by Nisarg Patel
“I could not / Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing / Looking into the heart of light, the silence” (lines: 38–41)
–T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Two women, and two scenes of death: in the first scene, the woman dies while terminating her pregnancy. Her name is Chandra Chashani. She has been given an ultimatum by Magram Chasha (who is her husband’s sister’s husband and the person who impregnated her) to either terminate her pregnancy or to take ‘bhek’―a ritual which would mean abdicating her caste. Chandra would undergo an abortion in her third month of pregnancy. Her mother, along with her brother’s father-in-law, will procure a ‘medicine’ through Kalicharan Bagdi. Her sister, Brinda, would administer a dose. The initial dose would do ‘nothing to destroy the foetus’, and the three of them [Chandra, her sister, and her mother] would go back to Kalicharan to procure yet another herbal medicine. This time, the medicine would work, ‘the foetus was destroyed’. However, we are told, ‘the pain in Chandra’s belly continued to increase and she died’ (136).[1]
The second, and comparatively better-known, of the two scenes is that of suicide. Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri, ‘[A] young women of sixteen or seventeen…hanged herself in her father’s modest apartment in North Calcutta in 1926’. Unlike Chandra, this was ‘not a case of illicit pregnancy’. ‘Bhuvaneswari was menstruating at the time [of her suicide]’. ‘[A] decade later, it was discovered that she was a member of one of the many groups involved in the armed struggle for Indian independence. She had been…entrusted with a political assassination. Unable to confront the task and yet aware of the practical need for trust, she killed herself’ (103).[2]
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For the readers of the subaltern school, these two cases, these two women and their scenes of death, would be deeply familiar. Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri’s death, her suicide, is how Spivak ends her (now canonical) 1985 essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’. Chandra Chashani’s death is the case-study of Ranajit Guha’s essay, ‘Chandra’s Death’, published in the fifth volume of the journal ‘Subaltern Studies’ (1987). Death, or to be more precise, unnatural death of women, lies as the foundation of both of these essays. Both of these essays not only think about the overdetermined conditions under which ‘woman’ appears within a colonial context, but, more importantly, both think about the ‘silences’ that accompany these women. For Guha, Chandra’s ‘silence’ is a spanner that brings the wheel of historiography to a standstill, while for Spivak, the ‘silence’ surrounding Bhuvaneswari’s suicide is symptomatic of the general illegibility which surrounds the sexed subject in the colonial context, showing us how ‘[R]ecovering a sexually subaltern subject is lost in an institutional textuality’ (‘CSS’, 99).
In this short essay, I want to revisit these two essays, the deaths of which these two essays ‘speak’, and the ‘silences’ which they identify and outline. My modest aim in doing this exercise is twofold: firstly, in revisiting these two essays, I want to situate how ‘silence’ structures the reading of Guha and Spivak. The aim here is not simply to see how Chandra, in Guha’s case, or Bhuvaneswari, in Spivak’s, in their individual and singular death, embody some generalisable, and thus universalisable, ‘silence’. Neither is my aim to locate the fountainhead of ‘silence’ from which postcolonial theory nourished itself in the wake of the Subaltern Studies project. Instead, what interests me here is the (differential-) work [Arbeitskraft, to use the word from Marx] that ‘silence’ performs, or is made to perform, within the texts of Guha and Spivak. Both texts, both deaths, bring us to the altar of silence, and yet, to use the old cliché, their paths to ‘silence’ differ. In this essay, I closely trace the arguments of Guha and Spivak in order to chart precisely this ‘how’ and ‘why’ of silence. My aim in doing so is to explore a simple question: can ‘silence’ ultimately serve as a category we can use when reading colonial material?
