West Bengal

The Japanese Wife

admin — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Here’s what I can muster for Aparna Sen’s film The Japanese Wife: I still don’t quite get it.

The Japanese Wife is not as simple as Madame Butterfly, but I think a similar analysis applies. This film was odd. The story is about this awkward (poor!) Bengali school teacher who is lifelong pen pals with an equally socially obtuse (relatively poor) Japanese woman. Neither of them speak English as a first language, yet they communicate, fall in love, get married, and live their lives (separately) through letters. There was no miscegenation happening.

Now what is the term for sub-empires orientalizing other sub-empires?

Every time Miyage, the Japanese Wife character, spoke there would be this ever so delicate music wafting in (gongs!) and all of a sudden, as if it were the elusive groundhog itself, would come her voice. Her tiiiiiny, high-pitched, broken-English voice. I have nightmares about this voice. Exotic yes, feminine definitely, little Miyage. Flutter flutter. "Miyage" to my knowledge, is a Japanese surname, not a first name. Miss!

A lot of The Japanese Wife was by the book. Like Snehamoy (the husband) being seen as a “race”-traitor/Japan-lover, so the plot line included the exotic Asian woman captivating Snehamoy enough for him to shun Indian women, specifically Sandhya (Raima Sen’s character), the beautiful young widow who (due to unfortunate circumstances) moves in with Snehamoy and his aunt. It’s best shown in a scene that takes on nationalistic proportions, where Snehamoy represents Japan in a village kite battle against the ultra-Indian kite team manned by the local teenage boys of Snehamoy's village.

So I figure, like the timing of M. Butterfly, Incredible !ndia, too, is going through major cultural-economic shifts. I mean look at the March Nuclear Agreement; thanks to the Obama Administration, India’s ascendancy as a "sub-empire" is firmly in place. Clearly Incredible !ndia’s capitalist growth and emerging status as world economic power (8.2% growth according to Asian Development Bank in 2010) is a discursive force in itself.

New India should exercise its growing machismo and brand its own Orientalism. But that’s not it! Bengali men are not exactly the epitome of machismo. Neither does India share in the post-WWII relations between the U.S. and Japan. India is expanding and the wave it’s expanding on is producing, circulating, and reinventing cultural practices and relations. So, it’s not as simple as saying that this example of fetishizing Japanese women is some sort of inherited or weird mimesis of nation-buildings past.

In a sense (and I feel like I’m sidestepping history, power, labour, etc.), the idea of the gaze is flexible. And employed by Indians. Just watch The Japanese Wife. Or Chandni Chowk to China. Or the host of new Indian films featuring ethnically Asian characters.

Now the celibacy of Miyage and Snehamoy remains. Maybe Sen really is a genius and made it easy for us to see the symbolism in Snehamoy’s celibacy as a way of describing a postcolonial nation-in-process. Clearly India is not Empire-proper. Indian men are still symbolically emasculated, same as U.S. hegemony still exists. Or I mean, shoot, it really is all about miscegenation. And Indians are not ready for transnational-transracial love like this. You’ve got to preserve some Brahmin in there.

Shrugs.

Written by: Nafisa Ferdous, June 11th 2010

Bina Das: A Memoir

admin — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Bina Das, Dhira Dhar

Zubaan

“History is always in the making, and our struggle for a truly free country will not be over easily,” says Bina Das towards the conclusion of her memoir, brilliantly translated by Dhira Dhar, who was close to this firebrand revolutionary of Bengal. In its pages, Bina Das: A Memoir holds history in flashback. The glorious and gradual unfolding of an Indian nationalist who is counted amongst the heroes of the history of the country’s struggle for independence (like Pritilata Waddedar, Surya Sen, Shivaram Hari Rajguru, and innumerable others) in the few pages of her memoir is nothing short of poignant.

The curtain rises on the eve of August 15, 1947, the day of India’s independence. A nation standing at the crossroads of destiny may have caused countless minds like Das’s to be filled with a sense of despair and doubt, coupled with the misery of Partition, yet she asserts that this freedom was finally the real one and “flashed like lightning through our thrilled souls.” She reminisces her life at the backdrop of this day when she expected her country to march ahead in full glory. And thereafter, the entire story of her life unfurls before the reader in dramatic flashbacks, moments of captured memory framed in the ensuing pages.

Das narrates her family background, her life as a student, and the wondrous transition phase of her life when she graduated from a non-violent freedom fighter into that of an armed revolutionary. She talks of her participation in the last lap of the freedom movement, her subsequent nine-year imprisonment, her release on the eve of independence, and her return to politics from a long prison life. Each of these events has been described in poetic subtlety.

