The Doctor and Mrs. A.: Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis [First edition.] 9780823286669, 0823286665, 9780823286676, 0823286673

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THE DOC TOR AND MRS. A.

Thinking from Elsewhere Series editors: Clara Han, Johns Hopkins University Bhrigupati Singh, Brown University International Advisory Board Roma Chatterji, University of Delhi Veena Das, Johns Hopkins University Robert Desjarlais, Sarah Lawrence College Harri Englund, Cambridge University Didier Fassin, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton Angela Garcia, Stanford University Junko Kitanaka, Keio University Eduardo Kohn, McGill University Heonik Kwon, Cambridge University Michael Lambek, University of Toronto Deepak Mehta, Shiv Nadar University Amira Mittermaier, University of Toronto Sameena Mulla, Marquette University Young-Gyung Paik, Seoul National Open University Sarah Pinto, Tufts University Michael Puett, Harvard University Fiona Ross, University of Cape Town Lisa Stevenson, McGill University

TH E D O C TO R AN D M R S. A . Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis

Sarah Pinto

Fordham University Press New York 2020

Fordham University Press gratefully acknowledges financial assistance and support provided for the publication of this book by Tufts University. Copyright © 2020 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at https://catalog.loc.gov. Printed in the United States of America 22 21 20 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

for Thea

CONTENTS

Introduction: Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 1. Singularity and Uncertainty: Draupadi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .41 2. Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala . . . . . . . . 84 3. Unconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya . . . . . 125 Postscript: The Shape of the Counter-Ethic . . . . . . . . . 173 Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .195 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .199 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .221 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .233

If it comes to a breaking point, I shall not be found wanting. —Mrs. A. Dream-interpretation is the Regenesis of the wish and the Reconceptualization of the thought from the discordant remains of the Manifest Dream. —Dev Satya Nand

INTRODUCTION: M R S . A . A N D D E V S AT YA N A N D

How does one remember the future? It might look something like this. Some time during World War II, in the final years of the British Raj, or, put differently, on the verge of India’s independence, a young woman in Punjab, perhaps Lahore, perhaps Amritsar, leaned back on a couch and closed her eyes. Her friend, a young psychoanalyst named Dev Satya Nand, seated just out of her line of sight, guided her into a state of deep concentration, then adjusted his chair so he could see her face. She related a dream. But rather than a dream experienced in sleep, a disjointed eruption of the unconscious, she shared a daydream, a lucid and conscious vision of possibility: I have joined the Ramakrishna Mission and am working in a village to reconvert men and women to the path of Dharma. I am enjoying the work. They respect me and come to me for all kinds of advice. I have healed quite a number of their sick by prayer.1 The daydream was a memory that was also a present that had not yet happened. Satya Nand parsed it as he would a dream, cutting its spare sentences into fragments, what he called “dream smudges.” He then organized these fragments into pairs divided by ellipses, gaps replete with unvoiced connection, which he called “dream spaces,” and offered each in turn, inviting her to say whatever came to mind, to turn the time-space of the daydream into recollection and possibility. The exercise, a familiar way psychoanalysis has of inviting the past into the future, had nothing to do with treatment. Mrs. A. was not ill; there were no symptoms to alleviate, no twitches to unravel. Instead, Satya Nand had invited her to join him in

an experiment, to test his new vision of a better, more “objective” technique for dream analysis. He was certain that his method was more attuned to the realities of everyday life than were those of Freud and Jung, convinced that its “oriental” concepts (such as samadhi, the state of concentration he had helped her enter) offered better access to reality. Mrs. A., though a willing subject, doubted there was anything valuable in her words. She told Satya Nand there was nothing to be made of her mundane fantasy, nothing “concealed” within it, “just a passing fancy with the religious stuff,” she said.2 In response, quoting an old medical treatise, he said that while happy dreams might be signs of satisfied desires, daydreams were another matter, fretful and complex, the very worrying to which slumbering dreams might be a salve. And so they embarked upon analysis. The twenty-one-year-old woman is known to us only as Mrs. A., a pseudonym chosen by Satya Nand, who promisingly entitled her case study “The Analysis and Resolution of a Day-Dream Namely, The DayDream of Hindu Socialism” and included it in his book Objective Method of Dream Interpretation: Derived from Researches in the Oriental Reminiscence State. Self-published in Lahore, the first edition is undated, although his later writings date it to 1947. Its language bristles with raw ideas and the urgency of getting them into the world, and Mrs. A.’s case is one of only two it contains. Her case was undated, and it is unclear whether they met in the final days of the war, when independence was close at hand, or earlier. The other case in the book is dated 1944, and cues suggest hers was undertaken between 1941 and 1944. She spoke of friends who were soldiers fighting the war, and independence seemed to have been a foregone conclusion, but there was no mention of a possible partition.3 An “accident” prompted her daydream, and it is possible the event was Mrs. A.’s having heard of Nehru’s imprisonment (in all probability the term that began in 1942), although it is also possible that the “accident” refers to an unspecified event that prompted her to recall first learning about Nehru’s imprisonment. Events and memories compound in this text, making time elusive. The first dream smudge: “I have joined the Rama-Krishna mission.” Mrs. A. responded by reflecting on her feelings about villages. Did they repel her? Did they fascinate her? She described, by contrast, the contentments of her urban, upper-class life: a happy marriage to a caring husband, 2

Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand

a household bustling with comings and goings, close friendships, and ardent politics. Mrs. A. was the product of fortunate life circumstances: educated, upper-class, urban and urbane. Though she considered herself bookish and introverted, Satya Nand thought her charming, and, hinting at their social connections, said she could be the life of the party. Although she was sometimes times “dreamy and prone to be absent minded” (he said), when analysis began she was chatty, eloquent, and steeped in hypothetical thoughts. Soon, however, her tone changed. Satya Nand noticed she was worried, that she seemed to be “using up her reserves of psychic energy.”4 As she reflected, a different story emerged. It seemed that not all was well in her home. Her marriage was sliding into unhappiness, there were suspicions of infidelity, she was childless and concerned about what this meant to her in-laws. Moreover, marriage constricted what had once been a world wide open with possibility. She had left college in her final year, setting aside a compendium of aspirations, goals to be a scholar, or a teacher, an actor, a writer, someone who would write a new version of India’s history, relate it in the way it should be told. Now that was all beyond reach. She told Satya Nand about the pleasures of college life, excitements that barely contained their erotic buzz, friendships, romances, and the general headiness of intellectual discovery. She contrasted that happiness with the stakes and demands of marriage in language that was plain and frank. She spoke about how she learned about sex, how sexual intrigues entered her childhood, and how she encountered the sexual expectations of and on a married woman. She described triangles of desire in her social circle, relationships that included women and men, desire for women, desire for men, desire for men who were not her husband, desire for women who desired her husband and who desired men who were not her husband and who desired her. Possible co-wives, potential affairs, romances thwarted and imagined. There were things she heard from girlfriends, things she heard from boyfriends, things she heard from the servant, and things no one had ever explained but she now wondered aloud about in the safety of the analytic chamber. There was a sense of finally being free to speak, liberated by a shadow cast by science’s objective light, liberated by its pseudonyms to speak for herself. As they moved further into the “dream smudges,” Mrs. A. invited mythic figures into her stories, particularly female characters from the Hindu epics. From the Mahabharata came Draupadi, the wronged but Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand 3

righteous wife of five brothers, and Shakuntala, cursed to be forgotten by her beloved. From the Ramayana there was Ahalya, punished for sexual transgressions by being turned to stone. Satya Nand, in awe of his young analysand’s intelligence and interpretive acuity, leaped at the offering. He took up Draupadi and Shakuntala as movable archetypes, binary stars orbiting Mrs. A.’s life, linking them to psychoanalytic concepts such as “adaptive” and “individualist propensities,” which he borrowed from existing models, and found interpretive potential in mythic stories and personalities. Where Satya Nand’s contribution to the “oriental method” was the samadhi state in which analysis occurred, Mrs. A.’s contribution was Draupadi, Shakuntala, and the almost bottomless well of narrative that constitutes the Hindu epics. With this, she also offered up the moral content of those tales, along with an alternative approach to understanding, a creative form of recall, a poetic form of retelling, a way of revising stories that combined the qualities of the actor and dancer, a gait in entering the scene, transforming psychoanalysis into an exercise in imaginative ethics, a way of remembering the future. Mrs. A. especially identified with Shakuntala. Everything reminded her of Shakuntala and her world. Mrs. A. had been cast as the heroine in a college production of the classical drama when a sudden fall in her family’s fortune rushed her into marriage. The loss of the role in a story with which she so identified was among her bitterest losses, and so as she recollected scenes from her childhood, as repeatedly examined scenes from her current life, and as she imagined what might be in her future, Shakuntala was there. Part of Satya Nand’s “objective method” was to involve analysands in self- analysis. After the first session, he prepared the case and gave it to Mrs. A. to read. She was not reticent about her views, and when they met again, she told him what he had missed. Satya Nand led her back into a focused, meditative state and returned her to what it was about Shakuntala that oriented her thoughts. He felt that Shakuntala was a yardstick for Mrs. A.’s self-evaluations, that she and Mrs. A. shared personality traits, and that Mrs. A.’s life shared elements with the play, or at least the version of it he recalled. Part of what Mrs. A. needed to achieve, he said, was a balance of impulses. Mrs. A. was unconvinced. She did not think the core issue was a tension in her personality between “Absolutism” and “Hostism” versus “Nirvanism” and “Parasitism.”

4

Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand

I am not sure about this continuous attempt at compromises. It appears that I am an integrated personality, using the term, the psychologist friend often used, but the way he “analysed” me, it appears I am not. If I am an integrated personality, then why these attempts to compromise two antagonistic trends? Why should there be these antagonistic trends requiring compromise?5 Satya Nand was taken with a political idea in her daydream: Hindu socialism. He saw this as an original and exciting vision, both for its own sake and for the ways in which it might demonstrate that dreams and their analysis are creative pathways to the new, not just pointers to what has already been or lies within. His lines of analysis veered toward “HINDU SOCIALISM,” which, he pronounced in all capital letters, was the “resolution” of her case. Mrs. A. had other ideas about this as well. In one breath she agreed, and Satya Nand pronounced her convinced by his analysis, but in the next she found a different way to Shakuntala, one that imagined a personal and national future not from the ground of a political vision but from the ruins of an intimate arrangement: marriage. Mrs. A. imagined herself as the forgotten heroine, but in an alternate ending, as Shakuntala, she reveled in being forgotten. Upending the play’s moral message, social values centered on marriage and recognition, the value of belonging, certainty, and emplacement, her script saw a livable future in the reversal of those terms. This new, sensical ending gave her purchase on a foreseeable future and, in the process, offered a different vision of a good and just life. Indeed, throughout the case, Mrs. A.’s reflections hinged upon marriage, the things it foreclosed and those it permitted, the way it set the terms for (apparently) wider dilemmas of agency. Mrs. A.’s politics and ethics, a single continuum, derived from conditions of marriage. The social, moral, and structural reality that was marriage for urban, educated Punjabis in late colonial times organized her ideas about freedom and how a person might be connected to others. With a few exceptions, Satya Nand, caught up in the thrill of the other new things, namely Hindu socialism and the analytic potential of epic heroines, did not appear to notice these counter-ethical moments, or the way they recurred, bubbling out from the two-dimensional maps they drew of the social, political, and cultural mores of their time. However, although

Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand 5

unconcerned with the shape of her ethical imagination, Satya Nand noticed, and appears to have delighted in, Mrs. A.’s smart rebuttals to his analysis and her political acumen. He was not an antagonist; sometimes he was right there with her. She, on her part, did not always reject his ideas or their scientific lens. His observations about her weren’t always wrong, and hers weren’t always clear-headed critiques. Sometimes she was blind to what stared her in the face, and at others Satya Nand gently nudged her toward an obvious truth. He made her a collaborator in her own analysis as well as in its presentation to the world. The sense one gets is of co-travelers, experimenters who were at once both subjects and critics. They were partners forging something novel for science and for themselves; these were not always the same things. When they met, Satya Nand was a major in the Northern Army, a military psychiatrist working at Lahore Mental Hospital and teaching at Amritsar Medical College. During this volatile time and as members of an educated and progressive social circle, they channeled a current of anticolonial and nationalist sentiment into their work. Reading the case now, it is difficult not to feel the Partition of India and Pakistan looming, though there was no mention of it, nor of any communal violence, only “our current troubles,” which could just as easily have applied to colonialism or war. There was much talk of Nehru, on whom Mrs. A. had quite a crush. The scenery of their lives and of the case was richly Punjabi: a life of parties, outings, and debates, with a cast that included merchants, farmers, businessmen, doctors, professors, educated women, rural landowners, missionaries, nurses, social workers, army subalterns and officers, ardent socialists, dangerous communists, traveling folk theater troupes, and college actors. Theirs was a dense urban world ever in contact with nostalgialaden rural settings: villages, farms, forests, Hindu missions, mountain shrines. The backdrop for their scenery was religion, a scrim of both religious blending and battened down categories, awash in decades of colonial actions and religious reform that had institutionalized religious difference and consolidated it into nationalist politics. Satya Nand, born a Christian, and Mrs. A., a Hindu enamored with Sikhism in a religiously diverse social circle, tended to skirt over such differences, even as they conceived of samadhi and Hindu myth as methods with universal application and potential.

6

Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand

The case is in English, and it is likely that Mrs. A.’s passages are accounts of precisely what she said. For one thing, they are clearly worded, complete thoughts, with readerly buoyancy, whereas Satya Nand’s prose is dense, often incomplete, replete with abstractions and difficult to navigate. For another, in the sections following her review of his analysis, she often quoted herself, linking the latter half of the case to the former through mirrored and commented-upon passages. Notwithstanding her lucidity, the case is tangled and complex, and, befitting a young woman with (almost) a B.A. in English, winds from memories to stories to myth to literature to theater to plays that Mrs. A. saw, read, heard, and (almost) acted in, and the people who surrounded her when she saw, read, heard, or (almost) acted in them. Past and future often merge. This being psychoanalysis, all of it is meaningful, content slipping into form slipping into another level of content, and the like, and there is a frequent concern with truth, sometimes even the sense of the courtroom. Before they began, Satya Nand made her promise to tell “the whole truth and nothing but the truth” about whatever “came into her mind during our investigations.”6 It is a curious text. Given the ways we have come to understand the work of reading archives, and reading for women in them, ways that are oriented toward things either on public record or in the more private writings of individuals, this case is an odd amalgam. A certain approach to historical documents attends to what is missing, noting what is obscured in plain sight, particularly in relation to sexuality, but Mrs. A.’s reflections on female sexuality were frank and detailed, and little needs to be read between lines or layered on the page in Technicolor imaginaries.7 Similarly, historians working with autobiographies and memoirs might consider encounters between memories and publics, and writing the turning of a face toward an audience, however small.8 This is also not entirely appropriate to this case. The notoriety of psychoanalysis for overwriting the “real story” with analysts’ fantasies about analysands’ fantasies might require us to think of psychoanalysis largely as a project of power. This, too, is not entirely correct. Mrs. A., anonymized, was neither a patient nor a memoirist nor a letter writer. She appears in a published, but narrowly circulated and apparently little read text to which she had no claim of authorship. Yet her thoughts appear to be recounted as she spoke them and their fi ltering by the book’s author is right there on the page. Here, words are

Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand 7

spotted with the emotion of remembered events and put on display the process of turning memories into, well, memories. Her archivist was collaborative about their experiment and forthright about his goals, which did not involve finding, naming, or fi xing pathology but seeking a new way to talk about thinking and think about talking. It is a record of a conversation, and Satya Nand’s translations of Mrs. A.’s words into his method are as apparent as the little, intimate performances that occurred in the room where they spoke. While there are vacancies and elisions, there are also extensive and intimate first-person account of female sexuality, with homosexuality a topic of much reflection (and the word itself is used) that appears as a given aspect of sexuality, un-pathologized by the physician. Barring brief references to sexual activity among women as “wicked,” for Mrs. A. if there is a negative vibe, it is gentle, and it is not the only vibe. This book is about their story, what happened in their conversations, how Satya Nand presented them to the world, and what burns through in spite of what he and she did and did not say. But it is also about the kind of thing they were up to, the picture they offer us of ethical imagination and reflection in action. The term “ethical” may seem an odd one, but I think it is the right one, as opposed to “culture,” or “ontology,” or any other gloss, though it was not a word they used. Something extraordinary happened when the mythic heroines entered Mrs. A.’s story, something that brought together a young woman’s faltering marriage with a nation’s incipient freedom with a weave of social and cultural ideas about womanhood, class, sexuality, and religion with the pressured possibilities of certain ideas (socialism, freedom, feminism, art) through the labile reimagining of familiar tales. Mrs. A. may have invented a “Hindu socia lism” that captivated her young analysand, who was, himself, working on a new theory of mind and society, but she also demonstrated the imaginative, experimental, reflective work of the contrapuntal, the counter-ethical, a quality of movement and change in relation to ideas about being a person in the world, living a worthy life, finding, as she put it, “ultimate happiness,” or as Satya Nand would phrase it, later in life, “authentic horizons of fantasy and imagination.” This book traces that work, their conversation, and Mrs. A.’s life as they came into view over the course of what was, in all likelihood, just a few days, in a decade when whatever they imagined was soon to be overshadowed by other, bigger things, and in a book that left little impact on the world (to its author’s dismay). 8 Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand

As a text on dream analysis, Objective Method is obscure and often confusing, a byzantine scientific vision, but as an account of mid-twentiethcentury Indian gender, sexuality, and marriage and the ethics and counter-ethics they generate, it is remarkable. Also remarkable (Satya Nand would remind me) is its social and political vision of a Hindu socialism that was nationalist without being religiously chauvinistic, which derived meaning and inspiration not only from contemporary heroes (Nehru, Gandhi, Naidu, and others) but from myths about cursed and wronged women, stories about marriage as a site of ethical conundrums. These figures stitched Mrs. A.’s intimate life to her politics, and both to ethics, providing clarity to a certain form to ethical imagining, a certain quality of creativity. This may be a heavy burden to place on her. She was, after all, only twenty-one. Perhaps this was a moment in her life when, through an accidental collision of events and actors, things suddenly came into view. It may have been sheer youthful openness, girlish humanity rich with desire and motivated in part by wonder, that allowed her to tell us less about sciences of the psyche than about the nature of musing, and indeed, these are the musings on musing of a muse in a “muse-state” (as Satya Nand described samadhi). It is a shame that Satya Nand appeared to have not noticed this aspect of what was happening, but then again, in wandering into his own imaginaries, he left her and her world and thoughts in tact for the future.

S AT YA N A N D ’S S C I E N C E

Objective Method was Dev Satya Nand’s first book. Trained, like many Indian physicians under colonialism, at the University of Edinburgh, and later a student in psychoanalysis of the famed and controversial colonial psychiatrist Owen Berkeley-Hill, Satya Nand spent his career developing bold, occasionally fanciful, ideas about mind, self, and something akin to an ethical psyche. He drew on Indian and European source materials, taking up literature, mythology, philosophy, and psychology, often in a single crammed paragraph, and formulated “oriental” methods not because they were more culturally appropriate for “oriental” patients, but because they were of universal value. In Objective Method, a dense text with rough edges, his wild mind was on display along with his intricate knowledge of his discipline and its canon of concepts and thinkers. Little seems to be Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand 9

known about his personal life, except that he was a Christian by birth, his father having converted from Hinduism and mother from Islam.9 He published under different names throughout his life (Dev Satyanand, D.  S. Nand, even David S. Nand), which, although not uncommon, has been associated with his lifelong interest in personhood and personality.10 Satya Nand was a prolific writer, but his corpus is elusive. Aside from his books, most of his articles, essays, and shorter pieces appear to have been lost. His writing is at once brilliant and obfuscating, his syntax often difficult and strange, and his pages full of diagrams and schematic visualizations of abstract ideas. It has been my experience that it is only after numerous readings that his ideas come into view, if at all, concepts dwarfed by the scope of his thought experiments. The most basic premise of Objective Method is that dreams (in the conventional sense, which Satya Nand referred to as “manifest dreams”), are not merely expressions of latent desires but are their “Regenesis” and “Reconception.” In Satya Nand’s vocabulary, the first level of dream analysis, which few people move beyond, and which he termed “Lulla-by” (because it helped the dreamer go back to sleep), was just an “interruption” of the real crisis and the task of resolving it. This was a longer process involving self-understanding as “reconceiving,” a mode of experience as realization. This was creative work; it could, should give rise to something “new.” It might be a solution to a life crisis, but it was also more, transforming the desires at the heart of crisis by “reconceiving” them. In Mrs. A.’s case, the dream was a “recurring error” (it is not clear to me just what he meant by this), and “the Objective Method not only interpreted the dream, but took up the threads of the problem-solution tangle and carried the on to the natural termination, the invention of a thought.”11 Satya Nand had something specific in mind. Outlining the “land-marks in [her] process of resolution,” he wrote, In the terminal stages she talked of Socialist Hinduism, and . . . finally the new idea of “Hindu Socialism” was evolved during the process of interpretation. The history of the evolution of a new concept, at least as far as the dreamer is concerned, or the genesis of a new thought, can be studied by the Objective Method, as much in detail as any other process of development of the parts of the body.12

10 Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand

In other words, he believed Mrs. A. had created a new political vision in the process of undergoing his scientific method: his psychoanalysis enhanced dreams’ naturally regenerative quality. Satya Nand’s method entailed a rigid structure of analysis together with the altered state of consciousness required to embark on it. Samadhi, in many uses of the term, is a state of deep and focused concentration (it can refer to death or death rituals). Akin to hypnosis, Satya Nand’s samadhi, which he also called “Reminiscence,” “Contemplation,” and “muse” state, facilitated both recollection and association through a stilled hyperstimulation that dissolved boundaries between “layers” of the mind such that the conscious and subconscious could “function simultaneously.”13 In such a state, an analysand might “confide and accept the analyst” as a “guide,” with sufficient “trust” to “say whatever” she wished, and without “reserve.”14 Lying in a dark, quiet room, so positioned that she could not see the analyst, the analysand would be prompted to “reminiscence” through “dream smudges” alone, without additional questioning or prompting. Although the “stories” that arose might be “self-contradictory,” contradictions provided insight into the “rise and fall” of thought.15 Importantly, for Satya Nand, samadhi was “creative,” even artistic, and the results of its “maximum pitch” were “stories” the analysand “wove.”16 What made Satya Nand’s technique “oriental” was also what made it “objective.” Samadhi, for Satya Nand, was the foundation for a better, stronger science. As in the way he engaged Mrs. A., his sense of truth had a juridical ring, objectivity understood as “the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” Comparing his method to Freud’s, he argued that free association was unscientific because its recollected “points of experience” were incomplete. They did not access “the whole truth.” At the same time, they layered meaning on to the analysis; because the “points of experience stimulated” were in excess, they could not express “nothing but the truth.”17 To the associative method, Satya Nand proposed a “correlative” one that included his “dream smudges,” which might break a person’s life experiences into segments they could associate with the themes generated by the dream. This entailed a series of sessions, in which an analysand would reflect not only on the dream but also on the analysis. Truth would accumulate over time. Here is how he expressed it:

Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand 11

If the Correlation or Reminiscence Technique . . . is used, the process of investigation becomes Objective as well as Scientific. It may be noted; (i) that the correlations, find the whole truth about one point of experience at a time. (ii) At repeated sittings correlations obtained at previous sittings can be verified.18 As an Indian psychiatrist writing for a global audience in the 1940s, Satya Nand was in a small but established community. Psychiatry in 1940s Punjab was not a recent arrival, though it was then, as now, an underrepresented medical specialization. The pharmaceutical revolution had not yet hit psychiatry in India or elsewhere, but a wide range of therapies were practiced, including electrical and chemical shock therapies, water cures, and lobotomies, and talk therapies. Psychiatry was primarily practiced in large colonial institutions, former “Lunatic Asylums” refashioned as “Mental Hospitals,” several nearly a century old, though many psychiatrists, including Satya Nand, also engaged in private practice, occupied teaching posts, conducted research, and published work that contributed to national and in some cases international conversations. In Punjab, in 1847, the earliest asylum, if it can be called that, housed twelve “lunaticks” in the horse stables of Rana Suchet Singh.19 After years of debate about the location, discussions that embodied racial politics in architecture and concepts of disease, the asylum was moved to a prison in a former cavalry barracks outside Lahore.20 Recently vacated of its primary residents, members of the notorious Thug cult, the new asylum became as storied as its predecessor, infamous for disease and pestilence, with death tolls nearly 40 percent in some years, and prone to cycles of “improvements” and “hopeless sanitation.”21 Its history involved elements of the heroic, decadent, and fantastical, all colliding in incidents such as the transfer of inmates to the ruined tomb of Ali Mardan Khan during epidemics. Romantically described by its C. Lodge Patch, director in the 1930s, the asylum’s “horrors” were ethereal in every sense: After the Thugs had been exterminated by execution and transportation, their erstwhile prison was handed over as a barracks for the gallant Punjab Mounted Police. What ghosts of bygone times must have flitted around this ancient monument when it was handed over for the requirements of the insane. But, however much the hallucinated may have been distressed by ghosts and vampires, they were subjected to more 12 Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand

tangible horrors in the form of bacilli and vibria which claimed the blood of hundreds over a period of nearly forty years.22 In the early twentieth century, a new building was constructed and the Punjab Lunatic Asylum came under the directorship of the Indian Medical Service (IMS). Decommissioned Indian soldiers returning from the First World War were hired as staff, their military training and documented employment record attractive to an administration concerned about the asylum’s poor reflection of “humanitarian ideas.”23 Franciscan nuns took in hand the improvement of the women’s ward, and new treatment techniques included occupational therapies in hospital gardens so well tended that they allowed the hospital to enter horticultural competitions.24 By the time Satya Nand arrived, the institution had been renamed Punjabi Mental Hospital and new IMS rules allowed Indian-born physicians to hold key positions. Satya Nand was part of two established colonial medical traditions. Objective Method’s cover page boasted membership in the Indian Psychiatric Society and the Indian Psychoanalytic Society, as well as his psychoanalytic training under Berkeley-Hill. Psychoanalysis also came to India early, via a circle of European and Indian practitioners in Calcutta, where it was quickly put to use for creative revision by both those who would assert and those who would refute colonialism’s racist ideologies. Girindrasekhar Bose, widely understood to be India’s first psychoanalyst, famously (and literally) “wrote back” to Freud in his 1921 doctoral dissertation, using Hindu myth to develop India-centered psychoanalytic models that emphasized family structures and moral dilemmas more familiar than those of Oedipal ones.25 In the same period, Berkeley-Hill, director of the European Mental Hospital in Ranchi, pondered the cultural relevance of psychoanalytic models in a more colonial mien even as he thumbed his nose at starched British mores by defending liberal attitudes to sex and masturbation. Hindu mythology continued to be fertile for psychoanalytic theorizing, if not necessarily consistently for practice, through India’s twentieth century, with South Asian narratives offering ample material for scholarly thinking with psychoanalytic themes, and scholars and practitioners finding ways to put both in dialogue.26 On the surface, Satya Nand’s “oriental method” echoed strategies of adapting European models for South Asian context. However, much about Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand 13

it differed. For one thing, as I have mentioned, he was not seeking to establish a more culturally appropriate method but to derive a better, more objective universal science. Equally boldly, his psychoanalytic method was grounded in an organic vision of the psyche, in the sense that mental and emotional states were seen to be above all biological. Objective Method offered a “physico-chemical hypothesis of the nature of dreams” that used a meaning-laden method.27 Such melding of symbolic and biologic processes may be counterintuitive, but far from being biologically determinist, it allowed Satya Nand to develop an expansive sense of the scope of the world’s influences on individual minds. Later in his life he was a vocal proponent of community mental health care and remained interested in the effects of social conditions on human experience.28 As Jain, Sarin, and Murthy wrote in one of the only published biographical sketches of Satya Nand, “He perhaps stands out as one of the few psychiatrists who practiced both psycho-analysis and psycho-surgery, and saw a link between the two!”29 Satya Nand’s ideas about the biology of mental states were intriguingly headless. His theories were less concerned with the brain or even the mind than with cellular, genetic, and molecular processes through which the world writes upon the body. In linking up “biochemical and bio-physical processes” in the body with social processes in the world, he envisioned a multitude of ways in which the mind could be enmeshed in circumstances.30 His intricate theories of child development, emotion, and personality grew more complex through his career as he took up evolution, cultural development, and concepts such as the “paraplasmagene,” an extracellular interface between the body and its external environment.31 Although the “paraplasmagene” was a discounted trend of mid-twentiethcentury cellular biology, some of his writing feels prescient of epigenetics. In later work, Satya Nand reached deep into human experience and to questions of the soul. His visions remained bold, addressing the way knowledge should be gained, shared, and used as a resource for personal growth. Calling for disciplinary holism, he sought to unify the “four Hippocratic fields”: sociology, religion, philosophy, and what he called the “arts of living.”32 He considered these “Hippocratic fields” to be complementary to the four yogas of the Bhagavad Gita, and he sought a “neoindividualism” that would bring together Freud, Pavlov, Jung, Heidegger,

14

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Bhakti yoga, Karma yoga, Gyan yoga, and Brahm vidya. Such unity of knowledge might be accomplished through an “experimental” approach that extended beyond scientific understanding and into what he called “time design” or “time rhythm,” or something like a position toward the world, an ethic.33 In the “knitting together, churning together and working through all the boundary zones and all the relevant sciences”34 was a melding of method, ethic, and therapeutic. A Nietzschean tambura hums through his work, expanding mere biology into a sense of Man with a capital “M,” even as he overlaid that foundation with calls for interconnection: “Such a group [of scientists], more widely based and including the cybernatic school, might find itself working at the level of man-in-time and not merely at the level of a biophysical machine.” Satya Nand’s goals for human betterment reverberated across different scales. His “man-in-time” was neither Übermensch nor the man on the street, neither a reference to pure human potential nor to the everyday or phenomenological. He was, rather, a composite of time-frames, embedded simultaneously in the epochal time of evolution, the grand but less epochal time of generations, historical time, gestational time, and the asymptotic time of self-realization. The goal of analysis for such an entity was not cure but “to prepare him [man] for life-long self-analysis”; self-knowledge was not an accomplishment so much as continuing method.35 If certain understandings hold that organic approaches are associated with South Indian psychiatry (including the early use of lobotomy, called “leucotomy” in India, at the Mysore Mental Hospital by psychiatrist M. V. Govindaswamy), and North Indian colonial psychiatry with a psychoanalytic inclination, Satya Nand is an outlier on this map. In a career-long effort to theorize organic pathways between society, culture, mind, and personality, although his ability to discuss psychoanalysis and biological forces in the same breath may appear contradictory, his approach demands that we question the ways we assume ideas to line up. At the same time, his work should not be seen as patently heroic. In later publications, he defended eugenics, and the urgency and anxiety of his insistence on the greatness of his ideas increased over time. His later work continually revisited his professional frustration. “Due to neglect,” he wrote, “it is necessary for me to emphasize the value of my work. I am justified in being desperate about it,” and Design for a Man is full of pleas to the reader (“Don’t you

Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand 15

agree?”) as he grew increasingly dogmatic about the value of his method. His dream analysis was the only complete one, he insisted.36 The rest were partial and, thus, dangerous, as analysis “once begun . . . must be taken to its termination.”37 As grand as his visions were, the question of his influence is moot. Satya Nand seems to have left little lasting impact on Indian psychiatry. His ideas are, as far as I can tell, unknown beyond a small group of scholars and doctors with an interest in history. Even in the time of its publication, his writing was considered obtuse and his ideas obscure and irrelevant. I am unaware of anyone attempting to make use of Satya Nand’s “objective method,” or any other part of his work, and there are scant citations of it. Critics dismissed much of his work as incomprehensible. One anonymous reviewer of Objective Method was particularly harsh: This privately published brochure on dream analysis cannot be reviewed because its contents are not understandable. The words employed are legitimately English but apparently have a private meaning for the author and their combinations make no sense for the reader. Apparently the writer rejects all previous theories of dream structure and purpose and has developed a “mechanical method of dream interpretation.” There are diagrams and tables as well as case histories, but their validity could not be evaluated for proving the author’s conclusions.38 Satya Nand owned up to his creative approach to syntax. “There has been no effective step taken to give one common dogmatic terminology. Question of terminologies can be decided later.”39 His work is, for this reason, desperately difficult to understand. I learned this when I opened Objective Method, which, apart from the cases, is not an enjoyable read. It begins with pages and pages explicating theory and is riotous with citations. Finally, come the cases, written to show Satya Nand’s method in action, and thus organized as near transcripts of conversation (a blessing now, if not to the reviewer of 1949). An overview of the complex analytic method is provided, and the “analysand’s rebuttal” is included. Two foldout pages offer elaborate schema of the cases, concentric squares containing analytic categories, correlated to life events and fragments of “musing.” As if longing to escape the grid, these details insist on their right to exist. They form stories of their own accord. Perhaps it was the time, perhaps it was the dominance of scientific enterprise over the nitpicking details of 16 Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand

little lives, but it seems that even when Satya Nand missed the jungle of content for the vines of his “objective method,” he left the fruit hanging in the open air. His was not a failure to acknowledge lives but a different kind of acknowledgment: I honor you with science.

