The Birth of Irony : Or, the life of a ‘social anthropologist’

Looking back over the years, I realise that I can say, if with some diffidence, that I became an ironist, almost overnight, one cold misty winter afternoon in 1990 during my grandfather’s funeral. His children (or, to be precise, most of them) who had gathered for the funeral feast (itself an irony, when you think of people feasting over a dead man’s body, if not his soul), were caught up in a dense network of intrigue and scheming over the division of his property. To this day I have never been able to overcome the instinctive horror that runs through me whenever I hear of brothers and sisters settling property issues on legal documents. This ruthless incursion of the juridical-legal complex into the life-world of familial relations implies, to me at least, that brothers and sisters do not genuinely trust one another; indeed, that they suspect one another of being thieves or brigands waiting to pounce upon one another unless their assets are clearly enumerated and declared on paper stamped with the aura of the law. What was so ironical about what goes on, possibly in every family with two (or more) siblings when it comes to the question of the division or distribution of parental/ancestral property? This very fact that for all the ‘tribalistic’ claims that brothers and sisters keep on repeating ad nauseam that blood is thicker than water, surely it seems to be ‘liquid money’ that is much thicker than both of the former! If they do not have sincere faith in one another’s honesty, integrity, and goodness, why not make it clear at the very beginning instead of having to wait for the morning when the grim bespectacled estate lawyer will arrive on the scene?

That, however, was only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Though I was probably unaware of the word ‘irony’ and its cognates at that time, I realise now that I have spent the greater part of my adolescent life as an ironist, constantly shuttling back and forth between two allegedly fixed and clearly identifiable poles, not waiting for too long at either. I have thereby become a ‘man who refuses to be moulded into a myth’, though it is not always easy to communicate the pain, the isolation, and the loneliness that is also associated with this persistent refusal. I shall mention three such groups of poles here, ‘Assamese’ and/or ‘Bengali’; ‘Hindu’ and/or ‘Catholic’; and, finally, ‘Indian’ and/or ‘European’ : whereas people around me have sometimes forced me to accept one of each of these binaries, I have constantly attempted complex negotiations through the broken, and uneasy, middle across each of them. And this was possible only if I were to live as an ironist; if I were constantly aware of my contextualised ‘location’ in deep socio-cultural matrices; if I were to remind myself incessantly that the views I hold and the beliefs I practice are, to a significant extent, a ‘product’ of my childhood upbringing and adolescent experiences, which cannot therefore be ‘universalisable’ or superimposed on others without further ado.

First, then, the binary of ‘Assamese’ and/or ‘Bengali’. I once horrified an elderly Assamese gentleman with my comment, stemming ultimately from a conviction whose intensity has not dimmed down the years, that I am essentially ‘Bengali’ and only accidentally ‘Assamese’. Or to put it a bit more gnomically, this is the conviction that a wo/man is not born as, but becomes, a ‘Bengali’. (Which is an extension of Simone de Beavouir’s celebrated dictum : ‘One is not born as, but becomes, a woman’.) What, however, is it about ‘Bengali-ness’ that drew me, and continues to entice me, so deeply and powerfully towards a tongue and a set of cultural patterns which are, at least in the opinion of some of the ‘Assamese’, alien, forbidding, and strange? In attempting to answer this question, I have always sought to avoid the misreading associated with what has come to be known (and, rightly maligned) as ‘essentialization’, that is, the fallacy that is committed when an ‘interested onlooker’ picks out one strand out from a complex matrix that characterises ‘another culture’, and puts this forth as its ‘quintessence’. Such was the misreading perpetrated by several writers during the colonial period when India was stereotyped as an ‘essentially’ spiritual land of everlasting mystical truths, thereby ignoring the rich traditions of atheistic, sceptical, ‘humanistic’, and agnostic thought in the classical heritage. They were, of course, not utterly off course (no pun intended) in discerning the occurrence of certain ‘spiritual’ components in Indian civilization, but they overlooked the presence of other quite ‘anti-spiritual’ (or what we might today call ‘secular’) aspects, and thereby constructed an homogenous entity called ‘Spiritual India’ which even today does the rounds not only within the country but also in various Western circles.

