteri~usand unexamined? and exceeds the economy of both novels. In T h e
Maar's Lasl Sigh, a case in point is Aurora Zogoiby's annual dance looking over
the Ganpathi Chaturthi celebrations taking place on the beach below
Elepharz?a. This echoes the festival towards the end of Fosteri s novel; in both
cases, the Hindu festival remains unexamined, unprocessed by the witnessing
subject.

Abraham thus becomes the ''M~gambo'~

who runs the mderworId dong

with the M u s h gang-boss "Scar." Abraham as Abr&m suggests the mildmannered nature of a Clark Kent; Abraham as Mogamgo, however, is dearly
rajasic-asuric, pursuing power and wealth with mcomaonable zed, trading
in h m a n flesh and drugs, making his way through threats and coercion.

Likewise, Vasco Mirancia's ostasibIy h d e s s cartoon-like character which

nevertheless is rajasic in the extreme-with his 'legendary heAawtibfiq, as

ef5ective in the pursuit of commissions, bed-mates and squash-bids as of

Iove" (155)-aemp& in vain to contain the asuric monster seething within
his being; Moraes remembers the disturbing moments when "we who loved

him would gloss over the times when an agpssive fury would pour out of
himf when he seemed to crackle with such a current of dark, negative
electricity that we feared to touch him lest we stuck to him and burned up"

(165). Though Miranda recedes into the background of Moraesi story soon
after the independence of hdia (among other related events) "destroy[s] the

fraple equilibrium at the heart of his invented self, and set[s] the madman

free" (165),he and his madness becomes pivotal in the fourth and find
section of the Moor's tale; as an authorial strategy this facilitates or puts in
relief the ethical dimension by pIayhg out Moraes story by and through the

person of a family hider/outsider who tums out to be a cold-heartedf

demented murderer. It is in this section, of course, that we find out that the
entire narrative has Vasts stamp on it-it has been comksioned albeit as
extortion horn Moraes the Moor.

In terns of secret identities, it is significant that the two characters who

are depicted without one are Ramart " M ~ d u c kFielding
"
and Aurora
Zogaiby. Mainduck is the unabashed Ieader of the pro-Hindu Mmbai h i s ,
and wears his program on his sleeve. AI his rajasic energies axe directed

towards self-*ent

and gff-aggm&ement; his pursuit of Miss India

Nadia Wadis, for example, has as its motive not love but conquest and image*

His hunger for power is u

~ and~his delusion
d
that he is doing the

right thing is unmitigated. Moraes notes more than once a HMerian

rnegalomea in Mainduck but is at the same time histent about
t
these MainduckMahduckts hm&v: "the paint is they are n ~ irthuman,
style little Wtlers, and it is in heir humanity that we must locate our
collective guilt, humanity's guilt for hman beingst misdeeds; for if they are
just monsters...hen the rest of us are excused" (297). The ethicid message

here, which is suspiciously akin to an authorial intrusion as it contradicts the

operative ethical uncertainty in Moraests character, is nonetheless important
mci one that invokes both a dharmic-karmic and even a Levinasian

SeU/C?ther ethics.3~But the power of Mainduck lies in the fact that he is able
to let others reveal and revel in their "true" selves:
There was a thing that Raman Fielding h e w , which was his
power's secret source: that it is not the civil social norm for which men
yearn, but the outrageous, the outsize, the out-of-born&-for that by
which our wiId potency may be unleashed. We crave permission
openly to became ow secret selves. (305)

Finaliy, it is notable that in the economy of murders in the story, Mainduck

remains on the receiving end of things. Abraham Zogaiby, Vasco Ibfiranda,

and even Maraes b e l f tum out to be more asuric in their willful murders

32~evinas1attempt at resolving an ethical imperative in the aftermath of the

Nazi experience remains in most instances incornpatibie with the Hindu
dhizrmic-ethics. However, there are significant echoes in this particular
instance, that is, the case of being always responsible for the Other's actions:
"La relation intersubjective est une relation non symmi5trique. En ce sens, je
suis reponsable dlautrui sans attendre le r&ciproque, diit-il me coilter la vie...je
suis responsabIe des pers6cutions que je subis. Mais seulement moi !...Puisque
je suis respansable m&ne de la responsabiliti5 d'autrui'* (LtErhique et l'infini,
93-96).

than Mainduck, whose atmaties in the quest fur power remain a hazy

suggestion and escape Maraesrdepiction.

Xf there is one dement that makes The Moor's Last Sigh d i k e any of
Rushdie's previous novels#it is its inordinate attention to Axt* This is
facilitated by the fact that Moraes*mother Aurora Ra Gma-Zogoiby is among
the leading dite uf India's modem painters* Her life's work comprises a
series which pardeIs and reflects the main events described by Moraes in his
literary narrative. The title of Rushdie's novd-me Moor's Lasf Sigh- refers
to not one but two paintings of crucial importance in the novel. The fixst
painting0 entitled "?'he Ariist as BoabdiZf the Unlucky (el-Zagoybi), Last
SaZfan of Granadaf Seen l3qaeing from the Alhambra...Or, the Moor*s Last

Sightt(160),is created by Vasco Miranda and portrays himself as Boabdil. This

painting forms a palimpsest over Mirandais originaI p h i h f g Oa portrait of
Aurora sitting cross-legged on a @antbardf under a "chhatrifsr
her left breast
exposed, and her arms cradling empty space instead of a baby (Inamorata).
The iconography of this painting is suggestive of the depiction of a Kindu
goddess0and Moraes remarks an its universal appeal: "her arms [were]

cradling nothing, unless of course they were cradling the invisible Vasca, or
even the whole world; unless by seeming to be nobody's mother she indeed
became the mother of us all'' (160). This sentiment echoes Moraes earlier
comparison of his mother with the movie Mother I ~ d i a in
, which a "stoicalf
loving, redemptive" mother can also become '*anaggressivef treacherous,
annihilating mother" (139). Aurora's image becomes0 in all subsequent
Miranda work, a miniaturized icon which is then painted over by the larger
scale commercial artwork that is the source of Miranda's wealth and success.
The second painting entitled The Mour*s Lasf Sigh is Aurora's last painkg
before her murder. In a reconciliatory gesture towards her estranged and

banished son, Aurora depicts him as the Moor "lostin limbo like a
wandering shade" and herself as the Moor's mother "looking frightened and

stretching out her hand (315-16). This painting, found on her easel at the
time of her death, also turns out to be a palimpsest whose dark secret-a
portrait of Aurora's murderer: none other than Abraham Zogoiby-is
revealed to Moraes by Vasco Miranda in Benengeli, Spain.
Why does Rushdie turn to this visual medium in his latest novel? Is

it true here that "when a writer considers painting and painters, he is a little

in the position of readers in relation to the writer, or the man in love who

thinks of the absent woman" (Merleau-Panty, 94)? hi other words, what is it

that Rushdie wishes to evoke by referring to painting, what ineffable truth is
it that makes the yearning of his own artistic medium incomplete, that needs

to invoke this indirect complementation of another medium of expression?