E T H I C S , CO U N T E R  E T H I C S , A N D M Y T H O P O E T I C S

Satya Nand saw Mrs. A.’s Hindu socialism as a breathtaking political and social vision and made it the thrust of his analysis. It is tempting to follow him down that road by expanding on the politics of the moment and how they may have informed the case. However, his writing and her spoken words direct our gaze elsewhere. Satya Nand was also prolific reader of European and Indian literature, myth, science, and philosophy, and proficient in Hindu, Muslim, and Christian doctrine. He drew inspiration and examples from a firmament of texts, citing Greek myth as an outline for human social evolutionary stages and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as an example of personality development, alongside Hindu myth and Muslim poetry, in writing described by Jain, Sarin, and Murthy as “a fusion of experimental religion, philosophy, sociology, and biology.”40 Where a reading from the distance of decades of theorizing about medical encounters in the colonial world might find itself moved by things that appear to be culturally situated about this case, Satya Nand’s delightfully promiscuous myth-making and world-rambling for sources of inspiration inspire a different approach, one oriented less to culture or context and more toward ethics, which he called “arts of living.” The phrase “arts of living” does not appear in Objective Method, but, as a vision of a full human life that sought to contribute to a global repertoire for living, it is possible to wonder whether he did not receive something of this orientation from Mrs. A., who took her recollections and musings beyond questions of what would be possible in her life and into what it might mean to create a good life and a just world. There are elements of this in Hindu socialism, but these do not contain all that was ethically curious about her musing. Her thoughts were flush with ethical questions, and her resolutions pulsed with ethical conviction (the eroticism of my language is intentional), even if they were not declared with as much assurance about their genre as I have assigned them. Mrs. A. and Satya Nand never said, “This is ethics,” but they built their effort from narratives that hinged on vital ethical conundrums. What Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand 17

does it mean to be enslaved by one who is himself enslaved? What is the right way to turn our attention to the world? What is the ethical status of being deceived? How can we live, how should we speak in conditions of violation? These questions arose from a specific set of Hindu stories. Or rather, they arose from certain iterations of stories, from variations of accumulated meaning as rambling and productive as Austen novels and Greek myth. Mrs. A. introduced them, and Satya Nand took them up, each working with their own versions of the tales. Because so much of her case, and so much of what follows in this book depends on these stories, I will pause here to share them, pulling from the case, as well as from something we might call a collective corpus, some imperfect, boiled down versions of what are complicated and varied narratives. To say they originate in the epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana, is accurate only in the sense of textuality. These are essential elements of a living tradition, and my attempt at storytelling is imperfect and incomplete. You may know these stories differently or may be able to better relate them. First, Draupadi. Much of the Mahabharata concern Draupadi, and there are many versions of each tale. There is no one, simple tale to tell about her, although certain key events were important to Mrs. A. In one, Drupada, king of the Panchalas, held a swayamvara, a contest to determine a husband for his daughter Draupadi, with the secret intention that she would wed Arjuna, one of the five Pandava brothers. The brothers, who were then living in exile disguised as Brahmins, learned of the event and about Draupadi’s beauty and accomplishments. With their mother’s blessing, they set off to the capital of the Panchala kingdom. Disguised as mendicants, they stayed in the home of a potter and went about the city unrecognized. At the swayamvara, one by one, prospective suitors (including Karna, the Pandava’s estranged half-brother) failed at the task of shooting five arrows through a suspended ring. Arjuna stepped on to the stand, clad in the animal skins and matted locks of an ascetic, circumambulated the bow in prayer and shot five arrows through the ring. Draupadi consented to marry him, and, as the crowd celebrated, most of Arjuna’s brothers left the arena. The remaining suitors, warriors humiliated at being bested by a priest, grew angry, but Arjuna and his brother Bhim protected king Drupada from the crowd. Draupadi became wife of all five brothers when, returning to their forest home with Arjuna, their mother, Kunti, 18 Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand

told her son to share what he had won with his brothers, without looking up to see that what he had won was a wife. The second event is the dice game, in which the Pandavas were challenged to a gambling match by Duryodhana, eldest of the Kauravas, the hundred sons of the king Dhritarashtra and queen Gandhari. Yudishthira, Draupadi’s eldest husband, weak to the lure of gambling, hit a losing streak. Frenzied with each bet, he wagered higher and higher stakes until he had lost his kingdom. He gambled away his brothers, one by one, and then himself. Finally, he wagered and lost Draupadi. Duryodhana called for Draupadi to be brought into the gambling hall (in many iterations she is dragged by her hair) and told her in the presence of the assembled group that she, along with her husbands, was now the Kauravas’ slave. Draupadi asked what Yudishthira’s status had been when he gambled her and was told that he had lost himself first, and then her. She rebuked him: How can a person be wagered by one who has already lost himself? How can a free person be transacted by a slave? The assembled group debated the matter, and discussion intensified to argument and insult, until finally Dushasana, Duryodhana’s brother, was ordered to strip Draupadi, an insult compounded by the fact that she was menstruating. Draupadi admonished her husbands for failing to protect her, and then, summoning inner power, produced an endless sari and defied the attempted humiliation (in later versions, she prayed to Krishna for protection and he granted the yardage). Dushasana finally stopped. As he was about to lead Draupadi to the slave’s quarters, the ominous call of a jackal was heard. Fearing the dark portent, Duryodhana, advised by Queen Gandhari, offered Draupadi a boon. She demanded freedom for herself and her husbands. King Dhritarashtra sent them home, but Duryodhana convinced his father to summon them back for one more game, this time with a wild wager. The losing side would go into exile in the forest, living as ascetics for twelve years and spending the thirteenth year in the city unrecognized, punished with another twelve years in the forest if they were recognized. The Pandavas returned and again lost, leaving Indraprastha for twelve years of exile. Next Shakuntala. Shakuntala is more difficult to narrate in that Mrs. A. and Satya Nand were working with versions of the story that differed on key aspects. The most widely known Shakuntala narratives appear in the Mahabharata and in the Sanskrit play The Recognition of Shakuntala by Kalidasa (which follows the Mahabharata by roughly five hundred years, Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand 19

although the dating is imperfect). Satya Nand’s version appeared to condense many variations, whereas Mrs. A. was rooted to the Kalidasa version (and it is the play that was most formative of ideas about ethics in Sanskrit literature and captured the attention of later writers).41 I will emphasize the latter here, which begins with Shakuntala, beautiful daughter of a union between an apsara and a sage, adopted by the sage Kanva. Shakuntala attracted the eye of King Dushyanta when he encountered her in the forest, and after the two united, he gave her a ring. When Dushyanta returned to his palace, Shakuntala, caught up in a reverie, failed to appropriately greet a visiting sage. The sage cast a curse upon her that she would be unrecognized by the person she most adored. Her girlfriends intervened and the sage mitigated the curse, saying that Shakuntala would be recognized when she presented the ring to Dushyanta. Unaware of the curse, Shakuntala traveled to the palace with her son Bharat (by Dushyanta). Along the way she lost the ring, and so when they met, Dushyanta, failing to recognize her, spoke cruelly, and cast them out. Shakuntala did not return to her father’s hermitage, but, ashamed, went to live in a different forest hermitage. Some time later, a fisherman found the ring and visited the king. When he saw it, Dushyanta remembered Shakuntala and his insult to her. Setting out to the forest to find her, he came upon a young boy playing with a lion and marveled at the child’s bravery. Shakuntala entered the clearing and Dushyanta recognized her, reuniting the family. (The Mahabharata version is similar, but there is no curse. Shakuntala and Dushyanta marry, a union to which Shakuntala only agreed if he promised that their son would inherit his lineage. Later, when she brought the boy to the court, Dushyanta refused to acknowledge them, and, in response, Shakuntala castigated him for failing to honor his promise. Ultimately, a divine voice convinced Dushyanta to recant.) Finally, Ahalya, whose story is shorter but arguably has more variants. For Ahalya, who appears in two versions in the Ramayana, as well as in the Puranas and other later texts, I will leave it to Mrs. A.: I remember the play in which [the god] Rama while passing a village sat on a stone and he had to get up because the stone was turning into a woman. The transformed woman told her story to Rama, who had ordered her to relate it. She was the wife of Gautam, a sage, and [who] was the teacher of Indra, who became king of Heaven. After having fin20

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ished his training Indra came often to see his teacher. But in reality he tried to make love to the wife who did not respond. One day Indra came at a time when the sage had gone out a great distance. He made the wife drink some medicine and played such good music, that she lost control of her passion, and Indra forced her into the act. Gautam came in to discover this. He cursed both of them. Indra was made impotent and she was turned into a stone ’till Rama was born, and went that way.42 Satya Nand saw these stories as part of the universal human library rather than a shared Hindu vocabulary even as he invoked, all at once, the “oriental” “objectivity” of the effort. The terms of this scientific vision unsettle some basic things. First, they raise a question that, while it may feel important to us, may not have struck him as being at all compelling, a testimony of silence to the scholarly and cultural accretions of eighty or so years, all that makes the presence of Hindu myths as universalized resources in Objective Method feel surprising. The question is simple, and I am among a crowd in asking it: what can we gain by approaching ethics (or any similarly abstract label for human thought and behavior) through lines of thinking that come from beyond the usual, authorized canons of inquiry? This is another way of putting the almost ridiculously obvious observation that the vast majority of impactful scholarly writing on ethics, writing with the most traction in the academy, especially in philosophy, anthropology, and critical studies, is framed in relation to a canon of philosophical writing that, through its legacies of citation and conversation consistently figures European thinkers and Greek myth as its primary referent. This argument, especially when made in relation to South Asia, is familiar to the point of being predictable, and immediately brings to mind colonial histories of education and decades old debates over the limited nature of literary canons, not just those that concern ethics. These are important questions, but my point is somewhat different, that is, it is not intended to challenge the act (or art) of putting European authors to use in theorizing beyond Europe, but to think about the arrangements of the world of actions and ideas contained in our ways of thinking about thinking, to make those arrangements our points of inquiry too, and to do so without assuming any particular sense of difference (if that is possible) yet with an eye for how those senses are created. I include myself in the Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand 21

category of writers who, mea culpa, dabble in a very narrow range of canonical European authors, and I find that Satya Nand’s and Mrs. A.’s flexible uses of myth make my own thinking more bendy. So, too, their way of taking up myth at once raises the fact that the universal capabilities of European mythopoetics are taken for granted, and Euro-American canons and terminologies made a common vocabulary, and makes it clear that a canon is not a thing or a list of sources but a direction, a particular orientation to all it is not. Where Hinduism and psychoanalysis are concerned, after decades and decades of what scholars like to call “cross-fertilization,” and given intertwined pre-histories mediated by roving ideas and narratives, does it even make sense to think of these domains as “encountering” each other, now, or in 1947? Speaking for anthropologists (who may prefer I speak for myself), it is not (or not only) that our small libraries tend to deny us sources of “difference” but that we cauterize eons of wide-ranging, albeit often mysterious influence, making our geographies of difference little more than imaginary lands. Speaking, as Satya Nand did, from a world of literatures, places with their own canons, terminologies, and intellectual traditions, let alone myths, suggests creative ways of thinking that break through the weary line between the details of locations (ethnography) and concepts that might orient them. Shakuntala et al. leave me wondering what would it mean to face the world of wild connections and old conversations from other than our usual (narrow) sources, disciplinarily as well as canonically, to use art, say, or myth, or dance, to pull us into those ongoing confabulations, as resources for, to paraphrase Jain et al., our own experimental philosophies?43 There is an additional layer of complexity that relates to the supposed Europeanness of modernity (or at least its assumed homogeneity), in that historical contexts share canons with modes of critique that are aimed at modern institutions, including ethics. Ethics are powerful things, and, as Mrs. A. showed, they can organize lives in ways that constrain them, directing not just how we might know ourselves, but how we should know ourselves, indeed, how we should make ourselves over as things to know. Because of the way the history of modernity tends to be told, European canons dominate work that asks not only what ethical paradigms are (here, or there, now, or then), but what is normalizing and reifying about ethical paradigms. The critical work of articulating the connection between ethics and power, with roots in the important writing of Michel Foucault, has a 22

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slippery dual purpose of showing the historical continuities of powerladen ethical paradigms somewhere to serve as abstract tools for thinking anywhere. There is nothing inherently wrong with creative flights out of context and into musings; the issue is that these are seldom seen as creative acts. This produces some degree of ambivalence about the diverse ways we might bring myth into reflections on the state of specific worlds. In an example that is relevant to Mrs. A.’s case for addressing the moral regulation of love, in her book Antigone’s Claim, Judith Butler exposes the reproduction of kinship norms as conditions for social belonging and human citizenship by turning to Antigone (the play and the character), following her through a European canon that includes Hegel and Lacan, who both put the heroine to intellectual use.44 Even as Butler traces Antigone through specific political and psychoanalytic histories, she extends those histories to modernity in general, resulting in an ahistorical critical language applied to agency, desire, and regulation writ large. Discussing the regulation of kinship, the potentialities of the very form contained in the play are dampened. In a brilliant response, Thomas Strong signals the plurality of kinship itself, calling for ethnographic specificity in attention to the very forms of kinship that are taken to signal the birth of the social, or law, namely, the avunculate.45 This form even resides in the play: Creon is Antigone’s mother’s brother, making her betrothal to his son an instance of cross-cousin union, an arrangement of conjugality with important stakes for how “insider” and “outsider” are made meaningful. Understood as form (of exchange) rather than rule (for being human), cross-cousin marriage, as anthropologists know, allows kinship to be conceived as a moving structure, a guiding aesthetic of relation, even right, rather than fi xed moral order, a foundation for the very meaning of things like “love” rather than a means of its regulation.46 Such observations hinge on an openness to varieties of typically glossed social forms (“kinship,” “regulation,” “love”) and a willingness to name the creative quality of critical tools; they are capable of changing how we understand both the emotional stakes of the mythic resource and the paradigmatic relationships it might engender. Some critical readings assert narrower models of power and agency than they claim, perhaps by rejecting the worlds of possibilities contained in seemingly minute matters. “Kinship” is already a vastly plural set of arrangements.47 The same is true for “belonging,” which leaves unobserved that even forms of kinship that bear the imprimatur of the “law” Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand 23

can contain multiple and movable relationships to persons, power, and human agency. Also at risk of being lost is what, in all its specificity, we are up to, as readers seeking a critical truth. This is not to say that we should not be up to things, but rather that there is a story to be told about mythmaking in which we, too, are characters. This is also not to say that abstractions and mythic resources of any sort, including Greek ones, are not eligible to be broad referents. I am of the view that all resources are available to all who like to think, and I have no interest in policing thought and no problem with wanton connections. I hope that by now it is clear that no piece of writing that takes Dev Satya Nand or Mrs. A. seriously should sharpen the razor’s edge of difference with the strop of philosophy, nor could it possibly argue that European resources should only be engaged through the lens of their own particularity, that is, for European subjects, or with a postcolonial critique that finds their appearance in ethnographies of “other” places to be inappropriate.48 Rather, through their use of Hindu myth, Mrs. A. and Satya Nand allow us to ask, What would it mean to embark on a critical analysis of contemporary kinship, love, and state power, say, with poetics from elsewhere than the usual canon, or in a way that recognizes the presence of diverse sources in apparently familiar histories, or that simply reads the usual canon as though from elsewhere? What would it mean to do so in a way that does not limit the value of stories to their status as regionally legible but for their sheer arrangement of ideas? What would it mean to value the ways they have contributed to canons of writing and to the lives of everyday people? When the narrowness of our scope for method of approach, as well as content, is taken for granted, our use of even the most familiar (European) stories can also be stunted. Mrs. A. turned to the Hindu epics for a reason, perhaps noticing their rich ethical complexity, while Satya Nand, like many others before and after him, noticed their compatibility with psychoanalysis. As Veena Das has argued of the Mahabharata, there is much to be said about matters of sovereignty and intimacy and about the ways in which gender figures centrally to the political, that is, other than what lineages of European political philosophy assume to found not only governance but also justice.49 Draupadi, lost in a dice game by one of her five husbands, surely can tell us about kinship, patriliny, and state regulation, as well as about the form of agency that is the power a person can hold over intimate others, and the limits of that power. Shakuntala, punished for a 24 Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand

minor transgression by being unrecognized by her beloved, who happened to be the father of her son, who in turn happened to be the heir to a kingdom, can allow us trace the scope and limitations of kinship and ethics of recognition, or the foundations of statecraft on ethics of intimacy. Ahalya, punished for being deceived, or in some versions raped, by being turned to stone, can help us think critically about the way in which transgression is commuted unevenly and consciousness deployed as an ethical mandate. All of these stories can help us think about the gendered ways that ethics are unevenly distributed. Because they appear in an inconsequential scientific treatise, an almost-but-not-quite-postcolonial effort toward an “objective method,” these epic stories can help us think about not only the big things with which the stories themselves are concerned (agency, sovereignty, love, and violence) but about the projects they energize, things as apparently “foreign” to them as science, psychology, psychoanalysis. Neither Mrs. A. nor Satya Nand saw such stories as contextual or explanatory “ground” but as resources for knowing oneself. Mrs. A.’s musings and Satya Nand’s wild claims, not to mention the roving mythic women they entertained, highlighted creative connections rather than cultural systems, the ways ethical stakes can get scrambled, ideas can be decontextualized and recontextualized (and relationships to times and places made in terms other than “context”), and ethics be fi xed and unfi xed from the world. Infinitely dense Hindu mythopoetics and their infinite rivulets of existence in the world suggest that ethics might be approached as a deliberative, unfinished, creative, mesh that nonetheless becomes a place to stand, if just for a moment. Alongside figures from Hindu epics, there were other sources of ethical imagination in Mrs. A.’s musings. Concepts of independence attached her personal dilemmas to national ones, as did matters of love, responsibility, and dharma (or sense of moral rightness, different for each person). The un-ethics and bad faiths of colonialism were profoundly felt in Punjab, and with the 1919 massacre at Jallianwallah Bagh, a depth of oppression that seeded, among other things, revolutionary Bhagat Singh’s ethic unifying death and hope.50 Long-steeping nationalist doctrines asserting “sentiments of attachment to land and local custom” were nothing short of “political ethics,” well before Gandhian self-rule’s vocabulary of selfhood, responsibility, desire, and agency shuffled the terms of British morality, injecting ethical value into precisely the qualities that racist ideology had Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand 25

derided, such as asceticism, even weakness, and passivity.51 Gandhi’s “experiments with truth” wove Hindu principles of renunciation with the goals of American transcendental philosophy, self-determination and nonviolence, materializing moral strength in bodily practice, while advocating female involvement less through legal reform than by encouraging women to take up social uplift.52 This was a history in which female mythic figures made frequent appearances.53 There were also diverse cultural systems to draw on,54 living ethical principles that may have included karma,55 virtue,56 responsibility and domesticity,57 love,58 care,59 contract and vitality,60 and aesthetic principles such as rasa and lila, among moral principles with material condensations in bodies and relationships.61 Satya Nand’s binary personality forms shared an outline with certain qualities of personhood whose academic attribution to South Asia would soon flourish (juxtapositions of the individual with the dividual, hierarchy and social orientation with individualism), and Mrs. A.’s revisions of those binaries were a prescient caution against their fi xity.62 Ultimately, Mrs. A. and Satya Nand were less interested in what a person is than in how to be a person, infusing with dynamism cultural forms often pressed into place. That many of these ethics were gendered may be obvious, but it bears mention. In the most basic ways, ethics in South Asia, as anywhere, are gendered because they involve different standards, criteria, expectations, and effects for men, women, and people who transcend binaries. In less basic ways, ethics are gendered because people are gendered in their terms and, in becoming gendered, bear the impact and consequences of ethical formulations in different ways. This is so intersectionally with other ways of differentiating people, caste and class especially, but also color, religion, and language. Women’s folk songs, religious practices, writing, and other forms of creative expression amply demonstrate this, as do the lifeworlds and expressions of values of transgender and third-gender people,63 the way political ethics involve codes of masculinity,64 create politicized visions of gender,65 and make gendered bodies bear the burden of broad moral visions.66 In many ways, it is the gendered quality of ethics that most vividly illustrates the possibility of ethical contestation, and it is a contested quality of ethics that allows it to move toward the future. Taking a place on the anxious side of the “arts of living,” Mrs. A. frequently dwelt on the future, 26

Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand

and in that dwelling articulated what I am calling “counter-ethics,” a term I mean in its most straightforward sense. For Mrs. A., counter-ethics emerged at the pressure points of ethical formulations, the place where an ethical principle, ideal, or narrative met its logical end, hit obstacles thrown up by life, or by historical change, or by some other force. Counter-ethics were where a new or different idea about what is right, or good, or just, or livable came into view, often when Mrs. A. remade or revalued the terms that defined the ethic in question. The final chapter of this book takes leave of the shoreline of Objective Method to venture into more oceanic aspects of this concept. Here I offer a few brief thoughts, leaving the definition of ethics to a vernacular sense of the term, keeping it at once open to however it may be articulated or defined in the world and, at the same time, in suspended animation, holding it, for now, so we may look upon it, imperfect though it may be as a translation for a moving set of ideas, memories, worries, and wonderings. If a counter-ethic is a departure from, or a reversal or reorganization of an ethical formulation, it is so because ethics are things we do as well as things we think, things we think as well as things we do. It might work like this: An ethic appears. It may be proclaimed or tacit. It may come from above, as a statement of power or expression of authority or it may come from below in the form of critique. In and against it, something, at some point, pushes, diverges, spins off. Some element cannot be completed, some piece cannot be resolved, some fragment refuses the drive to encompass, some expansiveness diverts involution. This is true even for a position taken as critique of a larger system, even if the ethic in question is a rejection of universal positions or a claim for the particular, positioned, pragmatic. Every thing has a limit, including the search for limits; everything situated, including “situatedness”; nothing is universal, including critiques of universality. Veena Das notes that opposed ethical principles can be bound together, both in narrative rendering and “ordinary” actions, points at which life might nullify what is deemed ethical.67 The direction in which counterethics asks we look is similarly oriented toward the moment of transfiguration. It is less concerned with the what of ethics, the content, tensile or otherwise, of a particular visions, than the how, the choreographies of transformation, the forms taken by ethical imaginaries in their encounters with one another and with the world, how new (or not so new) ideas come Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand 27

into being, often in moments when the terms of ethical formulations are revalued, or their meanings parsed. There are other stakes to thinking with counter-ethics. One of these is a perhaps counter-ethical, or at least counter-intuitive, defense of the small argument. Counter-ethics call us to reconsider the value of derivative ideas, ideas that emerge in response to other ideas, systems that proceed in and against the terms set by other systems. Here is one response to masculinist systems of evaluation and expression that refuse responsive ideas as less worthy than bold, grand, and non-derivative claims, whatever those might be. (Is there an idea, a symbolic system, an academic argument that is not derivative? Or just posturing to that effect?) Mrs. A.’s dreamy vision of “converting villagers to Hindu socialism” and of a freedom that defined itself against conjugality, not against enclosure writ large (see Chapter 2) was undoubtedly derivative, even in the freshest moments of its newness and wondering. This was also what made its deterritorializations so full of potential, so consistently tied to the world. There is a shape to this, which comes into view in the ways Mrs. A. made use of mythic heroines. Draupadi oriented, among other things, Mrs. A.’s location vis-à-vis marriage and desire and the ways marital ethics might be reshaped into a life. She allowed Mrs. A. to imagine, against an ethic of certainty and emplacement, a counter-ethic of singularity, while for Satya Nand, Draupadi stood for “individualist propensities,” a motivation oriented around desire and personal interest. Chapter 1, guided by Draupadi, focuses on the details of Mrs. A.’s love life and intimacies and it considers the resonance of similar, but not identical, concerns in the history of women’s movements in India. Chapter 2 arranges itself around Shakuntala. Satya Nand, who did not question the foundational ethic of recognition in Shakuntala’s story, saw Shakuntala as Draupadi’s opposite, representing “adaptive propensities.” He felt her tale of recognition organized Mrs. A.’s desires into a clear set of nationalist and personal principles. For Mrs. A., Shakuntala was a more human resource, a kind of friend, helping her bring into view a counter-ethic of nonrecognition as ground for personal and national freedom. Ahalya was the quietest figure in Mrs. A.’s account, appearing only briefly, and never by name. Chapter 3 is Ahalya’s, and a turn to stories that skirt the edges of Mrs. A.’s own, both from within the case and beyond it. Ahalya helps us imagine Mrs. A.’s case as part of a larger collaboration between medicine and law around the question of violence 28 Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand

against women, and to find, in the midst of that collaboration, counterstories about retreat as a rebuke to the injustices of justice. It raises the history of hysteria in India and what came to be seen as its defining feature: unconsciousness. Both Mrs. A. and Satya Nand felt that Ahalya represented an ethic of redemption, akin to Mrs. A.’s “reconversion of villagers to Hindu socialism.” However, a parallel archive of women beyond the case offers us a counter-ethic to Mrs. A.’s own, one that finds healing in retreat and solace in invisibility against associations of consciousness with ethical awareness. The ethical counterpoint of the Hindu epics might lead us to ask: Which comes first, the place, genre, or idea? Is the moving and contested quality of ethics, if not particular to, then consonant with forms of gender and expression in South Asia? Scholars of gender in South Asia have long traced this intersection in creative, critical, and innovative ways people find the limits of moral paradigms and talk, sing, and dance alternative possibilities. Religious and expressive forms concerned with women’s lives have not only subversive qualities but “sub-versions,”68 from folk songs that reinscribe masculinist themes69 to Punjabi qissas and the poetry of female devotees of male saints,70 the words of contemporary female gurus,71 and Shakuntala’s theatrical contemporaries in which “beneath the dominant theme there always exist different sets of values, which are to a certain degree adhered to among certain social groups and which function as a kind of counterpoint to the leading melody.”72 While not all women’s expressions are counter-ethical, gender offers a persistent framing of existence for counter-ethical imagining, as people disproportionately bear ethical stakes and create responses that offer a rhythm for wondering, making something new and funny and angry and beautiful of it all. The critique of power is a primary goal of much writing about ethics in critical theory, and while Mrs. A. pluralizes our sense of what ethics are and do, she also reminds us that elements usually aligned in certain ways in critical terms can come together in surprising arrangements. As colonialism racialized possibilities for being and living in terms at once stark and contradictory, people’s ways of thinking and writing also fled those grids. For example, it may be the case that the gold standard of personhood, adopted by many reform efforts, that considers oppression a constraint upon freedom of will, cannot account for the moral universes of women who have no interest in strident individualism.73 But it is not Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand 29

therefore also the case that ideas about freedom of will have no relevance in non-Western places or as feminist values, or that these terms necessarily adhere to stark liberalism. Mrs. A. was frustrated by constrained agency and taken with ideals of independence and self-determination. But her reference points derived from texts in which self-determination was an ethical question in terms determined neither by liberalism nor by difference from it. She rejected Satya Nand’s binary of “individualist” versus “adaptive” propensities even as her visions of a future beyond marriage, or of how society might be changed by giving women political power did not depend upon a vision of emancipation (female or otherwise) understood as “foreign.” Her musings on the gendered nature of social “mores” remind us to disarticulate feminism from the charge of being non-Indian.74 They also leave us wondering whether, rather than representing the limits of liberal values, it hasn’t also been women who have kept certain visions of selfdetermination alive. I admit that there is something about Hindu mythopoetics (to stand in a place) that makes this form of engagement possible. Imagine a character, say Ahalya, who shows up in an epic written in Sanskrit in the early part of the common era. In fact, she shows up twice in that “single” text, her story told in different ways. Except that those stories were inserted in that text later than much of the rest of it was written. Different details, messages, and possibilities reveal stretches of time and plurality of voices involved in the creation of “one” epic. However, just because we first meet her in that “text” doesn’t mean that Ahalya wasn’t someone people already spoke about, sang about, danced about, thought about, or became. The fact that she made it into this long story about other heroes and heroines at all suggests a longer process in which her stories were retold, remembered, written, and copied. Centuries later, other versions were remembered, retold, written, and copied, and Ahalya was reborn again and again, reorganizing time and defying its forward motion. Sometimes the books in which her story appears are entered by voices who add new details to old stories as if they were already there. One way of approaching such alloys is with careful attention to time, seeking out signs of what came first, what was added later, and what it all means. This is certainly important work. Another is to feel the recursivity of time and the mutuality of ideas, the non-dialectic ways that stories, ideas, and arguments grow and atrophy (which is not to say there are not dialectical ways in Hinduism). Perhaps the different Ah30 Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand

alyas represent different regional traditions, different gender arrangements, different politics, or different positions in a social hierarchy. Perhaps they represent a rebuke of those things. Perhaps they have nothing to do with them at all. Now imagine that for every one of the Ahalyas in a book there is a crowd of Ahalyas in spoken words, songs, poems, dances, children’s games. Add to that the way Ahalya’s recorded stories get read and recited and heard, and every time they are read or recited or heard, they are remembered, recalled, retold, re-sung, re-danced, remade. If Mrs. A.’s Ahalya, or her Shakuntala, or her Draupadi, were linked only to their appearances in some text imagined as original, this would represent just one tendril to the past, there being innumerable others. Ahalya is many forms of time, and many forms of connection. She grafts onto and splits from text, vining us to all the people before us to whom stories mattered. She is a multitude, and in our encounters with her now, like Mrs. A.’s in the 1940s, she is cumulative but never complete. That, for now at least, is my method too, to follow stories as they move in and out of Mrs. A.’s case, into and out of the historical scene (late colonial Punjab in wartime), and multidirectionally through time, to form a small channel through a moving world of creative ethical reckoning. As far as possible, my aim is not to deploy Mrs. A.’s case in order to bring South Asia, or even gender, to conversations about ethics, but to find amid its temporary scenery a place to think about how ethics move. Mythic meanderings at once bring the world into this scientific encounter and allow us to hear interruptions on matters such as culture and context. In reading along with others who read along with these myths and the histories they bring into view, my method is to experiment with accommodation, with a spirit of sharing and creativity, with the involutions within stories and all they open up, over and above (for now) a sense of the constructing, constraining effects of systematic social and historical forces. It is thinking from somewhere that is also thinking from elsewhere, and, at certain moments, thinking from nowhere.

WRITING WITH MRS. A.

