Introduction: To ashes, or disclosing impunity

KEYWORDS:

• impunity
• sovereignty
• translation
• literature
• Jaspreet Singh
• state
• complicity
• pogroms
• 1984
• archive

The longer you look at a thing

the more it transforms. (Michaels 1997, 7)

Originally published in 2004 as Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaires des intraduisibles, the Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Cassin 2014a) is a rich and fascinating resource for students and researchers in such fields as comparative literature, translation studies, and continental philosophy. The paradoxical task of translating a labyrinthine work on the inherence of untranslatability to all acts of translation is not lost on the editors.¹ Indeed, spanning more than 1300 pages in the English edition (there are others, either published or forthcoming, including in Arabic, Farsi, Romanian, Russian, and Ukrainian [Apter 2014, vii]) and encompassing a dizzying range of entries that ‘compare and meditate on the specific differences furnished to concepts by the Arabic, Basque, Catalan, Danish, English, French, German, Greek (classical and modern), Hebrew, Hungarian, Latin, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, and Spanish languages’ (Apter 2014, vii), the Dictionary’s editors underscore the quandary of seeking ‘to translate the untranslatable’ while underlining the tome’s ‘performative aspect, its stake in what it means “to philosophize in translation” over and beyond reviewing the history of philosophy with translation problems in mind’ (vii).

In theory as (in) practice, the distinction marked by that difficult and generous shift into reading, or more humbly into forever attempting to read, ‘over and beyond’ matters a great deal. By pivoting from translation as a disciplinary, describable, and compartmentalizable problem or ornamental puzzle for the history of philosophy into untranslatability in translation as a foundational impasse whose terrain we witting and unwittingly traverse (or pass and repass) as we discipline our thinking, the editors alight upon yet another quandary that compromises their opening description of the volume as a ‘massive translation exercise with encyclopedic reach’ (vii). Taken to its logical conclusion, that compromise might enable rather than restrict or negate careful reading. It is a productive or enabling compromise, one that grounds our responsibility as readers, but only if we read it with requisite care.

No reach, even if it extends over and beyond 1300 pages, can be truly encyclopedic on matters of translation and hence of untranslatability. An encyclopedic reach, concerning translation and the untranslatable within the compass of the world’s languages, would be impossible.² There are, depending on how one counts (and for linguists, the question of how one counts certainly counts), around 7000 languages in our world today (Anderson 2010). An encyclopedic reach regarding translation and untranslatability, understood as such, would entail interminably crisscrossing, cross-referencing, and inhabiting all 7000 languages (and in innumerable cases both the dialects of each language and the languages that genealogically preceded those that count among the contemporary list of 7000), apropos of all possible concepts belonging to a philosophical lexicon that could live up to its intended systematicity. The interminability of that task, its fascinating desirability in theory contra its sheer impossibility in practice, forms the outermost limit or final orbit of researching untranslatability in translation.

To be sure, no one can approximate or assume for themselves that absolute margin of philosophy, which is in fact not quite or not only marginal but rather the entire grid or infrastructure of all languages today (whether it is a language that imbues the lives of hundreds of people or a language that imbues the lives of millions) whose simultaneity produces the intelligibility of our societies. That infrastructural medium of untranslatability is the bedrock on which all acts, including all feats, of translation pitch themselves. Marking the innermost basis of that outermost limit – the sheerest limit of all sheer limits – one feels precisely how parochial one’s position is, especially when one’s discipline or claims to interdisciplinarity posit an all-too learned perspective through which to think the world, posthaste, by ignoring untranslatability.³

Traces of this fundamental compromise to any claim of encyclopedic reach are present both in the prefatory texts and in many of the entries that comprise the Dictionary of Untranslatables. The most apparent trace, rendered for us with utmost responsibility, arises through the discussion of the volume’s title, or more precisely the title’s genesis and therewith its complicated domain. The word européen in the French edition does not carry over into the English edition. The explanation of this omission is worth reproducing at length, insofar as paraphrase may fail to capture nuance:

This was a difficult call, as the European focus of the book is undeniable. Removing the emphasis on ‘European philosophies’ would leave us open to criticism that the Dictionary now laid claim to being a work of world philosophy, a tall order that it patently did not fill. Our justification on this score was twofold: so that future editions of the Dictionary of Untranslatables might incorporate new entries on philosophy hailing from countries and languages cartographically zoned outside of Europe; and because, philologically speaking, conventional distinctions between European and non-European languages make little or no sense. … Notwithstanding concerns about the global hegemony of English … we assume that the book, by dint of being in English, will disseminate broadly and reach new communities of readers. The book’s diffusion in Asia, South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America will lead, we hope, not only to more translations in other languages, but also to spin-off versions appropriate to different cultural sites and medial forms. (Apter 2014, ix)

The titular difference between French and English editions thus becomes a gesture of open-endedness in at least three senses: through it, the editors recast the volume as organic, insofar as it may gradually find its project taken up, expanded, and ultimately transformed across as many regions and languages as possible; that single gesture of omission, to boot, reopens the book to further generative concepts as its project traverses and is remade by the languages it has yet to take into account; and, of course, amid all these solicited crossings, core samples, and philological deep dives, the complicated gesture of omitting Europe even as ‘its’ languages dominate the existing entries reopens the book’s concern for translatability vis-à-vis untranslatability. This threefold reopening, with its recursive open-endedness, is possible solely on the grounds that it is impossible to achieve an exhaustive or truly comprehensive – that is, an encyclopedically encyclopedic – dictionary of untranslatables for roughly 7000 languages.