Rushdie's attention to painting is given a very dear emphasis right from the

very first artwork created by Aurora: it is an impossible mural composed by

the child Aurora in the week of her having been grounded in her room:

Every inch of the wall and even the ceiling of the room pullulated
with figures, human and animal, real and imaginary, drawn in
sweeping black line that transformed itself constantly, that filled here
and there into huge blocks of colour, the red ofthe earth, the purple
and vermilion of the sky, the forty shades of green; a line so muscular
and free, so teeming, so violent, that Carnoens with a proud father's
bursting heart found himself saying, "But it is the great swarm of being
itself."
[She] was suggesting that the privacy of Cabral Island was an
illusion and this mountain, this hive, this endlessly metamoyhic line
of humanity was the truth ...(59-60, emphasis mine).
This first artistic attempt is a veritable masterpiece which depicts all of

human and natural history, ancient and modem Indian history, the
imaginary world which lies beyond the bounds of rational history; but what

strikes Camoens enough to make him tremble is the vision of Mother India-

presented in the stead and glaring absence of any of the Western icons of
divinity (no Christ8no cross, no angel, devil or saint):

Mother hdia who loved and betrayed and ate and destroyed and again
loved her children.--who stretched into great mountains Eke
exdamations of the sod and dong vast rivers full of mercy and
&swe..Mo&e h&a with her oceans and coco-palms and rice-fields
and btdlocks at the water well...a protean Mother India who codd f u n
xnonstrous... who codd turn murderous, dm&g cross-eyed and Kditongued while thoumds died...(6 0-61).

This amazing description of Aurora's painting crystdizes the secret of

rush die*^ creative genius. In tern of ontologicd and ethical determination,

we see that the Western and the Indian are very much the issue here- From a
Western perspective8how does one reconde the image of the Goddess KaEwho wears a necklace of hesMy severed h w a n heads, who kills m d feeds in
frenzied cannibahtic f i q 8 and who is mu& revered and worshipped in
India-with a Western ontology of divinity? h d if, ulthnateIy, ethics
demand a recourse to the Absolute, as either an Absolute seIf/Self or an
Absolute %If/Otherf two mutually exclusive choices, what is the imperative
choice dictated by the Western imagination? There is, arguably, no resolution

in fhe Western imagination of the SelfIOther which does not perform an

Othering b e t i o n - d k t m h g it8 making it phmtasma~c,alien, unknowable,
irrational-an such a fact as the Indian Kali. The Indian imagination
premised on the seIf/Self, on the other hand, accommodates the Self/Other
in alI its pemutations, but always on the plane of Maya.33 There is one

common denominator in these two universes, howeverf and that is the

agency of a t i s t i c expression, be it I i t e r a ~ or
e painting- Xt is not surprisingf
then, that in a nave1 whose center of signifiance colIapses momd the
protagonist's ethical failure and hespomibZv, his inability to Iatch on to
3 3 ~ o ra more extended discussion of the Indian and the Western conceptions of
ethical responsibility, see my first two chapters.

ethical vindication in a world "swept with confised alarms of struggle md

flight'' between competing ontoIogies, Rushdie has tuned to the stabiU~hg

medium of painting. For8after

if the painting is that which gives

m e d i t a t e d access to the essence of Being, what kind of Eking is it?

Here8Merleau-Ponq's essays on the activity of artistic vision are
invaluable in coming to terms with Rushdie's literary attention to painting as
a source of a certain kind of ethical evocation. He undertakes a vindication of
the artist's vision against the Cartesian certitude of mind; against the

Cartesian faith in the connective act of thinking that spins the fabric in which
ressemblmce comes to be recognized, Merleau-Panty proposes the
primordiality of a vision in which being or the self is caught up in the
continuous fabric of Being, a vision which moves through the eye and mind

and body in space-time, preceding the artist from both ends of eternity. His
vision of the function of artistic vision is appropriately mystical as it returns
time and again to see, tracing the movement it seeks to describe in words, the
order of the one eternal Being, the mystery of an eternal, mdtipficitous yet
indivisible SeIk

as a texture8[vkion] is the concretion of a universal visibility, of one

sole Space that separates and reunites, fhat sustains every cohesion
(and even that of past and f&ttue8since there wodd be no such
cohesion if they were not essentially parts of the same space). Every
visual something, as individual as it is8functions idso as a dimensionF
because it is given as the result of a deshiscence of king. (147)'This deskcent Being has a distinctly Prakitic shading to it and echoes the

"greatest secret of all" evoked by Moraes: "that one day we, too, will become as
arboreal as they [the b e s ] . And the trees8whose leaves we eat, whose bark we

gnaw, remember sadly that they were animals once" (319). Merleau-Pony's
words ~g true not only for the painter, but also for Moraes8and for hirnseu
as well: "only one emotion is possible for this painter-the feeling of

s&mgmess-md only one Iyrieism-that of the conthud rebirth of existencet*

(a)
*

The painter's destiny is to m a k e the w d of the separate Me of each

cansciousness by recapturing and converting into visible objects the
"vibration of appearances'' (68). Merleau-Ponv*s"vision1*implodes the
SeM/Other dialectic by coUapshg the distance in space-time between the
various rndestations of Being in the miverse: "vision alone teaches us
that beings that are Werent, "exterior," foreign to one anothert are yet

absolutely tugether, are "shdtaneity~'which is a mystery..." (146)-His

concept of vision and its correlated Being bears a stunning resemblance to
Hindu conception of Being, of the sel.f/&lf as portrayed in the Bhapada Gita.
The artistic gesture or Will gains in Merleau-Ponty a definite Karmic
determinism (see Aurobind~,211-above): 'TfI am a single project from birtht
the given and the created are i n d k ~ w h a b l in
e met and it is therefore

impossible to name a single gesture which is merely hereditary or hate-..but &a impossible to name a single gesture which is absolutely new in regard
to that way of

being in the worldt which &om the very beginning?is myself'*

(71). Literature as well as art, then, h e a r b to the mmaese and forefzont the
ineffable spiritual reality of Being: "there is a power of words because working
against one axtother, they are attracted at a distance by thought, like tides by
the

moonf and because they evoke theis meaning in this tumdt..."(81). The

a d y truths are those which can be evoked, glanced ihrough the body's vision,
but which cannot be captured in s i e c a t i o n ; and thus modem painting,
Merleau-Ponty tells us, "obliges us to admit a truth which does not resemble
things?which is without my external model and without my predestined
instruments of expressionf and which is nevertheless the truthr' (94).

Art as the inartidate cry that ttawakenspowers dormant in ordinary

vision,. a secret of prewktencef "Art as a system of eq~vaIencesra hgos of

hes, of lighting, of colors, of reliefs, of masses-a non-concephd
presentation of universal Being'' (142). Axt as yaptz or sacrifice, an act of
spiritual worship performed to ihe e t d mystery of the Self. Clearly, the
artistic activity rents the mayasic &sue--that fabric of SU/mer-md reveals
a glimpse of the W i e and eiemd Being. Merleau-Ponv's hdian vision is

clearly artistic, Merleau-Ponv's artistic vision i s dearly Indian- It is not

surprising that it aids us in appr&a&g Rushdie's Indian tension as

reflected in his concern with art in ?'be Moor's Last Sigh. The value of the
treasure we are seeking in the person of Moraes the Moor rests,.finally, in our
apprehension of his Me, of the story of his life, as a yagrza performed in an
ethical evocation of the eternal mystery of the Self.