As a cultural anthropologist, I conducted my first research in an older style of my discipline’s technique. I lived in a small village in rural Uttar Pradesh and spent most of my days in the heart of households, near a hearth, or in Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand 31

the shade of a veranda, in domestic spaces, talking about domestic things. After those often meandering conversations, I sometimes struggled to transform confusing notes into stories, histories, or generalized accounts of something like “culture,” and if I had a question, if there was a piece missing, I could track someone down the following day who could explain, or clarify, or tell me more. On occasions when the words people felt they could share ran out, I could fi ll in spaces with elaborate, often excessive, observational details. How a person looked, how she dressed, how she moved when she spoke, what it felt like in the room where we sat or the field through which we walked. I could learn something about life from the ways stories gapped around absent details, the ways they did and did not circulate, and from the labors of tracking them down. About eight years later, I worked in urban hospitals and discovered that it was significantly more difficult to build a story or history from institutional lives than in households, or from the patchy and conflicting elements of “cases” than from woven stories about a life, a family, a village. Patients and their families came into the ward, stayed for a few days or a few weeks, then vanished. Still, there were always others to ask, doctors, ward attendants, other patients and their families. There were other details to take in to allay anxiety about the spareness of it all: details about the ward, the waiting spaces, what it all looked, sounded, and smelled like. I could learn something about medical life and practice from small sensory details, but also from the nature of the patchiness that was medical knowledge. I could learn, as I wrote at the time, what it means to know a person from the impressions she leaves in the lives of others. More recently, when I began to look to the past, into the history of Indian psychiatry and its treatment of “hysterics,” I found that it is exceedingly difficult, almost impossible, to treat medical archives as my discipline seemed to want me to do, to enflesh them into stories and description. When details came not from conversation, awareness, or observations, but from sparse clinical fi les, the ethnographer in me fought the apparent constraints of the historian’s work, even though I was aware there was something to be made of the archive itself, its holes, wrinkles, and obsessions. To take it all in without fi lling voids with imagined back-stories, create atmosphere and ambience, invent character and personality felt like a feat of anti-imagination. It might be done in the name of social science, but the ethnographer’s ravenous appetite for “thickness,” caused me to mistrust 32

Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand

myself. Something extra was always there, a supposition here, a whiff of mood there, a mountain made of the molehill of the momentary appearance of tone. Is it sarcasm? Is it annoyance? Is it love? Researching the history of hysteria in India, I was fortunate to be given access to the archived case fi les of the psychiatry department at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro-Sciences, formerly the Mysore Mental Hospital, in Bangalore, where thousands of carefully scanned pages had been uploaded as fi les onto a hard drive. The computer was on a desk in the small back room of a psychiatrist’s office, and I sat at that desk, in that small room, methodically reading individual fi les, page by page, for mention of hysteria, scanning for keywords as my right hand tapped at a mouse, moving me from page to page. Doctors’ handwriting became recognizable, or almost recognizable, in swoops of ink, blue, black, green, from 1930s pens. Like the living patients in the wards I once visited, these patients appeared, disappeared, sometimes reappeared and then left. The sounds from the wards down the corridor reminded me that these lives had been recorded, their cases “taken,” in the space where I sat. I did not have to travel far to imagine what it might have been like. The patients had been here; their proximity in the fi les meant proximity in the wards. The jangle of a lock, a person’s wail or laughter or shout, the rattle of wheels on a metal cart, these would in all likelihood have been their sounds, too. Even so, it felt distant. The fi les were an invitation to fantasy curtailed. One of the doctors at the helm of the preservation effort guided me through the fi les. He knew the history of the institution, could tell me whose handwriting was whose, recognized interesting cases, knew the dates for the arrival of doctors, the beginning of new ways of recordkeeping, the discovery of medicines, therapies, concepts. “I have a case for you,” he said, one late afternoon, as we spoke about what was and was not in the fi les, “It will challenge everything you think you know about Indian women,” or something to that effect. The case was in a book held in archives in England. Later, an Internet search told me there was also a copy in the stacks at Harvard’s Widener Library. A few months later, returning home to Massachusetts, I held in my hands the small, blue, clothbound volume with the grand title. I thumbed through, glanced at Mrs. A.’s case and then, with the semester’s labors underway, put the book on my shelf. After the end of term, I picked it up again, took a printed copy of the chapter about Mrs. A. to a cafe, and began to read. The clarity and fullness of Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand 33

the details were astounding, “giving” so much more, and with greater immediacy, than those of the cryptic yet apparently more “private” case files. Satisfying a craving for banal life details that had been so lacking in my hysteria researches, they raised a new set of dilemmas. What would it mean, and what would it take, to make sense of the intimate exposures of this anonymous woman? Who was she? At the time of the book’s publication, Satya Nand described himself on  the book’s cover page as “Assistant Professor in the Physiology Department at Amritsar Medical College,” and “Formerly, Deputy Medical Superintendent, Punjab Mental Hospital” (in Lahore) and “Recently Psychiatrist, Northern Command, in the Army,” two poignant markers, “formerly” and “recently,” signaling the monumental transitions in the short years between the analyses and the book’s publication. In many ways, Mrs. A.’s case is a tale of two cities. Or, rather, a tale of a city that could be one of two. Lahore or Amritsar? The text does not say. In some ways it matters little, in others, it matters a great deal, and it is conceivable that this upper-class, highly educated, Hindu woman, and her circle of socialists, Gandhian nationalists, Sikh paramours, and Christian psychoanalyst could have lived in either of these sister cities, which, before Partition, were separated by little more than a short journey. The strange and uncertain timing of the case gives it the relief of a parallel universe, of alternate histories. Their Lahore/Amritsar is, for us, a frozen, timeless pause from which time might split and our shared story, India’s, Pakistan’s, humanity’s, might branch. This pause-at-the-cusp creates an elsewhere of time that is also an elsewhere of geography. However, in the somewhereness of this text, the difference, Amritsar or Lahore, matters very much. How it matters depends upon from which side of Partition we read. In a post-1947 reading, it matters enormously whether we think we are reading the words of a young Hindu woman in Amritsar, or a young Hindu woman in Lahore. In a pre-1947 reading, the difference matters only in terms of unimportant details. It is curious, but not epochal. A post-1947 reading happens in the light of all we know. Th is reading wonders who Mrs. A. was, who she is. It notices that she could still be alive, into her nineties, living somewhere, Delhi, I imagine, accessible by phone. Th is reading puts Mrs. A. in the grip of time and history and seeks,

34

Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand

as Satya Nand expressed it, “the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” Who was she was, where did she live, to which family did she belong? It is a historian’s reading, a biographical reading, and fi nds in other sources the details she does not provide. It makes us wonder what happened to her. A post-1947 reading, attentive to the details of time, place, and history, would ask what came next. It would make us see her anxieties in the light of darker possibilities, and reduce them, by comparison, to the strikingly banal prelude to cataclysm. It would render her dilemmas inconsequential, or at least make us wonder if they were wiped away by violence and displacement. It would suspect that whatever happened next would have ruptured this picture, making Mrs. A.’s imagined future a deadened vine. In some ways, this is inevitable, but it is also a choice. At one point I considered tracking down Mrs. A., or at least her family. My sense is that it would not have been impossible, potentially quite easy. Upper-class Amritsar and Lahore society in the 1940s was relatively small; my social world contains possible links to that life and time. I could have run upstairs in the home where my daughter and I stayed in Delhi one recent July to ask a certain aunty. I decided I did not want to trace Mrs. A. Satya Nand made her anonymous. Her story of youthful desire is so ripe with detail, confessions that might one day feel like indiscretions, concerns and thoughts she might find it prudent to disavow. I hope not, but it seemed better to leave Mrs. A. as a cipher in name so she might flourish in feeling. This allowed me to wonder if she became a writer herself, someone whose books or novels or poems I may have read, whose thoughts may have already influenced my own, long before I found her in Satya Nand’s book. This means that I have chosen a reading from the other side of the divide, from pre-1947. This reading has a more tenuous relationship to historical time and detail than the post-1947 reading. It leaves Mrs. A. in the text and wonders about what is outside of it in that spirit, the spirit of wondering rather than the need to know. This reading sustains the temporary fantasy that, for a moment, we do not know what came next to Mrs. A.’s Punjab. It allows us to take seriously the small wonders and concerns without rendering them inconsequential. Satya Nand cannot live only in pre1947, he belongs to history. His life and work went on in documented, linear

Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand 35

time, but the woman called Mrs. A. can point us differently, poised at the cusp of two different senses of how history matters. There are plenty of things we cannot know with this kind of reading. We cannot know what may be perhaps the juiciest detail: what Mrs. A. and Satya Nand meant to each other, how they found each other, whether they liked each other, whether they were friends, what made it possible for a somewhat older man to have such intimate conversations with such a young woman under the blanket of science. These things are not available in the text, but there are things we can do by keeping Mrs. A. in her moment. We can follow lines of imagination and musing rather than tracks of proof. We can know Mrs. A. through accumulations of narratives, sisterstories, and flights of connection. In evading the relentless push of historical time, Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, we can instead turn into the wind and enter the time-space of myth that charges Mrs. A.’s words. She can, like Ahalya, be frozen in time, turned to stone in the text, with all that might make possible for how we understand this as a story of rebirth as much as of fear and sadness. She can, for a moment, even freeze time for us, with all that might make possible for how we learn from the past. At the point in her analysis when she seemed to accept the possibility that her marriage was in jeopardy, Mrs. A. said, “If it comes to a breaking point, I shall not be found wanting.” It was at the breaking point that she encountered the possibility of a future, of living, that was also a life of fulfi llment, beyond “wanting.” Although, according to Satya Nand, she considered her account to be “one of hope,” I find in it an openness and realism at once more tangible and heavier with possibility than mere hope. For Gayatri Spivak, ethics are the “experience of the impossible” in which “the future is always around the corner” and “there is no victory, but only victories that are also warnings.”75 This statement captures the fullness of that moment, in ways that pressure it with all we know and all we might suppose but leave it available beyond that pressure. At Mrs. A.’s breaking point, there is both openness and realism, openness because there is a future to it, realism because it comes from a position of risk. Not long after I began writing this book, I visited with a friend, an anthropologist, and her mother, also a scholar, from India, a contemporary of Mrs. A., now ninety-something. I reiterated the idea that Mrs. A.’s story defied assumptions about Indian women’s lives in the mid–twentieth century, especially in its freshness about sex and its willingness to entertain a 36 Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand

life beyond marriage. “No, that is not so,” she said, recalling woman after woman from Mrs. A.’s era, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, women she had heard about who had left husbands, initiated divorces, returned to educations, raised children, and made new lives and careers. Mrs. A. fi lled the room as one among many, rather than a singularity. Certain stories pose reminders to confident assumptions about the past and about our own enlightenment. The case reminds us that the late twentieth century, and certainly not the twenty-first, did not discover desire or invent female ambition, that the West does not own independence and self-determination as concepts to either embrace or reject, nor do anthropologists and philosophers own the suspicion of recognition or the pleasures of uncertainty, or appreciation of the commingling of loss and possibility. Mrs. A., and others like her, did it decades ago in a sleepy Punjabi city, or a vivid and urbane one, still, but only just, under colonial rule, on the breaking edge of freedom. Hers is an account of the world that is also an account of deterritorialization, of maps for what is livable, for how to live. It matters that this happened at a historical moment of incipient territorialization, of the violence of tying people to the world at the moment of liberation. We cannot know how it matters, because Mrs. A.’s story ends. We do not know if she found happiness in marriage or in a life on her own, converting villagers to socialism or acting in plays, or how or if she weathered Partition, what fates the cavernous difference of an afternoon’s drive would have meant. I have wanted to hear this story without placing Mrs. A. under the axe of premonition, but I confess that I worry about her. Her life was likely to have involved grief in ways I can barely fathom. There is such a sense of beginning to her case, of thoughts, ideas, and confidence that should have thickened as she matured, if that was permitted her. I worry, selfishly because this is not my family’s, my region’s, or even my country’s story. This is not my past, but I am also someone with daughters, one not far from Mrs. A.’s age at marriage. Even from another time and place I can recognize in my concern the confining gestures of care, the caring gestures of safety, and a wonder in seeing a young woman move joyfully through her city as though it is hers, because it is. Writing from my own moment, I also have a sense of looping time, of the pulse of incipient disaster as I entertain moments of thinking about Mrs. A. differently, rejecting any treatment that poses her afterstory as mere coda. No, I think in those moments, we Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand 37

do have to turn time on its head, we have to think about how the future shapes the past. Partition is the foundation for how we know and hear her words, even if it was not the basis from which she spoke, so we can only bring her into our now with a clasp of luminous sadness around the unknowing in her hopeful words. She spoke about her future as if her world was not about to be ripped apart. She spoke about her country as if the principal task would be to narrate, not to mourn. Then I am reminded of the purposes of leaping into the before-time, of the stance at a precipice one does not see. The perspective of counter-ethics appears, at a glance, to be the perspective of endurance. But it can also be the perspective of endings, of change, of death. This is the Janus face of time. If the kind of relationship with time that we have is hope, or if it is mere duration, without the rhetorical bravado of hope or the quieter pride of endurance or the critical stance of waiting, or if it is mourning, the question becomes how ethics and counter-ethics are relationships with time, repertoires for ways of being not just in, but through it. What I now think about Mrs. A. is that we are always standing at a precipice of things we might know but do not yet know how to see. We inhabit the actions of powerful people and are the signs and sites upon which their doings will unfold, and we live among neighbors poised at precipices of their own. We might turn against each other tomorrow, I think, as I hear the celebrations from next door, see and smell the bonfire, hear the gunshots celebrating the election of a man who stokes hatred. I then want to reprimand myself for the audacity of comparison. The view from the precipice is never complete; it may be no view at all, or it may be a mirage, or it may be overrun with wild, imaginary things. In and beyond Mrs. A.’s conversation with Satya Nand, in and beyond what meaning we can squeeze from a mere forty or so pages, or what we ladle into them from our own moment and its unknown ratios of banality and cataclysm, is a question of how we do, how we might, how we should inhabit time, what is inevitable about the power and impossibility of hindsight, what is imaginable at the breaking points we know we stand upon, and those not yet in view. Before all that, for what I imagine as a series of warm but cooling evenings in her father’s quiet home with all that was familiar beside her, or in a side room in her husband’s house hearing laughter and swift footsteps and opening and closing doors from the other side of the wall, or in the

38 Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand

quiet university office of an eccentric friend, not much more than a decade older than she, her words pressed against the territorializing actions of so many around her, those she knew, and those she did not, those whose political mappings would shape her world as she tried to find the shape of her life.

Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand 39

1 S I N G U L A R I T Y A N D U N C E R TA I N T Y Draupadi

In the early 1940s, Mrs. A. was a young housewife three years married. She was unsettled, ill at ease in her new home, in what should have been a comfortable, secure life during a heady time. War was still on, the young men of her city and its surrounding countryside offered up as the rank and fi le in the Indian Army under British command. Friends were away fighting, and those who were not debated their country’s future and wondered which vision of society would shape it. Her hero, Jawaharlal Nehru, was in prison, which upset her greatly. When she met with Dev Satya Nand, an army doctor training young psychiatrists to serve on the front lines, he noted her demeanor with affection. Care and enthusiasm overrode clinical reserve. In his eyes, she was cultivated but aloof, empathetic but intimidating, tall and imposing and timid and “tender,” “pensive and thoughtful from early school days.”1 Her contradictions were endearing, making her, perhaps, an ideal analysand, self-aware and reflective yet mysterious, at times opaque. He wrote, A beautiful fair-complexioned, dignified and artistically dressed, cultured and well-educated girl. She was taller than the average Indian girl, and attracted attention, as well as commanded respect wherever she was introduced. With large tender eyes, and refined tastes she could charm and even allure when she liked to do so. She was of a trusting nature, confiding and popular with the rich as well as with the poor.2 At times she was dreamy and prone to be absent-minded now and then. But at others she would be the very life of a party, and could entertain very well.3

He knew from the world beyond these meetings that she had “made many boy-friends” in college, and yet “no one could be on very familiar terms with her.”4 He also knew from that world that she was a “formidable opponent at socio-political discussions”5 who adored “reading about the political leaders of her country” and described herself as a “rabid socialist” in “ideas as well as at heart.”6 She reminded him of social worker Katherine Booth and feminist Sarojini Naidu.7 Though Mrs. A. had a happy life, in which “fortune had smiled at her,” she was not “spoilt” or unaware of life’s complexities.8 “Her deep sensibilities and loving nature had made her share the sorrows and the pains of others as if her own.”9 Her family, in all likelihood Hindu Khatri, was an important part of her happiness. Part of a new, urban bourgeoisie, leaders in commerce and politics after centuries of prominence in trade and money lending,10 her community had a “flexible” position in the Hindu varna system of caste and a long role in social and religious reform. Khatris were a literate, often progressive, elite, committed to both a modern identity and upholding social proprieties.11 Mrs. A.’s father was a physician. Although “quite rich,” he put patients before making money and was cherished by his patients, especially village women, with whom he was “gentle and friendly” and who “almost worshipped him” in return.12 He was a devotee of the Sikh Guru Nanak and a Gandhian nationalist, and his household placed high value on the education of girls. Even Mrs. A.’s mother was “highly educated.”13 Together, they were “old-fashioned and strict” but “affectionate and loving,” and had raised their daughter “sensibly and carefully.”14 Like many young people, Mrs. A. scarcely viewed their modern outlook as a sign of being up to date. Her parents, she said, were old moderates, lacking her youthful idealism. My father is a dear old man and so is my mother. They have always followed the rule of the happy-medium. This has not been accepted by, either my brother or by myself as our guiding principle in everything. I am an extremist, with very strong likes and dislikes. I try to go all in for a thing and do it well. Otherwise I am very much like my father.15 Her brother was more like her, sharing her tendency for “go[ing] all in.” She was “very attached” to him.16 As a child, when he was hospitalized with pneumonia and Malta fever, she sat by his hospital bedside, even though he was too ill to recognize her; because, “older only by four years [he] was 42

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much wiser in worldly matters,” she sought his advice and help, “even though he was not always so willing.”17 Mrs. A. had no sisters, a fact Satya Nand viewed as a source of sadness, but her brother brought female confidantes into her life.18 Before his marriage, “quite a number of girls wanted to make friends with me to get acquainted with him,” but the real connection came when Mrs. A. was a young adolescent and her brother married, bringing a new bride into the household.19 Mrs. A. was enamored with her sister-in-law, who was just a few years older, and the two grew close, laughing and sharing secrets. Her sister-in-law brought her out of her brooding self, made her “more communicative” and “less confined to books, music, and a few games.”20 If Mrs. A.’s family was a source of joy, they were also to blame for her “deep tone of anxiety.”21 Her brother had not followed their father into medicine, instead building a successful cloth import business. When she was in her third year of college, inspired by Gandhian noncooperation, he stopped selling imported cloth and began dealing in homespun. It was a moral decision, but a disastrous one. Not only was he now dependent on village workers with whom he had little experience, but a trusted clerk, a household servant he had brought into his business, also cheated him out of a large sum of money. The family faced financial ruin. This new reality had repercussions. Mrs. A. reflected, “I have often suspected that my parents earnest desire to get me married soon was partly determined by this turn of bad luck. They thought it would be difficult to marry an older girl, specially if they had further reverses in fortune.”22 Regardless of how her family felt about dowry (marriage gifting, which, by the 1940s, had ballooned in scale and status as vital bourgeois life), their social world depended on it.23 The difficulties of securing a stable life for their daughter increased with their decreases in wealth. Around this time, the young Mrs. A. met man at a party at her grandfather’s house, the son of one of her father’s patients. She thought little of their flirtation until a marriage proposal arrived at the house. The forwardness of the offer was off-putting (“I was taken by surprise”), but he “courted [her] so well” that she accepted.24 Mr. A. was outgoing, charming, caring, and “desperately in love with her.”25 A successful “capitalist,” he owned a factory some distance from the city. They had a “perfect” honeymoon in Darjeeling, where they “rode together and danced a good deal” and Mrs. A. was as taken with the pretty, Singularity and Uncertainty: Draupadi

43

charismatic women she met as she was with her new husband.26 “I met a number of Bengali girls, I liked their ways very much,” and they inspired in her a “desire to learn dancing.”27 Mrs. A.’s new household, which included her husband’s parents and his two sisters, was bustling and rife with intrigue, a world away from the bookish warmth of her childhood home. Her mother-in-law and sistersin-law, all cultivated and beautiful, had “many girl friends” who came to “live with” them.28 Her husband joined the jollity; “being a happy-golucky person, [he was] very popular with them” and there were frequent outings to see his factory.29 So different this was from the trusting intimacies with her brother’s wife; her sisters-in-law and their circle of friends came with a hovering sense of betrayal. As Mrs. A. reflected on her daydream, the picture of her marital home dimmed. “The father-in-law is quite outside the picture, in their house. The only brother, who is my husband, is a spoilt child of the family. The sisters fus [fuss] on him and so does the mother.”30 She went on, “The sisters have a good reputation outside the house, but they are such hypocrites in reality. They made friends with me in the beginning, but their main aim was to run even my part of the house as they wished. They wanted to know all my secrets and tell my husband about them.”31 There were other sources of unease than engineered jealousies. Though hardly forced, marriage had come at the expense of Mrs. A.’s education. She had wished to “postpone [marriage] til I had passed my BA,” at the very least, or, better still, to work before marriage, as a teacher, an actress, or in promoting socialism, but her parents insisted she leave college to marry and “thought [her working before marriage] was below their dignity and would not allow it.”32 Many losses were enfolded in this sacrifice, including a diverse sense of the future’s possibilities. “I had planned to be a professor of History or Psychology. If not I would have at least taught High School,” and “If I had continued studying, and had become a professor I would have been able to convert so many girls to my [Socialist] views.”33 Once married, certain things had to change. She muted her political views: “I wanted to be a writer but being a Socialist I would have written, that kind of material, and my husband being a capitalist would not have liked it. So I had to give it up.”34 This cut to the heart of who she thought she was: “I think I am a very ambitious girl. I want to be a leader in socialism. My ambition to write, to speak, and to teach are all parts of that basic 44

Singularity and Uncertainty: Draupadi

desire to lead. I have been able to do so in life, and both boys and girls have followed me automatically.”35 More than ambition was at stake. Mrs. A. had been exhilarated by life in college. Those were her “happiest days,” she said, describing a life of thrilling debate, outings tinged with adventure, new friendships skirting romance, impassioned ideas, and a sense of an opening world.36 If she was in Lahore, leaving college for wifehood may have meant giving up a sense of being at the center of the world, leaving spaces that were the “crucible” of intellectual dialogue, conversations pregnant with “answers that explain a new universe.”37 Education contained the future, not just hers but her society’s, embodied in science and Mrs. A.’s own field of study, the English language.38 These, along with arts, theater, and dance, gave Mrs. A. a sense of having a place in that future. I cannot write, because it is likely to be strongly coloured with socialist ideas, and it may not be to the advantage of my husband. I cannot do active socialist work, because I shall have to mix with other men freely. I cannot study because it may break the home if I go away to College. The customs, traditions, and mores of our society would not let one try a hand at anything.39 The sum of all the losses must have felt vast. Such “mores” came together in the Hindu concept of pativrata, the moral wife, a pivotal if malleable idea that, in the early twentieth century, was fraught with all the social investment of any load-bearing metonym for “tradition.” An old but continuing concept, changeable to “suit the needs of contemporary society,” the pativrata had been “reconceptualized” by decades of religious reform battened down ideas about what a right and virtuous marriage was, and what the codes were for respectable wifely behavior.40 These ideals moved through Punjab not just in the demands of family life but also as public propaganda, in pamphlets, literature, and religious tracts.41 These ideas were not at odds with ideas about social reform. Wifely virtue might align with education, science, hygiene, and modern ways of living. It might be linked to nationalism, as in Gandhian models for women’s participation in the freedom movement. It might be displayed by performing rituals in a modern, rationalized way, or, the opposite, through a perfected orthodoxy. Husbands might even expect, or demand, elements of the “modern, Westernized, elusive, forbidden woman” in their Singularity and Uncertainty: Draupadi

45

sex lives with respectable wives.42 Mores of the pativrata may have invited, even demanded, enticing new possibilities for women at the same time as they foreclosed a certain worldliness, directed ways of moving through the world, indeed, the ability to move through it at all. In Mrs. A.’s society, marriage permitted ideals she held dear even as it eclipsed her ability to fulfi ll them.43 Such conflicts came to life in sex with her husband. Sexuality was enfolded in disappointment over thwarted ambition, as she recounted the sexual awakening that came with marriage. Her first interactions with her husband were reluctant, but he was “very slow and cautious with me in sex matters in the beginning and the whole affair became quite a likable experience for me.”44 Later, she reflected in a different tone: My husband was always very patient with me, in the matter of sex. Was [my reluctance] because I was not fully in love with him? . . . The night we got married, [he] only kissed me. I was very tired. But the kiss was an experience, also quite new to me. . . . As time went on my dislike of the business profession, of the in-laws, of having to give up my personal ambition, which were coming between me and my husband, broke down, because of his tact and skill. He had tried to explain what sex was. But I was not interested, before. After all that stood between us had resolved, I became interested and gave myself to him.45 Much is contained in the final sentence: “all that stood between us” could include a love of learning, passion for politics, zeal for social improvement, dramatic talent, and desire for a career. Mrs. A. put the sense that such fulfi llments might divide husband and wife on the side of her own emotions, her own resentment. Not only did their “resolution” settle potential marital unrest, it allowed for the awakening of sexual “interest.” She phrased this in transactional terms, as a gift. Mrs. A. confessed to Satya Nand that she had not “talked to anyone” about her husband because, “It appears that we are one, and it is very difficult to talk about yourself to others.”46 Satya Nand appears to have overlooked the implications of this statement, and possibly its tone. He described her as “having begun to love her husband tenderly. She had the ideals of a girl of the Orient in spite of her Western education. ‘One life, one love’ was in her nature.”47 For Mrs. A, however, this only “appear[ed]” 46 Singularity and Uncertainty: Draupadi

to be the case. The reality was that she did need to “talk about herself,” she did desire a face to turn toward the world. There was more. After three years of marriage, Mrs. A. was childless. She worried this might be due to the contraceptives she and her husband had used early in their marriage (“It was something new to me and I considered, it could solve the problems of uncontrolled birth rate in India”).48 This had become a concern to her in-laws, and Mrs. A.’s “servant girl” was whispering that they were thinking of bringing in a new wife in a “second marriage.”49 Mrs. A. was not bothered. She said, “I am fond of books and spend my time in study.”50 Even so, the lack of a child was “becoming a big gap in our life” and she was “determined to consult some doctor.”51 There may have been things a doctor could not address. Mrs. A. and her husband had stopped having sex. For Mrs. A., this represented a deepening of marital understanding, a kind of maturity in restraint: “He is becoming to understand me better and is controlling himself.”52 The servant girl, however, saw things differently. She warned Mrs. A. that her husband was having an affair with a mutual friend, a young woman named Vidya. Through most of the analysis, Mrs. A. refused to consider the possibility, dismissing the servant’s “funny tales” as a sign of her jealousy and dislike, proof that her intentions were sullied by disappointment in love.53 However, as the analysis proceeded, she appeared to be preparing herself for an altogether different future.

“ I A M W O R K I N G I N A V I L L AG E ”

Mrs. A. challenged Satya Nand to find anything “hidden” in her daydream.54 There was indeed something banal in it: a simple desire for work and social change that only hinted at things less worldly in its fi nal phrase. I have joined the Rama-Krishna Mission and am working in a village to reconvert men and women to the path of Dharma. I am enjoying the work. They respect me and come to me for all kinds of advice. I have healed quite a number of their sick by prayer. “A village” was not a straightforward place for Mrs. A., and the early stages of her analysis dwelt upon what “villagers” might mean to her. Her desire for a social mission with a religious quality was out of character for one “against religiosity of all forms,” and it was clear to Satya Nand that Singularity and Uncertainty: Draupadi

47

villages were a complicated symbolic topography, a map of a social, emotional, and sexual ethos.55 Initially, it seemed to Mrs. A. that the daydream reflected a struggle with distaste for villages. Perhaps this was because of “having been born and bred in a town,” or “comparative ignorance” about rural conditions.56 Perhaps it had to do with the laborers she blamed for her brother’s failed venture: “The villagers do not work hard, they have so many festivals, often have boosing parties, and there is so much sickness. On the whole they are poorly fed and cannot work for long hours. They cannot produce enough cloth. Am I thinking of going to the villages, improving their lot and thus benefiting my brother’s trade?”57 Perhaps it had to do with the incompatibility of social work, which requires “going out of my home for days together,” with wifehood.58 For Satya Nand, the issue was less that Mrs. A. needed to overcome an aversion to villages in order to pursue her dream than that her conflicted feelings signaled the dream’s impossibility. Work in the villages was unthinkable from a social perspective: “She a sophisticated, wealthy, married girl, with no children, educated, rich, and happily married, would never be seen doing any of these things in actual life in India.”59 Or perhaps it had to do with something more complex, the way villages suggested sex and also parsed it. The way they were a symbol, through sexuality, of the permissible and impermissible, the safe and the dangerous. Mrs. A. recalled a childhood encounter at the Rama-Krishna Mission (the mission in her daydream). She referred to this as her only “previous [sexual] experience.” I was a child of about seven when I saw a play, by young boys and girls, belonging to the Ashram near my town, of the Rama-Krishna Mission. The play was about Kand Yudh that is, the war between Krishna and his enemy named Kansa. The young boy who played the part of Krishna was a very good actor. He was about 14 years old. I was attracted by his dress, especially his crown. He played the flute beautifully well.60 When the play was over, the sadhu belonging to the Mission, and the Head of the team of actors, was introduced to me, with all his team. I was particularly interested in the boy, who acted the Krishna. I inquired about his dress and his crown and how he had learnt to be such a good actor. We were shown around. He took me to his room and showed me all his clothes. I was wonder struck by his attainments (R.R. [through48

Singularity and Uncertainty: Draupadi

out Objective Method “R.R.” stands for “Reductive Reminiscences,” and “P.R.” for “Perspective Reminiscences,” part of Satya Nand’s technical vocabulary]). I wished I was an actress too (P.R.) and as I stood there he kissed me. I did not understand much about it, then. The sadhu came in the meanwhile, and explained to me the good work he was doing, as much as I could understand and asked me to join them. The sadhu was a strong big muscular fellow with a big mustache, thick lips, and a strong voice. He lifted me into his arms when I had to cross a gap in the stage. I was only seven years old.61 She recalled this to Satya Nand from the perspective of a child, describing an experience of exotic enticement, the onset of her desire to be an actress, the young boy not unlike the Bengali girls who later made her want to learn dancing. However, at the time, when she told her brother, she learned the stakes were different. He had been “furious and wanted to box the boy’s ears” and told her she “should not have allowed him to kiss” her.62 She asked a “girl friend” about it. The girl “explained that the only other outsider who should kiss a girl ought to be her husband.”63 Now she understood that villages were places both of sexual threat and sexual allure. “I do not have a good impression of the sex morals of village boys,” she said.64 “I remember a boy friend telling me to be aware of them as they forcibly kissed girls, and try to run away with them.”65 She recounted a girl friend’s story of the time a “cow-boy” (cowherd) ran at her with an erect penis, which touched her hand.66 The village was not just a place or a symbol, it was a form, a model of gender that laid out arrangements of sexuality upon the social geography of late colonial Punjab. Mrs. A. was not the only one who thought through gender with the formality with which she traced in her own life. The other case in Objective Method included similar set of ideas, screened in reverse. It was the case of a twenty-eight-year-old psychology professor who was struggling with, among other things, finding a topic for his doctoral thesis and grappling with a recent betrayal by a senior professor who had tried to claim his work as his own.67 A dream about climbing a ladder prompted discussion of sexual frustrations, in which he described his wife, two women of his social class, one called Miss X. the other Mrs. X., as well as a “servant girl” and a boy in the neighborhood. Although he had had a sexual relationship with the latter, he organized categories of sexuality Singularity and Uncertainty: Draupadi

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according to the women in in his life. The servant had an open but cunning sexuality, which included nonconjugal and homosexual sex. Miss X was an “interfering object” in his relationship with his fiancée. He was attracted to Miss X, but due to her “lively sex appeal” and “happy-go-lucky” and “devilmay-care attitude” considered her a poor choice of wife.68 Mrs. X., by contrast, was an out-of-reach object of desire, both married and an intellectual equal. His wife (whom he associated with his mother) was asexual, even angelic: a “good mother,” a “good school-teacher,” self-sacrificing. Late in his analysis, he reflected (with wide-eyed ingenuousness), I notice there is a lot of material about women I have known, and on sex matters. Going over it again and again I consider that the two aspects of my nature, in sex matters are laid out before me. My admiration of my mother and my wife have some common points. I compare them and find them in most ways like each other. The second aspect of the sex component of my nature is my passion. In that state I recollect all the reminiscences about, the servant girl. Mrs. X. and Miss X. act as the intermediary phases between the two widely divergent aspects of the sex component of my nature.69 In the juxtaposition of the two cases, it is difficult to imagine a clearer demonstration of the way a formal concept of male desire, one on which morality rests, depends upon the fragmentation of female sexuality. This spectrum of female sexuality correlated with the contrasting “propensities” in Satya Nand’s analysis, “individualist” and “adaptive,” which in turn correlated to distinctions between cities and villages, upper/middle and working classes/villagers.70 In Mrs. A.’s case, it also mapped onto the distinction between “rape fears versus goddess phantasy,” the first correlating with her disgust with villagers, the second with her dream of “reconverting” and even “healing” them.71 Draupadi, heroine of the Mahabharata, entered Mrs. A.’s case by walking onto this map. Although most frequently paired with Shakuntala, shift ing associations of different qualities with each kept their pairing in motion. Draupadi did not play a single archetypal role in the case. In much of the analysis, she stood for “individualist propensities” or “the aggressive, forward and dominating girl,” while Shakuntala (to whom we will turn in the next chapter) represented “adaptive propensities,” and was deemed “proud, high-minded, and patient.”72 In some places, however, the 50 Singularity and Uncertainty: Draupadi

arrangement was reversed. Neither stood for either village or city, or even for one particular stance in relation to the village, though they offered a way of getting at meanings associated with villages. What Draupadi consistently represented was a broader theme, the way a moral geography involving gender, sexuality, and agentive action was connected to marriage. Mrs. A. referred to the dice match in which Draupadi was violated by Duryodhana as a narrative of wifely dharma: Daryodhan brought Draupadi in the hall, and wanted to disgrace her by taking off her Sari. But as Daryodhan was taking off the layers of the Sari. Lord Krishna hidden to all miraculously was supplying more and more layers to the Sari, so Daryodhana, the wicked had to give up his attempt. (R.R.) This was done because Daropadi was perfectly faithful to her husband. She had fulfi lled her Dharma (Duty) to her husband and so all her wishes had to be granted by the Lord. (P.R.)73 Much of this taps conventional understandings of Draupadi as a righteous victim of both marital deceit and violation, “speaker of what should be happening or should be done” yet propelled by the actions of others.74 It reflects a sense of Draupadi as a symbol of female suffering, as a pativrata who dares to expose her husbands’ failure to fulfill their marital responsibility when they witness her violation but do nothing. Mrs.  A.’s account of the dice match affirmed that Draupadi’s denunciations of her husbands were not denunciations of marriage, but expressions of her husbands’ failed moral duty, that is, of a gendered ethic defined by the condition of being married, women’s need for protection and the need for marriage to enact that protection, a position bolstered by Draupadi’s wifely virtue. But the Draupadi of the dice game was seldom the one Mrs. A. mentioned. More often, she summoned Draupadi’s exile, making it fit the outlines of her own desires: “Daropadi and the Pandavas, when turned out of their kingdom, by Kauravas, went to a few villages and re-converted them to the Co-operative Movement and improved their lot so much that other villages also came to them for help, and then more and more villages came under them voluntarily.”75 Satya Nand saw this as an expression of her desires: “Like Daropadi, with Arjan and Pandavas . . . she enjoys her work. People come to her for advice and respect her. The new combination of religion with socialism, the new prayer heals everything.”76 Singularity and Uncertainty: Draupadi