Over the years, I have become extremely sensitive to this issue of subsuming entire patterns of socio-cultural existence under ‘globalising’ umbrellas which forcefully (indeed, violently) wipe out or discard those which cannot somehow be squeezed into its cover. And given the fact that I regard myself as essentially Bengali, does this self-understanding not make me particularly guilty of a similar act of picking out some constituents of ‘Bengali life’ out of their total complex in specific settings, and raising them to the timeless status of ‘Bengali-ness’? This is a question that has bothered me off and on during my interactions with ‘native’ speakers of the Bengali language (this, incidentally, is my ‘definition’ of a ‘Bengali’, and a parallel definition holds, for that matter, for an ‘Assamese’), and in the process of such relations I have found myself time and again in the role of a ‘social anthropologist’ who is at once almost completely immersed in the life-styles that she is trying to indwell from the within, and yet feels a certain degree of ‘conceptual distance’ or ‘alienation’ or ‘cognitive dissonance’ from the ‘tribe’ that she has consciously made her second (and sometimes only) home.

I entered the multifaceted world of what I have here tentatively called ‘Bengali-ness’ through the Ariadne’s thread of the two specific pieces of Rabindranath Tagore and the songs of the late mediaeval wandering minstrels or troubadours, the Bauls (and, as it turns out, the two pieces are, as we say, of one piece, for Tagore himself was strongly influenced by some of the themes in Baul music). Thus every time I meet a ‘Bengali’ (note the definition above) I unwittingly find myself trying to shift, or at least, orient the conversation, however subtly, towards either Tagore or the Bauls. Great indeed is my joy, akin to a sense of ‘home-coming’ (even if a ‘home-coming’ in the reverse), when it turns out that my interlocutor him/herself is immersed or rooted in these two, and it is always a certain dejection that overcomes me when I meet a ‘Bengali’ who is apathetic, or even antipathetic, towards them. This, however, only raises the ponderous question of whether I am guilty of a certain form of ‘interpretive violence’ in trying to see ‘Bengali-ness’ through these two components : in expecting, or hoping, that every ‘Bengali’ that I meet or talk to should be grounded in Tagore and the Bauls, am I not culpable of the very same gross ‘cultural stereotyping’ that I have warned against in the preceding? Or, in other words, have I not ‘reduced’ the rich complexity and diversity of ‘Bengali-ness’ into two signifiers that I have set up as its ‘essential’ markers? What about the Bengal of Anglicized Calcutta, the Bengal of the C.P.I. and Naxalbari, the Bengal of Suman Chatterji and Mohinir Ghuraguli, the Bengal of the interminable adda on the road-sides, the Bengal of Durga Puja and Kalibari, and the Bengal of the rapidly vanishing quaint exotica of North Calcutta?

It was a long engagement with this painful question that gradually brought home to me that though it was/is a constitutive part of my self-understanding that I am essentially Bengali, in approaching ‘Bengali-ness’ I remain nevertheless a ‘social anthropologist’ as a person who is highly conscious that he is an ‘eclectic’ figure. That is, I pick and choose certain elements (but not all) that lure me, and seek to combine these with other elements that go to form my self-identity (which itself is not a static entity but a dynamic process). And when I go back to the world of ‘Assamese-ness’, I try, almost unconsciously, to see or unearth these very same elements, and call myself an ‘Assamese’ only to the extent, which is usually very limited, that I actually find their parallels there. Consequently, I am a ‘social anthropologist’ even with regard to the ‘Assamese’ : in some genuine cases, I think I ‘know’ them, but I cannot truly ‘understand’ them, and this lack of ‘understanding’ precisely because they have not stepped into the world of ‘Bengali-ness’ to the extent, and in the specific ways, that I have.

Hence, when it comes to the ‘binary’ of ‘Assamese’ and/or ‘Bengali’ I have to live as an ironist. With the ‘Assamese’, I desperately seek, usually in vain, to find elements of ‘Bengali-ness’ in their lives, and craftily pretend to be an ‘Assamese’ for the rest of the time (for their sanity, not mine), even when carefully hiding my bitter disappointment at my failure. With the ‘Bengalis’, on the other hand, I have to remain conscious of committing yet again the fallacy of stereotyping an extremely vibrant and multifaceted world with the stamp of Tagore and the Bauls, while yet hoping for that encounter with that ‘Bengali’ (who is, after all, thankfully not that hard to come by) who shares my passion for the former. Consequently, the hard-nosed and exasperated Census official who might tell me someday, ‘But you have to be either Assamese or Bengali, you can’t be both!’, I can only reply, ‘I am neither ‘Assamese’ nor ‘Bengali’ because I am something of both at the same time!’