The Dictionary of Untranslatables is thus an invitation to supplementation as interminable expansion. What is now present among its brimming pages casts a vast shadow, in which the enormity of what is lingually and conceptually absent (a word by no means synonymous here with excluded) forever warrants illumination. With approximately 115 million native speakers in Pakistan, India, and the diaspora (most prominently in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States), Punjabi, whether composed in Shahmukhi or Gurmukhi script, is among the multitude of languages that does not (yet) factor into the Dictionary of Untranslatables. This relatively brief introduction to ‘Reading Impunity in Aftermaths of State Violence,’ a Sikh Formations colloquium on Jaspreet Singh’s (2013) novel Helium, will of course not remedy that absence. Nevertheless, it is significant to note that impunity – one of the keywords, if not the keyword, that shapes this colloquium – also happens not (yet) to factor into the Dictionary of Untranslatables, or at least not as a full-fledged concept with its own discrete entry.

Impunity, that is, crops up three times in the Dictionary, but does not coalesce, via any language, into a formal entry of its own. There is of course no special connection between the Punjabi language and the concept of impunity; the absence of one in the Dictionary did not precipitate the absence of the other. Their respective absences, however, intriguingly do converge when one consults the Dictionary from a philological perspective that adheres to reading Jaspreet Singh’s Helium as a book that contributes something quite original to the study of political violence – something quite original, that is, to construing the readability of impunity as it relates to political violence across regions and languages – in a humanities context. In this light, the threefold presence of the word in the Dictionary, despite or even because of its absence as a discrete concept, may nonetheless be worth tracing. Its slight presence at present may indicate the potentiality of its fulsome presence in a future edition. While all-too brisk, my overview here of impunity’s marginal position in the Dictionary, on the way to delineating its centrality to Singh’s Helium, may be read as a preliminary or gestural response to the editors’ sense that an expanded lexicon of concepts and their productive untranslatabilities remains a crucial, indeed an ultimately interminable, objective.

Here, then, is a list of references. In a larger entry on the concept of the animal (Depraz 2014, 34–36), impunity appears in Leland de la Durantaye’s subsection on Giorgio Agamben’s use of the Latin term Homo sacer, or sacred man, one who ‘could be killed with impunity, but could not be employed in sacrificial rituals that required the taking of a life’ (De la Durantaye 2014, 36). In Alain Pons’ ‘Verum factum and poetic wisdom in Vico,’ a subsection of Élisabeth Décultot’s entry on the German term Dichtung (whose meanings pass through by exceeding the usual English translations of literature, poetry, and fiction) (Décultot 2014, 215–220), we read that by ‘creating gods, men began to think in a human way. However, one cannot simply create gods with impunity’ (Pons 2014, 217). In an entry on the Russian terms svoboda and volja, which are usually translated into French as liberté but whose untranslatable semantic range extends from something like ‘a vast expanse without limits, e.g. a steppe’ to the abyssal oppositions of culture/nature and form/matter, respectively, we read the following: for the common man in the era of the Muscovite state, ‘svoboda had a purely negative value, synonymous with impunity and slackening’ (Vasylchenko 2014, 1105). The fleeting presence of impunity in these specific entries already points to various pathways, from imbrications of sacredness and violence to the double bind of political freedoms and their concurrent determinisms, that a rigorously formal entry on the concept would tread.

Yet to follow such slender paths as are presently available across three entries that collectively traverse English, Latin, Italian, German, French, and Russian (among pithier references to other languages), the attentive reader must also think through impunity’s imbrications with major concepts that most certainly appear at length in the Dictionary’s current edition. Needless to say, the absence of references to impunity in the entries on these concepts, which I list here in quick succession without cataloging their authors (to avoid confusion insofar as many entries feature multiple authors under a wide range of subsections), is striking: consciousness, conscience, awareness; law, right; government; rule of law; stato; securitas; demos/ethnos/laos; people/race/nation; politics, policy; power, possibility; Macht, Gewalt; justice, judgment; memory/forgetfulness; morals/ethics; economy; oikonomia.

This list of concepts defined without reference to, yet imbricated with, impunity in their respective entries is hardly exhaustive. Nor is its inexhaustibility a matter of all-too-many concepts closely related to impunity having garnered their own proper entries. Although referenced far more times than impunity, for instance, the arguably much bulkier concept of sovereignty secures no entry of its own. One cannot posit impunity as approachable, interpretable, or otherwise readable as a concept without first, or simultaneously, working through the vast definitional thickets of sovereignty. One shadows the other. Shadows cast by their absences as entries in the Dictionary are, then, prodigious. If we add the absence of Punjabi, amid so many other languages, then the shadows in which we stand, trying in vain to find our way by reading carefully, only deepen.

How then might an entry on impunity begin to take shape as it emerges from the shadows with sovereignty backing it? How might various languages, region by region and linguistic branch by linguistic branch, illuminate its contours or flesh it out, perhaps untranslatably, from within? Surely English, Middle French, and Latin, apropos precisely of the word impunity, factor in here, but what about a language like Punjabi? As I am not a specialist in Punjabi language and literature, my responses to such questions will be tentative at best; certainly, they will not be worthy of a full-scale entry in any edition of the Dictionary of Untranslatables. Yet there may be some interpretative value to what is merely tentative. Whether they are in the know or not (or somewhere in between), readers will judge for themselves.