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In the 1940s, the invocation of Draupadi and other epic heroines was not unfamiliar to politics and, especially, the freedom struggle, though the heroine at the center of most nationalist rhetoric was not Draupadi but Sita, wife of Lord Rama and central figure in the Ramayana, an arguably less complicated good girl whose wifely virtue could be viewed as iconic of nationalist service. Earlier in the century, returning to India from South Africa, Gandhi spoke to a women’s organization about the need for “leaders who were ‘pure, firm and self controlled’ like the ancient heroines,” including, chiefly among them, Sita (he often compared the British to Ravana), but also Draupadi, choosing heroines who had “suffered at the hands of men but survived with dignity.”77 Gandhi’s invocations of the triad of virtuous wives, Sita-Sati-Savitri, were just an incarnation in a long history of associating women (and the female body) with the physical, geographic, and political entity that was India, one that would soon have violent implications. This was not without rebuttals from women, such as Uma Nehru, who decried the “hypocrisy of male nationalist discourse in prescribing models of ideal Indian womanhood” in the mold of Sita.78 Draupadi was a different kind of entity for Mrs. A., an imagined real, or real imagined, woman as much as a moral narrative, and the stories she emphasized were less about wifely virtue than about venturing into the world in order to remake it. Mrs. A.’s eponymous “Hindu Socialism” was part of this picture. Indeed, the two terms converged in Draupadi, whom Mrs. A. saw as socialism’s progenitrix: “Daropadi gave birth to warriors who fought Daryodhan or capitalism . . . they were like the socialists of today.”79 Deeming socialism to be “merely a modification of Hinduism,” to such a degree that a “conversion” of villagers to it would be merely a “reconversion” (a familiar Arya Samaj term for converting Muslims and Christians),80 she said, My dominant interest in life is Socialism. It has not only a political theme, but also a religious one. I think the people of India, cannot understand anything, unless it comes as a natural outgrowth of their religion. So I am interested in showing that Socialism is Hinduism, applied under modern conditions of life, I think, it is so. I believe in the deep wisdom of our sages, they had planned long ago a system, which could be modified to all possible situations. Hinduism has weathered all storms, and will not only weather the storm that is around it now, but 52 Singularity and Uncertainty: Draupadi

will be able to give a lead to others in the similar storms in their own countries.81 The religious nationalism of Mrs. A.’s Hindu socialism is an open question. There are certainly whiffs of it, but there is nothing anti-Muslim (or anti-Sikh, or anti-Christian) about it, and key hindutva issues that had settled into place by the 1940s seem to be missing. The Hindu Mahasabha and other nationalist groups had, by this time, consolidated and institutionalized their ideology into a political movement, but Mrs. A.’s soul was socialist, even as she amalgamated decidedly antireligious ideology with a Hindu-oriented “ancient” identity. And her heart was with Nehru, “the one man to whom we can look for guidance.”82 There was a personal quality to this that brought together national and social concerns with Mrs. A.’s own self-concern. “I am very interested in the welfare of my country,” she said. “I think we are more and more shut-in. [‘We’ appears to refer to women.] We criticise each other too much, and do not have inclination to do creative work. The morals of persons, occupy our minds to the extent of having become an obsession. It is specially so when a woman wants to do useful work. The husband, the father, and everybody begins to criticise her.”83 In this way, from the villages, she returned home, to sniping and backbiting sisters-in-law, to a husband, brother, and father who would direct her future and even how she might feel about the world, to a sense of the home as a “shut-in” place that stifles “useful work,” to a sense that such conditions were not in society’s best interest. Mrs. A., usually opposed to religion (she derided it in familiar Marxist terms, opiate of the masses and so on), understood “healing by prayer” as referring to an ethos of service: “The only prayer I believe in, is the service we can render to one another and thus become a more integrated community or group, so that we can attend to one another’s needs in a better way. Socialism seems to colour my view, but I believe this is the right way.”84 There was sexuality too in this vision, but rather than being about the sexual threat posed by villages, it involved their sexual allure (these may have drawn upon another set of conventional understandings of Draupadi that reckon her a symbol of the dangers of unattached female sexuality).85 Conversion, too, had an erotic quality. Mrs. A. imagined the appeal of Singularity and Uncertainty: Draupadi

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being “able to influence strong and sturdy men of the villages and to get them to follow me,” and thought that the “well-built women” of the villages might be helpful in converting men “to our creed.”86 Indeed, for the young woman, frustrated in marriage, part of the appeal of such work was “the appeal of sex,” and she imagined, “If I were to get surrounded by handsome men, specially in the villager’s attire, with their muscular arms making gestures and appealing to me for a cause, I think I would be inclined to oblige them. In any case, still be, tempted to test, what they advocated.”87 A changed vision indeed of villagers. “But, I would not take to it, just because of their physical appeal,” she relented, perhaps halfheartedly, perhaps with a laugh, perhaps with a flush of embarrassment. Mrs. A. also spoke similarly gushingly about Jawaharlal Nehru, admitting an “infatuation,” describing hearing him speak, and holding him up as an example of a life rightly led. For Satya Nand, Nehru was crucial to the matrix of Draupadi—Hindu socialism—nationalism—self-fulfi llment he felt to organize the daydream. He wrote, She is combining in her dream, Rama with Krishna, religion with politics and synthesising a new Mission, which she is trying to teach like Shakuntala in the villages, under the auspices of Pundit Nehru, who is at the same time represented by Rama-Krishna, in the manner mentioned, and is therefore the author of the Mission, also. She is also playing the role of Daropadi identification, and this endogenous dream-wave colours Pundit Nehru who is in her mind, like Arjan of the Mahabharat, and therefore the husband of Daropadi, a husband substitute for her. Like Daropadi, with Arjan and the Pandavas . . . she enjoys her work. People come to her for advice and respect her. The new combination of religion with socialism, the new prayer heals everything. The thought-critical stage is reached. The identification with Daropadi paints Nehru identification into the style-of-life of Arjan, the warrior and into a political leader, of socialist colouring.88 Indeed, for Satya Nand all correlations led to Nehru. The Pandit was “the nucleus of all identifications.”89 “Resolving” the case in final paragraphs that rose to a fervor, he wrote, 54

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Daropadi, Arjan and the rest of the Pandavas, practiced cooperative movement in the five villages given to them by Daryodhan. . . . Daryodhan and capitalism are the great alienations and schisma in her personality. . . . A war between Capitalist and Socialist Hinduism lead by Nehru, the Arjan of the new Mahabharat. . . . The manifest dream; because the accident occurs. Here Nehru like the Pandavas looses the game. . . . Nehru was in prison when the dream occurred, thus confirming the above-mentioned in the reality of the dream-world. After banishment the Pandavas went to the five villages. Nehru would have loved to do so. . . . The dreamer identified with Nehru accompanies him to villages and does as he would do. . . . The new war of Mahabharat begins and a new Gita is born . . . . Gita merely means a new sentiment or an invention to get over a difficulty. The Gita of the old is re-interpreted in terms of HINDU SOCIALISM.90 In the opening pages of the book, Satya Nand summarized the case and its contribution to his science, The day-dream, due to these conflicts, had ended in an accident, the manifest dream. It ended in exaggerated fears (as if the disaster of a broken home had already taken place) and with new-born but abnormal wishes (I have healed quite a number of their sick by prayer) both in greater conflict with each other. . . . It was found that she was in her subconscious synthesizing Hindu religion and Socialism into one single whole.91 Mrs. A.’s Hindu socialism, a “new thought” representing “new values,” was for Satya Nand the “solution” to the case, the interpretation of the dream and also its creative product. Her wariness of villages was transformed into an abstract arrangement of mythic associations, in which religion and politics might be deeply personal, psychic, even sexual processes. Satya Nand had little to say about the gendered arrangement of sexual fears and desires pulled invisibly into that picture of dharmic action, objective analysis, and political ideology. He drew scenes from her childhood, or those in her marriage, into a tension between “rape fears” and “goddess fantasy,” and while anyone with a recollection of the damaging legacy of psychoanalysis may find relief that he did not frame this as “rape fantasy,” he contributed his science to a worldview Singularity and Uncertainty: Draupadi

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in which domestic safety was juxtaposed with the wider world. That worldview included the dangers of violation by others as well as the sense that ambition, movement, voice, action, and ideas threatened the oneness of the husband-wife unit and the patriline for which it stood. This ethic of security and emplacement, which defined the world as dangerously uncertain and marriage/kinship as the site of female protection, was a subset of another map that outlined the female experience of the male organization of desire. Satya Nand applied to both cases the same analytic frame, the same opposed “propensities” (although the male case lacked “rape fear/goddess fantasy”), demonstrating something akin to what Gregory Bateson referred to, roughly contemporarily, as the complementary schismogenesis of different but interdependent binary gender positions.92 That is hardly surprising. What may be less expected is that as mirrored cases deemed exemplary of the same scientific method, the male and female analysand entered not only the same scientific gaze but a dialogic approach to analysis, one that treated them as equally entitled to a voice on the validity of the analysis, equally entitled to longing and frustration, even if the longings and frustrations of one encompassed and defined the longings and frustrations of the other. In this, Satya Nand not only accepted but was also riveted by Mrs. A.’s political vision, a vision that was founded on a map of sexual ethics. Here, alongside Draupadi “re-converting” villagers with her many husbands, a smart, reflexive young woman found herself at odds with the way sexual, gendered, scientific, political stakes converged in a demand for how she lived her life. And so, where Mrs. A.’s feelings about villages were concerned, something in her was starting to change. College friends from villages challenged her stereotypes, as did her father’s patients, to whom she began to pay more attention.93 On a recent drive through a village, she had entered into an “argument with a friend” and found herself, “probably in the heat of the moment,” defending villagers, saying “that I wished to work among the villagers and said that they were better folk.”94 Draupadi might be a good wife, but she showed that a good wife could go to the village. She might have a dangerous form of female agency, but she could point that agency toward dharma in the most sexually dangerous places. Certainly, Gandhian politics and the assertion that India was defined by its villages may have authorized this shift. It is perhaps also obvious that Mrs.  A.’s

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socialism was at stake in her conflicted feelings about villages and villagers, and that the gendered and sexual associations with villages shaded the implications of socialism and the work of promoting it. When conversation turned toward this (personal and national) path, her tone changed. There were moments when she seemed to be echoing Marx and Engels: “The poor are more powerful if they only come together. They being at the lowest rung of the ladder of the standard of living, have nothing to loose to fight for their rights. They can be the backbone of Socialist India.”95 However, more than reiterating boiled down socialist principles, Mrs.  A.’s Hindu socialism was at once embedded in and opposed to a gendered sexual ethic that underscored distaste for villages; it was among the things she stood to lose with marriage, but it also reversed the encompassment, offering desires that encompassed marriage, not the reverse. In some moments, she wondered if the opposition (marriage/socialism) was false: “I feel that my love for my husband, and my love for socialism, are two conflicting trends apparently only, but they are likely to meet in the end.”96 Mrs. A. initially rejected the maid’s suggestion of her husband’s affair on the basis that the “jilted girl’s mind was warped.” But when she suggested Mrs. A. visit Vidya’s village when her husband was away, she rejected the suggestion on different grounds. “I told [the maid] that once I begin suspecting and go to her village, I must be ready to go away forever, if so required.”97 When the servant whispered about the possibility of an affair, or her sisters-in-law shared her secrets with others, they made it clear that treacheries and violation entered the home space too, and that villages might stand for knowledge rather than ignorance, for truth, albeit painful, and clarity rather than blind superstition. “I think I understand the meaning of the dream,” she said, “It is the marking of a change in my attitude, I was first against the villagers, but now I want to compensate, and work for them.”98 Satya Nand thought that this was a “partial interpretation.”99 His vision of her vision’s scope was vast. “The new war of Mahabharat begins and a new Gita is born.”100 However, the smallness of Mrs. A.’s vision included vital things. Rather than being “secondary,” they deepened the urgency of all a “village” might mean, be, and do for a woman grappling with a gendered ethic of desire that directed not only her feelings but also the kind of life she might be permitted to realize.

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“ T H E A P P E A L O F S E X M AY B E AT T H E B AC K OF . . . A NEW VIEW OF LIFE”

In her first year of college, Mrs. A. met Arjun Singh, a married Sikh student who shared her passion for political debate. Like many young men of the era, Arjun Singh had left his village to be educated in the city, bringing with him an educated wife whose religious views prevented her from joining the socialist crowd.101 Mrs. A. saw herself as Arjun Singh’s mentor and protector, crediting herself with “keeping him away from the Communist circle.”102 They traveled together, in groups and alone, around the countryside and on trips to holy sites. At Punja Sahib, a Sikh shrine near Rawalpindi, she learned about the water Guru Nanak had made to flow from a stone and the healing of the sick “by the blessings and prayers of the priests.”103 She was struck that “people of all status go there” and noticed “that many beautiful girls go bare feet to get water from the spring.”104 On journeys electrified with the natural, religious, and human sublime, Mrs.  A. and Arjun Singh stayed up late discussing politics, lying on the ground and staring into the moonlit sky. On a trip to Kangra Valley, they got separated from their group and had to spend the night in a remote village. “We slept in different rooms, but we were far away from the other inhabitants,” she said, “And we sat and talked for many hours.”105 Notwithstanding such romantic settings, she insisted that their relationship was platonic. Nothing “stimulate[d] any idea of sex.”106 It was at Punja Sahib that Arjan Singh introduced to Mrs. A. to his wife’s brother, an army subaltern named Arjan Dass. The dashing Arjan Dass “impressed” Mrs. A. “at first sight” by telling her “a good deal about his military training.”107 He was “a tall, well-built, broad-shouldered, and  quick-witted young man,” with “a polite accomplished way about him, and . . . at the same time sure of himself.”108 “As fair looking as his sister . . . and as smart and handsome,” he was, in retrospect, “A prototype of the youth, whom I want to convince of my views.”109 She told his sister, Arjun Singh’s wife, that he “looks very much like Pandit Nehru, when the Pandit was young.”110 Arjun Dass invited Mrs. A. to his village and drove her there in a car. His family had built a large, modern bungalow on the grounds with an “old fashioned house.”111 Only a few rooms in the new house were furnished, but those that were impressed Mrs. A. as being “artistically deco58

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rated” and with “modern furniture.”112 His sisters took to her immediately and were “very good to [her].”113 After this, they began a correspondence. “My letters were merely friendly,” Mrs. A. said, “but he was downright in love.”114 Arjan Dass proposed marriage, and though Mrs. A. was “very fond of him,” her brother “did not like that match” and made her show him “cold shoulders.”115 Her family felt that it was too “great [a] risk to marry a soldier” during wartime.116 Though Mrs. A. was “sorry” her brother “stood in [her] way,” she was not convinced it would have been a perfect union. “I had my own doubts, about my being well suited to his temperament. He was very emotional, and sentimental. His wife, moreover would have had to be smart and stylish, up to the standards of the Army wives.”117 Even so, she said, imagining what might have been, her family might have warmed up to him. “If he had persisted, I think everyone would have agreed in the end.”118 In his final letter, Arjan Dass “wrote that he would not give up hope, and would wait for me forever, which is a hopeless situation, as a Hindu marriage is irrevocable on the part of the wife.” She kept the letters and photographs, even after marriage.119 When Mrs. A. moved into her husband’s home, she was open with her husband, sisters-in-law, and their friends about Arjan Singh and Arjan Dass, and felt gravely betrayed when her sisters-in-law shared with her mother-in-law “a few distorted versions” they had “heard from their friends.” Among her sisters-in-law’s many “girl friends,” a girl named Vidya had “become a particular friend of ours.”120 Vidya was Sikh (“but her people do not have long hair”) and of the Jat agriculturalist community.121 She lived in a nearby village where she was the beautiful, “spoilt” only daughter of a rich landlord, and visited the household often, staying for days at a time. Studying for her master’s degree in English, she recited poetry and dazzled with her “repartee.”122 “She quotes so freely from the poets that it is a pleasure to talk with her.”123 She was “very attractive, very fair, and has ‘it.’ ”124 Vidya teased that Mrs. A. might still be in love with Arjan Dass, and Mrs. A., perhaps hungry for someone to trust, wondered aloud if there might be any truth to this. She also wondered whether her secret was safe. “Playfully [Vidya] might have mentioned this to my husband. I hope not. He is very jealous, and might do anything in a fit of jealousy. But I know Vidya and she is too good for such a mean trick.”125 Singularity and Uncertainty: Draupadi

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Mrs. A. described a lifetime of friendships with girls and women, relationships replete with warmth, laughter, fun, and intimacy. She often recalled women whose beauty and friendliness she admired, women who influenced her to try something new or think about things in a new way, barefoot beauties at Punja Sahib, “well-built” village women, Bengali dancers, sisters-in-law, school friends, and sisters of friends. She learned about sex from other girls and women, her brother’s wife, the “servant girl,” school friends. Female friendships brought her into the world and out of herself, and she evaluated her male friendships by comparison to them. But female friendship also brought threat. Girlfriends shared dangerous knowledge; those who were unattached might themselves be dangerous. The pleasures of female intimacy might happen on the grid of smoothly functioning conjugality, among sisters-in-law, for instance, or they could interrupt the security of the marital home, or they could come from outside conjugal kinship, relationships with maids and school friends, bearing secrets, pleasures, and poisonous information. And they could disrupt this very division between conjugal kin and nonconjugal friendships. All these elements converged in Vidya, who was at once an object of desire and a kind of double. Vidya had what Mrs. A. was denied: education, a life of letters, freedom of movement. She was also a proxy in romance. If Vidya teased that Mrs. A. was still in love with Arjan Dass, Mrs. A. teased that Vidya should marry Arjan Dass, a triangulation (Mrs. A., Vidya, and Arjan Dass) that recurred in the case: “I have often suggested to her to marry Arjan Dass, and have shown her the photograph, in a family group of theirs.”126 Savvy Vidya suspected (or had) hidden motivations. In an encounter fraught with sexual tension, Once she had a playful tussle with me, being a strong, haft y [sic] girl, she soon had me on the bed and was sitting on me. I was struggling to get up, that she being a passionate sort, become very excited and began squeezing and kissing me. I got up and told her it was time she got married, and pointed out Arjan’s photo. Teasingly, I told her that Arjan Dass has a couple of brothers, who will be willing to keep their Daropadi occupied in the long absences of her Arjan. (This being a hint at the wrong legend that Daropadi was the wife of all the five Pandavas [Is this Satya Nand’s voice interrupting? Or Mrs. A.’s own?]) She turned round 60

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and teased me, that it was I who was in love with Arjan Dass, and wanted her to marry him so that he may be near me.127 In a web of intimate redoublings, nonconjugal, multiconjugal, and homosexual desire were less differentiated in this moment than mapped onto, even drifting into, each other. “Play” involved a “tussle” with bodies, words, categories, and forms of intimacy. The word “that” in the second sentence leaves it unclear whether the kissing and squeezing actually happened. Polygamy and polyandry legitimated extramarital desires; monogamous conjugality made possible both homosexual and nonconjugal love; homosexuality was an expression of sexual desire writ large. Nonconjugal erotics infi ltrated conjugality at every turn; so too were they legitimated by, potentially absorbed into, flexible conjugalities. She continued, “I think nothing can come between me and my husband if this lively, beautiful, and cultured girl, who has lived so freely with us, has not. But, my in-laws are getting nervous about the absence of children and want him to have another try with another wife.”128 Mrs. A. moved on to the issue of plural marriage: “I have often asked, this girl friend of mine, if it was true that in villages, specially among Jats, the wife of the first brother becomes the wife of the family. She being one of the Jats gets furious. If a girl can flirt with many boys at the same time she ought to be as capable of polyandry as are men who advanced the same argument, for their being made polygamous by nature.”129 Mrs. A. clearly adored Vidya, defender of polyandry (shades of Draupadi?) and bearer of lesbian possibilities. Consciously or not, Mrs. A. described her using (still current) euphemisms for lesbians (“spoilt,” “play,” “single”), repeatedly invoking the “freedom” of Vidya’s condition, and describing her sexual play as “being free,” with all the term might imply. Vidya’s status as a Jat carried with it the weight of sexual stereotypes relating to the custom of brideprice versus the dowry deemed more upstanding by Mrs. A.’s community.130 Her liberty was opposed, for Mrs. A., to the demands of patrilineal responsibility, even as her considerations of her erotic freedom skirted the edges of marriage in any forms. When her husband was traveling for business, her servant suspected all was not as it seemed. But it was Vidya Mrs. A. missed. Yet her expressions of love were bound up in the possibility that Vidya and her husband were involved: “Vidya is my companion when my husband is away. But at times Singularity and Uncertainty: Draupadi

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I cannot find her, when my husband is also away on tour. I miss her much in those days.”131 Although the maid said she saw the two “flirt” the drawing room while Mrs. A. slept, Mrs. A. claimed not to be bothered, translating flirtation into siblingship: “my husband is also very free with her, and I have often noticed them tease each other. They behave with each other as I used to play with my brother.”132 In the same breath she witnessed and denied Vidya’s threat to her marriage, taking pleasure in Vidya’s singularity, in her personality, her sexuality, and her unmarried status, and in the way she so “freely” moved among households and relationships. In a passage replete with themes of sexual uncertainty, uncertainty about actual relationships and about cultural knowledge, uncertainty about the difference between friendship and sexual desire, uncertainty about sexual intentions, Mrs. A. recounted, I was discussing [polyandry among Jats] one day with my husband. His girl friend came in, her name is Vidya [she reintroduces Vidya] . . . and my husband said, “Let us ask her, she ought to know better than either of us.” She so charmingly came between us and said “yes” to me in my ear and playfully pulling his ear near her, said the same to him in his ear so that we both exclaimed together that each one of us were right, and she jumped out from between us, from the sofa, and stood laughing. Her presence brightens our home life.133 What must we do to hear those last six words in a spoken voice, full of tone that might communicate their meaning? Was she serious? Naïve? In denial? Sarcastic? Ironic? Was she really so blind? In the face of so many clues, surely there was motivation for insisting on Vidya’s innocence. Perhaps sustaining uncertainty allowed Vidya’s exuberant sexuality to exist in terms other than threat. Everyone can love Vidya. Alternatively, if as Lawrence Cohen writes, “the category is the site of the ethical,”134 the triangulation on Mrs. A.’s drawing room sofa (and her bed, in encounters in which she offered a photo of Arjun Dass to Vidya in exchange for herself), as well as in their shared love of Nehru, put categories into deep play in which ethics and erotics (and politics) commingled in terms that had nothing to do with asserting or rebuking moral norms. Such play was serious. While Vidya’s unlocated sexuality destabilized Mrs. A.’s domestic position, it was full of singular exotic potential, compressing all the possibilities of conjugality and nonconjugality into a uni62 Singularity and Uncertainty: Draupadi

tary figure of desire, making conjugality just another element of category play. In this, lesbian relationships could be reabsorbed into conjugality. Might Vidya become Mrs. A.’s (co-)wife? That a sexual relationship with Vidya was an option was clear to Mrs. A., who at once seemed to deny and entertain the possibility: “She wants to be free with me, like silly school girls at times. I do not know why should she be so keen on it. When she is fond of the company of men?”135 Her obliviousness to her own desire and to the possibility of Vidya’s affair with her husband were of a piece, as were the possibilities that Viyda’s sexuality at once threatened and enlivened Mrs. A.’s marriage. The maid suggested the sexual pleasures of Vidya as a lure into polygamy. “My servant girl tells me that Vidya wanted to be free with me sexually so that I might agree to have her as the second wife of my husband. I think she says all this because this jilted girl’s own mind is warped.”136 Possibly blind to her husband’s relationships and to her own desires (though not to Vidya’s), Mrs. A. was scarcely unaware of lesbians. Both cases in Objective Method involved extensive reflections on homosexuality, especially in childhood and adolescence, portraying it as a familiar, even normal, feature of youth and glazing its inevitability and allure with a moral wash that included notions of predation and seduction (qualities that also attached to heterosexuality in youth), as well as the concept of “spoiling.” Sexuality between girls or women (and between girls and women) was portrayed as anticipated, if not entirely allowed, within the scope of friendship and paradigmatic relationships (sisters-in-law, teacherstudent). There was a sense in both cases that homosexual sex was obviously better (hence the ethically loaded notion of “spoiling,” too much of a good thing), so maturity entailed, if not overcoming such appetites, then replacing them with a respectable social situation: heterosexual marriage. Although social condemnation is not to be denied, there far less evidence of it in Objective Method than there is of the possibilities that loaded terms (“spoilt,” “wicked,” “free”) can have multiple meanings, that language and sex share opportunities for play and delight, and that fear, even disgust, may not be incompatible with pleasure. Mrs. A. described a childhood friend: The class girl who had told me her story of the cowboy, began telling me, about her admiration for a school teacheress. She used to take flowers Singularity and Uncertainty: Draupadi

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for her, and waited for hours at a stretch to have a few words with the teacher. Once she came very excited to me, saying that the teacher actually called her in the room, and asked her to press her. After that she did not turn up to my room for some weeks, and then one day she came in a bad temper, and told me all about her experiences with, the teacheress, who “must have spoilt many others.” She became friendly with the teacheress again, and brought some photographs on sex acts, and some books written on such matters, pretending to hide it from me, but really wanted me to get tempted and join their wicked circle.137 The case of the psychology professor also involved such encounters. One began with a “sweeper girl.” The sweeper girl was a very shy, hard working sort of girl, and we often played together. I used to call her BUA, which means elder sister. The servant girl, instead of showing displeasure, was very pleased and gave me sweets out of her pocket money to be distributed among the two of us, she used to do part of her work also. When she had become friendly, and we were playing together alone, she came and took us to the back of the house under thick trees and bushes. When we had reached there, she, saying it was too hot undressed herself in the upper part of her body, and began to chase this other girl. I missed them and went in search but could not find them, and was very worried. Later I started running about the place, crying Bua, Bua, as loudly as I could. Being afraid that my shouts might bring mother on the scene, the servant girl called out for me, and I saw both of them undressed and enjoying sexplay. The servant girl invited me, but I returned back. It appeared I had lost my Bua. [was there wry laughter here?] I made friends with a boy, who was about 15 years old, and was our new neighbour. He was very emotional, and related to me, his homosexual contacts, with older boys. He tried to teach me to masterbate. He had to come through these bushes and trees behind our house, and we often played there. These girls started coming and playing with us. I tried to warn my friend about their dirty habits. But he seemed to be thrilled by the description, and asked me to show it to him. I did, but to my surprise he started throwing stone at them and made fun of me, as one too thick-headed to understand, when I tried to advice him. The servant girl looked around, both standing up and still undressed. She 64 Singularity and Uncertainty: Draupadi

pretended to rebuke this boy, but he also undressed and in the pretended attempt made by the servant girl to fight him, she possessed him. The sweeper girl was frightened and dressing herself quickly came away with me to the house. I was reminding her of my advice not to be friendly with the servant girl, and that it was dangerous to use sex parts. She went and told my mother, who got the servant girl married off. My sister, Bua, and I used to play together afterwards. The servant girl was quite happy about getting married.138 What is to be made of this startlingly explicit memory? Even if it was not a fantasy, it was at the very least infused with fantasy about what certain actions (“fighting off ” and “possessing”) might have meant. The professor’s account shows at once the lability of sexuality, its sheer presence, and internal struggles to situate it. The latter is not unique to homosexuality; both he and Mrs. A. struggled with marital sexuality and its relationship to morality and agency. I write this aware of the rebuttal that the terms “lesbian” and “homosexual” are inappropriate to the context, impositions of Western arrangements of sexuality into a time and place when such categories were not meaningful, or the overwriting of archival lacunae with the assumption that sexuality must be named.139 However, in the case of this text, though it does not use the term “lesbian,” it is clear that homosexuality was understood by both Mrs. A. and Satya Nand to be a distinct thing, an identifiable class of sexual longing and activity (he, at least, uses the term “homosexual”). Even in the absence of the term “lesbian” (itself delightfully, anachronistically vague), evocative euphemisms for sexuality among women in both Mrs. A.’s English and North Indian languages suggest at once that lesbian sexuality was recognizable as such and also that this class of love thrived in ambiguity, an arrangement perhaps familiar to Mrs. A. from literary works such as Chugtai’s Lihaaf (published in Urdu in 1942) and Tagore’s A Wife’s Letter (published in Bengali in 1914), in which female friendship and even kinship enshroud intimacies in ways that might be skillfully sustained.140 Similarly, it is clear that bisexuality was an available reality, if not a definable concept. Also evident is that the kind of “things” that homosexuality and bisexuality were in this case, need to be understood on their own terms, not by reference to realities imagined as global, cosmopolitan, Singularity and Uncertainty: Draupadi

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Western, Indian, Punjabi, or otherwise. It is not that they don’t accord with “Western” or “cosmopolitan” ideas about homosexuality, but that they do not line up vis-à-vis “heterosexuality” in quite the way we may be expecting. In Mrs. A.’s case, “homosexuality” was a distinct category in a family of polymorphous sexualities that collapsed desires, actions, and categories in a more general erotic, one that, though defined, was not defined in opposition to heterosexuality so much as in opposition to conjugal sexuality, to marriage. Homosexuality was a subset of nonconjugal sexuality, and if it opposed any “normativity,” it opposed conjugonormativity. Conjugonormativity encompassed heteronormativity, not the reverse. While there are certainly distinctions to parse between different forms of nonconjugal sexuality (including characteristics attributed to male-male, female-female, and other less binary arrangements), the broader distinction situates ethics of emplacement and belonging. The fact that the “solution” to homosexuality might be marriage involves an ethos less morally loaded against homosexuality than in favor of the need for sexual containment writ large. The mother “got the servant girl married off ” and the servant girl was “quite happy” (we don’t know how the sweeper felt about it, or if that relationship even ended). Similarly, homosexuality’s connection with youth had arguably as much to do with a juxtaposition of marriage with childhood as with one that sees childhood as developmentally inferior to adult maturity (the psychoanalytic framing of the stories conferred that element). Where lesbian sexuality is concerned, the cases use ascriptions that are not used to discuss male-male sexuality: “wicked,” “warped,” “dirty,” a “habit.” Yet neither case pathologizes same-sex desire. Though diminishing, infantilizing associations of lesbian sexuality with youth harbor the ethically complex concept of play and the pleasure-dense concept of spoiling. As a category, such sexuality is imagined not as a categorical “other” but as the fact of exceeding categorical containment. Conjugality itself was not, however, a singular thing, and plural marriage (which was much on Mrs. A.’s mind) complicated this picture. Into the twentieth century, colonial laws parsed rights to plural marriage in terms of religion, and colonial ethnographies made polygamy and polyandry, and their various forms (as well as exogamy, brideprice, and so on) into intellectual curiosities, creating a mesh of group identities, moralities, and social forms that are visible in Mrs. A.’s curiosity about Jats’ mar66

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riage practices. That this curiosity shared a slice of time with flushed recollections of Vidya shows that sexuality was part of the way conjugality was itself in flux, with different forms taking on different sexual associations. This is visible in ample literatures of and about the period, in Punjab and elsewhere, which recognized the potential for drama in polygamy’s moral ambiguity and in moral contests over the sexual status of women married through dowry or brideprice. In both her fear of Vidya’s place in a potentially polygamous union and her interest in Vidya’s community’s marriage practices, homosexuality might have opposed conjugality, but it also found a place within it. Love between co-wives was an imaginable outcome of plural marriage. Even in rejecting her maid’s suggestion that Vidya’s desires were a precursor to polygamy, Mrs. A. showed that if lesbian sexuality were a matter of immaturity versus mature marital love, the reverse might also be true: Lesbian sexuality could be enmeshed in conjugality’s forms, its pleasures underscoring all erotics and “play” bringing a welcome joy to the serious business of getting on with adult life. At once continuous with female friendship and part of a sense of social risk (not unlike the way male homosexuality can involve connotations of criminality), homosexuality articulated here with ethos, not identity.141 For Mrs. A., Vidya’s potential crime was “the stealing of another girl’s husband.” “Vidya is a wayward girl who will settle down soon. She has some ideals and will not steal a friend’s husband.”142 At certain moments, Vidya was a Draupadi, not for the way the heroine represented the dharma of marriage or social work in villages, but in her fiery temper and uncontained sexuality. I this way, Vidya-as-Draupadi helped Mrs. A. decide Draupadi was a model she would not wish to follow: I have read that [Draupadi] was the daughter of one of the Rajas of the Punjab States, in those days. She was a very lively and head-strong girl, and stronger than all the warriors in the kingdom. She was herself a very good markswoman. She was very hotblooded and before marriage was never controlled by any person. She listened only to her father, and that also till he fell in line with some of her own wishes. This is the type of girl likely to be successful as a wife these days, and can control men. Vidya is like this. I wish I could acquire some of these habits. But I think I shall remain like Shakuntala.143 Singularity and Uncertainty: Draupadi

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“Proud, high-minded . . . and strong-willed” Shakuntala offered an alternative to the excessive agency of one who might control others, especially men, and thus “be successful as a wife.”144 It is a dim vision of marriage, and of whether a sensitive (female) soul can survive it, and juxtaposed with the “other” Draupadi, the one who headed into the villages to tend others with compassion and assurance. One of the benefits of having a fragmented female sexuality is that fragments can be loosened from their casing and rearranged. For Mrs. A., unlike the psychology professor, sexuality both was and was not separable from conjugality. Even nonconjugal offerings might be contained by flexible conjugal forms (polyandry, polygamy), yet their power seemed to reject the bracketings marriage might attempt to impose. Although throughout the case there was a sense of threatening outsides versus safe interiors, village boys and dangerous teachers versus caring husbands, treacherous husbands versus whispering maids, jilted maids versus playful girlfriends, opposition was not all there was. There were also sultry bedrooms and starry skies, mountains and forests, holy places and drawing rooms, stages and classrooms, in which erotic play, including the erotics of conversation, did not depend on a map of insides and outsides, threat versus containment, security versus abandonment. In this alternate landscape, many things might be imagined. Lesbianism might be, for a moment, not entirely unlike polygamy; the multiplicities of nonconjugal desire might be another mode of polyandry. For Satya Nand, most of these things were “secondary,” and could be gathered up like so many fallen leaves. All the centrifugal secondary dream smudges may be collected together. They are: Professor, teacher, Sikh servants, rats, Arjan Singh, Arjan Dass, rape fears versus goddess phantasy, brother, father, servant girl, class girl, country, creative work, husband, obstructive criticism, inlaws, Vidya, self-Vidya comparison, Vidya-husband relationship, polygamy versus polyandry, problem of having a child, marital disaster, jealousy.145 To us, Mrs. A’s unblinking accounts of sexuality are refreshing, but to Satya Nand they were uninteresting. He said almost nothing about lesbianism, only noting that Mrs. A. “identified strongly” with Vidya. I am not the only one to note this lacuna. After reviewing Satya Nand’s analysis, 68 Singularity and Uncertainty: Draupadi