Chapter 6
Ksetra and Kisetrajna The Zone and the Knower of the Zone

Gmuify's Rainbow is a @omdebrefig instance of literature which

accomplishes at least one goal with certitude, namely, a cefebration of the
Zone. This novel, which has been critically hailed as one of b e central texts

of (American) post-mode-t

fiction, decomtnacts traditional modes of

literary represatation and the hopes of te1eolagicd closure associated with it.
It isf among other things, its explosion of teieology which makes the universe
it describes exceed the bounds of Western metaphysics and consequently

perplexes attempts at deriving ethical base from which to measure the value
of all action (and by action here I mean not simply physical but also

emotional, imaginativef and menid action). From a dharmic-ethical point of

view, however, one can see that Pyn&onts miverse in Gravity's Rainbow is
traversed by the three Gmas (qualities) of Prakriti (Name). The novel is a

poetic celebration of life, an act of Wihesshg to the great Eternal Mystery;

this aesthetic presentation is the instance of a y a p a (Works or Sacdice)

performed as a raucous and 10vefiUed celebration of Me. Perhaps the most

telling sign of this yaps is the fact that Graaity's Rainbow performs within
its death-obsessed cosmos the negation of death itself, that is, the negation of
teleological Western death. Instead of death as terminal, it celebrates death as
the marker of an energy transfer, a aossing-over. Gravity's Rainbow is a

yugm that exernp1ifies the fundamental ontological truth in Hinduism, a

truth succinctly expressed in the Bhaguada Gila: that which exists, exists; that
which does not exist, does not exist-nasato vidyate bhvo / nabhuvo vidyate
satah...It is found that there is no coming to be of the non-existent; It is found

that the not nonexistent constitutes the real...@-16,

WBG 101).

The Zone delineated in Gravity's Rainbow owes its startling nature to

the following negations of conventional fiction: there is no central or hero
character amongst the novel's vast cast-over three hundred characters
circulate within its novelistic zone; there is no central plot or thread which
weaves the narrative into a prestidigtable pattern and it thus defies habitual
consumption; there is, seemingly, no normative ontological base upon which
epistemological networks can come to hierarchize themselves to generate
definitive truths. The narrator crystallizes the dominant authorial strategy in
the following (characteristically parenthetical) remark which also is, of

course, an admonition to the paranoiac reader: "those like Slothrop, with the
greatest interest in discovering the truth, were thrown back on dreams,
psychic flashes, omens,cryptographies, drug-epistemologies, all dancing on a
ground of terror, contradiction, absurdity" (582). Complementing these and
sundry destabilizing strategies is the attention given to Technology, to the
technological transformation of lived experience, which makes Gravity's

Rainbow a truly a post-modem novel. The modernist categories of an

autonomous ego, of an alienated inner self, of a subject of coherent and
unified intentionality, and the corresponding textual strategies of metalinpal

skepticism and epistemological doubt become outdated in the face of the

proliferating technologies of (howledge-)production which put under
erasure the fundamental aspects of the constitution of "human"reality.34
^see Linda Hutcheon's A Poetics of Post-modernism and Brian McHa1ers Postm o d e r n i s m for excellent discussions of the theoretical differences between
modernism and postmodemism evinced in literary writing. S e e especially

h historied terms, the primary operative Zone of the novel is set

towar& the end of the World War II in Europe, a time in which nothing less
than a destruction of Old Europe becomes forcefully evidentf dong with its

sirndtmeow reconstitution by forces whose controlking agents remain

k z i l y dehed-iced more ofien than not by "Theyf""Them," "the

FM-but which are propelIed by an unabashed drive and commitment

towards Technoiogy and Cartebation. The Rocket, in d its phallicf rationalf

and teholo@cd glory, becomes the monmentd due to a global coUusion

amongst vested p ~ e - m e g a c m e kwhose constitution makes the category of

nafionhood obsolete; TchitCherine, for exmpief finds himself being
addressed by a "veq large white finger" which points his attention to ''A
Ruckt-cartel. A structuse cutting across every agency human...a State begins

to take form in the stateless Geman night, a State hiit spans oceans and
surface politics, sovereign as the International or the Church of Rome, and
the Rocket is its sod. IG Raketen'' (566). Yet, the novel sets up against the
nascent throb of the Raketenstadt a host of non-rationai, non-linear
knowiedges and modes of being, not least amongst which is Mother Earth
with her etemai natural cydes of creation m d destruction, a vibrant? WWUI

Earth with its quality of Gravity whidt?''taken so far granted, is r e d y

som&iting eerie, Messianic, extrasensory in Earth's mindbody..."(590).

Most importantt then? for the significance of G r ~ u i t t j sRainbow, is the

fact that it presents a universe in which the binary identities and opposites-

such as ra~anal/krationd,teholow/name, North/Southf Us/They?

masahelfe-e,

etc.-are made to coilapse towards each other though

m implosion in which the inteface between them sweils to become the

Hutcheon's discussion of "historiographic metafictian" and McHa1e1s
explanation of the epistemoIogical versus the ~ntological dominants
characterizing, respectively,
modernist and postmodernist fiction.

effective Zone of all action and meaning- This results in an intimate

imbrication between oppositesDone which destabilizes dl identities based on a
system of anthmnid reciprocity. In this regard, the ubiquity of Kekd6's
&earn and its repermsiom in aU facets of the Zone is crucial for coming to

terms with the nature and qualities of Pynchonrsinterface. As architect

turned chemist, KeM6's visual mind discovers in a dream the structure that
organizes the benzene rn01ea.de c6H6. This "dream of 1865" is crucial as it
not only revolutionized chemistry but also "made IG possible/ that is?the
world of polymers and plastics whose scope in the arena of Gra~ity'sRainbow
is vast enough to induce the paranoid xemark that Kekd6's discovery has led

to an edifice so large that it can be contained "not just under the aspect of IG,

but of World, assuming that's a distinction you observe, heh, h e h (411).