Reopening, so to reframe, the Dictionary through an expansive South Asian lens that would alight upon Punjabi as one of its many perches, editors, contributing authors, and eventually readers in general might initially navigate the (un)translatable vis-à-vis English as a language of South Asia. Impunity in English refers to ‘1. Exemption from punishment or penalty and 2. In a weaker sense: Exemption from injury or loss as a consequence of any action; security’ (Chaudhary 2018). Etymologically, it channels the ‘Middle French impunité, from Latin impunitat-, impunitas, from impune without punishment, from in- + poena punishment’ (Merriam-Webster.com). In greater relief, according to Merriam-Webster:

Impunity (like the words pain, penal, and punish) traces to the Latin noun poena, meaning ‘punishment.' The Latin word, in turn, came from Greek poinē, meaning ‘payment' or ‘penalty.' People acting with impunity have prompted use of the word since the 1500s. An illustrative example from 1660 penned by Englishman Roger Coke reads: ‘This unlimited power of doing anything with impunity, will only beget a confidence in kings of doing what they [desire].' While royals may act with impunity more easily than others, the word impunity can be applied to the lowliest of beings as well as the loftiest: ‘The local hollies seem to have lots of berries this year … A single one won’t harm you, but eating a handful would surely make you pretty sick, and might kill you. Birds such as robins, mockingbirds, and cedar waxwings eat them with impunity.’ (Karl Anderson, The Gloucester County Times, 22 Dec. 2002). (Merriam-Webster.com)

The range of reference available to impunity – extending from loftiest to lowliest and all points between – may be its most surprising or unexpected aspect to many for whom impunity adheres, primarily if not solely, to state functionaries (e.g. police and politicians). Impunity may have the support, whether tacit or explicit, of huge swathes of society (from top to bottom socioeconomically), including those whose ‘own’ community has suffered greatly the violence whose perpetrators impunity shelters. Some may indeed perpetrate such violence against their ‘own’ community and partake thereafter in impunity’s considerable expanse. Impunity may be upheld culturally by a complacent or complicit but surely desensitized general society, for which the recurrence of atrocities is a matter of course, like clockwork.

Immunity and impunity, distinguished by the merest of differences (a hop, a skip, and a jump between m and p), slip into one another’s senses; just as particular species of birds are immune to the poisonous effects of certain berries, which they relish with impunity, and are hence secure from sickness and death (although one likely would not say they go unpunished by the berries they consume). Immunity and impunity similarly slide into one another’s senses when they are read in such societal contexts as collective and/or political and/or state violence, institutions of policing, normative violations of international law (the sovereignty of which is generally weak because its enforceability is ultimately voluntary), and state policy writ large. Brutal excesses of impunity in any given society, moreover, can reveal fractures in its overlap with immunity: social unrest or revolt against impunity as a mode of securitization and as a perpetuation of sanctioned violence may set into relief the autoimmunity that, to one degree or another but always via ‘a sickness of reason’ (Derrida 2005, 124), courses through (forms by deforming, configures by disfiguring, attacks from within in the name of defending or preserving) all social formations (118–124).

In Gurmukhi script, for a sense of impunity as exemption from punishment, the Punjabi-English English-Punjabi Dictionary supplies ਸਜ਼ਾ ਤੋਂ ਛੋਟ (Goswami 2005). Immunity and security, in turn, are two senses of ਸੁਰੱਖਿਆ (Goswami 2005; Research Centre for Punjabi Language Technology [RCPLT] 2022). So far so good, or perhaps good enough, for translatability. A much trickier element, though, figures forth if we return, with Punjabi in mind, to Merriam-Webster’s entry on impunity or, more precisely, to what it underlines via its poetic example of certain birds that are immune to the toxic effects of the berries they regularly consume. ‘Birds such as robins, mockingbirds, and cedar waxwings,’ we recall, ‘eat them with impunity’ – a usage of the concept that, as the dictionary’s editors point out, illustrates its germaneness ‘to the lowliest of beings as well as the loftiest;’ from birdlife (if one insists on considering such life to be among the lowliest) to royalty (if one insists on considering such life to be among the loftiest) (Merriam-Webster.com).

I remarked earlier that the comprehensiveness of this referential range, which encompasses the vast zone between the lowliest and the loftiest especially in the context of our own human societies, can find itself imbued by impunity (qua immunity from and security against consequences, losses, punishment, and accountability) – even if those inhabiting such a zone, or inhabiting large and influential swathes of it, are not themselves perpetrators. Because it often traffics in a generalizable complacency, and by extension in a kind of indifference or willful ignorance, impunity may be a constitutive aspect of what we call a culture. It can be normalized to the point of becoming natural – again, like marking time via clockwork, or like breathing. In this register of its definitional senses, impunity as an English word encounters an untranslatable dimension of its translatable concept. This untranslatable dimension is the idiom, which ‘remains’ untranslatable by harboring a singular ‘poetic economy’ whose ‘relentless resistance to translation’ holds fast to any field of translatability that may approximate the content, but never the form, of its concept (Derrida 1998, 56; emphasis in original).⁴

Consider the idiomatic scope of ashes in Punjabi: ਸੁਆਹ ਕਰਨਾ – to reduce to ashes, but also idiomatically to do nothing or to do something carelessly or wastefully and, therefore, in effect harmfully (RCPLT); ਸਿਰ ਸੁਆਹ ਪਾਉਣੀ – ashes on the head, with the idiomatic sense of slander and neglect (Veerpubjab Group 2007, Wiktionary 2019); ਸਿਰ ਸੁਆਹ ਪੈਣੀ – ashes on the head in a further idiomatic sense of being damnable (Veerpunjab Group 2007); and ਸੁਆਹ ਉੱਡਣੀ – ashes flying, with the idiomatic sense of becoming infamous (Veerpunjab Group 2007). The first of these phrases, ਸੁਆਹ ਕਰਨਾ, has found its way into English via a major report, Reduced to Ashes: The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab (Kumar et al. 2003), composed painstakingly by Ram Narayan Kumar, Amrik Singh, Asok Agrwaal, and Jaskaran Kaur on behalf of the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab.

