Jokes Apart

Abstract

This paper revisits Orientalist discourses with a specific concern: to explore the unresolved relationship between Orientalism and colonial regimes. This exploration involves questions of representation, the status of reality and exteriority in a discourse like Orientalism, and the assertion of truth within a discursive field. I read a set of parodic texts by the noted Bengali satirist Rajshekhar Basu, which stage an inverted reality of colonialism, to suggest that ‘the Orient’ functions as a designation and a deterritorialized representation in the constitutive protocols of Orientalism. It is shifting and uneven in organization, and politically effective because of its capability of mutation and adaptation through the colonial business of governing ‘the Orient’. Parody's unusual engagement with Orientalist discourses makes us aware of the moment where Orientalist knowledge and colonial governmentality join each other. Without this circular relationship the discourse is quite ludicrous and ineffective. This laughter at the oppressive and sacrosanct discourse of global domination, however, is a postcolonial prerogative.

Keywords:

• Orientalism
• deterritorialization
• parody
• Paraśurām (Rajshekhar Basu)

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Rajeswari Sunder Rajan for her invaluable comments and suggestions on various stages of this essay. I have greatly benefited from the comments of Robert J. C. Young and the anonymous reviewer for Interventions on an early draft. Earlier versions of this essay were presented in Jadavpur and Penn State Universities (ACLA 2005); I would like to thank all the participants in these conferences for their questions and comments which have helped me to think through some of the arguments presented here. And, finally, I would like to thank Rajarshi Dasgupta, Bodhisattva Kar and Mallarika Sinha Roy for their support and help. All translations from Bengali, unless otherwise indicated, are mine.

Notes

¹Edward W. Said's Orientalism (1978), more than twenty-five years after its publication, is still the classic source of our understanding of Orientalism as a global discourse. My attempt here is to think through one of the unresolved tensions in Said's text, the relationship between Orientalism as a self-contained discourse and colonial regimes, particularly after the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798.

²A brief biographical sketch may not be out of place here. Rajshekhar Basu, after obtaining an MA in chemistry from the University of Calcutta, became associated with the Indian venture Bengal Chemicals & Pharmaceutical Works Ltd. from 1903 to 1932. He wrote under the nom de plume Paraśurām. Among many of his accomplishments, he was one of the pioneers of modern Bengali advertisement with his colleague Jatindrakumar Sen. He published his first collection of short stories, Gaddalikā (A bellweather or a flock following a bellweather), at the age of 44. His other publications include the following collections of short stories: Kajjalī (Ethiops (Mercury sulphate)) (1927), Hanumāner Swapna (Dream of Huanumān) (1937), Nīltārā (Blue star) (1951), Krishnakali (1953), Ānandībāī (1957); collection of essays, Laghuguru (High and low) (1939), Bhārater Khanij (Minerals of India) (1943), Kutirshilpa (Cottage industry) (1943) and Bichintā (Diverse meditations) (1955); abridged Bengali translations of Rāmāyana (1946) and Mahābhārata (1949) from Sanskrit; and a Bengali dictionary, Calantikā (1937). He was awarded Jagattarini Medal (1940), Rabindra Puraskar (1955), Sarojini Puraskar (1955), Sahitya Akademi Award (1958) and the ‘Padmabhusan’ (civilian award from the government of India) (1956). A writer of remarkable diversity and a prominent author of Bengali short stories, Basu is primarily known for his sophisticated humour and satire.

³Discussing nineteenth-century texts by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (1838–1894), most prominently Kamalākānta (1885), Kaviraj argues that the tragic fate of subalternity within the colonial world is difficult to come to terms with. For those who cannot do so ‘cognitively and practically’, the only recourse available, ‘the most ambiguous recourse of all, is the discourse of irony’ (Kaviraj 1995: 28–33). A similar reading can be extended to most of the prominent satirical texts from that period: Bhabanicharan Bandyopadhyay's Nababābubilās (Drolleries of the new bābu) (1823), Pyarichand Mitra's Ālāler gharer dulāl (Spoiled rich brat) (1858), Kaliprasanna Singha's Hutom pyanchār nakśā (Sketches by Hutom the owl) (1862) or Jogeshchandra Basu's Model bhaginī (Model sister) (1886–9) and so on.