An ironist is thus a ‘hybrid’ person, and is a threat in some ways to those who seek to maintain the social fabric by inscribing onto it the distinct silhouettes of clearly-defined, stabilized and secure identities. Consequently, an ironist lives on the fractured middle where s/he is exposed to fire from both sides. From the (orthodox) ‘Assamese’, I have to bear the brunt of having ‘diluted’ the ‘validity’ of ‘Assamese’ culture by ‘mixing’ it with the ‘contaminated’ and ‘alien’ elements of ‘Bengali-ness’. For some of the (orthodox) ‘Bengalis’, on the other hand, I would be at the end of the day a ‘freak’, a sort of ‘cultural tourist’ who selectively appropriates whatever suits his fancy without wanting to participate in the minutiae of the life-worlds of ‘Bengali-ness’. On both sides, then, I could be accused of a lack of ‘authenticity’, of ‘loyalty’, of ‘allegiance’ and of ‘steadfastness’. Why, indeed, trust someone who is ultimately neither here nor there, who is (apparently) free from all cultural fastenings or roots?

Is this alleged deficiency of ‘cultural moorings’ a source of ‘liberation’ or of ‘condemnation’ for the ironist? Probably both. To take the latter first, some form of ‘condemnation’ because it involves a certain amount of ‘loneliness’, associated particularly with the cold realisation that it is not everyday that I will meet someone who will be able to genuinely appreciate my ongoing experiments with ‘hybridity’, someone who will not wave away with a scornful gesture my ‘lack of authenticity’; and yet at the same time of ‘liberation’ because it infuses me with the hope that there are indeed some ‘hybrid’ people such as me whom I might run into round the next street-corner.

Some of these complicated cultural dynamics are also manifest in my ongoing negotiations between the two dense life-worlds of ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Roman Catholicism’, but I shall necessarily be somewhat brief in this matter. (Ultimately these are also reflected in my Ph.D. thesis.) It was in class six that I first came across this text from the New Testament, ‘Foxes have their holes, and birds of the air have their nests, but the Son of Man [i.e. Jesus] has no place to rest his head’. As it turns out, this text fell upon me with something of the gravity of a Upanisadic mahavakya (‘great saying’), and I found myself returning to it, mesmerised by the notion of the deity who ‘had no place to rest his head’. I was even more impressed by the rather austere lives of the Catholic Brothers and Sisters in my school who were trying to ‘imitate’ the Son of Man by dedicating themselves (however imperfectly) to the ideal of a human community with no internal divisions while seemingly not having any place to rest their own heads. Thus, just as I entered ‘Bengali-ness’ through Tagore and the Bauls and began thereafter to look backwards at ‘Assamese-ness’ in the light of the former, I stepped into the intricate socio-religious patterns of Roman Catholicism (and, more broadly, of Christianity) with this text, and then started to cast a backward glance at ‘Hinduism’ through it, looking specifically for those elements in ‘Hinduism’ wherein I could hear its echoes or see parallels to it.

A set of questions, similar to the ones raised above, however, have again haunted me here : have I not ‘reduced’ the sheer complexity of the beliefs, the conceptual frameworks and the liturgical practices of Roman Catholicism by picking out just one text out of a hundred others? and, surely there is much more to the lived worlds of ‘Hinduism’ than a motley band of ascetics and so-called world renouncers? And, similarly, I find myself immersed in a different sort of a ‘hybridity’, this time with respect to these two religious patterns : to the (orthodox) ‘Roman Catholics’, I am, at best, an agnostic (for ‘agnosticism’ is the most accurate description of myself in ‘religious matters’) and, at worst, a dilly-dallying indecisive ‘heretic’; whereas to the (orthodox) Hindu (though it is by no means easy to delineate the contours of ‘Hindu orthodoxy’), I have muddied the clear and pristine waters of ‘timeless Hinduism’ by importing the (‘foreign’) contagion of Roman Catholicism. And yet, if the Census official were to indignantly protest to me, ‘But you can’t be both Hindu and Roman Catholic!’, I can only repeat with somewhat tiring consistency, ‘I am neither ‘Roman Catholic’ nor ‘Hindu’ because I am something of both of them at the same time!’