The phrase’s literal meaning is clear enough, as the report exhaustively surveys the history of government-organized pogroms targeting Sikhs in November 1984 and carefully documents subsequent years of torture, custodial killings, rapes, abductions, disappearances, illegal cremations, and systematic impunity throughout Punjab. Thousands of people were literally reduced to ashes, as the report illustrates through its laborious fact-finding investigations. Idiomatically, though, the phrase also intimates how doing nothing; how looking the other way; and how being indifferent or willfully ignorant as the culture around you normalizes atrocity all factor into ਸੁਆਹ ਕਰਨਾ as reduction to ashes. Reduction to ashes, ashes on the head, ashes flying: the untranslatability of these idioms comprises the lived experience of ਸਜ਼ਾ ਤੋਂ ਛੋਟ (impunity) as a translatable term and concept. An entry on impunity in the Dictionary of Untranslatables that draws on Punjabi might gauge the penumbral force of these idioms. In turn, such an entry might also seek to read the penumbral force of the untranslatable by pivoting between the historical reduction to ashes and an address to them, apropos of laboring to write in memoriam to those – even to the unnameable – who were so reduced.⁵

In theory as (in) practice, that is, in the ineluctable practice of theorizing, this phantom entry on impunity clearly informs the complex matter of reading impunity as an unconscionable yet formative norm that is always-already present, or on the scene, before the foundation of the very nation-states into which it is recursively integrated. Every nation-state, to one extent or another, is an example of this constitutive recursion. Alongside the history of settler-colonial states and their genocidal policies against Indigenous populations, which cleared the way for massive regimes of private property that (despite all our copied-and-pasted land acknowledgements) implicate us, the colonial–postcolonial case of the partitioning of British India into India and Pakistan is a key example; one, indeed, that occurred upon the bodies of women abducted from the other side of newly drawn borders amid the displacement and deaths of millions (Das 2007, 18–39). Impunity’s recursiveness, its iterability, renders it at once before and after state violence. More than one preposition undergirds this colloquium’s title.

The ubiquity of an impunity that historically founds societies and implicates us in its everyday recursions may seem at first to render it readable beyond a doubt, perhaps because so many of us (liberal or left intellectuals, for instance) are repelled by it and take a vivid stand against it from moral, sociopolitical, and economic angles. We need not ask questions about how to read it; for, we know exactly what it is via our resistances to it and despite our various implications in it (e.g. if we own property on stolen land; if we buy clothing manufactured without even basic labor protections; if we pay taxes that fund weaponry and war and sovereign power that will not be interrogated by international courts or tribunals, etc.). Resistance appears to convey all we need – in fact, all there is – to know about it. And yet, as we have seen, impunity as a concept carries an idiomatic charge that can exceed its neat definitions and tidy etymologies. This is kind of excess, which spirits us from translatability to untranslatability and back again, functions as a cue for the entry of literature, and the humanities more generally, into any entry on impunity that one may find in any dictionary.

Jaspreet Singh’s Helium is an important work of contemporary literature that asks, or enables its readers to ask, how to read impunity across its translatable concept and its untranslatable idioms. It does not take for granted the readability or intelligibility of impunity. It does not presuppose that resistance is transcendence of what one resists or that opposition equals knowledge, or all there is to know, about what one opposes. On these grounds, while a summary of Helium is easy enough to read and reproduce, readers of this colloquium surely will not mistake summary and reproduction for reading:

On 1 November 1984, a day after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination, a nineteen-year-old student, Raj, travels back from a class trip with his mentor, Professor Singh. As the group disembark at Delhi station a mob surrounds the professor, throws a tire over him, douses him in gasoline, and sets him alight. Years later, after moving to the United States, Raj finds himself compelled to return to India to find his professor’s widow, the beautiful and enigmatic Nelly. As the two walk through the misty mountains of Shimla, painful memories emerge, and Raj realizes he must face the truth about his father’s role in a genocidal pogrom. But, as they soon discover, the path leads inexorably back to that day at the train station. In this lyrical and haunting exploration of one of the most shocking moments in the history of the Indian nation, Jaspreet Singh has crafted an affecting and important story of memory, collective silences and personal trauma. (Blurb for Helium on Bloomsbury’s website)

Invested as it paradoxically is in conveying, apropos of translating, the untranslatable idioms of ash briefly surveyed above, Helium is much more than this summary.

As Singh’s characters variously confront them, perish in them, survive them (often in the mode of [re]living the murders of family members and whole communities), or feel totally indifferent to them, the infernos of November 1984 and the ashes they render take shape in an archival historiography whose literary style pays homage to the oeuvre of W.G. Sebald. Helium at points will and at other points will not translate Punjabi, among other languages that it leaves alternately translated and untranslated. Accordingly, it opens (as translatable) the concept of impunity even as it closes (as untranslatable) the idiomatic experience of impunity’s ashes.

The question of how to read impunity in the aftermath (and hence the fore-math) of state violence arises repeatedly through these circuits of fire and ash, which summon the interplay between translation and the untranslatable. As a question, how to approach impunity (or how it approaches us) necessarily or in the first place assumes a disciplinary cast. The contributors in this colloquium, that is, take up the question of reading impunity via the academic fields of history, literature and the sciences, gender studies, literary theory, and comparative literature. In each contribution, albeit in different ways, impunity is a subject to be read, or whose readability must be thought through rather than presupposed or given as known.