Specifically, Kekd6 dreams of the Ourobouros serpentD"the Great Serpent
holding its own tail in its mouthf h e dreaming serpent which SWOLUI~S the
world*'(412). The serpent's obvious Christian assoaation with evil is
explored through PokIerls dream about a h l a Jamf lecture in which the
professor ash, "who sent this serpent to our minous gardenDalready too

fouled, too crowded to qualify as any l o r n of

(413). Of course, in

keeping with the novel's logic of multiple and mutually destabilizing

ontologiesf the Snake is not merely a Christian symbol. As the ~ o u b o r o s

snake encircling the world, it refers to a Norse cosmologyf and invokes also
the snake Ananfa of Hindu my&olow which,equally tail-in-mouth,

symbokes the nature of an infinite universe- h the novel, Kekule's dream

is a visitation sent by the bureaucracies of the Other side and ushers in the era

of aromatic compounds "so that others might be seduced by its physical

beauty, and begin to think of it as a blueprintDa basis for new campomds,

new anmgements...so there would be a German dye industry to become the

IG...lt (412). It is these plastic tedmologies which threaten to lay waste to the
rest of the Natural World comprised of animd, vegetal, and minerd life.
That the cyclical structure of a Cabon cornpound should lead to the
technoIogies of plastic fabricationf and help in creating an organization of
resources polarized according to the dictates of the Carte1 with its logic of
System and profit-making is centrd to the novel's obsession with the nature

of the interface in d its various mdestatiom. The serpent itselff that isf the
nature of the chemical bondf becomes the interface between the Cycle and the
h e a r System; it proposes both alternatives in its bi-valent form-in its zone it
bears the potential or valence of both cycle and system. "They"have decided
to pursue the h e a r alternative promised by the %rpent:
The Serpent that announcesf "the World is a closed thhgr cycLica1,
resonant, etemauy-re-g;
is to be delivered into a system whose
only aim is to ~ioZatethe Cycle. Taking and not giving back,
demanding that "productivitygrand "earnings"keep on increasing with
time, the System removing horn the rest of the World these vast
quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fkactian showing a
profit...The System may or may not understand that iits only buying
h e . And that time is an artifiaal resource to begin with, of no value
to anyone or anything but the Systemf which sooner or later must
crash to its death, when its addiction energy has become more than the
rest of the World can supply...No return, no sdvationf no Cycle-that's
not what They, nor Their brilliant employee Keh16r have taken the
Serpent to mean. (412013)
This new technology allows for the creation of hipolex-Gf a heterocyclic
polymer which is 'the first plastic that is actually erectile. Under suitable

stimuli, the chains grow ~ r 0 s s - W

which
~ stiffen the moIecde-.-from h p
rubbery morphous to perfect tessellation, hardness, b f i a n t transparency"

(699). hipolex-G is most probably what lies behind or b i d e Slothop's

inexplicable erectionsf and his seas& for the v l ~ t hforms
' ' one of the more
developed narrative threads in the novel. hnipolex-G is ihe interface
between nature md artifice through its simulation of sexuality* Porn star

Greta E r h m vividly recalls her sexual arousd during her Gsit/abduction

to Bficero's Castle: "they took away my dothes md dressed me in an exotic
costume of some black poIymer..~"Thisis hipolex, the material of the
futureF*
...The moment it touched them it brought my nipples up swollen and
begging to be bitten. 1wanted to f d it against my mt...Drohne had strapped
on a gigantic h i p o l a penis aver his o m . 1rubbed my face against itf it was
so deficious.~~"
(488).

Surely a cybernetic era is at hand. Yet, the Zone is infused with the
f d a r tones of reckless, joyfisl abandon and celebration. Traveling through

the Zone in his "quest," Slothop finds himself involved in a series of

adventures whose authorial renditions approximate buoyant Vaudeville
comedy and in which he is time and again stripped of his nominal identity;
Slothop is also Ian Scuffling, Max Wezpig, Rocketman, and Plechauzunga.
Despite his shifting roles, what remains constant is his u e & g

abWy to

survive, to find shelter and c o m p ~ o m K p the

: narrator assures us that

"helUfind thousmds of arrangementsf for warmth, love, foodf simple

movement along roads, tracks and cmals...S10hop~haugh he daesngth ~ w
it yet, is as properly constituted a state as any other in the Zone these days"

(290-91). These "simple movemerits" of human relationship are intimately

intertwined with the vast and often confusing gamut of militarized

deployments rampant in the Zone: Carbon as the Cycle of Nawe and,

equally, as the Systemic march of Plastics. Griz~ity'sRainbow is a poetic work

which unabashedly celebrates Me in all its potential and competing

mWestatiom, life with its grand Eternal Mystery:

Pynchon's work seems nothing more than the squirming fragments of
a dozen bright ideas until we read it as poetry, as images and meaning
rather than as narrative investigating personality. Ppchanfs
characters move through time and event, but the central mystery of

their world is outside tiate and event, and words cannot describe it.
Tchitcherhe finds the Krghiz Light, but Pynehon cannot t
d us what it
is. "Theyt*disintegrate Slothop, but we never learn haw or
why..--Visible effects, invisible causes; not a single, haman-sized plot,
but mimy little ones leading off into the supernatural where words
cannot follow than. (Fowler 66)

Fowler's evocation of poetry as the expression and celebration of the ever

unknowable rightly contradicts an element in Lyotard's famous maxim about
post-modedm, "[it] denies itself the solace of good formsf the consensus of

taste which would make it possible to share coUectively the nostalgia for the

them but in oxder to import a stranger sense of the mpresmtabletT(emphasis

mine, 81). Enjoyment is the strongest element of experiencing the

unattainable mystery celebrated by Gravity's Rflinbow. I would like to pursue

the mystery further and read the novel as a yapa8a gesture of sacrifice, to the
eternal mystery of Me.
The Zone is the site of the effacement of the Other. As 1 suggested
above, not only is death conceived of as an energy t~mferand a crossing-

over but it is also represented as an untolo@cd reality, a part of the ''Other

side,'*a side which is an equal partiapant in the Mt+processes of the Zone. h
negating death in its traditional Western sensef the Zone also negates the
metaphysical Other. It performs a destruction of hierarchy-no one
ontological version, description, or conception of reality can be said to be the
nornative one. The Zone is an m d g m of various alternative zones? the
site of multiple realities all of which are seU-cantabed and in a state of
interaction: "Each alternative Zone speeds away from all he others, in fated
acceleration, red-shifting, fleeing the Center...Once it was necessary to know
unifoms, insignia, aiqdane markings, to observe boundaries. But by now
too many choices have been made...each bird has its branch now, and egch

one is &e Zone" (emphasis b e , 519).35 Boundaries age dissolved not

merely on the physical and geographical planes but on dl planes where kheir

om
entrenchment defined the constitution of "Old E ~ o p e ' ~ 4 k ~ c t ibased
on binaries and dialectical oppositions have lost their poles. As a result, the
Other is that which has been erased in the Zone because there is no longer a

normative ground from which to other the Other; we have, instead, a

universe of the Self that approximates a Hindu cosmology and oni~l~gical
determination of the self/Self.
A simple yet not so minor example is that of the "Hund-Stadt," a

village in M e c k l d u g h a t has been taken over by m y dogs (614). Thaugh

it may be seen as a parody of d Mensckstadte, the Hund-Stadt is ontolu@cdy

speaking a reality in the Zoneit exists inasmuch as any of the variously

strange villages of the Zone exist. Killer Dobemans and Shepherds popdate
this dog-city and constitute a threat to the life of anyone except their erstwhile

trainers, who are either dead or lost in the Zone. They form an autonomous
state that thrives on the cornuption of various resources in the zone. The
narrator acknowledges ignorance when it comes to specifics of their sacial
system: *'if there are lines of power amongst themselves, loves, IoyaIties,
jealousies, no one knows.'' The Hmd-Stadt has proven impregnable and
attracts sociologists who, dong with the "bodies of the neighboring

vdlagers...b ~ e rall the approaches1'to it. From the little information

provided, one can see that the dogs are of Kihatriyic (warrior)aspect and that

3 5 ~ h eterm "red-shift" refers to the currently accepted scientific theory for

the creation of the universe, the Big-Bang theory.
Weisenburger explains
that the theory describes how light waves from stars in rapid motion away
from the point of observation '*shiftw to infrared color spectra (193). This is
proof of an expanding universe since a11 stars observed from earth show the
infrared shift, therefore, a11 stars are moving away from the earth. We must
keep in mind that this scientific story of the universe is merely one among
others in Gruviry's Rairzb~w,it is not in any way privileged.