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Allow me to begin with Guha. The case of Chandra Chashani, which Guha appropriately characterises as an ‘untamed fragment’ of history, comes to Guha in the form of an ‘ekrar’ [legal confession] written by ‘a village scribe’ and ‘drafted in the service of the local law-enforcing agents’ (‘CD’, 138-39). At the level of the content, as Guha notes, the confession ‘abounds in spelling errors’, while at the level of its form, the confession is written not in the colonial/bureaucratic language of law but rather in the local dialect. The confession begins with an invocation of a deity and, in its narration, it marks events according to the Indian classification of temporality [both by month and by time of day]. Chandra’s ‘story’ itself is somewhat straightforward: she was having ‘an illicit love affair’ with Magram, her husband’s sister’s husband, and, as a result, became pregnant. Magram visits Chandra’s mother (Bhagaboti Chashin) and demands from her ‘to arrange for some medicine to be administered’ [which is to say, to administer an abortion] or else he will ‘put her into bhek’ (136-37). To be put into bhek would mean that Chandra would be excommunicated both socially and spatially. She would have to live ‘outside’ the social world of the village, and, with her head shaven and with a rosary in her hand, would pass the rest of her life as an outcaste―which is to say, she would have to go through her ‘symbolic death’. In order to save her daughter from social death, Bhagaboti [Chandra’s mother] secures ‘herbal medicine’ from Kalicharan Bagdi, and it was in the wake of this medicine (which does ‘destroy’ the foetus) that Chandra eventually dies. In an effort to avoid her symbolic death, she meets her actual death.
I will not repeat Guha’s ingenious reading here―which covers everything from the theme of gender politics to solidarity amongst women in the face of the coercive force of patriarchy― and will simply refer you to the essay in case you are interested in the ‘life-death’ of Chandra. I am rather interested in the sites of silence that erupt as an ‘aporia’ within Guha’s text. Guha laments that a text like that of ‘ekrar’ [confession] which we find within colonial archives, has already suffered from ‘imposition of other wills and purposes’ (‘CD’, 135). It is not simply that Chandra does not speak (for how can she if she is dead), but even to listen to voices which do speak [like Brinda, Chandra’s sister, or Bhagaboti, Chandra’s mother], we have to refer to, and thus impose, historiographical ‘principles’ that would help us construct a series of events out of these ‘untamed fragments’ (‘CD’, 139). However, neither these ‘principles according to which a series is constructed’, nor ‘the character of constructing authority [historians, in our case]’, are neutral, even against all their attempts to be one (‘CD’, 139). A legal historian, for instance, can only read these events after he transforms the ‘matrix of real historical experience’ into a ‘matrix of abstract legality’ (‘CD’, 141). The problem with these discursive transformations is that they not only change the conditions dictating the legibility of historical material [i.e., its conditions of legibility], but, in doing so, inescapably lose the ‘real historical experience’. This emphasis on the ‘real’ of the historical experience, and the lament over its loss within mediated text, comes directly out of the early Hegelian orientation within the subaltern school in general and Guha’s work in particular, where the aim of the project was ‘excavation’ of the subaltern consciousness. One sees this Hegelian inflection within Guha’s interpretation, where he shows how the process of converting the ‘plurality of […] recorded utterance’ into ‘a set of judicial evidence’ results in the erasure of ‘[T]he particular will’―the very ‘will’ which, according to Hegel in Philosophy of Right, is ‘the sole positive existence which the injury possesses’ in the first place (‘CD’, 141).
Within the text of Chandra’s story, by which I mean the ‘ekrar’ [legal confession] that was registered by the legal authority, Guha notes, the ‘voice of the state…subsume[s] the humble peasant voices which speak here in sobs and whispers’. It is the state that makes the text ‘speak of an event without a subject’ (‘CD’, 141). Silence in Guha emerges in the gap ‘between the actual sequence of events and its representation in the document’ (‘CD’, 140, italics added). Silence is this very gap between the ‘actual’ event and its historiographic ‘representation’ on the one hand, and, on the other, the space between the two discourses, namely, the text of the state and the ‘real existence’ of its subject[3].