In ‘“Event, Memory, Metaphor”: The 1984 Anti-Sikh Pogroms in India,’ Reeju Ray accordingly reads Helium as a significant contribution to the historiography of November 1984, including the many commissions of inquiry that arose, only to be compromised by government influence, in the wake of the atrocities. Ray identifies impunity as a systemic mechanism embedded in a wider assenting culture. By implication, this central aspect renders impunity considerably more difficult to interpret definitively via resistance alone, precisely because its impact on the lives of survivors and its effects on the very idea of (including public faith in) accountability traverse state and civil society. The complexity Ray attributes to singularly lived and irreducible experiences of impunity – impunity’s ashen idioms rather than only its concept, one might say – manifests crucially in her reflections on distinct meanings of citizenship embodied by characters who are quite differently affected by forms of trauma. By turning to such theorists as Dominick LaCapra, whose work on mourning and trauma sharpens such key distinctions, Ray forges a path through the titular rubrics of event, memory, and metaphor.

Anton Kirchhofer’s reading of how impunity materializes in Helium across the narrative’s historical backdrops is based in a humanities context, surely, yet the careful attention Kirchhofer pays to the omnipresence of science opens further vistas for reading at the margins of the humanities. Such vistas include crucial perspectives on how Singh’s advanced degrees in chemical engineering and his earlier career as a research scientist contribute to Helium’s representation of various sciences. Yet as Kirchhofer’s ‘“Not as a Historian, but as a Scientific Observer”: Notes on Science in Jaspreet Singh’s Helium’ indicates, we should not tarry with the term representation. For Helium is ultimately not preoccupied with representations of science or scientists. More subtly, it is attuned to archival, rhetorical, and narratological implications of science for any rigorous understanding of November 1984, alongside all events of political, collective, and/or state violence – in India, South Asia, and beyond – to which November 1984 is historically connected via mechanisms of impunity that function on a global scale, nation-state by nation-state.⁶ Thus, while considering the potent symbolism of the novel’s eponymous element alongside Helium as a monographic supplement to Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, Kirchhofer underlines toxic relations between science and society as well as geopolitical inequalities among the sciences themselves. A key example is the December 1984 Bhopal disaster as it relates, via criminality and impunity, to the November 1984 pogroms. Here, the politics of science and the science of politics are brutally crosshatched.

‘I helped them kill my own daughter,’ we read at what is virtually the dead center of Helium (Singh 2013, 132). Nelly, the widow of Raj’s murdered professor, reveals in what the novel stages as a taped interview that her children, Arjun and Indira,⁷ had exchanged festive male and female costumes the day the pogroms began. When the Congress thugs, murderers, rapists, and arsonists show up, they cut the hair, beard, penis, and testicles of Nelly’s brother before setting him alight. This instance of atrocity, in which the slashing of genitals and other markers of Sikh masculinity prior to immolation conveys precisely how the pogroms were conducted day to day, anticipates the role of sex and gender in the murder of Nelly’s daughter, who was dressed up like a boy and was killed with phosphorous. Nelly blames herself for this atrocity in part because her daughter cried out, ‘Leave my mother alone,’ while her son, ‘that idiot, came down as if he was competing with his sister to save me’ (132).

She, mistaken for He (the symbol for helium on the periodic table) and then literally taken, perishes in a scene that is central to Sailaja Krishnamurti’s contribution on ‘Gendered Impunity: Complicity and the Body as Archive in Helium.’ Krishnamurti’s compendious reflections extend from the systematic violence of gendering in this scene, which refocuses the nationalist violence of gendering during Partition (Das 2007, 18–37), to queer subtexts within the story and the construction of Raj as a narrator steeped in a substrate of the very impunity against which he rails when confronting his father, who officiated the pogroms. Raj had no hand in the pogroms, but he exudes a masculinist impunity that adheres to his treatment of the women in his life. He is never held accountable for his possessively chauvinistic actions against and self-absorbed neglect of them, and this hierarchizing element of gendered sexual difference is a mainstay of the antifeminist, ultranationalist, fascist politics of Hindutva that configure the father he deplores. Women in Helium enjoy no such impunity. Although impunity as such is as evasive as the He of helium, women in the novel nevertheless bear all its brunt. Krishnamurti’s point is not to trash Raj’s construction as a narrator, for indeed his situation as a Hindu deeply compromised in/by his resistance to Hindutva indicates Singh’s perspective on his book’s protagonist. Rather, Krishnamurti’s core insight is that Helium, while marking the He of fathers and sons, is a work of art only if we read the She of relegated mothers and daughters.

Before drawing us back into the archive, whose boxed and catalogued contents it simulates in the style of Sebald via indexed images and documentary fragments, Helium endeavors to posit impunity as, or to condense it into, a discrete object with an interiority (an interior archive) of its own. This object is Raj’s father, also known as Father, which simulates a proper name: one that continually spurs a primal scene of patriarchal authority and the anxieties of a necessary yet contested inheritance. In a work of fiction that reproduces core samples of an atrocity’s historical record, Father as a discrete object or embodiment of impunity arises as the figure Raj most wants to determine as readable and intelligible; as at once subject and responsive to disgust; as answerable and accountable on even the basest plane of recognition; and as the ultimate catalyst of resistance – a resistance fervent enough that its appeals to reason, emotion, responsibility, and conscience may rescue, or at least unsettle, Father.