their Prakrific constiiution or nature seems to be dominated by the p i r ~of

Rajas; that is, they willingly w%g themselves into the batik and attempt to
slay, conquer, dominate, enjoy" (EG 49). Xn the Hindu cosmology, the anhmdlife f o m is & a a d e ~ ~ c &bLind
y to its Sattwic potential; indeedf

Rajas prevails much more against Tamaspbrings wiih it its developed

power of Me,desire, emotion, passion, pleasuref sdering, while
Satfwa, emerging, but siiU dependent on the lower action, contributes
to these the first light of the conscious mind, the mechanical sense of
ego, conscious memory, a certain kind of thought, e q & d y the
wonders of instinct and a n h d intuition. But as yet the Buddhi, the
intelligent will, has not developed to the full light of consaousness;
thereforef no responsibiIity can be attributed to the animal for its
actions. (209)
Whether the energy deployment in the Hmd-Stadt is purely mechanistic or
whether it is the result of ccmscious reflection remains unclear in the
narrator's description. On the one hand, the dogs "may be Iihg entirely in
the light of the one man-instaIleci reflex: K U The Stranger. There may be no
way of d k k @ b g it from the other given quantities of their Eves-from
hunger or thirst or sex" (614). On the other hand, perhaps their b~ddhihas
developed to an extent considerable enough for them to entertain heretical

ruminations: "if there are heresiarchs among the dogs, they are careM..But
.

in private they point to the image of one h man...in whose presence they
were tranquil and affectionate..."(614). ln the former possibility, the actions
of the dogs remain mostly on the Tamsic plane, and "whatever soul is in
it...is as mu& passive in its passion and activity as in its indolace or

inaction. l l ~ animal
e
like the atom acts according to the mechanism of its
Prakriti or Nature" (EG210); whereas in the latter, the dogs have begun to
achieve a sattwic illumination, a conscience of Self, which means that each
dug must " h o w more or less imperfectly that he has to govern his tamesic
-

and rajasic by his sattwic nature and that thither tends the perfection of his

n o m d humanity" (211). The term humanity is used here for any

manifestation of Me which has a sattmic awakening.

From a Hindu point of view, then, the Hmd-Stadt represents one

possible mMestation of Prizbiti. The Dog-City does not transgress nor
t r m c m d the cornpass of being and becoming. Nothing "new" is r n a e s t
heref simply the innate qualities of Prakriti are revealed in an unexpected or
unusual form. Men Jarnf describes the nature of the Eon to P6kIerf he
emphasizes a rajasfc s h g 1 e d d e h e s s as weU as a mapsic ignorance in the
lion's m t r e n h e n t in bharism: "the lion does not know subtleties and halfsoh..~tiom
...He wants the absolute. M e and death. Win and lose. Not truces
or arrangements, but the joy, the leap, the roar, the b10oC (577). And as with
the Hmdtstadt and the lion, sitniIarly with the plastic hipolex G: h e fact
that it is a new compound, that is, a new arrangement withirt Prubiti, and
that it can simuIate a hman erectionf does not support knessemts
assertion that "the invention of plastics is thus the final state in the attempt
to control any physical as well as psychicf mental substance: matter and
subjectiviv...W i h the help of Mpolex G it becomes possible to create a
perfect simulation of the human" (137). Beressem does not elaborate on what
he means by the '%mant'
that Mpolex "simuIates," unless we are to

In the
understand that a gmd erection is enough of a criterion for ''hmmgtt
Hindu conception of "hman,"there is a dear distinction between Prizkriti
with her Gunus and energies and the Conscience as the Witness of aU

Pr~kriticaction, the human being the s u m thereof. In inanimate objects toof

such as the plastic hnipolex Gf Prakriti is present in its entirety but Tamas

reigns supreme, and beings at this levelf such as the atom or plastic have not
liberated their witness or comdenc+of-%k

There is a will even in the atom, but we see clearly enough that it is not
kee-will, because it is mechanical and the atom does not possess the
will but is possessed by it. H e e the budithi...is actually-..jadiz, a
mechanical, even an inconsaent principle in which the light of the
conscious Soul has not at a l l struggled to the surface: the atom is not
c~nsdousof an inteiligent will. Tamas, the inert and ignorant
principle [sic], has its grip on it, contains rttjas, conceals Satfwa within
itself... (EG 209)s
Pyrtchon*~
universe presents us with a mdtifariaus assortment of LSe in

which plant, minerd, animal, and '*artificial'' forms compete and interact in a
Zone that doesnetfavor any conventional Western hierarchies. The category
of man, of humanity, becomes one of many equally irnporimt or valuable in
the M e c o n ~ u m
of the Zone. If there are various planes of teality-

perception, they, too, are given equal significance. The point is that the
priviIeging of the empiricdy verifiable reality as the normative one for our
existence is negated. It is with these t h e e negations in mind-af death, of the
Otherf of normative redityethat one can see that Gruvify's Rainbow

surpasses the limitations of a traditional Western universe, it tears the veil of

Maya.

In doing so, Granity's Rainbow is best understood as m instance of a

literary and aesthetic y a p a that demolishes binaristic, teleological, empirical

justifications and celebrates the universe of the seE/%lf. In this sense,

Gravity's Rainbow is hij$dy moral but only in the Dharmic-e%cd sense. As
a yagm, it dtimately celebrates the Dhama that binds all existence and if it

teaches us anything, it is the howledge "to see all beings in the one
impersonal selff for so we are liberated from the separative egesmse, and

3 6 ~ o ra listing o f the various manifes~tions of the Supreme Self in Prukrifi,

see chapter X of the Bhagvadu G i t a Krishna emphasizes the following:
"Whatever manifested being exists, glorious and vigorous, indeed* understand
that in every case he originates from a fraction o f my splendors* (X-41* W G
451). Also* see x-29: "Ananta I am* of snakes..." (WBG 439)* which resonates* as
pointed out earlier, with Keku16's Ourobouros snake.

hen through this delivering impersonality to see them in this Gad, utmani
atho mayi, '*inh e Self and then in Me-l*"(EG124).