Like children of her generation, her education began at home under the careful guidance of her parents. Often Das’s father, the erudite Brahmo scholar Beni Madhab Das, who played a pivotal role in shaping the thoughts of the young Subhas Chandra Bose, would sit with Bina and her siblings and read plays like Bhishma, Shahjahan and others by D.L. Roy. This, Das claims, was her first introduction to the heroic and tragic in drama, bound to have left indelible imprints in her mind.

Das belonged to a family and a generation that was making the platform for the freedom movement. Her mother, Sarala Devi, was exceptionally enthusiastic about all kinds of social work. Sister Kalyani (Kalyani Bhattacharjee) was also a leading social activist and revolutionary. Das acknowledges that the most precious thing she received from her father was the wealth of freedom he gave her. Understandably this was instrumental in building the consciousness necessary for the struggle for freedom in her later years.

A ceaseless, tireless worker, Das concludes that her only prayer shall be to remain active in the cause of suffering humanity and not lose herself in the “idle morass of inactivity.” This perhaps aptly sums up towering figures like Das and those of her bygone generation.

Memoirs are almost always untranslatable, and Dhar has done a grand job of translating this one with impeccable skill. It is a must read, especially for those who wish to recapitulate the lives and times of revolutionaries like Bina Das.

Written by: Jhuma Sen, April 25th 2010

Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal

admin — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 18:02:00 +0000

By Rochona Majumdar

Duke University Press

Rochona Majumdar's firmest statement in Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal is that the Western conception of arranged marriage is dated. The portrayal of arranged marriage as immoral suited the Western sense of superiority over the “Hindoos,” despite the fact that Western courtship was riddled with its own problems. Arranged marriage is obviously the creation of a certain cultural condition and sought to fulfill certain perceived needs. After cautioning her audience against a lens of liberal progressivism, Majumdar narrates the evolution of arranged marriage into modernity.

As culture changed and the expectations and ideals of family changed with it, urban society and the escalation of technology impacted arranged marriage in no small measure. Majumdar's discussion of the matrix of influences that impacted arranged marriage is a fascinating study in the modernization of customs.

Majumdar begins by describing how the ghaktas—traditional matchmakers—became seen as antiquated and irreputable and were replaced by early “personals” in print. She continues on to discuss how this format reflected other cultural trends, such as the increasing fluidity of the caste system. Of special importance is the impact of the dowry on the economy. A woman's appearance, accomplishments, and social standing all factored into the negotiation of price, which could be enormous. At the peak of cultural anxiety over this issue, a young girl, Snehalata Mukhopadhyay, committed suicide rather than see her family ruined. In her discussion of the dowry and the maelstrom of controversy over Mukhopadhyay 's death, Majumdar proves especially interesting; the suicide became a symbol for the direness of a woman's circumstances, and was used as a rhetorical device for feminists and other reformists generally.

The marriage flux became a matter of crucial moral and legislative importance. As arranged marriage was modernized, certain segments of the population began to rebuke marriage as “degraded” from its original, “pure” incarnation. The ideals of marriage, it was claimed, were lost amidst all the economic concerns. As dowries and wedding costs became extravagant, the rituals performed in the ceremony itself became a matter of critique. Rituals were a forum to discuss the proper role of women within marriage and society and to discuss matters such as women's modesty, dress, and duties to her husband.

Throughout this period, too, was the influence of the English conception of individuality and love. Many tried to find means to incorporate this into a traditional picture of married life—literally so in the form of the portrait, an invention which, Majumbar claims, shows the couple's new centrality to family life.

Ritual has its legislative consequences as well, and Majumbar also discusses two crucial moments in the history of Bengali marriage: the first civil marriage act in India, which ignited a debate on wedding ritual and recognition by law, and the Hindu Code Bill, which addressed issues of property and who set the tone for India's cultural development into postmodernity.

Moral commentary is beyond Majumdar's scope, as is a consideration of the role of ethics in anthropology in general—though she touches on it briefly in the conclusion. However, good anthropology tends to invite reflection on one's own cultural moment, and—if we believe the hype—we are in a similar moment as that of colonial Bengal; we are also concerned with the “purity” of marriage, its impact upon the economy, its uses of technology like the Internet, and traditional ritual's relationship with legal recognition. The debates on marriage in colonial Bengal are, in many ways, our own.

Written by: Eirene Faust, August 9th 2009