None of this happens, as one might expect (imagine a version of Helium in which Father buckles under the strain of his own renewed conscience and begs for forgiveness, thereby turning Raj into a redeemer). Yet the staging of this anticipatable failure, the form it takes, is significant unto itself. Characterologically, Krishnamurti shows us how Raj perpetuates foundational norms that predicate the politics of Hindutva, which he opposes. His resistance is certainly impure, but not futile, in the sense that we would rather Raj challenge Father than champion or defer to him; such impurity is nonetheless an aspect of his failure to shame Father into remorse. Moreover, Ben Baer in his contribution (on which more anon) sharply observes that a crucial passage in Raj’s primal scene of confrontation with Father in fact does not materialize in the grammar of direct speech; rather, it hinges rhetorically on an apostrophe to Father, which lends to the scene a dramatic abstractedness akin to a soliloquy. Only Father’s reported actions – e.g. ‘At home he walked into his study. “Bloody fool,” he said and slammed the door behind him’ (Singh 2013, 258) – establish a sense that their dialogic confrontation, apropos of Father as recipient of Raj’s imperatives, has continued. The scene has, qua both grammar and rhetoric, an evasiveness that factors into the impossibility of redeeming Father. This interplay of evasiveness and confrontation condenses all modes of impunity disseminated throughout Helium. Hitherto, we found it as a watermark here and as a juggernaut there.⁸

The staging of this impossibility, or failure if you prefer, interests me. My contribution, ‘The Ice Within You: Sovereign Impunity, Unreadability, and the Archive of November 1984,’ takes its title from an imperative Raj ‘directs’ at Father – albeit only indirectly as Baer shows. Recalling a certain rhetoric of prayer (e.g. to God the Father) and its strangely passive imperatives, as in the phrase ‘Let us pray,’ Raj at best appears to say: ‘Let these macabre books [evidence of Father’s crimes] act like an axe to break the ice within you’ (258). The allusion is to Kafka, who spirits me from the singular you as an uncertain or suspended address to Father, to the singular you of any reader (yes, you), to the plural you of people in general society (yes, us).

If Father is a discrete object embodying impunity at maximum density, then sovereign impunity as an atmospheric force that shapes society via circuits of complacency and complicity touches us all: even the purest among us who resist it; even its victims, who resist it without perceiving themselves as pure. If impunity contaminates the societies it shapes (all societies, arguably) to this raw extent, how then does it impact our capacity to read it beyond how we determine it as an object of our resistance? If we are complicit or etymologically folded together with what we oppose, as Helium intimates, then in a certain way sovereign impunity becomes unreadable – and the ice within it unbreakable – beyond our righteous yet generally ineffectual stances against it. Here, one gauges the unreadable as readable: by resisting it, we have read it.

Accordingly, we are not certain whether Father feigns or genuinely suffers from Alzheimer’s after Raj confronts him (in)directly. Such undecidability is an exponent of unreadability. For if Father is feigning, then Alzheimer’s becomes a grotesque figuration of sovereign impunity as unaccountability taken to its extreme as a mere performance of the loss of sovereignty. On the other hand, as Helium conveys in a scene that finds complicity or folded togetherness between victim and victimizer on the slick field of trauma (265), Father’s dementia may indeed be genuine but nonetheless a cognitive byproduct of a life of impunity that has scorched the very icy sovereignty it had bolstered: sovereign impunity – sovereign cruelty, sovereign apathy, sovereign unconscionability, sovereign stupidity – becomes autoimmune.⁹ In a certain way, then, unreadability irreducibly remains – and that is the extent of its readability; readable remainders of fire, ash, and ice that underpin Helium’s rhetorical designs also form a slippery pathway (98, 200) to questions of unreadability in the archive of 1984.¹⁰

My earlier reference to Baer’s contribution, ‘Violent Elements: The Impossible Document of “1984,”’ indicates quite well the form of reading that aptly closes this colloquium: one that ricochets through the circuits of Helium’s literary and documentary form, retracing the book’s disseminated steps, again and again, gradually and from multiple angles. I use the words form and angles advisedly. For, Baer’s focus, which he maintains with a rigor that is at once generous and dizzying (and as such challenging to summarize), is most often directed to a structural indirection that shapes the text. Helium deftly circles a blindness in its own telling. The geometric designs of its inset images, whose margins partly frame and are partly framed by the narrative’s paragraphs, contribute to Helium’s pastiche: a term that occasions the first of three aporias (passable impasses, impossible possibilities; untranslatability in translation, for instance) through whose ‘loose end(s),’ blindly ribboned, Baer closes his article. The novel’s form(at) – its structure and (di)visions from section to section; its grammatical and typographic composition, e.g. the nuanced suspension of direct speech at a crucial point in the confrontation scene; the margins that the book multiples, angle by angle, via inset images and textual fragments that are in most instances indexed – elicits Baer’s formidable precision as a reader.

The structural blindness that propels Helium’s telling binds the book’s form to its content, but for Baer that binding (or double binding) is counterintuitive. Readers can clearly attest to November 1984s archive apropos of what the novel labors to reproduce (i.e. what it shows), but we are not thereby capable of overlaying the archive onto testimonies of the event that the novel painstakingly conveys (i.e. what it tells). This is not because accounts of what happened, and of what continues to happen in the aftermath, are on the one hand truthful and on the other hand replete with denialism. Rather, imbricating them precisely via their tension, the double bind of Helium’s form and content stems from the irreducibility of imagination to testimony: of justice to law (Derrida 2002; Evans and Spivak 2016). Sourced through the imagination as a faculty of excess, justice haunts the provision of testimony because the incendiary event to which one testifies remains incalculable in its impact and effects (e.g. one cannot say that understanding November 1984, or any such event, is merely a quantitative issue of arriving at sum totals of victims and perpetrators). A great deal of what makes an archive an archive would be superfluous if events were mattes only of calculation. Insofar as it remains incalculable, apropos precisely of its remains, the document of 1984 harbors for Baer an acute impossibility to which Helium testifies.¹¹