h the context of '%nowledger" it is notable that Grauity's himbow 's

dharmic explorations mcur in the '*Zone." The B h p a d a Gita is also
situated, as a chapter in the great Indian epic the Mahabharafa, in the kefra or
"zone1'of the ultimate war. The Gita is one of the core texts in Hindu
philosophy which exphim the dhumic constitution of and the ethicd
imperatives in Me. In doing so, the Gita ,Iike Gravity's Rainbow, is an
aesthetic yapu-a formal poem which elucidates the parameters of an
ontaIogicaI conception of life, knowing all dong that it is merely a gesture in

the direction of truth, that the greatest secret lies beyond the compass of its
discourse. The Gita is situated in the Zone of life, the KSekra of Dhama:
"Dhamaksetre kuruksetre / samavefa yuyatsauah / mamakah pa~dauas
caiva

kim ukzimata samjuya?// When in the Zone of Dharma, in the Zone

of K w , assembled together, desiring to fight, What did my army and that of

the sons of Pandu do, Samjaya?" (GI, WBG 391.37 The very fist words af the
Gifa, thenr situate LIS in the Zone. The speaker is Dhritarashtra, "the b h d

Kum king to whom the Bhapada Gifa is to be related by Samjaya, his

minister*'( W G 39). Significantly, the Gita, the discaurw given by Krkhna to
Q u a , is a reportage made by Samjaya, who is not on the scene but has been
granted what we can term in today's technological t e r n a Eve television
broadcast of the War but what in the dynamics of the Mahabharata is one of

the many h t m c e s of super-natural powers. The warozone is named not

o d y dharmaksetra but also Kuruksetra after h e clads patronymic Kitru: the

war of all wars takes place within the same family, a strategy that emphasizes
3 7 ~ h etraditional translation for ksetru is "field;" however, I believe that zone
approximates the meaning better--regardIess of the fact that this makes it
more congruous to my discussion of Pynchon's zone.

the oneness of all humanity-there is no Other against whom one wages war,
but only multitudinous incarnations of the Supreme Self.

Krishna's revelation makes true knowledge a function of both

knowledge of the Zone and knowledge of the knower of the Zone: not only
the knowledge of Prakriti and her Gunus but also knowledge of the
Purushottama, the universal Witness or Conscience. Knowledge of either

one is an insufficient knowledge; knowledge of the knower of the Zone

signals a dharmic-ethical knowledge of the self/Self, a spiritual

understanding of the Being of all existence. What is reinforced time and
again is the conception of an Other-less universe which is the sum of the
Processes + Witness, Nature + Conscience, Prakriti + Purushottama. In direct
terms, "the Gita explains the hetram, zone, by saying that it is this body
which is called the zone of the spirit, and in this body there is someone who

takes cognizance of the zone, ksetrasyam, the knower of Nature" (EG 398):
Krishna tells Arjuna, "know also that I am the knower of the zone, in all
zones, Descendant of Bharata; Knowledge of the zone and of the zoneknower; that is considered by me to be true knowledge" (Xffl-2, WBG 5301.38
Krishna goes on to describe the nature of the zone (see especially Xin-5) and

also the ultimate object of all knowledge: "it is the beginless supreme
Brahman which is said to be neither existent nor non-existent" (Xin-12)-

What, subsequently, can be said of the nature and quality of the

knowledge that is broached by Gravity's Rainbow, both at the level of the
zone and at the level of the knower of the zone? As far as knowledge of the
zone is concerned, we have already seen above how "Kekule's serpent," as a
^Elere, Ramanuja's explanation is helpful: "Sages who possess exact
knowledge o f the body call it experiencing-atman's zone of experience. A
person who knows this body and, because of this very knowledge, must be
different from his body which is the object of his knowledge, is called a
ksetrajaana (knower of the zone) by these sages" (in WBG 529).

metaphor for the P l s ~ & v - C k d of

~ the
v Carbon ring functions as an

interface between opposites8erases binary ~~1arity8

and makes a poste f i g h t m m t humanist concept of SIfhwd inadequate to understanding
the motive force of the novel. Its universe defies a ethical code that depends
on binary absolutes, such as gd/evi18 natuxe/dture, Me/death8 !%lf/Other8
femme/mw&e8

rationd/ha60nd8 and so fortbit is veritably "a great

frontierless streaming out theretq(543). As the dissipation of absolutest

GraaiQ's Rainbow becomes a highly impemond work in which one is hard

put to decipher the desire motivating the novel. If it is indeed the case that

the novel does not8in the h a l d y s i s , abet any one of its narrative threads
or fictive characters8then it is so because as a

a h e novel transcends fhe

domain of the mutable, the finite8and the personal; it opens up and opens
itself up to the impersonal and the infinite8'*tothat which is pure and high

and one and c o m o n in all things and beings8the impersonal and infinite in
Prakriti, the impersonal and idhite in life8 the impersonal and infinite in
his o m subjectivityt'(EiG 121). It is for this reason that even as it situates
itself at the cusp of one of the most violent and horrifying moments in
human historyt World war n8the novel transcends the world of transience

and suffering-for it r e h q a h e s the ego-sense a d the c ~ n c ~ ~ tdesires

ant
and demands of Me conceived of in any M t e way; it exemplifies the Hindu

credo that "life is not entirely real until it opens into the sense of the infinite*'

(121). It performs the real renunaation8that which transcends the bondage of

the Gunas of nature8nut by describing a universe in which action ceases8but

in which ego and desire are slain (122).

My argument for an essentially Hindu character to the Zone and the

novel as a whole shodti not be misconstrued either as mystical or religi~us.

If there is one point 1 am emphashhg in my dissertation, it is h t the Hindu

description of the universef of being and becomingf of ontology and thereby of

epistemologyf is h c o m a m a b I e with any Westem4ike version in which
Death and the Other are given overarching prominence in the determination
of ethical being and fiving (seechapter 1). Critics who axe perplexed by
Ppchon's imaginative genius, which "creates multiple dtemative realitiest
and several times b ~ g back
s the dead to coment on the blindness of the

living to the true nature of realityf' ( H w e 213)? have tried to resolve the
text's inherent "mysticism" according to various Western traditionst such as
the Orphic tradition (Bass) or Gnosticism (Eddins). Kathryn Hme, on the

other hand, points out connections not only fium "spirit~~aIisrn

and
theosophy to rilkean &acendmce, "eIec&omys~~~m,~'
the IGrghiz Lightf
[to] Pan and Wdpm@sna&tt' but aIso to BudWm-'*some&g

like the

Buddhist ffpureIight of the void recurs as a form of the ultimate in the textt'
(21415).