Mrs. A. responded, in a section Satya Nand entitled “The Analysand’s Rebuttal”: “That ‘Acting,’ ‘dancing’ and correlated dream-waves were not included. The reminiscences about Vidya were not given the proper importance. The idea of ultimate happiness, always in the background, is not included in the interpretation.”146

“ I F I T CO M E S TO A B R E A K I N G P O I N T I W I L L N OT B E F O U N D WA N T I N G”

Part of what made Satya Nand’s objective method objective was its commitment to “the whole truth.” Unlike Freud, for whom references to a social reality like marital unrest might have been reduced to individual desire and fantasy, Satya Nand took social possibilities seriously as a matter of principled science. This meant that there were things about Mrs. A.’s life that could not be ignored, which he phrased as an accomplishment of his technique: “The Objective Method discovered that the problem of the probability of the second marriage of the husband with Vidya was real. This problem was to be solved.”147 Early in her analysis, Mrs. A. recalled an outing with a friend: “She took me a few days ago, to her hospital. I admired her dressing the patients. How useful she was to people with her medical skill. She talked to me about her day-dreams of doing better and better in her profession. It appeared such workers never needed a companion of the opposite sex.”148 Mrs. A.’s thoughts contained two visions of the future. The first considered all that was lost to married life: a future career, a meaningful life. However, as she settled into the realities of a marriage coming undone, she began to imagine another future that was not lost but was yet-to-be. The two things happened together, truth and the future coming into view through imagining life beyond marriage. “Now that, I fear my marriage may not be successful, I want to begin my work, which I had planned before marriage, but this time I want to begin in villages.”149 This was not without sadness. “I could go and live my own life. I should be quite happy, but the idea that I was unsuccessful at marriage would be a painful spot.”150 Later, she made the point with stronger conviction. “If it comes to a breaking point, I shall not be found wanting.”151 For Satya Nand, the case’s “resolution” involved accepting one of the terms of her analysis, namely, her Shakuntala identification. For Mrs. A., Singularity and Uncertainty: Draupadi

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there was another “thread” to follow: “I notice, the problem of marital unhappiness; jealousy, and planning my future on surer foundations. There are four solutions: to follow the example of Pundit Nehru (when he lost his wife), to follow Shakuntala, to follow Draupadi, and to follow the threads of my life where I left them, when I got married.”152 She did not mention what may have been a likely outcome: that she would return to her parents’ home and to life on their terms. Neither did she voice indignation about abandonment. Rather, if there was abandonment in her picture, it was an inaugural, liberating loss. Now she compared herself to Nehru and her condition to her country’s: Nehru is banished and imprisoned. . . . In both cases [Draupadi’s exile by Duryodhan is the other] the fault lay in capitalism. . . . My side is also lost. . . . I am turned out of my home. My husband is also a capitalist after all. Nehru is banished. . . . He is in villages. . . . I am turned out of my house, and in villages. . . . I shall not come back. . . . I shall do as Nehru does.153 Alongside Nehru, there were many cultural models for life beyond marriage. There were missionaries: “I think the only missionaries required these days are Socialists.”154 The idea could summon many things at once: Christians establishing themselves in the countryside, doing good works and winning souls in close affi liation with colonial rule, but also those akin to missionaries such as adherents of the Arya Samaj, who built schools and hospitals and endeavored to win souls back from Christians.155 There were ascetics and devotees, storied figures of Punjabi lore and public life who often transcended religious identities.156 The idea of the ascetic is also associated with the Hindu life cycle; one of the ashramas, or stages of life, the wandering ascetic has left behind married and family life (usually with a sense of completion) to spend the final (or penultimate, depending on how you count the stages) years of life at a remove, in service of a higher dharma, be it seva (service) or bhakti (devotion). And there were widows, upon whom associations of missionaries and ascetics converged. While debates over widow remarriage circled the question of women’s sexuality, distinctions between ascetic and householder, and visions of missionaries as social workers supported a progressive model that allowed a widow to devote “her life to public service, especially as a teacher” while “sublimat[ing] 70 Singularity and Uncertainty: Draupadi

sexuality” into work for the social good.157 Mrs. A. would have had in her own social circle examples of widows, and even divorcees, living productive lives in professions,158 in settings not unlike the Rama-Krishna mission of her daydream. There were also more public figures she might have had in mind, less models of appropriate action than more “dissonant” and “fragmentary” voices in periodicals, decrying women’s imprisonment in homes, reformists’ unrealistic expectations, and all who would blame women for “social evils.”159 In literature, an emerging cadre of Punjabi feminist writers included Amrita Pritam and Krishna Sobti, whose work portrayed constraints of marital life and possibilities for other ways of living. When Mrs. A. said she would not be found “wanting,” she may, intentionally or not, have meant it in two ways. Many of her imaginations of a realistic future ended with the same coda: a mention of her ability to control sexual urges. Her time in Kangra with Arjan Singh was an example of how she could “control her sex easily,” she used the phrase again after she said she would be “quite happy” to “go and live her own life,” and she noticed that women like her nurse friend “never needed a companion of the opposite sex.”160 The question of desire concerned her: “I think sex will not come up as a problem for me.”161 Yet, the tacked on feel of these comments suggests that either the urges were stronger than she admitted or that she was attentive to social propriety, to what she thought Satya Nand might expect to hear. She was also confident of the erotic possibility of singlehood: “The appeal of sex, may be at the back of the first attraction to a new view of life. But it gets deeper later on.”162 The contrasting threat of the unattached woman and sexless requirements of postmarriage existence color her sense of the future, a frieze of apparent contradictions that, in fact, forms a continuous picture of marital emplacement and social belonging. The sexuality of villages could, however, go other ways: in an ethic of belonging, it made the protective containment of marriage at once necessary and virtuous; in a counter-ethic, “villages” made such work alluring. Even as sex beyond marriage was something a twenty-one-year-old might feel she should disavow to an older family friend, “villages” offered the possibility that a liberating erotic might conjoin with social transformation, and both with national independence and personal fulfi llment. Mrs. A. was, after all, a feminist. She said, “The narrow outlook on morals in India must go. Young men and women ought to be free to choose Singularity and Uncertainty: Draupadi

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their mates, without restriction of caste or creed (P.R.). If Rajkumari Amrit Kaur and Mrs. Naidu took the cause of Socialism the country would soon be on the right path; that is, the path of progress and of the Dharma of Equality (P.R.).”163 Draupadi was part of this, but in shifting ways. Broadly speaking, she signaled a fighting impulse (“Like Daropadi. I would fight Daryodhana” is a recurring sentiment).164 Draupadi’s fierceness, however, was put to diverse uses in relation to marriage. In places, it was at odds with marital contentment in representing “individualist propensities,” resisting conjugal kinship, even her in-laws. Business in India uses much of the tactics of Dharyodhan. . . . I wonder if my husband is also Dharyodhan in disguise.165 I hate my in-laws who are as cruel as was Daryodhan or as any capitalist can be. I am like Daropadi. Nehru is my Arjan. Shall Nehru lead me to war-path as in the Mahabharata or to the constructive work of education as in the play called Shakuntala?166 On the other hand, Draupadi as represented the fight for marriage. I am like Shakuntala [in being potentially cast out from marriage] and if I met her ill-fate, I should better act like her too. . . . I would take up Socialism, which is my son-substitute. I must pursue Socialism, preach it and for a living I would take up teaching. . . . But I cannot be entirely like Shakuntala. I have the woman in me as strong as in anyone else. . . . Say as strong as in Vidya. . . . I would not rest content. . . . Like Daropadi. I would fight Daryodhana. . . . Daryodhana, the rich cousin of the husband, due to her husband having lost the bet, though allowed by law, but against all decency wanted to strip her naked in the open court. . . . Loosing a husband and his marrying again is also a great shame. . . . I have “vengeance.” . . . I can be jealous. . . . I shall hate and fight. . . . I shall win in the end as did Daropadi.167 In Draupadi, it became clear that Mrs. A. was ambivalent about marriage itself. Though Draupadi was “the woman in her,” fierce in voice and action, righteousness unwavering, the path of that righteousness was less clear. For Mrs. A., the ethical status of marriage changed and Mrs. A.’s categories for evaluating it came unglued. She talked this out.

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I am becoming to realize that the villagers, are the backbone of India. Now that, I fear my marriage may not be successful, I want to begin my work, which I had planned before marriage, but this time, I want to begin in villages. The rest of it, merely denotes my self-confidence. . . . I think there can be attained a system of thought, which can show to the masses of India that Socialism, is merely a modification of Hinduism. It is so, otherwise Pandit Nehru and people like him, are selfcontradictions, between their religious trends and their national ideals, both of which are deep-rooted in them. I think he can lead even in this matter. I love my husband, but due to certain doubts and fears which have some foundation in facts, I think I better plan out my future independent to what happens to my married life.168 The future resolved into clarity. From unwillingness to accept the categories on offer came unease with the ethical topography they supported, and from that came a sense of how she might, now, begin to think about the rest of her life. Just as Mrs. A. did not question Draupadi’s commitment to dharma but left open the nature of the dharma, by invoking her position in relation to marriage and its violations, she began to envision a new life. This happened at the pressure points an ethic of emplacement placed on her own ethical commitments, her desire to do good in the world, a desire that, as it happened, coincided with joy, “her happiest time in life.” These limitations were everyday matters of married life, but they were also matters of abstract principle. There, amidst Nehru and Draupadi, Mrs. A. turned her world’s ethical model inside out in order to imagine a life beyond marriage. In ambiguity around whether Draupadi stood for dharmic action or agency exceeding it, it became clear that the real issue was not a distinction between “adaptive” and “individual” tendencies, but the pressured distinctions emerging from “marriage,” as a force that arranged her world. Depending on the year of the case, Mrs. A. may have been familiar with the work of Punjabi writer Amrita Pritam, who was perhaps only a few years older than Mrs. A., and whose work exploring themes of women’s independence, sexual freedom, gendered double standards, and violence was beginning to receive acclaim in the 1940s. Pritam’s life, which included marital separation, public unrequited obsession with poet Sahir Ludhviani,

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and longtime partnership with the artist Imroz, made her a figure of renown beyond literary circles. In a 1982 interview, she connected national self-determination and the arc of history with a defiant personal voice, epitomized by Draupadi: I saw in this journey a very big question of our history which for centuries is hanging in the air. In the Mahabharata period when the Pandavas lost everything in gambling and Yudhishter putting himself as stake, lost, and when he even staked Draupadi and lost, then Draupadi in the crowded court of Dhritarastra asked one question: Yudishter after losing his own self, what right did he have to put her up as a stake? That moment nobody could answer in the court. Even Yudhishter could give no answer and since that time Draupadi’s question hangs in the air. And it was my yearning that in this creation’s journey, the soul of my creation would be Draupadi’s soul who, in a crowded gathering feels the need to question the rulers of the time. And today I would like to call my journey of the consciousness, a journey from Draupadi to Draupadi. . . . It’s a long journey from Draupadi to Draupadi, at whose one end stands Draupadi who is not the cause but the effect, Pandavas are gamblers and Draupadi is a pawn to gamble with. And at the other end Draupadi is standing who is not the effect but the cause. Not a pawn to gamble away but one who has come to gamble.169 Mrs. A. seemed to be moving from Draupadi to Draupadi as well. Was Draupadi a model of singular power, or of preserving the dharmic order that is marriage? Was she a pawn or a gambler? The conundrum is not unlike the central question of the game of dice, “Who are you, who have lost yourself, to wager me?” in asking how freedom might be maintained when its very meaning is already compromised by an encompassing value system. This question resonates with the injustice of the colonial condition, but it also establishes the tenuous position of women not only in the disorder of foreign rule, the grave injustice of being owned by another, but in the “rightful” order of things, in which justice prevails yet a free (male) person can still determine the life of another. In the game of dice, the wager and loss lead to the surprising possibility that in a man’s loss of his

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right to himself, “his” woman has found a chink in the armor of the social order, and thus a place from which to speak, indeed to decry. At the same time, it may have tapped a broader thematic of the Mahabharata, or at least made use of the way women are situated in it, as Das argues, as moral mediators of violence, speaking in the confusion of conflicting principles, violence and nonviolence, cruelty and noncruelty, and conjoining them in a space of uncertainty from which they might raise questioning voices.170 Another ethical possibility emerged from Mrs. A.’s uncertainty about how to place Draupadi. To the ethic of marital emplacement, which in its failings might elicit outrage over failed protection, the failed promise of belonging, Mrs. A. posed a counter-ethic of singularity. Building a different sense of what was possible upon a different sense of what was important, she outlined an ethic centering on the emplacement and stability of marriage, one that figured singularity as an element of threat. She also resituated those components, posing a counter-ethic that saw singularity as a way to imagine not only a livable life but also a life committed to social well-being. I use the term “singular” (although Mrs. A. did not) because it condenses what I feel was most at stake for her: the social status of being unmarried and an ethical abstraction that takes meaning from it. Her sense of singularity was not a synonym for “individualism,” rising, instead, from her dissatisfaction with Satya Nand’s use of the term, but it was also not an antonym, and Mrs. A.’s counter-ethic is not to be mistaken for a cultural claim, an Indian model of selfhood juxtaposed with an insufficient or imposed Western one, or a constraining Indian model of womanhood rejected for a liberating cosmopolitan one. Instead, it was the ethical opposition itself, between singularity and conjugality, that made it possible for her to imagine an alternate reality. Singularity is a tenacious figment of crisis. Postindependence, decades of public debate and legal dispute would hinge on the question of how a woman was to be located in relation to marriage, with conventional and legal arrangements persisting in imagining women as to-be-married, married, divorced, or widowed. Even as the laws that organized divorce and widowhood were contested, it remained, broadly speaking, that to be unmarried beyond a certain age was to be unmarriageable, conceptually dislocated, and socially suspect. That “never-married” would become a recognizable social category signals how deeply normative marriage is,

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how single is not something a woman is, it is something she becomes, often through crisis. Questions raised during landmark legal challenges through India’s postindependence—“on whom must she depend?” “to what rule of law is she accountable?” “what are the limits to her claims?”—underscore the precariousness of the certainties marriage is supposed to bring. In such instances, some public voices have claimed that the “problem” of unattached women is one of Western incursion. In Mrs. A.’s time, films and pulp fiction underscored the conflation of the single woman with both the West and with the dangers of liberated sexuality, with cultural icons such as the vamp and femme fatale. (Even now, such modern fantasies about tradition and its geographies are invoked as though obvious truths.) In order to revise the value of singularity, something else had to happen for Ms. A. She seemed to notice that marriage didn’t just ensure the certainty of emplacement or security but established an ethic of certainty. If singularity was dangerous and singular women threatening, this was so because of their relationship to uncertainty. However, in a counter-ethic oriented toward singularity, uncertainty could not be fi xed or resolved but revalued. If an ethical binary mapped singularity and conjugality onto principles of movement and emplacement, with conjugality paradigmatic of locatedness and certainty, and singularity a sign of dislocation and uncertainty, then envisioning a counter-ethic to conjugal emplacement founded not just a sense of life’s direction but also a sense of life’s purpose on a principle of uncertainty, of pleasure and possibility. At the risk of repeating myself, it is worth reexamining the way the counter-ethic of singularity was not juxtaposed with social connections writ large, or with a general sense of the collective. It was defined in opposition to a specific social arrangement, marriage, an arguably more acute, even derivative, position. A certain perspective might see singularity defined against conjugality, not social connection more broadly (as in Satya Nand’s oppositional urges), as an imperfect, yet-to-be-fully-realized form of individuality. However, in thinking in that way, we reduce marriage to a peculiarity, a smaller piece of something larger that we might call “the social”; indeed, we see marriage as something ethics attends to. For Mrs. A. (and for an anthropology dawning during this period by making sense of social worlds such as Mrs. A.’s), marriage was the social world, the fabric of existence from which “the social” and its ideas and categories arose. There

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is nothing more peculiar about the web of institutions and infrastructures that is marriage than there is about the web of institutions and infrastructures that is politics, say, or religion, or economy, or philosophy, though we treat these as more easily abstractable, more obviously the site of ethical purpose. It seems just as reasonable to say that in, not in spite of the ethical binary of singularity versus conjugality, resources for ethical imagining might become accessible that are less available in distinctions between “individual” and “group” orientations. The most important of these may be uncertainty. That kinship can be the source for ethics, not in being synonymous with the “everyday” but in its abstract and formal quality, strikes me as being at once gloriously feminist and gloriously anthropological, turning the tables on the idea that ethics apply to the intimate, or that political visions of freedom are paradigmatic for petty intimacies. The reverse, it would seem, is true. The trenchance of marriage as an ethical position remains. Discourses about the safety of women and the safety of society from unattached women are as vivid now as they were in Mrs. A.’s stories of villages and domestic intrigue, and so too is the embrace of uncertainty as a counterstrategy. In our own time, organizations and social movements have assumed the important work of addressing at once the condition of “single women” and the fact that their very existence is understood as a “problem.” In 2011, a brilliant sociological study of women’s use of public spaces in Mumbai generated a social movement for women to reclaim public spaces, not in terms of their right to purposefully move through them, but in their right to just be on their own in public. In Why Loiter? Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan, and Shilpa Ranade described a double standard in which men in Mumbai were free to enjoy the pleasures of being in public for no apparent reason, while women were required, in a seldom spoken rule, to demonstrate both their reason for being in public and their connection to domestic space, the everyday effects of ethoses of protection conjoined with notions of respectability.171 Women’s ability to take pleasure in public spaces, they argued, has everything to do with being seen as located in relation to others, and locatedness has everything to do with how female sexuality is valued. The problem is larger than the constriction of women’s movements; it is the limitation of women’s right to serendipity and the unknown. In response, they suggested that women reenvision the value

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uncertainty and claim the “right to risk.”172 Ethically revaluing the unexpected, the book spawned a movement of young women doing just that: setting up chessboards on city sidewalks at night, spending time in public just to talk and laugh, loitering. Against her own mappings of risky spaces, of all that was beyond marriage and a happy home, Mrs. A. went to the village for a counter-ethic. Rather than reading her life in accordance with ethical narratives in which Draupadi was a symbol of wifely virtue, she made something else of the dilemmas of that status. At the point at which we might anticipate a demand for familial recognition, or social inclusion, or the embrace of belonging in the midst of an unfair situation, a marriage failing due to a husband’s infidelity, a traitorous girlfriend, in-laws seeking to replace a potentially barren daughter-in-law, a more defiant call resounded. This was one that looked elsewhere for possibility and wed freedom to uncertainty, joy to singularity, and both to the possibility of building a better future for herself and her society. In this was a guide for how a life could be lived and a world could be built. In the dialogic enterprise of Satya Nand’s “objective method,” Mrs. A. was invited to reflect on the analysis. In spite of all it missed, when “Asked to state, the tone of the dream as a whole, she realized it was a hopeful one.”173

“ T H E I D E A O F U LT I M AT E H A P P I N E S S”

Mrs. A.’s singularity was not isolated, although it rearranged the terms of connection. Such arrangements and rearrangements were also pressing for women’s movements in the mid–twentieth century, for groups concerned about how women’s issues might fare amid other social movements and the risk that women’s emancipation might be encompassed by “larger” freedoms (to be sure, a Draupadi-esque concern). The 1940s were a transitional period in Indian women’s political mobilization, as new, radical visions “undermined the hegemonic claims of the major women’s organizations.”174 Women who turned to Marxism, including jailed revolutionaries encountering socialist writing in prison, “gained a new vision of women’s place in society,” one in which they would “work side by side with men spreading the message of socialist revolution.”175 Both Marxism and nationalism contained a dilemma for feminists. To what degree were wom78 Singularity and Uncertainty: Draupadi

en’s rights to be addressed as separate and valid, and to what extent should they be subordinated to other concerns, such as nationalism or class struggle, and sorted out once these were accomplished? During the noncooperation movement, this was a tangible question: Should women’s organizations seek to pass legislation, or should they practice civil disobedience by boycotting the legislature?176 Amrit Kaur and Sarojini Naidu sought legal reform, while many male leaders urged noncooperation. In the late 1930s, in face of public opposition, women advocating for legal reform and comprehensive enfranchisement “increasingly . . . couched their pleas in terms of human rights and spoke less often about the special contribution of women to politics.”177 Tensions between the strategies divided an ethos of gender emancipation into conflicting streams: social work versus politics. To a certain degree, this question had the imprints of older concerns about how to direct reforms on women’s lives, toward emancipation and systematic matters, or toward “social evils” such as child marriage and prostitution, a dichotomy that also related to the kind of actions women social activists themselves might be permitted. Women’s movements adopted a wide range of positions on colonial rule, nationalism, socialism, and questions of what a just society might look like. Individual women adopted, or were permitted, diverse strategies, some women traveling and communicating widely to promote suffrage and social concerns, and others, especially middle-class women, focused on encouraging “women to fulfi ll their social obligations to the family and nation” while being “respected and honored.”178 Radical visions of emancipation were no less linked to ideas about respectable marriage and the dangers of uncontained sexuality; Muthulakshmi Reddy, who promoted laws banning the marriage and religious practices of devdasis on the grounds that they constituted prostitution, envisioned a society in which “mature females lived alone, supported themselves, and made their own decisions about marriage,” a vision that imagined a past “morality . . . where both men and women exercised self-control.”179 Mrs. A. mused around these issues, in one moment seeming to scorn, or at least play down, the idea that sex might complicate politics, in another crafting a plan for sublimating sexual urges. Path of Dharma is not the path of narrow morals, but the path of the good of the great numbers. Even if men or women had a few aberrations of Singularity and Uncertainty: Draupadi

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character, and blunders were committed in some cases in sex matters, it would be nothing as compared to delayed progress of the country as a whole by keeping women out of public affairs. . . . The worst wound is frustration and disappointment, and this can be healed by auto-suggestion. Frustrations can be prevented by the adoption of a socialist government. . . . We must confide and express our hidden wishes to friends and then ought to choose a creative path like socialism to act as an outlet and as a stimulant to our creative energies.180 Her youthful concern about sexual frustration feels experimental, and in certain moments I want to shout through time and typeface, “It’s not so bad! You can have sex and a purposeful life.” I settle for reminding myself that life may have taken her to understandings beyond those she could voice at age twenty-one. I also wonder what conversations might have taken place in her parents’ home, a household with progressive ideas about women’s education but an “old fashioned” strictness about marriage? (Her marital home seems to have been a place where political debate was replaced with gossip and talk of business profits.) Women gained the vote in Punjab just a few years before Mrs. A.’s birth. Had her brother or parents sided with Gandhi, who felt the struggle against the British should take precedence over women’s suffrage? Had they debated whether the vote should be extended to all women, or merely literate women, or wives of property holders? Had they discussed reserved representation? Had they, like many nationalists who promoted women’s rights, assumed women to have a proclivity for social work and social change? Had they argued over the merits of women’s role in politics versus social work and caring for a family? In 1946 the Rau Committee’s report on Hindu legal reform presented its findings on matters of importance to women, and women’s organizations grappled with the uneven support of the Indian National Congress. At that juncture Mrs. A. would have inhabited a moment of heated debate over different models for women’s activism, and the whirling spheres of action and ideas that posed these things against each other (social work versus politics) hummed with the tension between the powerful changes wrought by women in “their own” spheres versus the value of independence per se. That this had everything to do with sex was, if not clear to Mrs. A. herself, resounding in her struggles to consider sex in her future. In a similar, 80

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but stronger voice, in the 1982 interview, reflecting on “Women’s Lib,” Amrita Pritam said: Like woman, man is also a slave. Man has not yet tasted friendship and company of liberated woman as an equal partner. Men and women have not yet met as two independent human beings. If men and women are not economically independent, how can they love? . . . Economic enslavement obstructs the experience of love. . . . To me, women’s lib means a fuller development of her personality, so that, she does not have to ask for freedom. She herself develops a capacity to achieve it.181 Guided by a sense of women’s economic dependence in a colonially rigged capitalist system, with laws that disenfranchised women, and leaders who claimed women’s support while delimiting their roles, Mrs. A. also saw the way love-in-place could be oriented against principles of service and equality. She did not go as far as Pritam in calling for unenslaved love, but she did recognize the quality of being free as opposed to begging for freedom, and the way love and freedom could be differently conjoined (both at issue with Draupadi). Nascent too in her musings was the feminist idea, contained in Pritam’s words, that singularity does not foreclose connection but makes it authentically possible. These thoughts depended on a fiercely binary gender arrangement and defined freedom in relation to heterosexuality, obscuring what may be the most stunning thing about this case, its descriptions of homosexuality, especially between women. Lest I repeat Satya Nand’s error, we should not lean too heavily on historical contests over the relationship between women’s and national emancipation, but should return to Mrs. A.’s more intimate stories, the parts of the case that feel gossipy, and the things that, in the 1940s at least, eluded politics. Why, for all her treachery, was Vidya, part of Mrs. A.’s “ultimate happiness”? Aside from the obvious possibility that Mrs. A. genuinely loved her, Vidya’s sexuality has everything to do with both singularity and uncertainty, both qualities long associated with lesbian sexuality. The love of women was elemental to Mrs. A. sense of what was true, real, and free. In an analysis that reappraised ethics of uncertainty, beautiful women, enchanting women, fondness for women, the love of women, desire for women, and desiring women constantly reappeared. They reappeared as sources of dangerous knowledge and bodily allure, inspiration, and Singularity and Uncertainty: Draupadi

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windows onto possible lives. They infused moral categories with everyday desires, risk with pleasure, “wickedness” with “play,” and all with “being free,” extending a matrix of joy and danger to political passion and, in moments, national well-being. Freedom, uncertainty, untethered desire, and personal freedom were co-travelers in this universe, coming together, so to speak, in lesbian sexuality. There are other places to look for a sense that lesbian authenticity and freedom rebuke the hypocrisies of marriage: Veena Oldenburg’s courtesans of Lucknow saw their chapatbazi as more authentic in eluding the transactional and performative nature of both their relationships with clients and conventional marriage.182 To critics of the 1996 fi lm Fire who charged that it portrayed lesbian relationships as derivative and the result of failed heterosexuality, others observed that “Hindu female lust outside of matrimony has long been understood as a result of neglect and ineffective conjugal containment.”183 The very project of dream analysis was tinged with the homoerotics of friendship. Satya Nand introduced his method as an adventure in the potential “overfulfi llment” of dreams, to which Mrs. A. replied that there was nothing to be unearthed. There is more than meets the eye in a pleasant daydream, he suggested, quoting Thomas Browne, My awakened judgment discontents me, ever whispering unto me that I am away from my friend, but my friendly dreams in night reunite me, and make me think I am within his arms. I thank God for my happy dreams, as I do for my good rest, for there is a satisfaction unto reasonable desires, and such as can be content with a fit of happiness.184 In this brief exchange was a sexuality of scientific knowledge so refreshingly different from the entrenched subject-object, male-female dynamics that shaped the usual erotics of psychoanalysis (Dora, anyone?). It underscored the sexual-ethical arrangement in Mrs. A.’s musings, never valorizing, never condemning, that made it a snapshot of the sexuality of politics, rather than a sexual politics, founded less on bold, male declarations, public speech or the actions of congeries, than on quavering, at times questioning, at times forthright girlish reflection. Whether because women offered a real possibility for intimacy or, more likely, for their symbolic associations with freedom, even as Mrs. A. strutted her ability to “control her sex,” the sexual tropes she associated with “ultimate happiness” made a future with the force of queer idioms as, she imagined, realistically, life 82

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beyond marriage. In this was little concern with what a person (or a woman, or a wife) should be than with how to make a life as a person, less concern with social mores than building a just society. Mrs. A. was ready for her “breaking point.” Toward the end of the case, there was in Mrs. A.’s words a tone of openness to the future and a realism about what it could bear, because in her voice there was also the possibility of failure, something risk entails, and hope disavows. Mrs. A.’s counter-ethic had risky qualities, curving toward freedom and deterritorialized desire with all the paradigmatic risk that entails, the most pressing of which were not the things she imagined but all that was unforeseen, all that was beyond her control. In their call for women to claim their right to the pleasures of the public, Phadke, Ranade, and Khan write that they do not wish to romanticize risk. I appreciate this, but with Mrs. A. at hand, I wonder, why not? Why not at least mythologize? Ethical myths will get produced anyway. Why not counter them with celebrations of deterritorialized desire, the pleasures of uncertainty, the strange wonder of estrangement? Sometimes this is just the work of a moment. If this seems like too much of a burden to place on Mrs. A.’s young shoulders, too much vigor to match her ambivalent words, then perhaps it is because my feelings have outreached my pace through the text. There is more here to see. Mrs. A. did not just imagine going to the villages, she imagined going to the forest. Let us now leave Draupadi and turn to Shakuntala, to the dreamier scenes and wilder settings that entered the sober daydream of Hindu socialism and the struggles of being a person among others.