⁴One of the better-known examples would be Sukumar Ray's Ha-Ja-Ba-Ra-La (1922). Beyond its ostensible form of fantasy and children's literature, it involves a scathing commentary on colonial law and judiciary.

⁵Representation here is evidently cast into its two senses that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak locates in Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte – vertreten (‘“speaking for”, as in politics’) and darstellen (‘“re-presentation”, as in art or philosophy’) (1988: 275–6).

⁶The parodic text reveals how the territorial representation operates within the discourse as what Deleuze and Guattari call, following Jean-François Lyotard's influential lead in Discourse, figure (1971), ‘designating function’. The function, as they elaborate on Lyotard, designates a particular relationship between words and graphs in the overarching mechanism of representation.

⁷There is a marked difference in the use of the term deterritorialization between Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980): while the first mostly uses it interchangeably with decoding (a function internal to capitalism), the second significantly expands its contours vis-à-vis state-machines and nomadology. The suggestion of deterritorialization in Deleuze and Guattari, however, occurs most prominently as an internal function to both desiring-production and territorial representation. Deterritorialization is the limit beyond which ‘social production [as] determined by the conditions of capitalism’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2000 [1972]: 130) transforms itself into schizophrenic desiring-production. The social territories that are associated with the modes of productions, in other words, can no longer be represented within an immanent field internal to capitalist society. They must find newer territories of representation – both descriptive and transformative – for desiring-production. Deterritorialization thus marks both the limit and inauguration of territorial representation, a category that can simultaneously accommodate the double bind of desire and interest without collapsing them into a unified field of representation and without itself becoming complicit to the act of representation. The territorialization, as the nuanced and shifting use in Deleuze and Guattari suggests, is not tied to its Lacanian provenance (in meaning the spatialization of erogenous zones in a child's body), but distributed in and through larger and divergent spaces of topography, textuality, production and desire.

⁸Said's text does not resolve the central tension between ‘the Orient as such’ and the ‘real thing as “the Orient”’. His emphasis on the interconnectedness between statements and institutions, and hence the re-presence of exteriority in Orientalism, bears a hint of inauthenticity. When Foucault describes discursive formations as a ‘limited system of presences’ (2002 [1969]: 134) he also implies a distributive practice that allocates the non-presence within the discursive formation itself in order to bring out the effect of presence. My suggestion of deterritorialization and desiring production of the Orient is somewhat closer to this flattening of discourse. Foucault resolutely rejects any ‘outside’ of exteriority, so to speak; the discourse exists through its exterior network of statements and through this grid the interior becomes meaningful. There is no place above or below this surface of the discourse, and hence there are no ‘statements that have fallen below the line of possible emergence’. ‘There is no sub-text. And therefore no plethora. The enunciative level is identical with its own surface’ (Foucault 2002 [1969]: 135).

⁹The history of governmentality in the Indian sub-continent is a unique one. Because such techniques of controlling the population precede the births of independent nation-state, as recent studies have argued (Chatterjee 2004), the colonial culture of governmentality continues even within the decolonized nation-states. Foucault's account of the disciplinary and governmental practices, which he associates with the emergence of biopower and opposes to the older model of sovereign power, also reveals their colonial genealogy, particularly through colonial genocide and racism (Foucault 2003: 255–6). The point I am trying to make, therefore, is that the practices of governmentality and colonial occupation share a history of co-production.

¹⁰Homi Bhabha makes a similar point when he argues that Said's ‘inadequate attention to representation as a concept that articulates the historical and fantasy (as the scene of desire) in the production of the “political” effects of discourse’; Bhabha further argues that ‘having introduced the concept of “discourse” he [Said] does not face up to the problems it creates for an instrumentalist notion of power/knowledge that he seems to require’ (Bhabha 1994: 72).