My interpretation pushes the Buddhist comection to its mother

Hindu d t u e in an effort that counters a Western trend in interpretations
regarding Slc~throp'sseE-dbhtepation in the Zone. 1 agree with Hme's
proposition that his d i s h t e e a ~ o nsign& "a thorough renunciation of
control and hdividuav" and "strikes at the very root of Western
consciousnessf'(216);it should be no surprise, thenf that its interpretation

shauId appear tinged with negativity fiom critics who are unable to admit or
are simply ignorant about the possibility of the Hindu cosmos of the self/Self.
Slothrop's dissolution marks not simply the fact that he ceases to exist nor
that he ceases his actions in the Me-rhythm of the Zone#but that he ceases to
do so in arty egoistic manner-as an individual. His disintegration, his

becoming "a cross hhxIff a living crossroads'' (625) is a metaphorical marker

that sigxufies that Slothropfsself has harmonized itself with the Me-processes

of Nature: ''he likes to spend whole days naked, ants crawling up his legs,
butterflies lighting on his shoulders, watching the life on the mountain,

(623). As
getting to know the shrikes and capereaillie, badgers and mannotsS1
a *lcrossroads"Slothrop becomes the interface between culture and nature,
technology and spiritualism, and even, This side arid the Other side. James
Earl mistakenly asserts that SIothrop*sfreedom excludes his liberated self
from society-"our solitary return to freedom is experienced both by society
and ourselves as a dissolution-a lass of the self that is, paradoxicallyf an act of

identification with the world and of aU of those who constitute the very
society we cannot belong toftEarl

in H m e , 216); in a similar vein, Siegel

remarks, "his fate suggests the htemela~amfipof societal man's fate and his
t e ~ o l o g yfor
, in order to escape that technology Slohop must abandon
society1'(46). Both statements demonstrate an understanding of society solely
as society of the System; it is paramount to remember that Slothrop's
Iiberaied being or disintegrated self participates not only in conventional
systemic socieq<omider, for examplef AWOL Dzabajevls running into

''some part of Slothrop.*.in the heart of downtown Niedershamdorf* (742)but equally in the social Self of the Cycle.

There is a cosmological code in Gravity's Rainborn which has been

given a significant prominence by Ppchon and which exists in a polar
opposition to the Western codes premised on rationality and linearity* I refer,
of course, to that belonging to the South-West M c a n Herero tribes who

inhabit the Zone as the *'s&w~zkommdosl'

and are led by Enzian on a
mission, ostensibly, of txibal suicide upon the location of the "lX0cket-"3~The
3 g ~ o s e p h Slade finds the Hererosr inclusian in the novel as signifying the very
creative kernel of Pynchon's opus: "The inception of Gravity's Rainbow
probably occurred on the day that Pynchon, while searching for infomation
on Malta for V., stumbled across a New York Public Library "pamphlet vofume*'
containing reports on both the Maltese and the Bandelawarts o f South-West

Herero universe is pantheistic and admits a cydical regeneration of Wedeath;

af interest, in this regard, is the Herexo belief that inhabitants on the "othert'
side, those who have been &osm for death, have the ability to influence
events on this side. In a highly poetic description of a lover's tryst between
Captain Bficero and the boy Enzian, the narrator offers us the following

insight into Herexo metaphysics: "to the boy Ndambi K m g a [he Herero
God] is what happens when they couplef that's d:God is creator and
destroyer, sun and darknessf d sets of opposites brought together, hdudhg
black and whitef mde and female...and he becomes in his innocence Ndambi
K m g a q schild'' (GR lCW).40 The Hereto universe maps onto a major aspect

of Hinduismf as is evident in the foUowing explanation by Slade: "the preliteratef precolo~&ed, preration&ed Hereros view the world as a
metaphysical whole. Within that world paradox is the law of experience:
opposites can be reconciledf stones can be inhabited by so&, men can be
individual selves and yet parts of the larger self, members of a cosmic and a

hmm community1'(29). Taking the Hereros as emblematic of paradox and

cycl.icafityfSlade sees the Herero/Geman colonial history as "typical of every
encounter between West and non-West" (29).
But what both the Herero and the Western vision lack is an
accoxxunodation to each other in their world+iewsf for "where the Herera see
cyclical paradoxical nature, westemers see only metaphysicd void which they
have tried to "rationalizef'by displacing nature with institutions,

bureaucraciesf systemsf networks of power" (Slade 30)- This seemingly

Africa. After that fortuituus accident, Pynchon wrote to Thomas F. Hirsch in
1968, he could not forget the Hereros" (29).
4 0 ~ a~ ruseful explanation of Ndjainbi Kamnga, see Weisenburger 101-02. The
mythaIogica1 traits attributed to the Herero creator resonate with the Hindu
conception of the nature of the Piirushottama: "the god is also bisexuat ...while
he is thus "the gad ~f life,'* he is also "the master of death"...

inherent opposition is contained by the interface of Hinduism, a highly

literate tradition which has both extensively chuted rationad and d ~ ~ t i c
systems, for instance in the Sgm&ya, Nyaya, and Vaisesika philosopKes, and
also a conception of paradox, of circular infinity, of Prizkriti and Purushottama

which callapse all oppositions without losing any of their Gunas.41 There is a

and the non-teholoecd Me in the

proliferation of both the te&nol~@caI
Zone created by Pynchon which defies understanding premised on either the
Hereretype or the Western-type of cosmoIo@es. The yizgnic aspect of the
novel is undeniable, its god can be s e n not as "an injunction to subordinate
the individud to suciety and humanity or immolate egoism on the dtar of
the human coIIectivity, but to fdfU the h&vidaaI in God and to b a p ~the
]

ego on the one true dtar of the d-embracing Divinity1'@G 128). It is not
surprising, then, that Mark SiegeI's outhe far mderstmdhg the novel

proposes nothing other than an investigation of both h e ksetra and the

The only thematic perspective which accounts for all the events in
Gravity's Rainbow is a three-fold examination of the problem: fixst, an
exanhation of the possibilities for persona1 sdvation, in the sense of
freedom from and transcendence of the individual's paidid and
d i s h m o ~ o u existence,
s
as exemplified by S ~ o ~ and
o p Tchitcherine;
second, an examination of the s o c i d t u r d movement toward
apocalypse, as seen in the history of the rocket and in the political and
economic activity of the novel; and, third, an attempt at divining what
lies in the h t w e for both individuals and for society by examining the
available patterns of political, economic, tedmoIo@cal, dturd, and
psy&oIogical lines of force..."(46)

h the language of the Gita, the first step is knowledge of the fietrczgya or
knower of the Zone, the second step is knowledge of the ksetra or Zone, and

4kF0r an excellent introduction to these and various other schools of thought

in Hinduism, see T.M.P. Mahadevan's Outlines of Hinduism (1956)-

the third step is that of true knowledge: knowledge of the ksetra

+ knowledge

of the Ksetrasya.

Is the true knowledge that the novel gestures towards one of

"transcendence?" hi other words, what is the nature of the level of being that

has been attained by Slothrop? At one level, we are told that Slothrop's
disintegration consists of shedding the "albatross of self' (623). Fowler is
correct in pointing out that "the albatross is Pynchon's negative code-term for
the Western man's individual ego" (55): ultimately, "Slothrop has become
one plucked albatross. Plucked, hell, stripped. Scattered all over the Zone.