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2 B E YO N D R E C O G N I T I O N Shakuntala

In her third year of college, after a year of waiting, Mrs. A. was promised the lead in the play The Recognition of Shakuntala, which was to be performed at the Rama-Krishna mission of her daydream. A year earlier she had played one of Shakuntala’s girlfriends, watching a friend assume the role of the heroine. When her turn came, she was soon to be married. Later, when she thought about all the things she had given up in leaving college, the role of Shakuntala was among the dearest. The desire to dance and act continued to unsettle her with the promise of a joy more immediate than a career in teaching or promoting socialism. When Satya Nand gave her the case to review, she complained that he had left out the part about acting and dancing, left out “the idea of ultimate happiness.”1 After marriage, Mrs. A. took up “Indian dancing as a hobby.”2 It was a source of frustration: “I am making only a slow progress at it. I cannot get into the mood. I think I am stage-shy.”3 It also took her to strange new places in her mind: I have a peculiar interest now in Indian dancing. When I am practicing alone, with music from the gramophone, I loose [sic] myself in it. I begin to feel that I am dancing in a beautiful wilderness with only the birds and the wind as my companions. I think I feel the distant presence of a child far away, who I was looking after before I reached that spot. I think it is the play Shakuntala that comes to my mind.4 Dance could be solitary and transporting, but it could also be convivial and social. She recalled dancing on her honeymoon, where she learned

new steps from beautiful Bengali women. Satya Nand persisted in finding dance only tangentially important, and he noticed less Mrs. A.’s enthusiasm than her “regret at the slow progress with dancing,” saying she was “stage-shy for dancing but not for Socialist propaganda.”5 Dance, however, opened Mrs. A. not just to melancholy over the lost role, but to reverie. When Mrs. A. thought of dancing, it was the play Shakuntala that “came to mind.” Indeed, Shakuntala “came to mind” very frequently for Mrs. A. “Working in a village” reminded her of Shakuntala: The only time I worked in a village was in a play called Shakuntala, acted in our College. A friend of mine was acting as Shakuntala, and we had to be her maids. It was a very well acted play (R.R.) I had almost been given that part, but the directress thought, I would better wait for another year (P.R.). But I got married and left the College.6 Nehru reminded her of Shakuntala: I recall having attended a lecture by Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru. I was wonder stuck by the devotion of the man to his work. The death of his wife, whom he loved passionately, was not able to effect his interest and enthusiasm (R.R.). He reminded me of Shakuntala who devoted her youth to bring up her son Bharat.7 The “Collection of correlations...” reminded her of Shakuntala: This reminds me of the play we would have acted again, in my 4th year, with me as Shakuntala.8 In fact, the “the whole of the dream reminds [her] of the play called Shakuntala.”9 Perhaps because of this, Satya Nand asked her to “reminisce again on these dream smudges” (acting and dancing), and then wrote, “it may be said she realised that Daropadi-identification contained these items, [whereas] Shakuntala-identification and its dream wave implied, ultimate happiness.”10 The original quotation is somewhat unclear, especially given Satya Nand’s unique approach to comma splices. I am confident, however, that my “whereas” is appropriately introduced, and that Satya Nand talked Mrs. A. out of thinking that “acting” and “dancing” (and possibly Vidya) were really where her happiness lay, and into thinking that the real answer lay in Hindu Socialism, and that he associated the former with Draupadi Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala 85

and the latter with Shakuntala, whom he saw as a moral compass. Perhaps this was a gesture of avuncular care (“what will you do with that degree?”), or perhaps it was part of the way Hindu socialism fit his scientific agenda. If, however, Satya Nand was firm in thinking that acting and dancing were incompatible with Hindu socialism as a source of happiness, Mrs. A. seemed to feel assuredly otherwise. Although less concerned with Mrs. A.’s feelings about dance and acting, Satya Nand was interested in what might be gleaned by applying Shakuntala’s story to Mrs. A.’s life. Positioning Shakuntala as “adaptive” versus Draupadi’s “individualism,” he anchored Mrs. A.’s crisis, her threatened marriage, to these elements, one representing ambition and independence and the other familial embeddedness. In the previous chapter, many of the passages I quoted as examples of Satya Nand’s analytic work with Draupadi continued by describing Shakuntala’s counterimpulse. It was when partnered with Shakuntala that Draupadi could form the analytic glue, as together they arranged the themes of Mrs. A.’s life into a “correct” understanding, a “resolution.” In some instances, Shakuntala helped Satya Nand hear Mrs. A. There are indications, that the analysand is well-identified with Shakuntala, and the future is intuitively thought to be the same as that of the heroine in the play. Shakuntala as well as the dreamer were very happy before marriage, and had a well planned out path for the future as maidens. When Shakuntala’s husband turned her away without recognizing her, as his wife (due to amnesia) she went along the path she had built for herself, before the actual marriage took place. The dreamer, due to this identification has similar motivation for the future. She wants to begin again at the programme of socialism and teaching.11 In others, Mrs. A.’s nationalism and her identification with Nehru were analogous to Shakuntala’s parenting of Bharat (whose name, after all, is another word for India): There is a good deal of truth in the statement that Pundit Nehru is the father-substitute [Mrs. A. rebutted this, asking why Nehru might not be considered a husband-substitute], and he is identified with the sage, with whom Shakuntala lived with her son Bharat. . . . The two identifications synthesize a motivation to bring up this son, Bharat or India, 86 Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala

according to the way Shakuntala and her Guru on the one hand and Nehru on the other had brought up their sons [never mind that Nehru had one daughter, and no sons].12 Mrs. A.’s changing feelings toward villagers assumed a new, larger meaning through Shakuntala. As her “Adaptive propensity” grew (associated with Shakuntala and “Like,” and directed at villagers), the “Individualist” propensities (“Hate,” associated with Draupadi, and directed at her husband’s family) would wane. Mrs. A. often went along with this vision, searching her psyche for opposed Draupadi and Shakuntala impulses. Frequently, however, she was less concerned about the differences, and saw both as models for “constructive work,” educating, bringing the “cooperative movement” to villagers, raising a son and nation, and improving the status of women. She said, It is high time women took more active part in the shaping of their country’s future. This was done even in the olden days. For example Daropadi was an adviser of the Pandavas, and Radha was companion of Krishna. Shakuntala was able to bring up her son, when her husband failed to recognize her. She kept her son all the time under her care and tutorship. In the end, the son, named Bharat, became so strong that he defeated his own father.13 Shakuntala and Draupadi were also glue for long chains of association. These are a defining feature of Satya Nand’s analysis. Analysands may have initiated them with their correlations, but Satya Nand glorified them, rising above even Freud in the complexity of connections, reorganizing “smudges” and weaving in mythic plot points in epic stretches. Reading the case, I often find myself getting sucked in to these dense passages and the intellectual work of sorting connections, finding the key to all mythologies in their detangling. These sections are such hard work. They can easily dominate the case and they are certainly where we are meant to look. But there are also moments when it feels as if a door flies open and the wind blows those papers to the floor, when I am startled into looking elsewhere, looking outside. The scene of Mrs. A. “loosing” herself, dancing alone in her room, transported to the forest, is one of those moments. When I first read that segment, beginning with a “peculiar interest” in dance, I myself was “reminded” of someone, a woman who also had a Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala 87

“peculiar interest” in Indian dance at about the same time as Mrs. A., though she would have been younger. She, too, practiced alone for hours in her room; she, too, had been close to her brother’s young wife. Like Mrs. A., her passion was cut short by family who felt her dancing inappropriate for a bourgeois Hindu girl. Unlike Mrs. A., the loss was seen as predicating psychosis and an eventual diagnosis of schizophrenia. After marriage, she too had attempted to return to dance as a form of therapeutic cure. Later, when she was more or less lost in a forest of hallucinations, her family debated how they might see her as part of the family. One person said that the fact that she could not recognize family members, and therefore not “connect,” meant she was morally unfit for family life. Another person objected. The point was that you had to try to recognize her, to “make the effort to connect.” The argument revolved around a breach of the ethical status of recognition and its social effect, “connection.” If recognition was the foundation for ethical action, for healing and togetherness, then how can we evaluate those incapable of recognition, those who are unable to “connect”? This woman often said beautiful and inscrutable things about herself: “The hands are forest.” She counted on her fingers. “When I look at my hands I see this one is a forest, one, two, three, this is also forest, four, five. I look at my hands and I see them but I do not know what this face looks like.” Was this self-recognition or was it evidence of illness in its absence? What pulled tight the stitches of this “remind”-ing, this musing on a “dream smudge,” for me was not just the theme of dance, or that the two women were more or less of an age. It was Shakuntala. It was Shakuntala because Mrs. A.’s recollections about dance slid into Shakuntala. It was Shakuntala because hers is a story about recognition. And it was Shakuntala because Mrs. A., like the woman I knew, was building a life and a “peculiar” sense of herself around the idea of being lost in a forest. Whether it was the third-century (roughly) Kalidasa play or a version of it in which Mrs. A. almost acted, The Recognition of Shakuntala is a moral narrative about recognition, abandonment and reunion,14 and its plot (creatively reimagined by Satya Nand) is the most detailed mythic story in the case. Though much of Satya Nand’s analysis attached its themes to Mrs. A.’s life, recognition figured little in his analysis. But for Mrs. A., recognition was vital to all she made of the play, the role, and their place in her life. 88 Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala

The theme of recognition is not altogether absent from Satya Nand’s work. In a sense, it frames the whole endeavor. It is there in the medium of the case, an “experiment” in psychoanalysis that was, after all, about how best to know an other and how best to know oneself. Objective Method foreshadowed his later writing on the importance of self-knowledge by emphasizing the importance to dream analysis of recognizing the facts of the real world, the contingencies of people’s immediate lives and dilemmas. He took issue with what he considered the inscrutability of Freudian analysis, which he deemed a form of mysticism. For the “scientific mind,” he said, Freudian dream analysis was “Mumbo-jumbo,” an arcane and specialized method.15 He intended Objective Method for the “layman,” as a clear method “in which theories or dogmas or doctrines cannot interfere with observation.”16 For Mrs. A., recognition had little to do with science or tangles of association, and everything to do with art, feeling, the blown-open door of being “loosed” by music and movement. Against the staid realism of Hindu socialism and the (largely) human struggles of Draupadi, Shakuntala offered her dance, gods, apsaras, curses, wild animals, angry sages, and magical rings. As Mrs. A.’s gift to Satya Nand, Shakuntala was a soft rebuttal to a strident ethos of scientific self-knowing, and her story a beautifully corrosive opening to the discovery of a possible future, not in recognition, but in its opposite.

“ L AT E R T H E K I N G A L S O R E CO G N I Z E D H E R ”

Satya Nand wrote, somewhat blandly, “There are indications that the analysand is well-identified with Shakuntala, and the future is intuitively thought to be the same as that of the heroine of the play.”17 Because Shakuntala told the story of Mrs. A.’s future, it was worth recalling its details, and therefore, about half way through the case, Satya Nand provided them. Mrs. A. appeared to be thinking of the play, and of a script you or I could easily locate. Satya Nand, however, had a different version in his head, a conglomeration of iterations and elements of entirely different stories. It is worth entertaining his story: A daughter was born to a great Rishi, when he was concentrating on a Tapasya (or special exercises of penance, including what is now-a-days called research, experimentation, and invention) to conquer the throne Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala 89

of Indra, and even more than that. The king Indra, who rules the Purgatory in Hindu Mythology, came to know about it and was afraid, lest the Rishi may be successful, and turn him out of his kingdom. He sent a relation of his wife, to go and tempt the Rishi to get married to her. After that, ‘The Rishi would be a relation of mine and would not fight me.’ Moreover he would not be capable of such concentration after marriage. The plan was successful, and Shakuntala was born. She was reared in all the wisdoms, by her father. She grew up a very beautiful woman, learned and an artist of repute. She was friendly to animals and to the village girls and boys. A prince passed that way, hunting deers, the deer which was wounded, by the prince went to Shakuntalas, who was their friend. She attended the deer, with the skill she had learnt from her teacher. The prince followed the deer. He fell in love at first sight, with Shakuntala. It took a great deal of woeing [sic] before Shakuntala agreed to be his wife. Her father agreed, and they were married in the village and the jungle. The prince left, and was very sad to leave her. He went away, but there was no guard sent to take her. She waited for a long time. One of these days when she was to give birth to a baby, she lost the ring that was given to her by her husband. The baby was a boy. When he was a few days old, he had to be taken to his father. She left for her husband. The day she was leaving every-one was very sad at her departure. Her charm had won her the heart of every man and woman, even the birds and cattle were sad at her parting. She reached her husband’s kingdom, with great expectations and pleasant day-dreams. She sent word in to the prince who was the king by now, that his wife had come to see him. She was told the prince had married only once and that was only a few weeks ago; that she could not be the wife. There must have been a mistake. She could not show the ring either. She persisted in seeing the prince, which he allowed, but she could not make him recall the old days. The presence of the child made it look like a case of black-mail. Broken-hearted she had to leave, his kingdom. The greatest tragedy had befallen the most beautiful, the wisest and the most accomplished girl in the known world at that time. She was now a widow. She could not go back to her father’s place. When she passed that way, on her way

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back, the father came to take her, and the people of the village stood all along the bank of the river, on the other side, to welcome her. They were crying, and sad for her ill-luck. She would not go back to them as it was against the traditions of the country. They bade her goodbye and blessed her. She went to her mother, in Indra’s kingdom, but would not stay with her. She was taken in care by an old Rishi. She worked for him and brought up her son. She taught him all the wisdoms, even the military science, which was taught to girls as well as boys in ancient India. She named her son Bharat (the Sanskrit name for India) and accompanied him on all his excursions, while he went out shooting. He grew to be a great soldier, and well-versed in all the known sciences. The ring which Shakuntala mother had lost, had fallen in a stream. A fish had swallowed it. It came out in the house of a fisher-man. He took the ring to king, who was the husband of Shakuntala. At the sight of the ring, his memory returned, and he told his romance to his ministers, who recalled the woman with the son. He went to her village but she was not there. He searched for her everywhere but could not find her. After many years, he was adviced to start an Ashwa-Megha Yug. In this custom, the king who started it, was to let loose a horse, who wandered through the kingdoms of various monarchs, and the ones who acknowledged the owner as stronger than themselves, allowed it to pass, offering hospitality t the warriors that followed the horse. But the king who, wanted to challenge, the owner, captured the horse. The warriors then, had to go and fight the king, to retrieve the horse. The horse let loose, was captured by Bharat. The father came in the end to fight, as Bharat had defeated the warriors of his father and was at the point of defeating, and wounding his father as well, when the mother recognized the father’s chariot and later the king also recognized her. All the great kings and the wise Rishi, with whom Shakuntala had stayed all these years, blessed Bharat, and the three went back to their kingdom.18 Among the many differences between Satya Nand’s version and the play, the most important is the omission of the curse, which is intriguing

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considering the detail with which he recounts other, seemingly minor, details (Shakuntala’s journeys, her adoration by animals, her education of Bharat, which does not figure in the play, and the horse ritual, neither the play nor the Mahabharata). Besides providing narrative tension (the reunion of the lovers is thwarted, an obstacle must be overcome) the curse orients the play’s moral message, establishing the failure of recognition as injustice, and, at the same time, absolving Dushyanta of responsibility for his failure. So, too, it establishes Shakuntala’s moral failing, the youthful indiscretions of passionate love and the inability to properly acknowledge the sage, as a failure of recognition for which she is held responsible. The curse distributes the ethic and blame for its failure. (Where the play focuses on love, responsibility, and recognition, the Mahabharata version emphasizes patrilineal kinship and a person’s right to stake claims within it, underscoring the human agency of injustice and allowing Shakuntala a stronger voice in claiming Bharat’s right to his lineage.)19 In an essay published (in English) in 1920, Rabindranath Tagore considered the message of the play as, “rebellious passions raise storms.”20 The “unrivalled” play, he wrote, “depicts how Restraint can be harmonized with Freedom,” with all of its action and tensions, “joys and sorrows, unions and partings” arising “from the conflict of these two forces.”21 The contrasting moods of the two acts contrast two forms of love, one immature and passionate, the other mature and purposeful, portraying a transformation from “earthly unstable beauty and romance to the higher union in the heavenly hermitage of eternal bliss.”22 Love in “the sphere of physical beauty” is elevated to love in “the eternal heaven of moral beauty,”23 demonstrated not through Dushyanta’s failure and eventual recognition, but through Shakuntala’s transition from the first act when she “had not learned how to restrain herself, how to hide her feelings” to the end of the play, when her “deeper feminine soul” is revealed, and she becomes “sober, patient under ill, intent on austerities, strictly regulated by the sacred laws of piety,”24 and “invested with the dignity of a matron . . . the image of motherhood, tender and good.”25 This was not just a message for lovers. Kalidasa’s presentation of a “moral union,” Tagore wrote, established two distinctly Indian principles, the first, the “tie of home life,” the second, the “liberty of the soul abstracted from the world.”26 Founded on a message about what maturity means for women, Kalidasa deployed gender to articulate moral qualities in ways fa92

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miliar to Sanskrit theater more broadly, in which female characters are frequently likely to be “enigmatic,” “goddess-like, but sexually and emotionally vulnerable,”27 to represent lassitude and change but “wield their power quietly,” in contrast to epic heroines who “fight and win their battles through quick wit and verbal skills.”28 Gender underscores morality not only in plot but also in language. Kalidasa’s plays script women to speak Prakrit, a more informal, everyday language, replete with “spontaneity,” and men to speak Sanskrit, formal, perfected, purified, and “legalistic” language, creating a “fugue-like interplay” that “emphasizes the tension between emotional responses and socially ordained behavior.”29 Although Kalidasa may be credited with portraying “independent females,” heroines of complexity, strength, and subtlety, he did so by raising a moral edifice utilizing the building blocks of gender.30 Satya Nand’s narrative departures should not be taken as evidence of inaccuracy but as the creative reckoning of a multifaceted, multiversioned tale in order to highlight themes he saw as relevant for his analysand. Certain things matched Mrs. A.’s life: (i) A renowned father, (ii) an accomplished daughter, (iii) marriage to a prince, (iv) perfect happiness that lasted a short time, (v) accidental, but serious misunderstanding between the husband and the wife, (vi)  a  great disappointment, (vii) left to own resources, (vii) fighting one’s way through troubles, (viii) the guidance of a wise old man, (ix) slow and steady hard work on one thing, (x) final success and (xi) a success greater than was possible otherwise, with re-acceptance by the husband.31 In these connections, Satya Nand felt, a new social vision involving a colonized subject’s path to liberation grew from a youthful process of “identification,” oriented around accomplishment, voice, and self-determination. It is a remarkable contrast to other visions of the colonized psyche, those founded in damaged masculinity.32 When Shakuntala’s husband turned her away without recognizing her, as his wife (due to amnesia) she went along the path she had built for herself, before the actual marriage took place. The dreamer due to this identification has similar motivation for the future. She wants to begin again at the programme of socialism and teaching. Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala 93

There is a good deal of truth in the statement that Pundit Nehru is the father-substitute, and he is identified with the sage [Marica], with whom Shakuntala lived with her son Bharat. The identifications with Shakuntala as well as Nehru, have given her a son, and the name of this son according to the identification with Shakuntala is Bharat and according to the Nehru identification is also Bharat or India. The two identifications synthesise into a motivation to bring up this son, Bharat or India, according to the way Shakuntala and her Guru on the one hand and Nehru on the other had brought up her sons. Her alienation against the in-laws, who are thinking of rejecting her for the sake of the lack of a son, also tend to give her a son-substitute in the dream-life.33 In many ways, it is a lovely reading. Mrs. A. does not long for a son, mourn her childlessness or fear the end of marriage so much as she longs to “bring up this son, Bharat or India,” to participate in the nurturance of an independent nation, and to do so in concrete ways. “The reminiscence of Bharat or India as the son of Pundit, and her ambitions for her son, if she had one, are very similar, and she thinks that her future lies in going to Indian youth . . . what Shakuntala did to Bharat, her son.”34 Satya Nand’s method, at least in Mrs. A.’s case, occasionally entailed predicting the future, which he did in at least two instances. One involved the dizzying display of associations between Nehru and Arjan, Gandhi and Krishna, Duryodhana and capitalism, which ended with “The Gita of the old is re-interpreted in terms of HINDU SOCIALISM” (the complete passage appears in Chapter 1).35 This was followed by a prediction: “She gets in the end, the husband and the good things she missed in city life and which come of riches, as mentioned already due to the activity of the other endogenous dream-wave, of Shakuntala identification, who got back, in the end all she had lost. New emotions are born, new values have formed. A new thought has evolved.”36 Another involved Vidya: “Vidya will be merely looking after her husband, in the meanwhile, and the analysand’s renown as servant of India, and the  essential good nature of Vidya, will bring a reunion with her husband, who will follow her in her achievements leaving Vidya.”37 Both were Shakuntala-esque reunions: The girl “gets in the end, the husband.” Dharma and a hopeful future coincide in restored marriage and 94

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patriliny. But there was a twist: “the girl” will be not “merely looking after a husband” but accomplishing “reunion” through the glow her accomplishments in service to the nation. If Tagore found in Shakuntala an ethic by which a person’s ethical action and place in the world might be understood through feminine failing and eventual maturity, Satya Nand tilted this arrangement: Feminine realization of a just place in the world might found a secure and dharmic marriage. The ethical status of recognition, marriage, seva/dharma, nationalism/the world, and “adaptive”-ness were of a piece, performed in the reformation of a family around the idea that service to the nation might replace the raising of a son. Patriliny in political terms.

“O N C E I V I S I T E D T H E B AT H I N G G H AT S O F H A R I D WA R ”

Among the events of Mrs. A.’s youth, a trip to the Ganges had left a deep impression. Once I visited the bathing ghats of Haridwar. I saw many women and they were going to visit their respective Pandits, and talked to them of their troubles, these were mostly, about childlessness, husband’s second marriages, mothers-in-law, poverty, illnesses, worries, and fears of all kind, which had undermined their health and the worst of all, had dwarfed their souls. In fact, many of them had never enjoyed the luxury of having a soul. (R.R) I was so moved, that I resolved to do something about the matter whenever I could. (P.R.).38 Many of Mrs. A.’s reflections hinged on righting compromised authenticity. In a personal instance, she doubted her maidservant’s suggestion about her husband’s affair because “the jilted girl’s mind is warped.” In relation to India’s nationhood, she decried that India’s “story” had been told by outsiders. I had planned to pass my M.A., teach for a couple of years and then go to England, for research in Indian History. I do not think anyone from the West can understand our sentiments and motives. How can they, write our History? The History of India has to be rewritten. I wish I could have had that opportunity.39 She came to the realization of wanting to make the world better when she recognized the suffering of the women at the ghats. It was a dawning Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala 95

conviction. Connecting the sense that just as impoverished colonized women did not know their own souls India had not been permitted to represent itself, it began by seeing, really seeing, the women’s plight. For Mrs. A. and for those who shaped her world, a language of awakening was connected to ideas of social improvement, particularly in the lives of women. Sarojini Naidu, in a speech in Bombay in 1915, recalling travels in England, said “When I came back to India a year ago, the first thing that struck me . . . was that the womanhood of India was beginning to wake in an unmistakable way.”40 Social reform already had a long relationship to recognition. In colonial Punjab, social reforms existed in a context of authoritarian British colonialism, a strict, violent, and centralized regime in which colonial domination, social reform, and religion were tightly intertwined.41 Christian missionaries and colonial officials were so closely allied that their differences were invisible to many Punjabis.42 Hindu religious movements had conjoined social reform to religious identity and nationalist pride.43 The Arya Samaj made the forms and conditions of women’s lives a particular concern, preceding women’s organizations with concerns about child marriage, widow remarriage, and women’s education.44 Such reforms were not aimed at rejecting a “patriarchal system,” but sought to “improve the condition of women within the frame of patriarchy.”45 Even as the British enacted laws that brought marriage, property ownership, and inheritance in line with their own social conventions, nullifying common laws that permitted divorces and ensured women access to property, money, and maintenance, emerging elite classes also consolidated land and economic leadership into a bourgeois identity that converged on improving women’s lives as a social, political, and moral good.46 Khatris, once targets of social reform, became its mediums and their embrace of ideologies of progress made social reform a matter of personal, class, caste, and religious identity.47 The colonial state’s focus shifted to agriculturalist Jats and to matters such as brideprice, trade in women, and infant mortality, while an emphasis on ritual and social reform became a way for upperclass Punjabis to “amalgamate lessons of female uplift from their colonial masters with more indigenous forms of asserting social dominance.”48 Beginning in the mid–nineteenth century, social reform had also been the “ideological glue” of colonial hierarchies of patronage,49 making women focal objects, and specific women, namely wives and widows, into ideas as much as actual people, those upon whose existence colonial (and eventu96 Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala

ally anticolonial) assertions might be made.50 By the late colonial period, as colonial policies spurred the consolidation of religious boundaries, Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh “reformist institutions . . . organized lecture cycles and women’s groups, maintained mosques and temples and, most importantly, ran the most important schools and colleges that were not directly part of the government sector,” with schools funded by wealthy “financier families” and landowners.51 By the 1940s, it was not just elites whose worlds were shaped by reformist discourses, but also an urban middle class whose identity was founded on “ideals of thrift, hygiene, respectability and a clear demarcation from subaltern and folk practices,” with “education and selfdiscipline . . . new bywords of success.”52 The relationship between social reform and religious revival in colonial Punjab, and the figuring of women as focal points was influenced by movements from other parts of India, notably the Brahmo Samaj of Bengal.53 Though the Arya Samaj eventually distanced itself from the Brahmos, their initial vision was informed by the Bengali Renaissance and the amalgam of a purist yet rationalist Hinduism (anticaste, opposed to idol worship) with social change aimed at social ills. The Brahmos offered a way of addressing the tricky nature of tradition in the face of colonialism’s post1857 racism and vigor for social engineering.54 Beginning in the 1830s, Hindu texts and concepts offered source material for a new social landscape. Bengali reformers such as Rammohun Roy, founder of the Brahmo Samaj, writer Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, and reformist Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar sought textual evidence that practices which the British found horrifying were not only absent from ancient traditions but were, in fact, condemned by them. They remained agnostic or ambivalent about colonialism, embracing certain of its tenets, such as English education.55 For Roy and others, the eradication of sati (widow immolation) and prohibition of widow remarriage could display India’s readiness for a modern world and restore Hinduism’s compromised moral authority, a strategy whose tenacity would carry it into a range of arenas from social reform to law to philosophy, science, and medicine.56 Roy turned to the Vedas in his campaign against sati, a relatively limited practice, looking backward to look forward in “weed[ing] out the evils and anachronisms” of his society.57 In Calcutta, the Society for the Acquisition of General Knowledge argued that while only a secular education could raise Indian women from the “bog of illiteracy and superstition,” Vedic India represented a “golden Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala 97

age . . . which had accorded a special place to learned women.”58 In the 1850s, former Society member Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar initiated a campaign to eradicate religious and legal prohibitions on the remarriage of Hindu widows, arguing that the shastras, religious laws, permitted remarriage and observing that prior to the imposition of British courts (which had enforced the ban) many communities allowed remarriage. In a context of increasing colonial regulation of everyday life and British claims to moral superiority, debate over Vidyasagar’s proposed “Bill to Remove All Obstacles to the Remarriage of Hindoo Widows” shuffled alliances among British colonial interests, Hindu orthodoxy, non-Brahmanical Hindus, and reformers. For British authorities, concern about widows revolved around the “moral depravity” of prostitution, into which many widows “fell.”59 However, Vidyasagar’s concern had different stakes. He saw reforms as grounded in a larger ethic, a “profound moral sensibility” that offered “a concrete and consequential means for gaining recognition for Hindu women in Indian society.”60 For Vidyasagar, social reform was an ethical imperative founded in compassion and a personal responsibility to appreciate the plights of others and to seed the social responsibility to recognize categories of oppressed people.61 Vidyasagar’s autobiography, a “bildungsroman,” described women, often family members, who faced dislocation and suffering by being left alone by husbands through illness or abandonment, and who overcame hardship through “individual strength of character and independent agency.”62 Noting the timing of two important works, both published in 1854, one a Bengali account of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala and the other, a month later, Vidyasagar’s Hindu Widow Remarriage, religion scholar Brian Hatcher finds “uncanny” “emotional parallels.”63 “Both the widows and Shakuntala had been abandoned and forgotten; their only hope of deliverance lay in her being recognized.”64 Hatcher refers to this as “the Shakuntala Paradigm,” a model in which “love and affection are predicated on fundamental acts of recognition.”65 Projecting this formula into social concerns, he says, Vidyasagar called on the men of India to recognize the invisible women in their midst, demonstrating “awareness of the damage—social and not just personal—wrought by forgetfulness and misrecognition.”66 Connecting this ethos with Hindu and Buddhist concepts of awakening (that establish that “to awaken is to learn to recognize things for what they are”), Hatcher quotes Vidyasagar as call98 Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala

ing on the “people of India” to “Open your eyes just once”: “Your long desiccated heart feels no surge of compassion at the sight of the poor widows’ plight.”67 To turn a compassionate gaze toward widows was to envision a future in which “Bengal’s widows would not go unnoticed; they would not be asked to suffer in anonymity.”68 Decades later, similar kinds of identification would infuse folk songs and published poetry with politics by inviting men to connect women’s subordination to colonial subjection, as “women’s voices” were “borrowed by male authors” to provide men “a fresh and acute sensitivity in relation to bondage.”69 Similar tones resound in a story from the Bengali literary canon, one Mrs. A. may well have read. In Tagore’s Living and Dead (published in Bengali in 1892 and in English translation in 1916), a widow, Kadambini, is neglected in the marital home in which she lives yet forges a strong connection with her nephew, a bond of love amid ostracism. One day, Kadambini faints and, mistaken for dead, is taken to the cremation ground. She wakes up at night and walks into the world. Understanding herself to be dead, she is mistaken for a ghost by those she meets. Eventually, she returns to her nephew where, in a final act of self-recognition, she realizes she is alive. Her kin beg her to stop haunting the boy even as she insists she is not dead. The story ends with Kadambini’s smashing her head with a pot and throwing herself into a well, and with the haunting words: “Kadambini had proved by dying that she had not died.”70 For Tagore, Kadambini’s false death was an allegory of social death and example of the mistreatment of widows, of misrecognition as exclusion and gender injustice, and of recognition a mode of love, self-realization, and social consciousness. Love between aunt and nephew, demonstrated by his recognition of her as living, exceeds the laws of kinship and the constraints those laws place on the right to exist. At the same time, it is only in recognizing herself to be alive that Kadambini comes to realize the extent of her exclusion, her inability to find a livable place in kinship. Exclusion, here, is akin to misrecognition, and both are ethical failings. What does it mean for an ethic of recognition to found both modern psyches and vast, complex, and entrenched models of social reform focused on women’s lives? In both Shakuntala and in the nineteenth-century reform movements that tapped its moral impetus, recognition entailed gendered (and classed and casted) conditions, in which women might be doubly objects of recognition and bearers of the failure to recognize, a flaw Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala 99

that slides between being incidental and inherent to women. That Mrs. A. saw the women on the ghats in Haridwar as having souls “dwarfed” by hardship, or said they “had never enjoyed the luxury of having a soul,” suggests the outline of this arrangement, that poverty’s toll on the spirit is an incapacity to understand one’s own condition, an inability to recognize (the opposite view to feminist standpoint theory, for what it’s worth). But who is to evaluate the terms of another’s understanding? What hubris is there in assuming consciousness to come with the privileges of a secure life? What might she have meant by saying that “many of them had never enjoyed the luxury of having a soul”? This outlook would not have been unusual late colonial women’s organizations and nationalist social reforms, which carried forward, in many instances, the nineteenth-century legacy of orientation toward “social ills,” education, hygiene, and a bourgeois vision of a decent life, as opposed to, say, labor, social equality, or political participation. But Mrs. A. was a socialist, so perhaps these histories were sorting themselves out in her, in good dialectical fashion, or perhaps she had found a way to make them coincide in notions of consciousness, class consciousness being, arguably, not very different from knowledge of a personal abject position. In either event, in a binary between those who do and do not, can and cannot know themselves or recognize others there is a fundamental breach between those who bear the burden of ethical transgressions and those who bear the redeeming force of recognition. Tropes in which a moment of recognition (“I suddenly saw . . .”) sparks a sense of social justice, an urge to do something, might be read crosswise for their gendered (and classed, casted, communalized, raced . . .) dimensions, with Shakuntala in hand. In a nation about to be recognized, whose anticolonial movements and politics, indeed, whose social orders, were, for a century, built upon ethoses of social reform that, at least in some instances, claimed soulful recognition of suffering souls as orientation and instigation, the imbrication of ethics of recognition with social hierarchies would have been part of the weave of both daily life and politics at the highest level. If a “Shakuntala paradigm” of recognition was part of this, it is possible to ask how such a moral fabric might retain the gendered double bind of Kalidasa’s play, in which women are the objects of an ethical model for which they are also inherently (even unjustly) examples of failure. After two decades of ethnographic study of health, medical, and social reforms in our own time, the only thing that surprises me about 100

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this arrangement is how consistently and how precisely we find it across centuries and texts. Hatcher notes that by “representing the Hindu woman as a kind of forgotten Shakuntala, Vidyasagar perhaps inadvertently also created for Bengali women an identity predicated on pre-existing patriarchal norms, norms that supported an ethos of female powerlessness.”71 There may have been other inadvertent creations, in Vidyasagar’s time, Mrs. A.’s and our own. Among them, might be an ethos in which some people (and some groups) are recipients of recognition but incapable of offering it, capable of receiving moral action but unable to be complete moral persons themselves (at least not without “reconversion”), bearing the burdens of punishment for unwitting transgressions and the weight of the mutuality of the social contract, be it law or curse.