A key aspect of this colloquium, I noted earlier, is that its contributors approach impunity (or encounter it as it approaches them) as a subject to be read, or whose readability must be thought through rather than presupposed or given as known. That is one element that crosshatches them, notwithstanding their different disciplinary interests and foci. Another such element, I would venture, is each contributor’s sense that Helium is not a work that envisions an end to impunity as a practical or truly realizable goal. To end impunity as such, one would need to end sovereignty. As such. Impunity, Helium intimates, is too intimate with society to be expunged from it. This fact does not consign to vanity the numerous, well-organized, international campaigns to end impunity. Rather, it marks a necessary distinction between ending something, as in terminating it, and closing something, like a door or, say, a book that one may reopen. The hinge or binding that enables closing is the very same that enables (re)opening, or (dis)closing without closure. If we cannot end impunity, once and for all, then we can only work indefinitely toward closing the door or the book that allows it to wreak havoc in the name of a sovereignty which, notwithstanding all historical revolutions from below to remake society, remains unvanquished, if not unvanquishable. That interminable effort, one might say, is for many of us a tie that binds. And one that Helium crucially unravels.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 ‘To speak of untranslatables,’ Barbara Cassin notes, ‘in no way implies that the terms in question, or the expressions, the syntactical or grammatical turns, are not or cannot be translated: the untranslatable is rather what one keeps on (not) translating’ (2014b, xvii; emphasis in original). In the most practical terms of translating as an act, ‘this indicates that their translation, into one language or another, creates a problem, to the extent of sometimes generating a neologism or imposing a new meaning on an old word’ (2004, xvii). More philosophically, which is not to say less practically, the inherence of untranslatability to translatability finds translation inhabiting an aporia: it is at once necessary and impossible (Derrida 2001, 183).

2 Undoubtedly, one can think up mathematical formulas or schemas for comparative analyses across the world’s approximately 7000 languages. For instance, the number of unique pairs that could be made with 7000 languages would be n(n-1)/2, or 7000*6999/2 = 24,496,500. However, even this already abyssal formula fails to capture the complexity of precisely how, and how many, languages factor into any one given concept that already appears, or that may yet appear, in the Dictionary of Untranslatables. To take a random sample: the entry on civilità canvasses English, French, Greek, Italian, and Latin (Pons 2014, 139–141). Translational and untranslatable comparison via systematic pairings is thus an inadequate approach to encyclopedic comprehensiveness. The qualitative depths of reading, including the fact that the very words by which concepts become articulable or readable in the first place are themselves subject to lexical change over time, defy quantitative standardization that might aspire to an encyclopedic reach.

3 To think the world as a totality would be to think it simultaneously via, and hence in comparative terms across and among, all the languages of the world. In unsparing registers of translatability and untranslatability, this also means thinking across and among the various lingual and socioeconomic hierarchies of all societies, which reveal how the world is or is not restricted both for the imagination and for experience. The comparative aspect here, in other words, is not ‘limited’ to the already impossible task of zigzagging rigorously across approximately 7000 dictionaries, grammar books, and databases of oral traditions in search of the untranslatable in or as translation. Language as lived experience, situated anywhere and everywhere in any and every society whose inhabitants can conjure up a world, however restricted that world may be vis-à-vis the globe: this would, but cannot, be part of an encyclopedia of untranslatables. ‘I have the world-whole only in concept,’ Kant humbly admits, ‘but by no means (as a whole) in intuition’ (1998, 525). Tensions between concept and intuition are crosshatched by tensions between translation and the untranslatable. If this mere sliver of Kant, in translation, shows that he is in the offing here, so too then is Spivak (1999, 2012, 2017), whose oeuvre enables these sentences.

4 I realize this is an opaque sentence. I cannot explain the point in ‘simpler’ terms, however, because (to me at least) the paradox it tries to express is fundamentally intricate. The excerpt from Cassin provided in endnote one irons out the point better than I can. Derrida, too, is much clearer than I can be – a fact that may for certain readers signal the final nail in the coffin (mark the idiom) of this introduction’s intellectual style. The matter of the idiom leads Derrida to this sentence, in translation as it happens: ‘In a sense, nothing is untranslatable; but in another sense, everything is untranslatable; translation is another name for the impossible’ (Derrida 1998, 56–57; emphasis in original). The idiom is a case, perhaps the case, in point. It is an untranslatable, often figural, form or singular instance of a language (e.g., ‘to be on the fence about something’) from which a discrete concept (i.e., ‘indecision’) may be extracted, or abstracted, as translatable content. Following the circuit of (un)translatability, however, one recognizes that ‘an idiom is never pure’; the untranslatability of its formal articulation nonetheless indicates something conceptual about it that is more or less translatable; and ‘its iterability opens it up to others’ (Derrida 1992, 62). Its untranslatable singularity produces ‘‘effects of generality’ here or there, of relative generality, by exceeding singularity’ (62). And yet all such singularity, exceeding itself toward translatability, remains singular: untranslatable. A certain madness is at play in the work of translation.

5 This address to ashes, beyond the violence of the reduction that rendered them, would entail a kind of infinite responsibility both to the named and to the unnamable (those of whom no trace remains among survivors or more generally among the living) in the event’s continuous archive. The labor of such an address, like the entire issue of translation to which it is bound, would be aporetic: necessary yet impossible. A starting point for thinking through such an address might include Wyschogrod (1998).

6 In this important regard, it would be reductive to say that Helium is a novel about November 1984; it is most certainly about that month and year, as well as the (fore- and after-math of) pogroms that occurred in specific places in India following the assassination of the prime minister, but patient readers will catch how the book’s archival form and narrative content (to the extent that these are distinguishable) situate us at once inside out and outside in the literary historiography of November 1984 that Helium realizes.