Thirdly, am I ‘Indian’ or ‘European’? A straightforward response, in keeping with the foregoing discussion, would simply be to interrogate my easy assumption, implicit in this question, that there exist two neatly identifiable, and hermetically sealed, entities, one called ‘Indian’ and the other ‘European’. But how could I, a person who, on the one hand, not only speaks but also thinks in English all the time, but who, on the other hand, firmly believes, rather ‘parochially’, that there is no language as spontaneous and beautiful as Bengali, regard myself as either ‘Indian’ or ‘European’? Surely this dichotomy between ‘Indian’ and/or ‘Europe’ completely breaks down in my case? Nevertheless, as a personal confession, until I went to the United Kingdom in 1998, I did believe that ‘attachment to the family’ was a distinctively ‘Indian’ trait; and having absorbed some portions of home-spun ‘second-hand’ literature about ‘Europe’ was under the (false) impression that ‘detachment from the family’ was a distinctive ‘European’ trend. After a few years of my ‘sojourn in the West’ I realised that there indeed was a significant grain of truth in this popular re-presentation of the ‘West’ as a land composed of decontextualised freely-floating social atoms, uncoupled from their familial milieus. This perception, which I was able to ‘verify’ or substantiate on several occasions, then became my point of departure for approaching the ‘West’, and in the presence of such ‘detached atoms’ I felt for the first time in my life very much, and indeed truly, ‘at home’, for all the paradoxical ring of this statement. And yet, I was only too aware that I was engaging in yet another type of crude ‘cultural stereotyping’, this time of the ‘West’, for there are vast swathes, spreading over the Mediterranean, Southern Europe, and the Great Plains of the United States, where family bonds remain vital, powerful, and strong (though, in my more uncharitable description, ‘totalitarian’). And having ‘entered’ the West with this ‘hermeneutical’ key, I once again began to bend over backwards (perhaps somewhat in the manner of my predecessor at Trinity College, Jawaharlal Nehru) for my personal ‘Discovery of India’; and I indeed ‘discovered’ that the rejection of (or expression of distaste towards) the family was by no means unknown to the classical traditions of India, that Buddhism, Jainism, and (to a lesser degree) the occasional bhakti ‘revivals’ viewed (though in their highly distinctive ways) the family as an inward-looking ‘tribalistic’ system, somewhat in the manner of a remorseless octopus that drags individuals willy-nilly towards its insatiable cavernous maws.

Thus I found myself once again moving back and forth between ‘India’ and ‘Europe’. The more I ‘discovered’ in European writers, thinkers, poets, iconoclasts, feminists, nihilists, novelists, and theorists confirmation of my (almost) life-long ‘prejudice’ that the family is ‘an insidious institution created by men to dominate (‘their’) women and to punish (‘their’) children’, the more I ‘discovered’ side by side elements in ‘Indian’ civilization certain resonances and parallels of this view. And yet, questions similar to the ones that I have flagged in the foregoing, are not far behind me : is rejection of the family the only aspect of ‘European’ civilization? and, have I disregarded the existence of the so-called extended Indian family?

Thus I have become, over the years, a complex and highly unstable ‘product’ of uncompleted and fragmentary mediations between ‘Assamese-ness’ and ‘Bengali-ness’; between ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Roman Catholicism’; and between ‘Indian-ness’ and ‘European-ness’; and I carry around within and on my person the ‘effects’ or the traces, some perhaps hidden to my own introspective gaze, of these provisional and partial experimentations. I keep on moving dialectically between the two bounds of each of these ‘dualities’, and feel somewhat apprehensive and distressed in the presence of those whom I feel have got ‘stuck’ to either of them. Thus, a person who describes him/herself to me as an ‘orthodox Roman Catholic’ makes me as uneasy as someone who resolutely insists on something called ‘orthodox Hinduism’; and someone who maintains that there is an ‘Indian mind’ which is absolutely different from, and alien to, a putative ‘European mind’ makes me highly uncomfortable.

And yet, for all that, I am marked by a profound ambivalence in that I do at certain times envy such people. For they enjoy a certain stability and security that is denied to me, the self-assurance of knowing where their ‘roots’ are, the certainty of remaining clear about where they ‘belong to’; whereas ‘home’ for me is an interim construct built out of makeshift scraps that I have collected from here and there, crumbs whose ‘authenticity’ I cannot guarantee to those ‘purists’ who may wish to examine them. Slightly altering the words of Salman Rushdie in a similar context, ‘home’ for the ironist is an ‘edifice we build of out scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved.’ To be forever ‘on the move’ in this way might seem a welcome style of living to those who believe that they are trapped within some structure (whatever this might be). But to the ironist himself, he can be never sure whether his ‘hybridity’ is ultimately a font of ‘liberation’ or of ‘condemnation’.

Perhaps it is neither of them, because it is something of both at the same time!