“ I T H I N K S H A K U N TA L A W O U L D N OT H AV E B E E N H A P PY ”

Mrs. A. did not always stand so firmly on the side of the “Shakuntala paradigm.” As a young person seeking to make an impact on the world, her story of awakening tapped familiar tropes, but it was just one story among several, including confessions about the sheer pleasure of being in the world. Playing with the implications of different ethical positions for her own future, she tried out different approaches to Shakuntala’s story. How we understand the play’s ethical message depends upon what elements we emphasize. Vidyasagar, like others, may have identified with Dushyanta’s recognition as the critical moral act. Tagore isolated Shakuntala’s failures to discern a message about ethical maturity and grounded love. Satya Nand isolated Shakuntala’s “compromise-seeking tendency” and the resolution of the play, the family’s reunion, to establish that Hindu socialism resolved anxiety and indecision (with the added effect of restoring the marital unit).72 Initially, Mrs. A. followed the logical leapfrog of Satya Nand’s chains of association, the one that led to “Hindu Socialism.” But something about this did not satisfy her. When talked into making peace with the idea that the “Shakuntala impulse” was the “resolution” she ached for, she tried different tacks. First, she attempted social realism, realizing that the villagers “are the backbone of India.” Then she rose to loftier political ideology (“I think there can be attained a system of thought, which can show the masses of India that Socialism, is merely a modification of Hinduism”). Then she Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala 101

returned to earth and to realistic needs (“I better plan out my future independent to what happens in my married life”).73 She deemed this a hopeful note. As if to parse this hope, Satya Nand asked her to “go over the dreamelements” and frame a “rebuttal”. She turned, again, to Nehru, and his life following the death of wife, Kamala: I recall having attended a lecture by Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru. . . . The death of his wife whom he loved passionately, was not able to effect his interest and enthusiasm. He reminded me of Shakuntala. . . . It is the important dream element whose importance was being minimized by m. I wonder, if I am thinking of following his example more than other identifications. This is in keeping with me having told my servant girl, “Once I begin suspecting and go to her village, I must be ready to go forever.” I never knew that I was so keen a pujaran (hero worshipper) of him.74 In widowerhood, Nehru “reminded” Mrs. A. not of the sage, as Satya Nand saw it, but of herself. The point was not the resolution of marriage, but a commitment to dharmic responsibility at the end of marriage. We could rethread the associations Satya Nand-style: Nehru’s status as widower—desire for work in the world and for the nation—villages—the truth of the situation—end of marriage. By contrast, this was Satya Nand’s line of thought: She enjoyed the work in the villages because, Pundit, who was the Arjan of the Mahabharat, the correlation of Bharat, brought up by Shakuntala; and Shakuntala and Daropadi were again correlated through the Pundit, who was the hero of the story of Daropadi as Arjan-equivalent, and also the sage-equivalent of the play called Shakuntala, who helped her to educate her Bharat. The central core is Pundit Nehru; from that core, branch out three terms Bharat, Mahabharat, and Socialism.75 For Satya Nand, the meaning of the play was the line of connection that ran from Bharat to Nehru to India, and marital resolution that hinged on being recognized by Dushyanta. Mrs. A. liked this idea very much, but felt it had nothing to do with Dushyanta’s recognition. She said, I think Shakuntala would not have been happy if her husband had recognized her. She did better in being alone and away from the influence of a husband.76 102 Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala

Let’s stop there for a moment. Let’s read it again. I think Shakuntala would not have been happy if her husband had recognized her. This was not just a desire to make a life for herself, or even an embrace of singularity, or even just a revaluing of uncertainty. It was those things too, but it was also a refusal of recognition, of its fi xing, emplacing, and claim-making effects, dharmic though they may be. More than that, it laid claim to the opposite, call it nonrecognition, though it is not a perfect term. It was nonrecognition as happiness, nonrecognition as world-making. Nonrecognition could hold “singularity” and “uncertainty” together, making both part of not only a vision for happiness, but a foundation for right action, indeed, for the creation of a new nation, of a new world. The turn of phrase (if we take Satyanand’s account as verbatim), a “contrary-to-fact” formulation, suggests not only a different point of emphasis but also another outcome for the story, an alternate imagination. Mrs. A. did not interpret but retold, offering a new story, not a new reading. She made it clear that neither Kalidasa nor those who would translate Shakuntala’s message need to have the last word on ethics, indeed that the route to the future need not be mere “reading” but could involve new tellings. Satya Nand noticed this, and took it seriously for a moment, though the thrust of his analysis was “re-acceptance by the husband”77: “When Shakuntala’s husband turned her away without recognizing her, as his wife (due to amnesia) she went along the path she had built for herself.”78 He did not see, however, how much she had made of this, nor did he notice that she located her most pressured and recurrent thoughts on Draupadi and Shakuntala in their times of exile. This may be unsurprising for someone contending with in-laws threatening a second marriage and an unfaithful husband (Draupadi and Shakuntala’s stories involved marital betrayal and the injustice of being cast out of society). But unlike Draupadi, Shakuntala was cast out of marriage. Draupadi’s message for Mrs. A.’s future was unclear to her but with Shakuntala it all came into view. She could contend with singularity. It might even become a golden ring for which to aim. Mrs. A. went with Draupadi to “the villages” but she followed Shakuntala to the forest. In much Hindu narrative, the forest is a space of natural beauty and ascetic realization, but it can also be a place of exclusion, punishment, and grief. Part of the basic Hindu life stages, the forest-dweller Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala 103

stage follows being a householder and precedes more radical asceticism as a time of quiet and reflection, simple living, and nonattachment (“more state of mind than a plan of action,” Wendy Doniger writes).79 Yet, the forest is not so far beyond. It is not asocial. The forest contains hermitages that, intense with religiosity, make the forest a space of “moral excellence.”80 It is full of all those wandering ascetics, and of tamed wild things and wildened tame things. There are docile deer, singing birds, sweetsmelling flowers, and other natural delights, things that are “lovingly ingenuous” and “decidedly feminine,” with a “natural equilibrium.”81 And there are demons and deceitful gods, nymphs (apsaras) of the trees and water, dangerous women, and forceful desire. The forest is a space of ethical consequence; this is where exiles, the cursed, the punished roam. Sometimes the reasons are not fair, making the forest also a place that shows worldly justice to be unsettled, even unjust. If, for Mrs. A., the village was a realist focal point for analysis, a place to remember, work, make plans, and debate politics, the forest was a fantastical, magical place of music and dance. You might find yourself, your purpose, in the village but you could “loose” yourself in the forest. Both Satya Nand and Mrs. A. found the Shakuntala identification to associate Bharat with India (understandably) and, thus, to indicate Mrs. A.’s desire to “raise up India as Shakuntala had raised up Bharat.” There was, however, a crucial difference. For Mrs. A., raising Bharat/India happened in the space of nonrecognition because of that nonrecognition. It happened in a wild space of uncertainty, where “abandonment” meant freedom and anything might happen. Mrs. A. found in nonrecognition not only the possibility for personal happiness but also grounds for a social and political future. She was not the only one. “The future is dark, uncertain,” wrote Nehru at the start of Discovery of India.82 But we can see part of the way leading to it and can tread it with firm steps, remembering that nothing that can happen is likely to overcome the spirit of man which has survived so many perils; remembering also that life, for all its ills, has joy and beauty, and that we can always wander, if we know how do, in the enchanted woods of nature.83 How different a political evocation it is to wander through enchanted woods than forge stridently into the villages. 104

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How different yet again to dance. Even as Mrs. A. spoke in a language rich with the possibilities of recognition, of the need for women to play a greater role in public life, to be included and recognized, to tell a more authentic story of India, in moments she summoned a different way of thinking and being, associated with movement, pleasure, and wildness, emerging in times of dancing, acting, losing herself, playing another. In these moments, the future in all its possibilities arose from not only being cast out of marriage, patriliny, and the state, but also in being unrecognizable to them. If we reroute ourselves back to all of those associations, Bharat with Nehru and so on, then the converse of the Shakuntala paradigm comes into view. Not only a vision of an independent life for a young woman but also a vision of anticolonial sovereignty emerge from failures of recognition, from being beyond recognition. Although Satya Nand noticed that Dushyanta’s “amnesia” allowed Shakuntala to rear Bharat, for Mrs. A., nonrecognition allowed for something more than just the ability to live out one’s dharmic role. In the “beautiful wilderness” was not loneliness but freedom, not interiority but engagement. Getting lost did not mean being alone. Shakuntala was among a society of girlfriends, sages, and animals. Her solitude was not solitude; her singularity was not isolation. In displacement there was movement and motherhood without patriliny. In the nonhuman sociality of wind and birds was “happiness.” From that space was the possibility to create something new, to “raise Bharat” according to her own principles. Amid Satya Nand’s predictions of a future of both security and accomplishment, she paused to create something different, an anticolonial dream, nurtured in female singularity, gestated in uncertainty, heavy with the ripeness of risk, and made possible in, not in overcoming, the failures of recognition. To nationalist imaginaries that emphasized women’s role as wife and mother, or told them to subordinate legislative efforts to noncooperation, or demanded they venture into villages rather than work to change laws, all things Mrs. A. and Satya Nand gestured to in intricate associative chains, it was a powerful rebuttal, arising from somewhere other than “analysis,” insisting upon itself even in the moment of being convinced otherwise. To people who, like Mrs. A. herself, placed women in a double bind by invoking Shakuntala, making women represent the failure of recognition while holding them to the standard of its ethic, it was a subtle Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala 105

inversion, but one that, like Draupadi, found the double standard and decried it, and then, like Shakuntala, at least in Mrs. A.’s imagination, said, to hell with all that.

“ I R E S O LV E D TO D O S O M E T H I N G”

To the dream smudge “Healed by prayer,” Mrs. A. responded. My brother lay ill with pneumonia, and Malta Fever for many months. I used to go and do little things for him in the hospital. For many weeks he did not speak to me, and did not even recognize me. My mother used to tell me not to talk to him or even disturb him. I often sat near him, while he slept. He gradually recovered.84 Recognition has a powerful hold on imaginaries of what it is to be human, also what it is to be ill. During the time in my life when I was visiting with the woman of whom I was reminded by Mrs. A.’s reverie about dance, I was involved in a research project that had me spending long periods of time in psychiatric wards and, when I wasn’t in hospitals, talking with people about those spaces and those who occupied them. Recognition was part of those more casual conversations, chats about my work, about mental illness, about madness more generally. Funny stories, or stories intended to be uncanny or mildly frightening, often hinged on failing to recognize an insane person, taking them for sane, or the reverse, thinking the doctor was a patient and the like, and resolved, with humor and relief, by realizing the error. My fieldnotes from that time burst with such anecdotes. They are also frenetic with ghost stories, and at some point I began noticing a similarity between the two. At least in the parts of North India where I have spent the most time, ghost stories have a particular structure: You meet someone, on a road say, or maybe in a grove of trees, and you talk with them, answering a question and perhaps asking one, then something odd strikes you. Their voice is strange, their legs are growing. Then something else, and you suddenly “recognize” (pahcana) that the person is a ghost. Similarly, many fi lms dealing with ghosts and madness (or both) feature a narrative tension around recognition. Mistaking the mad for the sane and vice versa, healers posed as lovers in order to heal mad patients, mistaking lovers for ghosts and vice versa, mistaking people for other people (Mahal [1949], Madhumati [1958], Khamoshi [1969], and Manichitrathazhu [1993] 106

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and its many remakes), and too many plots involving doppelgangers and mistaken identities to list. In these stories there is much pleasure to be had in failures of recognition and their eventual resolution. There is, however, also something else in the fi lms and, especially, in conversations, especially about mental illness, a basic anxiety around the categorically displaced and the inevitability of our own moral failing. This expresses itself in scientific terms as well. The young psychiatry residents I spent time with described each other as notably skilled because of their diagnosing ability, especially their ability to recognize and name disorders with few details and little time for observation. Recognition figured in patient evaluation, that is, they gauged patients’ status on the basis of whether they could recognize kin or their own place in kin relationships and hierarchies.85 Accurate knowledge of kinship and action appropriate to that knowledge were signs a sign of a healthy mind. So too, insight, of a person’s recognition of an illness, of its symptoms, its name, was key to therapeutics. This was in a context overwhelmingly oriented toward pharmaceuticals, especially for the dissociative disorders that figured so prominently (“She must recognize that her symptoms are within her control”). If hospitals were, in their sheer busyness, safe places for anxieties about recognition to play out, homes were a different ground for dealing with the vicissitudes of recognition. A son might be grappling with the meaning of love when his mother no longer recognized him, or with the meaning of personhood when his wife’s behavior was no longer recognizably “hers,” or with the very nature of recognition in the first place, what it was, and whether or not or how it mattered. None of this was settled. That the moral theme was a source for humor underscored that dealing with the uncertainty of recognition was part of finding, building, and letting go of relationships in the midst of illness (as Janelle Taylor has also noted in the context of dementia).86 But if I can allow myself a Satya Nand-esque chain of associations, the connections go further. When I began noticing the accumulation of minimoral tales of recognition, I began to think differently about some of my earlier research, work that happened beyond the city, in rural Uttar Pradesh villages, where more everyday stories, often about how to care for bodies, selves, and families, reiterated social difference and reinforced power structures. In particular, they performed caste. In the very early 2000s, living in an upper-caste rural household while working and Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala 107

spending most daytimes in the homes of Dalit birth-workers, I was daily reminded how vitally important the intimate work of recognizing difference was for many caste-Hindu rural women. I was especially reminded of this by my own constant failures to do so, and my naive insistence to those who caught me in my transgressions that I could opt out of caste sensibilities, things that, for them, were signs of ethical and perceptual immaturity or sheer inanity. To understand people’s categorical differences from one another, to perceive the many, quiet signs, and to socially emplace them was to protect the household from the encroachment of pollution, yes, but also from the social dissolution that violated boundaries threatened to unleash. Indeed, the overlay of female bodies and households was painted onto walls in women’s puja art, when Karva Chauth, Chatti Puja, and other ceremonial works depicted goddesses in the shape of angular homes, like blueprints, containing a domestic universe of humans, animals, and sacred entities. Social actions I saw as part of a symbolic structure of exclusion and disgust, even amid intimacies such as the close and caring relationships with birth-workers, was, I had to acknowledge, at the same time vital, protective, and nurturing work upon and with bodies. This does not justify it; instead, it gave me pause in the ways I was tempted to value things such as protection, care, and family nurturance, and drew my attention to the symbolically charged social orders and maps (literal, in the case of the wall art) underlying those feelings and actions. The grandmother in that household made recognizing difference a meld of ethics and aesthetics. She cautioned me against the dangers of failing to take seriously physical differences I mistook for mere “social structure.” I made over her words into poetry, even as I felt itchy unease about their justification of caste as part of an ethic of knowing-as-relating. A simple description of skillful attention to the environment was not just allegory but also a method for discrimination. She said (the line breaks are my imposition), Everything has its category. Look now at the clothes and the beans, this one is red, and that one is like that. And there is moong and urad and arhar and names you would not even recognize. 108

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Rice flour, wheat flour, dal flour, flour from the lotuses of the dirty pond that is used during fasts when grains must not be taken, but all are flour, and each is different. Men are like this, all among our own genus. Do not make us equal, or pretend that my food is theirs, or that I am them. Do not force together that which will remain separate. The same woman once commented to me about her grandson, about three years old, who was running around the courtyard wearing nothing but the black cord under his belly that protected him from the dark forces that might be drawn to his happy existence: “Children’s emotions are different, in their hearts, from an adult’s feelings. [Children] don’t hide behind a curtain from anyone, not an adult, not a child. . . . When they become teenagers then they acquire some sharam [shame]. But he is not conscious yet. There is no pardah.”87 Maturity, in this sense, was not the lifting of a veil (of ignorance, irrationality, and so forth) but the falling of a net of sharam, of modulated being in the world, a fi lter for both action and perception necessary in order to function. I came to equate this veil with the capacity to recognize/discriminate, a way of being that divided the world into its categories by knowing things for what they were, as opposed to the childlike state of nondifferentiation and failure to recognize. But I was also aware of many small counter-acts of evasion taken up by some of the women with whom I spent my days, Dalit women who used both recognition and nonrecognition to evade dominant framings of difference as moral value. I wrote about what I called the careful agnosticism of Dalit birth-workers who refused certain of these terms of recognition even as they neither rejected nor embraced others, upon which their remunerated labor (and thus some degree of release from dependence on male kin) was based.88 In that book, I described caste ideologies, which deemed newborn, placenta, and the female body polluting (ideas that were part of the terms of difference mapped in the poem), as delineating the boundaries of labor, protecting certain women’s (women who were otherwise Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala 109

-symbolically and materially oppressed) right to perform them. These ideologies (if that is what we must call them) established their right to compensation for those labors, in the form of grains, saris, and other gifts, as well as varying amounts of cash. This does not justify them, but it may explain that it was not in their interest to disavow all mechanisms of caste as an ideology of recognition, just as it was part of their deeply personal motivation not to embrace them. There was a shadowy space of partial recognition, of looking askance, somewhere in the middle, which shaped their own ethical framing of the materials of their labors, labors that were ritually charged. Was a thing, a person, a labor polluted? Recognition of that quality was, more often than not, deferred. It’s just dirty. In this rural landscape, many of the upper-caste women with whom I lived had adopted morally charged languages of public health and intervention, describing others, from whom they protected themselves, as not only dirty and unhygienic but also unenlightened, and, critically, unable to know, see, recognize the right way to live, their children’s illnesses, their own illnesses, their own emotions, their own disempowerment. These seemingly neutral languages of insight, awareness, and consciousness were familiar in NGO circles as part of the picture of women’s uplift, and they helped both rural women and many urban health workers explain certain women’s (rural, Dalit, Muslim) inability to recognize as both a concern for national development and a moral failing. In the village, as those languages circulated as ethical discourse, they reinforced social boundaries that mapped onto caste difference, articulating caste through the progressive language of hygiene, compliance, public health, and female empowerment. These languages carried a sense of newness, but they were not new. They were part of long-standing, recurring, appearing and disappearing health schemes that had rolled in and out of their village for decades, and they could be found in a century of various reformist tracts of one kind or another identifying the causes of rural women’s suffering. In rural Uttar Pradesh, vaccination campaigns, family planning interventions, and dai-training schemes, all familiar parts of the colonial and postcolonial rural landscape, were discursively packaged with ethical languages about care, self-care, care for children, and, especially hygiene, as a form of civic involvement, a matter of responsibility, and a sign of recognizing affliction and the correct way out of it. Although most recently freighted with the neoliberal attitudes of global health, they were not necessarily exclusively so, and some of a sense of In110 Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala

dia’s history of socialist infrastructures and nationalist ideologies also remained. Statements like “those people never take their children to the doctor,” “those people don’t even know when their children are sick,” “those people don’t understand that infant death is not normal” could subtly but clearly describe specific groups while asserting socially unbound ethical principles. Such bad faith, an arrangement of recognition, continues to resonate in many contemporary projects aimed at improving women’s lives. The formula: Interventions claim the ability to recognize the oppression of others over and above the self-knowledge of those being recognized, with the sine qua non of oppression precisely the inability to recognize it; family planning workers who insist rural women do not recognize, do not really feel, the tragedy of infant death; retraining programs that seek “respectability” for sex workers; efforts to pass various forms of legislation that claim that women engaging in transactional sex misrecognize oppression as custom. The currency of recognition still has value.89 For some of the women I met, a counter-ethical position hinged on remaining unseen, unrecognized, removed from the gaze of official doctors and NGO workers, and the achievement of a degree of inscrutability. Something slightly different from “strategic essentialism,” this strategy was, for many others (health workers and women’s own neighbors) reinforcement of convictions about their moral failures. It, too, was founded in an ethic of protection and care. The fundamental values were not necessarily disavowed, but instead of a sense of personal and social responsibility, this counter-ethic emphasized a different kind of deindividuated future and an individual’s relationship to it, one founded in their sense that their oppression was founded in a wide-reaching institutionalized loathing of their group. Many women rejected the idea that they must embody obstacles to development even as they embraced the thing of which they were so often accused (inaction, noninvolvement) as an ethical value, of being sufficiently savvy to shield themselves, their kin, and their community from institutional violence. They therefore sought uncertified practitioners, refused to deliver babies in hospitals, and rejected vaccination campaigns as a way of safeguarding reproductive futures. These acts are neither to be condemned nor valorized. They are, however, to be seen as an intimate politics that bear out the stakes of an ethos of recognition and that generated counterpositions that are no less valid as ethical claims. The recurrence of ethics of recognition in spaces of discrimination (bedbhav, literally, the Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala 111

feeling of/for difference) in the strict, unvalued sense as well as in the morally loaded sense of the term, and, in the same spaces, the recurrence of a counter-ethic of nonrecognition made domestic spaces part of, indeed, integral too, the vast machinery of intervention and social “uplift.” There, in 2000, was the Shakuntala paradigm, intact as an ethic of social reform, fi ltered through generations of social realities and social change but with both the ethic and its imbalance still intact. It may go without saying, but should still be noted, that this is neither an “Indian” nor “Western” nor hybrid formulation, but one with long transnational purchase and movement, a sign that influence moves in many directions. It may also go without saying that there is much evidence that rebuttals to the Shakuntala paradigm (or versions of it) are also longstanding, and that the bad faith of recognition is often simply not tolerated. Katherine Mayo’s scathing Mother India is replete with languages of awakening and recognition.90 The American’s racist condemnation of the treatment of women in India drew extensively on metaphoric associations of darkness with ignorance and lack of self-awareness in condemning men for their treatment of women and women for their benighted submission. Of the Indian male’s “slave mentality,” and its connection to his lack of self-discipline and “sexual indulgence” she wrote, “The Indian perceives, to a certain degree, the condition, but he rarely goes all the way to the bottom thereof. Nor does he recognize its full significance and relate it to its consequences.”91 Whether applied to men or women, such words were hardly universally accepted. Indian feminists such as Uma Nehru and Sarojini Naidu responded with a twofold strategy. Rather than refuting the social realities Mayo described, and “refrain[ing] from invoking the glorious tradition of Indian womanhood” in defense, they emphasized political and economic issues rather than culture, race, or psychology, charging Mayo with misrepresenting women’s circumstances and situation.92 For Naidu, this meant encouraging men to educate (“their”) women so as to refute the book’s imperialism while making it clear that “the women of India were capable of redeeming themselves.”93 In a speech at Calcutta University in 1928, she referred to Mayo: The Women of India should answer all those who come in the guise of friendship to interpret India to their world and exploit their weakness and expose the secrets of the home [Sinha’s emphasis], with the words 112 Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala

“whether we are oppressed, treated as goods and chattels and forced on the funeral pyres of our husbands, our redemption is in our hands. We shall break through the walls that imprison us and tear the veils that stifle. We shall do this by the miracle of our womanhood. We do not ask any friend or foe in the guise of a friend, to come merely to exploit us while they pretend to interpret, succor and solace our womanhood.”94 Friendship can be exploitative and foes can disguise themselves as friends. It should be left to Indian women to “tear the veils that stifle.” Embedded in this declaration, historian Mrinalini Sinha notes, was the concept of domestic “secrets,” which suggested an “ambivalence at the heart of the identity of the Indian woman,” by which the site of both “male authority” and “political agency,” as Partha Chatterjee argued, might allow secrecy to be the ground for anticolonial power and self-realization, a rejection of the posture of recognition.95 Two decades later, Mrs. A. made a similar suggestion in wishing to “go to England, for research in Indian history” so she might “rewrite” the “History of India” (as ironic an arrangement as beseeching men to educate “their” women for the sake of women’s self-determination)96 Claiming the right to tell one’s own and one’s country’s story was, like rejections of Mother India’s false friendship, to stake a claim to the validity of self-knowledge against the idea that others know better. At the same time, however, at other moments, Mrs. A. went further, suggesting nonrecognition as not only a kind of freedom, but the necessary loosening to build a new world. Here was not an effort to enhance the reach of recognition, or improve its means or meaning, but an entirely different starting point. The anticolonial feminist response to the bad faith of recognition questioned efforts to know an other on nationalist terms, even as the idea of knowing an other was embedded in its own history as part of discourses of social uplift. The idea of knowing oneself was itself part of this doubleedged sword, how those in need were identified as being in need (the inability to know themselves) yet part of a feminist demand to be allowed to speak for oneself (from Naidu to Pritam, as discussed in Chapter 1), a palpable tension in Mrs. A.’s case. Self-understanding is, of course, a vital and worthy thing to value. The problem is the way it is distributed, moments when it is at once demanded for oneself and denied to others. This is an old arrangement, and so, too, the contours of ethics of recognition have been constantly pressed upon by counter-ethics, an antishape in which it is Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala 113

possible to think of nonrecognition as a place, a valid position, possible to isolate from recognition’s forms of betrayal. These antishapes show the way recognition, self- and other-, so integral to scenes of care, intervention, science, and governance in colonial and postcolonial India, are at once vital, necessary, and dangerous. Their impact is as unsteady as their implications are open to the social dynamics of the moment. A certain story about political history (which we might attribute to Hegel) says that societies have, or ideally should have, transitioned from being organized around status groups to modern concepts of individuality by becoming increasingly inclusive, expanding the scope of subjects deemed worthy of “the status of a legal person” through “struggles for recognition.”97 In this model, as the scale of acceptable personhood grows, as the horizon of belonging expands and states approach the “epistemic threshold” of universal individual rights, recognition is increasingly grounded in “inner-worldly decisions,” a sense of “normative obligations,” in which we recognize the other as bearer of rights and ourselves as “legal persons.”98 This model differs significantly from the ways recognition has mattered in anticolonial and postcolonial India, particularly the extent to which it has hinged on the value of group representation, both in terms of minority rights and the rights of large but disempowered groups, and in relation to the ways groups and identities figure within other groups. The relationship between individual and group rights in the eyes of the law has been a dynamic one, especially where women’s claims are concerned. At the same time, there was, as Brian Hatcher notes, a certain liberal quality to the kind of recognition that Vidyasagar, inspired by Shakuntala, wrote into his campaign for widow remarriage in the 1830s and 1840s, a quality that is also legible (if not identical) in the invocation of recognition as an individual moral act, a personal experience, for reformers of various sort. To this, a far-reaching critique may apply, one that articulates nineteenth century reforms with liberal conditions amounting to “ethical violence.”99 This critique holds that ethics of recognition are less a prescriptive “good” than a way for certain standards of personhood to be normalized, a system that functions through demands of self-narration, a double bind in which, if social norms establish what a recognizable self is, it is impossible to authentically tell one’s story: “the account of myself that I give in discourse never fully expresses or carries this living self.”100 Colonialism has a “passion” for this dynamic; its “cunning” is to make impossible demands for 114

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self-expression as a condition of belonging, a situation that extends into “late liberal ideology.”101 Against such ethical violence, demands made in the name of recognition can be resisted by “suspending the demand for self-identity” and rejecting notions of cohesive selves as mere “conceit.”102 This critique resonates with the Shakuntala paradigm, at least in its moments of bad faith. In a nation that, for decades following independence, would claim to recognize its people’s suffering by refusing their accounts of themselves: In post-Partition repatriations of abducted women, in legal invocations of parietal responsibility to silence the survivors and sufferers of Bhopal, in rejecting women’s legal claims in favor of those of community authorities who would claim to represent her better interest as in the Shah Bano case, the limits of recognition are obvious, and so are the limits of recognition’s relationship to truth. The dangers of recognition, of the Shakuntala paradigm have long been clear. However, just as there is no single history of liberal politics, critiques of the demand to “give an account of oneself” land differently in different moments, especially for people for whom colonial oppressions intersect with other forms of subordination and other strategies of refusal. For instance, critiques of recognition that challenge multiculturalism and its politics of inclusion may be especially apt in contexts of settler colonialism that draw on relatively binary visions of colonialism’s racial architecture, black and white, so to speak. However, extractive, nonsettler colonialism in an intensely pluralist setting complicates recognition’s cunning, thickening it with intersectionalities and long, long transmissions of stories that have recognition as the punch line. In late colonial India, recognition may have been a compendium of acts of cunning less because it demanded the impossible or imposed an alien narrative than because it was a long and robustly theorized idea with its own complex dynamics, already layered, pocked, and riven with subversion, already an archive of translocal connections and everyday strategies, already attached to a malleable, elusive self. More radically, such “other” histories of recognition may be less foreign to “western” liberalism than part of its very origins. If ethics of recognition meet their limits in, say, a village in rural Uttar Pradesh on a sweltering afternoon in late April 2000, after the family planning worker has left and women are sitting around discussing what was in her satchel emblazoned with the symbol of the latest government health scheme, or if they find their ends in a side room of a large bourgeois home in Lahore in 1944, when a Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala 115

woman discussed the end of her marriage and the beginning of a new nation by wondering whether a mythical woman might have been happier if her husband had not seen her for who she was, if the ethics of recognition find the limits of their capacity in such settings then it is at least in part so because those ethics have already repeatedly met their ends. That is, there is already a repertoire for thinking otherwise, already choreographies for departure, forms of evasion and transformation, rather than stark difference, waiting to be remembered, realized, rediscovered, imagined anew. In some settings, the idea that there are many ways to account for a self is not a philosophical or scholarly achievement but is perfectly obvious. It is the stuff of song and myth as well as centuries of storytelling and theater, capable of speaking to different historical conditions, capable of making new historical conditions, not because they are different from the selves of recognition but because recognition is already part of a rich library of theorization. Mrs. A.’s rejection of recognition did two things, neither definitively. First, it took up of the possibility of a counter-ethic of nonrecognition. Second, it suggested we could at least imagine forging toward a different horizon, or somewhere other than the horizon. If her description of the women at the ghats hummed with histories of intervention into women’s lives, with their various relationships to colonialism and nationalism, her musings about Shakuntala rang with something else. Offering up questions, wondering, she entered the forest. Was this a sudden acknowledgment that languages of recognition reinforce social categories? Did it offer nonrecognition as a slip out of the double bind that cast some as obstacles to the ethical models they were tasked with upholding, or that required selfknowledge to begin with self-loathing? Did it simply notice that a person might be more capable, effective, or happy, might raise a better child, make a better world beyond the demands of husband, family, the rules of the kingdom? Either way, there was a hanging question for Mrs. A., who was, after all, subtly rejecting Satya Nand’s analysis: Rather than try to be visible to those who will not see, why not go elsewhere, why not make a life there, why not build a society?

“ M Y R E A L ‘ P L AY ’ I N L I F E H A S Y E T TO CO M E ”

In the box office hit Mahal, released a few years after Mrs. A.’s analysis, a young woman, Kamini, concocts an elaborate deceit, pretending to be the 116 Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala

ghost of a woman whose lost lover is a doppelganger of the man, Shankar, whom she “haunts.”103 From behind a veil, she convinces the man, the new resident of a remote mansion, to find a woman whom he desires and kill her so that she, Kamini, can enter the body. She suggests Asha, the gardener’s daughter. Shankar runs away and marries another woman. Ever trying to escape his memories of the house, he begins to go mad, seeking Kamini in the faraway places to which he attempts to escape. Eventually, he returns to the house and to Kamini who implores him to kill the gardener’s daughter. In the end, it is revealed that she is, in fact, Asha, the gardener’s daughter, and had fallen in love with Shankar (because of his resemblance to a portrait in the house). All of this was a ruse to make him fall in love with her. In the end, Shankar’s wife, who discovered the plot and wrote it down in a letter, drinks poison, then goes to the police station, where she claims her husband has murdered her. Shankar is freed when the letter is produced but dies on the way to meet Kamini, whom he now knows to be Asha. Toward the end of the film, explaining her plan to Shankar’s wife, Kamini/Asha says, “when he would open that girl’s veil, he would recognize me. I played this dangerous game because . . .” In Mahal, recognition is a dangerous game in a plot in which women deceive by being unknowable, and recognition, according to Kamini’s plan, would never have been complete (Shankar would have thought Asha to be Kamini reincarnated). Writing on this fi lm, Meheli Sen notes that in early Indian cinema “the Gothic ghost fi lm jostles uneasily against many of the imperatives of the reformist ‘Social,’ the umbrella genre in the 1950s and 1960s.”104 Dark gothic fantasy worlds, with their plays of deception and recognition “reverse” the “hero’s journey” from village to city with a return to “a place suspended in time,” a return to the village or nonurban space of “profound uncertainty and peril.”105 Marking a “break with the triumphal narrative of national destiny,” fi lms like Mahal emphasize the Westernness of the genre while “grafting” on Indian concepts such as reincarnation.106 A different reading is also possible, which is that South Asian reformist social visions and gothic plays of deception may be more entwined than they seem, reversals coming less from outside (one genre versus an other) than from within (a set of ideas that depend on internal reversals). The “reverse journey” to the remote outpost as space of deception and contact with otherworldly forces (found in a number of fi lms of this period) may Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala 117

be a contingent counterimaginary underlying (or inner-lying) progressive visions. If nothing else, the Westernness of these themes is overstated, and the fi lm participates, like so many instances of Indian gothic, in familiar ethical and conceptual themes, plot twists that provide a compendium of narratives with recognition, mistaken identities, doppelgangers, curses, and ghosts, elements that shadow but are also intricately part of scientific and socially progressive narratives (rather than “grafted” to them). Sen notes the “recuperative gesture” in many of these fi lms, through which the hero is “restored to modernity,” rescued from madness and irrationality.107 While these recuperations “fi x” the transgressions of the plot, they cannot undo the entertaining possibilities encapsulated in confusion and scheming, elements so fundamental to moral stories about recognition. Perhaps better than “grafting,” with its assumption of compatible difference, is the metaphor of tumbleweed, or seed-bearing burdocks, roving and tenaciously clinging.108 Either way, the soul of the genre is its medium, which mirrors its message: Plays of recognition are just that, plays. In this way, I, too, have played a dangerous game. In the previous chapter, for the sake of emphasizing Draupadi, I veiled certain passages, those that discussed Shakuntala. I gave you the marvelous phrase, “If it comes to a breaking point I shall not be found wanting,” but I stunted it. The full passage sounds like this: Am I acting a part or am I really happy? I have sometimes wondered. When I am in the mood, and am dancing, I feel that my real “play” in life has yet to come. Marriage does not suit me. I am too proud, too independent to be the so-called successful wife, in a joint-family system. If it comes to a breaking point I shall not be found wanting. I think, I may still act the Shakuntala of the play, in the real sense. I may adopt a hobby and make it a success. It may be acting, teaching, or writing.109 It matters that Mrs. A.’s Shakuntala was the Shakuntala of the play and not the epic (unlike her Draupadi, who was a storybook character). Dance and acting were more than recurring themes in Mrs. A.’s case; they were distinct moods, alternate scenery. They were also a method, a countermethod, even, to Satya Nand’s analysis. When she lapsed, or danced, into these moods, sensory imagination combined feeling and future thinking as distinct from threads of association built from recollection. While in some moments she contrasted theatricality and performance with “real” 118 Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala

emotion (“Am I playing a part or am I really happy?”), in others, performance and play were the self’s “real” vehicle (“I may still act the Shakuntala of the play, in the real sense”). The distinction tended to collapse. The fact that Mrs. A.’s Shakuntala was a theatrical role matters not just because it tells us how deeply she felt its loss, but also because it allows us to imagine ethical selfhood askew from the vaguely paranoid mood of critical unpacking and looming power that stages critical approaches to political recognition. Hindu philosophical tracts and vernacular forms of practice offer a grammar of ways to think about performance as a pathway to realization that are not centrally concerned with authenticity, or that find authenticity in, not against, the idea of assuming a role. The concept of lila, both divine play and a form of “folk” religious theater, resonates in Mrs. A.’s use of the term “play,” and for anyone familiar with this theme, it will leap out of the text. Associated with Vaishnavite traditions and Krishna devotion (forms of religiosity more common in other parts of India), lila is everywhere in the case, including Mrs. A.’s description of the Krishna lila at the RamaKrishna mission, where she received an illicit kiss from the actor playing Krishna. Mrs. A. was not the first to invoke lila in exploring the relationship between personal suffering and ethics. In a little-read essay describing his grief over the death of a friend’s young daughter, Vidyasagar had a conversation with the dead girl, “reanimating” rather than remembering her, an imagination of alternate reality that was a “theodicy of lila” demonstrating the compassion at the heart of his social efforts.110 So, too, strands of the philosophical body of ideas known as rasa, Hindu dramaturgical/aesthetic, theory are legible in Mrs. A.’s dance with/as Shakuntala, and even if she was less familiar with the nuances of this philosophical tradition, Shakuntala, the play, is a “place” where, along with centuries of scholars, we can find and debate the meanings of rasa. A philosophical school rather than a single concept, expanded in many conversing texts beginning in roughly the beginning of the common era, rasa (in basic terms) denotes mood and flavor, and conjoins aesthetic, ethic, and affect in perfected gesture.111 Rasa is intended to be communicated and, in the earliest texts, instructional manuals for actors more than philosophical treatises, involves a vocabulary of paradigmatic emotions an actor/dancer’s gesture can imbue in the audience. Depending upon how they are arranged, these emotions establish meaning, offering “ethical instruction” Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala 119

through aesthetic and feeling.112 A good performance communicates genuine emotion, its goal to transport the audience, to “re-establish emotional harmony in the microcosm of the audience by exploring the deeper relations that bind apparent conflicts of existence.”113 Ethics are realized affectively, even bodily. If, like other Sanskrit theater, the plot of Shakuntala involves aesthetic accomplishments as much as ethical ones, it is so not only because of the story’s twists and turns but also because of the kind of performance it involves. In rasa theory, again speaking broadly, performance is an externalized mode of achieving truth (not, say, an obstacle to a genuineness that lies deep “within,” or the hollowing out of an interior truth for a reality of surfaces). Even more broadly speaking, selves in much Hindu narrative operate not as interiors at odds with an external world that demands it produce itself as truth, but as a temporary surface of gesture and impersonation. Truth is not at depth, but in plain sight. For Wendy Doniger, imitation, including self-impersonation, involves the impersonation of the self beneath the “covert masks”: “the overt mask reveals rather than conceals the truth, reveals the self beneath the self.”114 In stories in which people are misrecognized, unrecognized, impersonated, and take on guises, although “masquerades cannot change people into other people, they may change them into others among their many selves.”115 Rather than expressing selfhood as “true” and interior, something one struggles in vain to express, there is world-making potential in impersonation: “If we always tried to be one single self, without our masks, the world would grind to a halt. With them, the world proceeds from self to self.”116 As Mrs. A. proceeded from Draupadi to Draupadi, and self to self, and as she “reanimated” Shakuntala, she diverged from the journey of interpretation, of unearthing meanings, memories, and chains of association. Shakuntala permitted her not only an alternate future and an alternate ethical arrangement, she also allowed an alternate method. As a role one might play, she realigned the relationship of ethics to critique, questioning the givenness of the sense, inherent to the psychoanalytic experiment (and to our own methods), that the means of understanding is reading, and the goal of reading to “expose” the ways normalizing demands establish how subjects must perform themselves.117 Citing Foucault, Butler writes, “The practice of critique . . . exposes the limits of the historical scheme of things, the epistemological and ontological horizon within which subjects come to 120