It's doubtful if he can ever be "found" again, in the conventional sense of

"positively identified and detained."" (712). The emphasis on positive ID.
hearkens to Foucault's discussion of the modem technologies of the Body,
which Slothrop finally exceeds. In Foucauldian terms, Slothrop's scattering is
an extra-disciplinary phenomenon as it slips through the methods
(disciplines) which have, in modem society, made possible the meticulous
control of the operations of the body, being able to impose on it a relation of

docility-utility. In this sense, if Slothrop's body is scattered, it is so only

because it cannot be made to coalesce in the form of verifiable documentation

and subsequently lacks use-value.42 This type of "transcendencef'is one

operative prominently in the ksetra or zone-it tells us nothing about
fltranscendencer'for the Ksetragya, the knower of the zone.
"Transcendence"is a complicated term. Its meaning varies depending

on the tradition in which it operates. For example, Slade uses the term
"transfiguration" to convey what happens to Slothrop: "only Slothrop
achieves transfiguration. He may or may not be illuminated by radiance

4 2 ~ e eFoucault's discussion in Discipline and Punish, especially the section

entitled "Making the individual."

when he sees the rainbow, but he has lost his self in the All of the
universe.-To be subsumed by the AU, without being able to maintain the
integrity of the self, is to lose the joy of paradox, according to which the self
can be part and wholeff(36). Slade's "integrity" is a Western one, which
accounts for his use of the term "subsumed"to explain the process of

conjoining with the "All." In another context, Oldeman critiques Siegel for
employing the terms "transcendence" and "transformation" as though they
were synonymous, and proposes the clarification that Tynchon connects the
urge to transcend with violating earth cycles and life cycles. In Gravity's

Rainbow, wanting to transcend dominates some people's spiritual

conceptions almost in proportion to the degree that rigid mechanistic order

dominates other people's concepts of rationalism" (505). Whereas Siegel

finds Slothrop to be a failure, Oldeman urges caution lest Pynchon's
"radicality" might be misunderstood. In a Hindu reading, Slothrop's
"transfiguration," "transcendence,'*or "transformation" does not lead him
beyond the life cycles of the Zone, nor does it exclude him from participation
in the Systems of the Zone. Instead, it signals Slothrop's conscience of the

Self according to which all his actions are judged and from which all his
actions emanate. The essential proviso for such y a p i c action is that it is very

much paradox that is realized in such a state, the paradox-secret of "the

beginless supreme Brahman which is said to be neither existent nor nonexistent." Slothrop's increasing depersonalization is a uni-directional vector

in the novel and can be understood as the result of his gradual rise towards a
state of being beyond the bondage of the Gunas of Prakriti, that is, towards the
state of tremtita. In such a state, Slothrop continues to be the "enjoyerof
the Gunas, as is the Brahman, though not limited by them...unattached, yet
all-supporting...the action of the Gunas within him is quite changed; it is

lifted above their egoistic character and reactions" (EG 222). He begins to
recognize the Self in his self as well as the Self in all other beings, and
demonstrates the first two types of yogas, the Karmayoga in which the

which there occurs a realization of the Self and of the true nature of the Self
and world. It is as a jnanayogi that Slothrop begins to listen to what the trees
have to say:
Slothrop's intensely alert to trees, finally. When he comes in among
trees he will spend time touching them, studying them, sitting very
quietly near them and understanding that each tree is a creature,
carrying on its individual life, aware of what's happening around it,
not just some hunk of wood to be cut down-.-They know he's there.
They probably also know what he's thinking. "I'm sorry," he tells
them. (552-53)

The one yoga which Slothrop does not attain, for which Pynchon provides no
detail whatsoever, is Bhaktiyop, which is the state of performing all Works
in devotion to the Divine, the Lord of Works.

The Hindu reading provides one possible meaning for "the story about
Tyrone Slothrop, who was sent into the Zone to be present at his own
assembly-perhaps, heavily paranoid voices have whispered, his time's
assembly-and there ought to be a punch line to it, but there isn't. The plan
went wrong. He is being broken down instead, scattered (738). Whose plan
went wrong? Their plan went wrong, They screwed up. If They lost control,
then who is he being broken down by instead? He is being broken down, as
an. "individual," by the dominating trigunatita in his being, by the
awakening of the Self, the Purnsha within him. Sladefsconjecture concurs
with the Hindu thrust being made here: "Pynchon makes much of

Slothrop's paradoxical behavior in the presence of the Rocket, since it offers

if finally unsuccessfully-a charismatic counter to a rationalized world"

(emphasis mine, 33). In relation to Slade's terms, my Hindu interpretation

provides a framework in which to understand the contours and constitution
of the "charismatic counter." It must be pointed out, however, that my
interpretation sees Slothrop's disintegration as nothing less than a success but
in no way an escape or a "transcendence."

Slothrop's ultimate impersonal self is presaged by his propensity for

slipping into different personae, such as British ace reporter Ian Scuffling,

Max Schlezpig-the name which belonged to Greta Erdmann's deceased lover,

comic-book character Rocketman, and folk pig-hero Plechauzunga. Slothrop
does not don the roles of Rocketman and Plechauzunga because of any
egotistical motive or forethought, but simply because he participates as a doer
of Works in the arena of action in which he finds himself. He becomes

Rocketman on the insistence of Saure Bummer, who costumes him, dubs

him Rocketman, and sends him off on a comic-hero adventure to recover
hidden dope. Slothrop also becomes Plechauzunga, a pagan pig-hero on

whose presence the annual festival hinges, for no other motive than the
insistence of preterite German-village children. Ironically, it is for his lack of
sepishness that Slothrop is criticized for his role-switching, especially as this
is seen as non-conducive to his "questF'for the Rocket, for the schwartzgerat,
for the "truth" that is supposed to connect Imipolex G with his inexplicable
erections associated with the V-2 and that defines his "individuality."
Slothrop's "quest" is not the only incomplete story in Gravity's Rainbow that
frustrates closure-minded Western readers; there are also significantly "the
failure of Enzian to clash with Tchitcherine, the offstage death of General
Pudding, the uncertainty of Blicero's fate, the inconclusiveness of Pirate's
relationship with Katje, Pokler's unresolved search for his daughter and

wife," etc. (Fowler 54). This characteristic of narrative dispersal and open-

endedness supports the fact that linearity and teleology are undermined by

Pynchon in favor of a Zone of cyclical, unending tran5fomations. Consider

the epigraph to the first section of Gravity's Rainbiw, which is taken from
Werhner Von Braun and which situates us smack in the heart of Hindu

cosmology: "Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation.

Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my
belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death" (I). In such a
cosmos of Prakrific energies, it is fitting that stories mingle, criss-cross and
connect, and are transformed before their prefigured telos. hi such a nonWestern cosmos, it is tempting to appreciate and consequently dismiss the
nature of "Slothrop's Progress" as comic-strip realism and Vaudeville

comedy worthy of Abbot and Costello. But a dismissal on such grounds,

however, reflects little or no appreciation of the important non-Western
gesture of yagna that permeates Gravity's Rainbow.
Slothrop is not the only character to demonstrate impersonality in his

actions. Enzian and Tchitcherine demonstrate to varying degrees an

impersonality in their actions in the Zone which points to a liberated state of

being defying expectations or judgments premised on the finitude of the

traditional Western fictive character with a coherent ego-bound personality.
Tchitcherine and Enzian are half-brothers; on his way to a siege of Fort
Arthur Tchitcherine senior left behind a pregnant Herero woman in South-

West Africa, and was never to return, either to Russia or to South-West

Africa. Tdutcherine is described as a cybernetic organism more than as a

human, "more metal than anything else" (337)' and thus marks a compelling
interface between technology and nature, Them and self. For example,
Tchitche~e'sdoes not dearly know the source of his obsession to kill
-

Enzian. Though he uncovers "evidencet' that the obsession has been visited