7 The name Arjun recalls the fifth Guru of the Sikhs, Guru Arjan Dev Ji, who played a major role in compiling the Gurbani hymns that constitute Sri Guru Granth Sahib, contributed more than half of his own hymns to the compilation, contributed significantly to the infrastructural development of Amritsar and Harmandir Sahib, installed Sri Guru Granth Sahib in Harmandir Sahib, and was martyred while in Mughal custody. The name Indira recalls Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who in June 1984 turned Amritsar and Punjab generally into an occupied police state by ordering Operation Blue Star’s military assault on Harmandir Sahib during the commemorative anniversary of Guru Arjan Dev Ji’s martyrdom. Thousands of pilgrims were killed, Harimandir Sahib was partly destroyed, and Sri Guru Granth Sahib as installed by Guru Arjan Devi Ji was desecrated along with the memory of Guru Arjan Dev Ji himself. The assassination of the prime minister on 31 October 1984 predicated the government-directed collective punishment of November 1984’s pogroms and subsequent years of atrocity in Punjab. Arjun and Indira performatively swap genders, so that Indira is killed (recalling the assassination) yet as Arjan (recalling the martyrdom) and Arjun is spared (symbolizing the survival of Sikh tradition in the face of genocide) yet as Indira (signaling the exacerbation of Hindu nationalism at all costs). This allegory of interleaved names marks both the folding together of opposites that inherently characterizes historiographies of conflict and, more specifically, the impossibility of thinking through the constructive legacy of the fifth Guru without thinking through the destructive legacy of the third prime minister. Reading Helium carefully entails parsing this politics of sexual difference and performative gendering in historical terms.

8 The etymology of juggernaut finds the term especially germane to several of Helium’s texts, intertexts, and contexts of impunity: ‘In the early 14th century, Franciscan missionary Friar Odoric brought to Europe the story of an enormous carriage that carried an image of the Hindu god Vishnu (whose title was Jagannath, literally, “lord of the world”) through the streets of India in religious processions. Odoric reported that some worshippers deliberately allowed themselves to be crushed beneath the vehicle’s wheels as a sacrifice to Vishnu. That story was likely an exaggeration or misinterpretation of actual events, but it spread throughout Europe. The tale caught the imagination of English listeners, and they began using juggernaut to refer to any massive vehicle (such as a steam locomotive) and to any other enormous entity with powerful crushing capabilities’ (Merriam-Webster.com; emphasis in original).

9 On Alzheimer’s as an autoimmune disorder, see Meier-Stephenson et al. (2022). My point here, which I elaborate in my contribution, is not ‘theoretical’ alone. The cognitively reflexive violence of impunity, to follow Helium’s implicit reasoning, may very well form a neurological case study of autoimmunity. A hop, a skip, and a jump between m and p.

10 Reading, like the act of translation to which it is clearly linked, turns out to be dazzlingly aporetic (De Man 1979, 10, 18–19, 47, 61, 70, 72, 76–77, 82, 87, 131, 141, 143, 148, 161, 205, 209, 245, 270, 275).

11 Although they form a crude outline of an intricate article, these fleeting paragraphs on Baer’s contribution nevertheless indicate a certain baseline that guides his reading as it ventures through an array of interleaved subjects: narrative configuration and disfiguration; sexual violence; reading along the relational limits or margins of literature and historiography; textures of complicity across its various senses; the curious husks of performative autobiography; the raw materiality of the archive vis-à-vis the conceptuality researchers seek to abstract from it; and other subtleties of focus too extensive for me to list. Moreover, readers may notice a certain resonance between Baer’s contribution and mine. Such resonance seems to inhere not only in the ‘theoretical’ (however one wants to define that term) nature of our respective references, but also in our interests as readers. To some extent, for instance, unreadability as I read it would collocate (without synonymity) with impossibility as Baer construes it. Yet at close range, distinctions are perhaps more interesting. I used the word construe when referring to Baer’s focus on impossibility. Construe is a grammatical term; it refers to analysis of grammar and syntax, which interestingly renders it meta-grammatical (one uses grammar and syntax to analyze grammar and syntax, so that such analysis reflexively doubles back on itself). Baer’s reading is crucially grammatical apropos of construal. His remarks on the subtle suspension of direct speech are but one instance among others: the ipseity of pronouns; the deictic function of the narrative’s first word (para-textually, e.g., the presence of two complexly related epigraphs, the narrative’s first word is not the book’s); systemic implications of verbal tenses and moods; comprehensive enumeration and classification of parentheses, to name but a few more. This is not to say that rhetoric and its figurations are not pivotal to Baer’s discussion of ‘impossibility,’ but rather that the focally grammatical aspect of how he reads is a unique pillar in this colloquium. By comparison, my discussion of ‘unreadability’ hinges mainly on Helium’s dense figural networks, through which I alight on key aspects of the grammar that wires them. Baer’s relative tilt toward grammar and mine toward rhetoric are, in the end, elements of the same schema. Grammar and rhetoric are ‘certainly not a binary opposition since they in no way exclude each other’ (De Man 1979, 12). Their tensions are constitutive. Accordingly, differences between, for instance, Baer’s reading of the human vis-à-vis the nonhuman and my reading of the (in)human vis-à-vis the nonhuman are as complementary as grammar and rhetoric. Readers interested in the interplay of grammar and rhetoric will gain much from Paul de Man’s remarks on ‘rhetorizations of grammar’ apropos of rhetorical questions in Yeats’ ‘Among School Children’ and the ‘grammatization of rhetoric’ in Proust’s Swann’s Way (15).