¹¹ Dordanda literally means the hand conceived as the rod of punishment; it figuratively also means the sceptre.

¹² Metipukur means small pond; Belestārā is blister; Chachurābād is derived from an actual town in Bengal called Chuchura; Bhātikhānā means, in colloquial terms, brewery; Nimte is the place where the first Indian cotton mill was established.

¹³It is worth noting here that Basu was the President of both the Bangla Spelling Reform Society formed by the University of Calcutta in 1935 and the Terminology Council formed by the government in 1948.

¹⁴Successive episodes of the Rowlatt Act, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and the imposition of martial law in Punjab in 1919, and the immensely unsatisfactory Montague-Chelmsford report with its proposal of administrative diarchy in 1918 (with the subsequent act the next year), provided Gandhi with the opportunity of initiating a widespread agitation – the Non-Cooperation movement of 1920.

¹⁵For a comprehensive account of the movement, see Sarkar (1973).

¹⁶The launching of ‘Banga Lakshmi Cotton Mills’ in August 1906, for example, was a major event in the social history of nationalism in Bengal. In the first two decades of the twentieth century there was a steady growth in indigenous capitalist ventures in industries like textile, drugs and pharmaceuticals, iron, tobacco, tea, jute, leather and banking. Several such ventures were undertaken by prominent people like Prafulla Chandra Roy, Nilratan Sarkar and Rabindranath Tagore. Incidentally, Rajshekhar Basu worked for one such organization, Bengal Chemicals & Pharmaceutical Works Ltd., established in 1901. For a historical account of the indigenous enterprise, see Sarkar (1973: 93–148). See also Bagchi (1972).

¹⁷Particularly prominent in this context would be Aurobindo Ghosh, Speeches (1922), Bepinchandra Pal, Swadeshi and Swaraj (1954) and the political essays of Tagore; collections of songs and poems like Promodekanta Basu, Banga swādhīnatā (Freedom of Bengal) (1905), Tulsidas Bhaduri, Sonār bhārat (Golden India) (1905), Jogindranath Sarkar, Bande mātaram (Hail the mother) (1906); plays like Amarendranath Dutta, Banger angachhed bā The Partition of Bengal (1905), Amritalal Basu, Sābās bāngālī! (Bravo Bengalis!) (1905); stories and novels like Prabhatkumar Mukhopadhyay, Deśī o bideśī (Indigenous and Foreign) (1909) and Narayanchandra Bhattacharya, Nababidhān (New Dispensations) (1907).

¹⁸ Ānanda Nādu is a sweetmeat used during the rituals of Bengali marriage.

¹⁹For a theoretical exposition of nationalism as derivative discourse, see Chatterjee (1986).

²⁰What Basu aims at can be speculated from the following extract from a periodical published during the Swadeshi movement; it is taken from an article called ‘Bartamān swadeśī āndolan’ (Present Swadeshi movement) by Bireswar Pare that was published in 1906: ‘Machines enhance the suffering of the common people, and benefit only the rich handful. Independent professions are destroyed, laborers increase in numbers, become victims of drink and immorality, and are in time totally debased. Handicrafts provide food for everyone, preserve the freedom of all and produce worthy and religious men’ (quoted in Sarkar 1973: 107).

²²Note particularly the sections originally in English with their regional variations in accent. The readers in colonial Bengal were expected to recognize these trivia.

²¹People with titles from the colonial government became recurring comic figures in Bengali literature during this period. Basu himself invented such characters in different stories; the most memorable portrait is Roy Saheb Tinkaribabu in ‘Śrī Śrī Siddheśwarī Ltd.’ (Basu 1983 [1924]).

²³As Timothy Mitchell has argued in the context of Egypt, it would be ‘conceived in no other terms than the order of what was orderless, the contradiction of what was discontinuous, something suddenly fundamental to human practice, to human thought’ (1988: 14). The authority of the colonial state, he points out further, are built on such spectacular order that distinguishes and maintains differentially the publicness of authority from a fuzzier world of mentality and domesticity.