In contrast to Guha, Bhuvaneswari’s death in Spivak’s essay does not come through a text but rather through a combined work of ‘memory’ and ‘voice’. ‘I know of Bhuvaneswari’s life and death through family connections’, Spivak writes (‘CSS’, 104). Moreover, unlike Guha, who begins with a text of death, deaths (in the plural) in Spivak’s essay come only at the very end. Spivak’s point of departure is the category of the subject, particularly how the ‘critique of sovereign subject’ in Foucault and Deleuze ‘inaugurates a Subject’ (‘CSS’, 66). Underneath Foucault’s ‘unquestioned valorization of the oppressed as subject’ or Deleuze’s total suspension of the question of ‘representation’ [‘There is no more representation; there’s nothing but action’ (‘CSS’, 70)], Spivak identifies a full-blown tendency, at all levels, to cover over internal splits and differences that mar a subject, and it is precisely as a result of one such historical attempt at ‘sew[ing] together into a transparency’ a ‘S/subject’ which, for Spivak, produces the silence of a gendered subaltern. I am unable to do justice to the multiple arguments Spivak advances in her essay. Nevertheless, if I am to quickly chart a rough version of her reading of the ‘subject of suicide’, it can be described at three levels:
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The colonial machine, in its ‘heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject’, undertook ‘stabilization and codification of Hindu law’ (‘CSS’, 76-86). It is as a result of this codification that something like the practice of suttee [burning of a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre], gets converted from ‘ritual’ to ‘crime’, and the practice ‘leap[s]…from private to public’ (‘CSS’, 94).
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Assisting this external codification of (colonial-)law, there is an internal movement within the (Hindu-)law which produces permission for an act like that of suicide within a religion which otherwise treats ‘suicide as reprehensible’ (‘CSS’, 95). Suicide is possible when the subject comprehends the ‘mere phenomenality of its identity’ as its ‘truth’. However, even this act of suicide after attaining ‘knowledge of truth’ is not open to women [the interior realization of truth is suspect when it comes to women]. And so, for women, ‘we move from interior sanction (truth-knowledge) to an exterior one (place of pilgrimage)’. The husband’s pyre becomes this place of pilgrimage, and the dead husband becomes the ‘exteriorized example’ of the mere phenomenality of every subjectivity. Note how ‘truth’ remains with the man, even when he is dead.
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Finally, anterior to this sanction for suttee is the question of translation of the verse from Rig Veda itself and the indeterminate nature of the metaphors that are being used. For instance, in the verse which instructs the women to ‘[E]nter the house with clarified butter in their eyes,’ (the very verse which is used to justify the scriptural support for suttee), is the house the material house of brick and mortar or a metaphorical house of fire?
There are gaps at each of these levels: public-private, men-women, external-internal, and, of course, internal to the chain of signification itself. There are gaps, and because of these gaps, slippages. Catachresis is both inevitable and inescapable. Suturing gaps, at any of these levels, so as to make it ‘transparent’, would mean to cover over the differential and asymmetrical relationship that exists between the law and the gendered subject. ‘[T]he task of recovering a (sexually) subaltern subject’, Spivak notes, ‘is lost’ (‘CSS’, 99). The illegibility of Bhuvaneswari’s suicide is thus a product of multiple entangled genealogies that go from the mis-translation of ancient text [Dharmashastra] to the misadventures of ‘patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object formation’ (‘CSS’, 102). Unlike Guha, the inability to ‘put together a voice’ here, be it that of Bhuvaneswari or the victims of sati, is not simply because of the gap that exists between events and their representation, or experience and discourse. But rather, it is inescapable, unavoidable, and a characteristic result of ‘catachresis at the origin’. Silence, for Spivak, is a product of this (productive-) error.
There are, then, two visions of silence in the subaltern project: silence as the result of a gap and silence as a product of error. The first version makes space for the gap to be filled. The second is suspicious of every act of stitching or suturing. The first operates at the level of discourse, the second at the level of signifiers animating the discourse. The first believes that subjective consciousness leaves detectable ‘traces’ within the scripts of history. The second suspects any easy legibility of those traces. The first excavates, the second reads.
Between Guha’s Chandra and Spivak’s Bhuvaneswari, we get two ways to approach the silence of/in history within the subaltern school. While it is true that none of these approaches makes the ultimate faux pas of hastily translating the ‘absence of silence’ into the ‘presence of speech’, both of them, in their own way, do propose a ‘path’ [I am not sure if it could be called a ‘method’] that demarcates the site/space where silence can be detected, heard, and, at the end, be made ‘legible’. This path of making the ‘silences’ legible is, as I have shown, quite distinct between Guha and Spivak, and, furthermore, given this founding difference [between excavation and reading], what ‘appears’ at the site of silence, i.e., what becomes legible, can hardly be the same ‘thing’. ‘Had we but world enough and time’, as a poet once wrote, we could have posed and responded to some crucial questions here. For instance, apropos Guha, who locates ‘silence’ within the gap between sedimented layers of discourses, one would need to underline the fact that Guha treats the colonial/administrative discourse as a static, and thus transcendental, entity, whose boundaries are fixed in comparison to the ever-changing dynamic ‘experience’ of colonized actors. If so, what would happen to the gaps, and the silences inhabiting those gaps, as soon as we temporalise the discursive formation? With respect to Spivak, things are even more difficult. Spivak’s path of treating ‘silence’ as (an)other name for inescapable (historical-) catachresis, is, if I am reading her correctly, the same path which leads, with a swan’s nimble foot, towards the risk of total aphasia when it comes to speaking-history. Within this scenario, the only thing we can say about silence(s) animating the colonial texts is that those silence(s) could not be animated with a living voice. To bring this brief comparative exercise to an end, I will close not with a conclusion (and thus a solution to the ‘problem’ of silence) but rather with a set of open questions: firstly, can we take any of these two approaches, be it Guha’s or of Spivak’s, as a model for reading non-official (creative) materials produced during the colonial period? Secondly, how portable are these approaches, especially when we move them from archives of history to the texts of fiction and poetry, or, even more radically, we move away from the textual altogether and enter the realm of the visual? Seven years after Chandra’s death (1849), Toru Dutt, the first Indian woman writer in English, was born. Living worlds apart from the subaltern life of Chandra, her poetry in English, nevertheless, raises the same question that Chandra’s death raises for Guha.[4] Is there an Indian consciousness which can be excavated underneath her language―language which was studded by Victorian sensibility and influenced by the Romantics? Similarly, two years after Spivak’s essay, the last known instance of Sati was performed on Sept 4, 1987. Roop Kanwar, who was eighteen at the time and had been married for just eight months, decided to end her life on her husband’s pyre. In keeping with modern times, a photograph was taken of her sitting on her husband’s funeral pyre. How do we read this image? How are we to situate the semantic sliding which Spivak identifies as animating the silence of sati in a photographic image? In Dutt’s poetry or Kanwar’s photograph, does silence take on a new form? And finally, to repeat a question that I posed at the beginning, but this time with a slight modification: can ‘silence’ ultimately serve as a category we can use when reading post-colonial material?
To end, a couplet from a postcolonial poet:
मेरे अधिकतम चुप को सब जान लें
जो कहा नहीं गया, सब कह दिया का चुप।
―Vinod Kumar Shukla, बोलने में कम से कम बोलू
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Ranajit Guha, ‘Chandra’s Death’ in Subaltern Studies V: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Oxford University Press, 1987), 135-65 (hereafter, ‘CD’). ↑
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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Taylor & Francis Group, 2015), 66-111 (hereafter, ‘CSS’). ↑
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An interesting comparison can be made here between Guha’s excavation of judicial documents relating to ‘Chandra’s death’ and Michel Foucault’s unfinished project ‘The Lives of Infamous Men’ in Power: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, Volume 3, edited by James Faubion, translated by Robert Hurley and others (The New Press, 2001), 157–75. Guha, like Foucault, is also drawn towards ‘an anthology of [colonial-] existences’, ‘[L]ives of few lines or a few pages, nameless misfortunes and adventures gathered into a handful of words’ (157). Furthermore, Guha’s case-study of Chandra is quite similar to the ‘petitions’ which interested Foucault―‘petitions […] lodged by illiterate or semiliterate persons of humble circumstances; they themselves with their meager skills, or unqualified scribe in their place, would compose as best they could the formulas or turns of phrases they believed to be required when one addressed […] high officials’ (170). I am grateful to Dr. Jonathan Basile for drawing my attention to this. ↑
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Toru Dutt, Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan (London, Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1885). ↑