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be at all. To make oneself in such a way that one exposes those limits is precisely to engage in an aesthetics of the self that maintains a critical relation to existing norms.”118 In this model, the ethical goal is to desubjugate through an aesthetic of assuming a “critical relation” to “existing norms,” which amounts to a “politics of truth.”119 I have used the phrase “ethical limits” and recognize the inevitable sense that such a thing must involve this kind of process of finding and upending, especially when taking up themes of recognition. However, to jab a bit at that inevitability, we might attempt to identify how critique-as-ethic also has limits, how it might not only encounter but generate different ways of doing things, how right in its midst there may be the possibility for selves and ethics to happen, and happen truly, in following a script or perfecting a beautiful, normative gesture, the possibility that performance can be ethics, not just the means by which ethics function as normalizing, the possibility that we can use terms like “performance” without the baggage of a particular critical method. Certain terms need to be revalued. Michel Foucault described modern ethics as a code for “the kind of relationship you ought to have with yourself.”120 The emphasis of that phrase was surely on the word “kind,” and that is to where we are instructed to direct our researches. However, that the self might be a thing with which one could “have a relationship” (and a relationship something one “has,” for that matter), is also particular, peculiar code. While Foucault’s intervention shifted the terms for what ethics might be understood to be, allowing us to imagine that ethics can be operations of power, forces making us into the selves we only think we naturally are, its own (cultural? historical?) peculiarities (a self that has a relationship with itself?) are at once obscured and hidden in plain sight (of course we modern subjects are caught up in our own genealogies of knowledge). In its more overt aims, as well as in Satya Nand’s Shakuntala-ing of Mrs. A. the dream analysis fulfilled the idea that modern ethics establish such a self. It created a subject of self-care via moral codes for being, going so far as to establish self-realization as something one can, in fact, be objective about. Mrs. A. also worked this angle, sometimes demonstrating a sense of ethics as self-knowing selfmaking self-care that reinforces moral norms. She also diverged from it. Some might argue that the plot of Shakuntala and its ethical meaning are not open to either interpretation or alteration, that there are, by genre definition, correct “understandings,” particularly if Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala 121

the emotional effect of rasa is understood to happen by transcending, rather than depending upon, minor things like people’s life experiences, to “reawaken . . . a sense of our common humanity.”121 If the play’s truth is not unearthed through dismantling but properly legible on the surface, or rather properly felt in performance, then seen from the actorly/dancerly position, the self is neither an elusive interiorized core of shifting qualities, against or through which the world operates, nor is it a thing of truth, even a shifting, uneven, composite, or impossible truth compromised by normalizing demands. From a certain dancerly position, truth is accomplished through habitation and performance, and performance does not “generate” truth, it provides access by bodying it forth. Artifice, perfected, is real—unironically, and not as a sign of corrupt times. In Mrs. A.’s musings, dance, playacting, and play recur, sometimes thick with sexual possibility, confronting the psychoanalytic quest for interior memories and hidden thoughts (“objective,” of course) with other ways of getting at the truth. These ways do not appear to be channeled toward exposure as a critical act, or toward interpretation, or deconstruction, or critique, or going deeper inside, or situating in place as the primary actions to which we subject the world in approaching truth. They venture to temporary exteriors. They do not find truth but reanimate it. They do not interpret a story but retell it. The danger of thinking with “veils,” as is tempting after viewing Mahal, is of giving too much weight to the revelation, the lifting of the veil, and the knowledge and truth that lie beneath. The countermethod here is also a counterapproach to “hiding” and how we might organize the values we attach to it. In the actorly/dancerly position, critical ethical work can come less through “exposing” than in ways that make exposing and concealing, performing and feeling, scripted and “real” selves entangled in the playacting that is ethical imagining. It is the choreography of the veil’s movement that matters more than what is imagined to lie beneath or the way one gets to it. In whatever degree of materiality or metaphor we mean, the veil’s movement as fi lter, screen, instrument of ongoing exposures and concealment, suggests that in emphasizing revelation we miss the fact that there are multiple choreographies of exposure, and that those arrangements of movement are far more interesting than the instant of discovery or accomplishment of analysis (“HINDU SOCIALISM”). I think, too, that this says something about women, and the unevenness of gendered relationships to 122

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recognition. In Mahal, Shakuntala, and Mr. A.’s case, and for the many women I have known who sometimes held their ghungat in their teeth, sometimes placed it barely at the back of the head, sometimes let it fall to their shoulders or pulled it low over their face in a repertoire of moves impossible to contain in a term like “veil,” recognition layers upon recognition upon recognition upon recognition (and the opposite, nonrecognitions upon each other) until it is clear that the thing we have been doing all along is something else entirely. I find it refreshing to be reminded that whatever “message” Shakuntala contains, it also contains a message about how to deliver messages, not just how to know or understand, but what things we might do other than knowing. Amidst the undeniably modern practice of psychoanalysis and wrapped in Shakuntala’s costume, performed in her characteristic backward glance, was not only musing on recognition, but on what it means to be and do and perform an ethic. A counter-ethical vision that landed beyond recognition contained a countervision of how ethics might be performed. Mrs. A. began her quietest reflections with the self-query, “Am I acting a part or am I really happy?” But she responded to her own question by entering the part she most longed to play. Sometimes, when taking another pass through Objective Method, I come upon a sentence that pulls me up short. Sometimes these are disappointments, a defense of dictatorship, meanness toward the “servant girl,” that remind me that I may invest too much heroism, or too many of my own needy expectations, my own sense of lost youth and lost futures, into my reading. Sometimes these are surprises that make me smile, a flurry of erotic energy abutting a passionate rant about socialism. Both remind me that Mrs. A. was barely out of childhood, a young person high on desire and elated with the world, high perhaps on her moment in history, and stumbling into the sometimes dangerous, sometimes ridiculous expressions such flights can induce. Then I think that perhaps I have given too much depth, too much complexity to contradictory statements, struggled too hard to discover an underlying order. We are all complicated people who say one thing and mean another, revise our memories, and change our minds. Then, however, I think about the goals of this encounter and take each statement differently, hear them as a different use of words, and remember to remember what a pleasure it is to converse with this psyche as it works (and plays) to formulate, reformulate, and come into the presence of Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala 123

what it thinks and feels. What will or should happen next. This is a glimpse of process, of conversation, not conviction. I stopped short at the reference to dance, to losing (or “loosing”) oneself in music from the gramophone and the wilderness it brought to mind, for here was a rawness, exposure and, dare I say it, authenticity that rang so differently from her more formulated, confident statements of conviction. It offered happiness in the moment recognition was foreclosed (how can one know a person who is lost in a dance, or a trance, or a delusion, or a moment of being transported?) but also, against Satya Nand’s method, suggested a counterpossibility of experimentation with possible selves through movement, gesture, imitation, and feeling, through sensory abandon. Of a piece with singularity (“I think Shakuntala would not have been happy if her husband had recognized her”) and the uncertainties of the forest, its method, like its conjoined ethical impulses, took up the visceral pleasures of nonrecognition (is this not the point of being “lost” in a dance?) and all it might allow for new intimacies, new social worlds. And it underscored that singularity is not the same as solitude, and uncertainty not the same as chaos. Let us remember, Shakuntala was not alone; she was at the hermitage of the sage Marica, with a bevy of people who cared for him and perhaps even her. The forest of exile, the release from marriage, city, kingdom, and lineage allowed her to nurture multiple futures. It was not a place of solitude, but rich with life. There were animals, there were wise elders, and there were fairies. There was the companionate breeze, there were girlfriends, and there was a child.

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3 UNCONSCIOUSNESS AND VOICE Ahalya

There were many people in Mrs. A.’s life with whom she might “identify” (Satya Nand’s term) and there were some she barely noticed. Some people affected her life greatly but are unnamed in her account. One, in particular, shadowed her throughout. She was present in her childhood, then in her marriage, there at the edge of many stories, visible in a side-glance. In some places she is “the servant girl,” in others just “the girl,” in one or two places “the maid.” We know little about her except that she would have been just a few years older than Mrs. A. and that she worked first as a cook in her father’s home and later in Mrs. A.’s husband’s household, sent like a gift, part of life’s furniture, perhaps part of a dowry. When Mrs. A. was eight years old, another servant in the household pursued the servant girl. “The Sikh servant,” as he was called in the case, roughly sixteen at the time, followed her with poetry, gifts, and promises. One evening, he tried to go “stealthily into the girl’s room.”1 The girl soon rushed into my room, and told me to see that the Sikh boy was in her room. She had come away making an excuse. I told her to report it to mother, but she instead sat and talked to me till he went away.2 He persisted. I had heard him stand for hours in the cold, outside the door of the servant girl, asking her to open it for him, as he wanted to talk to her. He brought her presents, re-cited Urdu verses to her and gave her all kinds

of promises. When she gave herself up to him, [he] left her down in shame and disowned her completely.3 This was a sexual education for Mrs. A., who saw them “in the act, a few times by accident as she lived next door with a window in between.”4 “He did not marry her in the end,” Mrs. A. said, but chose another girl (intriguingly, the classmate of Mrs. A.’s who had told her “about the cow-boy’s attempts, on her, when she was on her way to the School”; one wonders what the story was there).5 In Mrs. A.’s marital home, with eyes and ears in all corners of the house, the servant girl told her about things she had seen: Mr. A. and Vidya in the drawing room while Mrs. A. napped. All the things she had heard: Mrs. A.’s in-laws discussing a second wife. All the things she suspected: that Vidya’s intentions in friendship were not what they seemed. Mrs. A. mistrusted this “whispering,” or at least that is what she told Satya Nand, although the servant girl’s predictions repeatedly found their way into her recollections, as did the assertion that her mind had been “warped” by her experience with the Sikh servant. That claim was typically proffered at the end of stories, as though to wipe away their possibilities: “The servant girl who was jilted by that Sikh clerk of my brother, had come as my servant with me after marriage. She has begun to tell funny tales, about Vidya and my husband, but I think it is because she does not like Vidya.”6 She continued to try to convince Mrs. A. that all was not well, using different tactics and imploring her to discover the truth for herself, but Mrs. A. deemed her very words poisonous. My servant girl, has poisoned my mind about [Vidya]. I think. She has told me, that while I am asleep in the day, my husband and Vidya sit for sometime in the drawing room together, and flirt. She states that when he is away from the house, Vidya is also not traceable, not even at her house in the village. My servant has often tried to persuade me to go and see for myself at her village.7 My servant girl tells me that Vidya wanted to be free with me, sexually so that I might agree to have her as the second wife of my husband. I think she says all this, because this jilted girl’s own mind is warped.8 She seemed genuinely concerned about Mrs. A.’s well-being (and, in all likelihood, her own). 126

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My servant girl tells me that the in-laws are thinking of his second marriage. I think all this, is her imagination. Her own disappointment is the cause of her fears, about me.9 Mrs. A. related her deepest anxieties by disavowing their messenger, determined to characterize the servant an unreliable source. However, she also inched closer to accepting her warnings and, at a certain point in the analysis, began to listen. “I love my husband,” she said, “but due to certain doubts and fears which have some foundation in facts, I think I better plan out my future independent to what happens to my married life.”10 Her words about the servant girl softened as she came to accept what seems so obvious to the reader, who, like the servant girl, watches Mrs. A.’s marriage unravel before her eyes. There is in all of this a glimmer of the map of female sexuality that organized Mrs. A.’s thinking about villages and, in the case of the psychology professor, delineated the dangerous and excessive sexuality of his “servant girl” from the near-asexuality of the wife (as discussed in Chapter 1). It may go without saying, but I will say it anyway: This was also a map of social class. Satya Nand saw the “servant girl mass of dream waves” and the “mother mass” as opposing psychic impulses for the psychology professor, noting, as the word “mass” suggests, the many thoughts and reflections that centered on the servant girl or returned to her in assessing decision making.11 (To recap, the young man had a formative sexual experience in his youth when he was drawn into and repulsed by sexual play between two domestic servants, the “servant girl” and the “sweeper girl,” who also tried to entice a boy from the neighborhood with whom he had had sexual interactions.) The servant girl’s sexual status was part of a larger scope of moral lassitude, he told Satya Nand. She shirked her duties, neglecting his sister even when she was ill. He wondered whether this was because she was “jealous of another girl in the house,” or perhaps because of her friendship with the sweeper girl she “had no time for work” (as evidence, he mentioned how happy she was when the girl’s mother retired and she came into the household permanently).12 He juxtaposed the servant girl with his (upper-class) wife, who was “cautious in falling in love, and slow too,” whereas the servant girl was oversexed.13 I think that the servant girl developed my sex instinct too early, that is why I find control of sex rather difficult. I am alright most of the time, Unconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya 127

but when I think of intense sex-pleasure the pranks of the sex starved and passionate servant girl, come before my eyes, and I see quite a different side of myself.14 Just as Mrs. A.’s school friend had been “spoilt” by her teacher’s sexual attentions, the servant girl spoiled the psychology professor’s ability to control his sexual desires. She had done more than that, however. Her sexual aggression had also sullied and transformed his friendships: She intruded on me twice and took away the two friends I had, one of them I had begun to call, Bua meaning sister in our language. The other was a boyfriend, with whom I talked of sex and to whom I was attached. She deprived me of these friends in the same place, behind our house, in the thick bushes and under trees.15 Personal struggles with (male) desire, which informed decisions about spouse and career, refracted through a vision of a sexually demanding laboring class, prone to desire and jealousy, epitomized by a domestic worker with an unemplaced sexuality. Combined with Mrs. A.’s recollections about household intrigues and roving sexual desires, the associations of servants with sexual excess extended to a sense that nonfamily women (domestic workers, friends, visitors) bring dislocated, free-range sexuality into the emplaced securities of affinal kinship, with its controlled and limited (hetero)sexuality. A theme of “falling” oriented the psychology professor’s case (his dream was of ascending a ladder), lending verticality to this arrangement of sex, class, gender, and domesticity. He described a sequence of analogous falls: “off the horse . . . due to my emotionalism,” “falling in a temptation or in committing an error,” falling into his “lower-self,” which was represented by “individualist propensities,” especially a danger in relation to sex. He concluded the train of thought with, “In the situation in my childhood, I would have become a prey to the servant girl. . . . I too was in danger,” and a side thought I find quite endearing, “in my comparative study of psychoanalysis, ancient and modern, I might, for the sake of cheap popularity, be prejudiced in one way or another. This might lead me to fall of the scientific ladder.”16 For Mrs. A., memories of her own servant girl indicated that her socialist principles were at odds with, yet also hand and glove with, a similar 128 Unconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya

logic that collated sex, risk, and the working class. Like Vidya, the outside girl who threatened domestic stability with secrets and uncontained desires, the maid transcended boundaries around sexual knowledge. But there was an important difference, perhaps more visible to us than to Mrs. A., who saw the servant girl’s relationship with the Sikh servant as “giving herself up,” a failure of fortitude, and her grief as that of being “jilted.” Unlike Vidya or the psychology professor’s “servant girl” (as far as we know), Mrs. A.’s “servant girl” had been predated. One evening, not long before her analysis, Mrs. A. was walking her garden and “pondering [her] ambitions.”17 Hearing a sound in a nearby bush, she jumped, imagining it was a rat. Mrs. A. had nurtured a fear of rats since she was eight years old, the eventful year in which the Sikh servant joined the household. He used to frighten her with rats, something Mrs. A. did not recall but which her mother said accounted for her phobia. She paused for a moment in telling Satya Nand the story. He waited. He asked her to follow that memory, to “reminisce to ‘villagers’ and ‘rats’ together.”18 She laughed “at the coupling,” then recalled a story a friend had told her: On my way to the school I had to pass by a piece of land, with bushes grown in it. There used to be a boy looking after a cow, in that place. One day, as I passed that way he rushed out from behind a bush and come suddenly towards me with his genital organ in erection and before I knew anything touched my hand. I screemed and ran away, I had felt as if a rat had touched my hand. Since that day I always take a servant with me when I pass that way.19 It was also at age eight (one year after the kiss from the actor playing Krishna at the Rama-Krishna mission) that she saw the Sikh servant banging on the servant girl’s bedroom door, and later witnessed them “in the act.”20 Is it going too far to wonder if something happened between the Sikh servant and Mrs. A.? Perhaps. Would she not have been likely to share such an incident with Satya Nand? It might depend upon what such an incident involved. The case is redolent with recollections that conjoin similar themes (bushes, rats, assaults, the Sikh servant) that read as possible replacements of another, more upsetting event. What is not in doubt was that the Sikh servant had contributed to Mrs.  A.’s current predicament. His trickery and cheating led to her Unconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya 129

brother’s business failures; he was part of the financial downfall that led to her marriage and its wave of losses. The “smudge” that summoned the servant girl was “financial situation sets,” which prompted recollections about Mrs. A.’s family’s financial position “going down hill.”21 My brother lost quite an amount of money in trusting his agent who was previously a servant, but my father educated him, to become a clerk. He was the Sikh servant I talked of recently. My father being follower of Guru Nanak was kind to him. But he was a rascal. He embezzled quite an amount and was later discharged.22 I cannot imagine a more despicable man. He was a rat, cringing when it served him to be so, and relentless when he could have it his way.23 Satya Nand and Mrs. A. compared him to Duryodhana, the Kaurava brother who attempted to strip and humiliate Draupadi during the game of dice: “I think I must be thinking of the Sikh servant as a Daryodhan who jilted my servant girl, became a clerk due to my father educating him and in the end cheated my brother a lot of money.”24 The chain of connections went further: My brother lost most of his money, on a project of popularizing the indigenous industries; a laudable idea, and should have paid for that reason in any other country, but it was the other way round in India. His assistant tried to do him down. I wonder what awkward things my husband has to do to keep his business going. . . . I wonder if my husband is also a Daryodhan in disguise.25 Duryodhana was an organizing archetype for Satya Nand, who saw him as “correlated” to “rape fears,” a category of motivation he juxtaposed with “Goddess phantasy.”26 Rape is an orienting term in his analysis, condensed in both Duryodhana and the Sikh servant, and while the latter’s actions with Mrs. A. are unclear, his treatment of the servant girl is not. In a context in which naming an experience “rape” so loads it with shame, stigma, and the threat of social exclusion that its social memory tends to exist in only oblique ways, what is perhaps remarkable here is that it was named.27 Equally important is that it was not named as an actual event or experience, but as an idea, an imaginary, part of a physical and psychic landscape. “Rape fears” coincided with a set of realities: the “despicable” 130

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young man who accosted and “jilted” a young girl is associated with rats which are associated with penises and with another incident of sexual assault. He was also “correlated” with Duryodhana, a mythic character whose name is nearly synonymous with “rapist.” Amid this, Mrs. A.’s treatment of the servant girl stings. She appears to us as blameless, but Mrs. A. transformed her victimhood into a damaged mind. For all she endured, and for all the ways she was, because of what she endured, no longer trusted to see, hear, know, or tell the truth, the servant girl interrupts Mrs. A.’s clarity on gendered double standards. She cuts short her hopeful visions by being the limit point of Mrs. A.’s ability to invoke justice.

“ T H E T R A N S F O R M E D W O M A N TO L D H E R S TO R Y ”

The third of the mythic heroines to animate Mrs. A.’s case does not figure in it much at all. Like the servant girl, she is never mentioned by name, and in the parts of her story Mrs. A. and Satya Nand emphasize she has been turned to stone. Mrs. A. mentioned her story early in the case (referring to it as a “play”) in response to the dream smudge “To reconvert”: I remember the play in which Rama while passing a village sat on a stone and he had to get up because the stone was turning into a woman. The transformed woman told her story to Rama, who had ordered her to relate it. She was the wife of Gautama, a sage, and was the teacher of Indra, who became king of Heaven. After having finished his training Indra came often to see his teacher. But in reality he tried to make love to the wife who did not respond. One day Indra came at a time when the sage had gone out a great distance. He made the wife drink some medicine and played such good music, that she lost control of her passion, and Indra forced her into the act. Gautama came in to discover this. He cursed both of them. Indra was made impotent and she was turned into a stone ’till Rama was born, and went that way.28 Mrs. A. recalled her again: “It reminds me of the play in which Rama reconverts Gautama’s wife from a stone back into a woman.”29 “The wife of Gautama” is Ahalya. This is one way of telling the story, but there are others. In the plot Satya Nand and Mrs. A. took up, Ahalya, most beautiful of women and wife of the sage Gautama, was seduced, or raped, Unconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya 131

or deceived (for Mrs. A. it appears to be a convergence of the three) by the god Indra who, smitten, lured Ahalya into sex (in some versions he takes Gautama’s form, in others she makes love to him driven by her own desire). They are discovered by Gautama, who, in spite of Ahalya’s pleas of innocence, curses them. Across variations, the curse’s forms are diverse. For Ahalya, they share a theme of slowed time, dimmed consciousness, muteness, and dampened sensation: she is cursed to become invisible and insensate for eons, eating the wind and sleeping on ash, or turned to stone, made into a dry riverbed, or made unable to sense the world around her. Indra is also cursed, but with signs on his body rather than stilted engagement with the world. He loses his testicles and has them replaced with those of a ram, or he is covered with a thousand vulvas (which get turned into eyes). Ahalya’s punishment is also softened. After she decries the injustice of being cursed, Gautama declares she will be restored to life and visibility by the god/king Ram, who will one day wander through the abandoned hermitage, see (or sense) Ahalya and end the curse with his touch. Many of these details are missing from Objective Method. Only referred to as the “wife of Gautama,” or “a woman,” Ahalya did not signal personality traits or “propensities.” Satya Nand saw her as an emblem of resurrection and thus religious reform, part of the way Mrs. A.’s case led toward the final resolution of Hindu socialism. Her story was a “para-reduction” of “Propaganda for Hindu Socialism” and summarized as “Rama’s conversion.”30 A cipher upon whom ethical actions unfold, Ahalya was for Satya Nand a sign of “re-”: rebirth, reform, reconversion. She represented freedom from delusion, uncorrupted truth, qualities he imagined as of a piece with India’s freedom and Mrs. A.’s desire to recreate society by “resurrecting” the “true secrets of Hinduism.” Ahalya’s “reconversion” was similar to religious reform. Satya Nand compared it to Sikhism and to Mrs. A.’s Sikh friends, casting the Sikh religion as Hindu reform, and telling Indian history as a story of waves of religious truth, corruption, and renewal, an evolution of sorts (he was fond of evolutionary metaphors), which he connected to the advancement of “the race” and its ability to adapt its “thoughts to the new situations”: Arjan Singh and Arjan recall Sikhism—a reformation of Hinduism to meet the challenge of Islam. . . . Another reformation of Hinduism is 132

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required to meet the new challenge of Socialism and Communism. . . . Rama’s incarnation meant the resurrection of the wife of Gautama. . . . Sikhism meant the resurrection of Hinduism. The interpretation of Hinduism becomes corrupt because of the lure of Indra or Maya as in the case of the wife of Gautama. A reformation means the further adaptation of the race and its thoughts to the new situations.31 Ahalya’s suffering resulted from being “lured into self-misinterpretation,” a fate that had befallen Hinduism.32 Reformations of Hinduism, Sikkhism, Rama-Krishna Mission are analysed to be like the resurrection of the wife of Gautama—Hinduism as well as she had been lured into self-misinterpretation by Maya or Indra— Hinduism also looses its real secrets and gets misinterpreted, down the ages—A reformation “is the resurrection of the true secrets of Hinduism like the resurrection of the wife of Gautama by the touch of Rama.”33 Of course, it was Mrs. A. who first came to this understanding, bringing Ahalya into the room under the sign of “reconversion.” Later, explaining that Nehru was her Guru, she said, Daropadi also did constructive work and took active part in the cooperative movement begun by the Pandavas in the village. . . . The Guru Nehru combines the message of Rama and Krishna. . . . Rama resurrected a woman who had died due to a delusion or Maya. Hinduism is deluded at present. It can be resurrected into a new life.34 When I first read the case, this bland use of Ahalya struck me as odd. I have long adored this mythic heroine, and her story is arguably the sauciest and most ethically complex of those that appear in Mrs. A.’s case. It vividly demonstrates the gendered architecture of ethical formulations, and shows the ways women’s bodies and minds bear those limits. It is about sex and lies, beauty and violence, and suggests that curses may not be all they seem, that there might, at times, be only the slimmest space between curse and cure. But here, none of those things mattered. It was Ram’s release of Ahalya from her curse, not all that came before it, that interested the doctor and Mrs. A., and for its resemblance to . . . religious reform? All of which made me wonder whether it was not odd that a scientific project so focused on “objective method” should continually return to Unconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya 133

stories of curses? Curses drove the stories that organized the analysis, making the inhabitants of their worlds (and ours) bearers of cosmic action. They compromised ethical action in some instances, enforced it in others. They signaled deceptions and delusions overcome, cosmic wrongs righted, and so, too, for their counterparts, boons, which sometimes took the form of mitigated curses, gifts amid punishment. What are these doing in a scientific exploration of the healthy mind? Missing even from Mrs. A.’s more nuanced narrative was the way, in many versions of the story, after Ahalya was cursed she defended herself against the injustice of being punished for her own violation. This does not make Ahalya unusual. In the epics, women speak out. Indeed, they are often key ethical voices. Notwithstanding maxims attesting the opposite (such as that “women are speakers of untruth”) where men’s speech often takes the form of “formulaic avowal,” “boasting,” and “insulting rhetoric,” women’s speech is “often a source of law and social convention,” giving “judgmental utterance to dharma,” saying how things should be done.35 In both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, women’s voices rise in grief, highlighting humiliation as both personal loss and ethical failure, and ethical failure as personal loss. Ethical failure, for women, can be injustice imposed from outside as much as an internal failing. Women’s speech (often long and discursive) says just this, and effectively so. Curses are softened, punishments are reversed, vengeance is pursued, although women are seldom agents of those effects. Women speak, men act; but women’s speech can cause men to act, and sometimes women’s speech acknowledges what is wrong with that arrangement. However, women of the epics (and the many retellings they bud and branch) have another paradigmatic response to violation. They can retreat, into themselves, into an altered state, into a wilderness whether real or figurative. Sometimes the two responses are paired. They may speak, or they may disappear. They may speak and then disappear. Retreat happens in different ways, and into different time-spaces of removal. Sometimes it is punishment, sometimes it is revenge, sometimes it is just a long goodbye. Women may go to the forest or be swallowed by the earth or turn to stone or become invisible. In less cosmic moments they may fall unconscious, become insensate, go silent, become paralyzed, or shriek with meaningless sounds and unreachable minds. Topographies of exile can include bodies and minds as well as forests and mountains. Men also meet these fates. 134 Unconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya

Ram becomes hysterical with grief when he hears of Sita’s abduction, and other men in the epics fall unconscious, have fits of anger, and reap exile as curse and punishment. They also, of course, speak righteously and with clarity. The Bhagavad Gita was, after all, spoken (god) man to man. There is, however, a gendered aspect to the things that cause grief, to the nature of injustice and violation, and to the kinds of truth women utter. So, too, for other responses. In epic stories, when women speak or when they fall  unconscious, decry injustice, or turn to stone, it is from a structurally gendered position, that is, as wives, mothers, mothers-in-law, and daughters-in-law, and from the way their structurally gendered life courses can, or more often cannot, make room for the truth of the things that are done to them. Sometimes these two possibilities coincide, especially in scenes of devastation. Like Sita, women might deliver an indictment then disappear, or like Ahalya, identify injustice then turn to stone. Like Gandhari, mother of the Kauravas (who won Draupadi in the game of dice and fought the Pandavas in the war that resulted) they might speak in the midst of scenes of mayhem and women’s bodily response to it. Gandhari is proof that we need not see, in the conventional sense, to witness. Blindfolded in devotion to her sightless husband, she accrued so much power through her virtuous self-denial that she developed second sight. After the great battle at Kurukshetra, she watched, with her mind’s eye, the carnage on the battlefield, where a crowd of women, the mothers and wives of fallen warriors, walked among the bodies. In states of shock, they fell unconscious, became mute, and lost all feeling in their limbs as they struggled to recognize bloody faces and match heads to bodies. The scene Gandhari described was one of utter fragmentation, of failures of consciousness and recognition, and of the isolating nature of experiences that might otherwise be shared. She narrated, Hearing only incomplete snatches of each other’s lamentations, these women do not understand each other’s wailing. These heroic women over here, after gasping and shrieking and wailing for a long while, shivering in their pain, are quitting this life. . . . And thrilling with horror upon seeing headless bodies and bodiless heads, the women unaccustomed to these things, are bewildered. After joining a head to a body, they stare at it blankly, and then they are pained to realize, “This is not Unconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya 135

his,” but do not see another one in that place. And these over here, joining arms, thighs, feet, and other pieces cut off by arrows, are overwhelmed by the misery of it and faint over and over again.36 Gandhari discovered the body of her son and fainted. When she came to, she called out, “See how time turns,” and began a lament, envisioning the men and their wives in youth, summoning their lost vitality into the scene of carnage. That my young daughters-in-law are running around, their hair loose, their sons killed in battle, that these poor women who usually move about on loft y terraces must now touch the blood-soaked earth with their ornamented feet. In the agony of their grief they move like madwomen, lurching and whirling, scattering vultures, jackals and crows . . . pained too much at seeing the horrible butchery and fall[ing] down.37 Veena Das considers Gandhari’s lament a “mythic imagination” in which “it is women who must bear witness to death,” and women’s sexualized position in the Mahabharata is the ground from which their questioning voices are raised and their ethics take flight.38 When gender is a structural arrangement, defined less as an inherent status than in the way persons are related to others, ways that may allow for multiple gender “identities” at once, as I would argue is the case in many South Asian gender arrangements and certainly in the Hindu epics, violation, critique, and redress may all happen through displacement. However, displacement can be incomplete; it can take partial and painful forms. There is, then, a certain shape to the kind of witnessing that comes from the structural position of genderedness in the epics: Clarity and speech often abut disarticulations of body and mind, sight and blindness, fragmentation and wholeness, recognition and misrecognition, acute consciousness and unconsciousness are often juxtaposed. In this, the seemingly inviolable relationship of consciousness to presence, and both to time and memory, is violable, and if women must witness to death, they do so by also embodying the effects of that rupture. Unconsciousness, among other retreats, may, thus, be a particular and paradoxical kind of witnessing. Closer to “home,” Pinjar, Punjabi writer Amrita Pritam’s 1950 novel about Partition, portrays violence, mistrust, and, especially, rapes and abductions as not beginning with the rupture of Partition but the social ground in which it unfolded.39 The novel’s main 136

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character, named Pooro in her youth and Hamida in adulthood, encounters a series of women traumatized by violences of kinship and religious chauvinism. One of these is Taru, a twenty-year-old newly married woman who has been afflicted with fainting spells since her wedding day, fits some attribute to spirit possession and others to “some unknown disease.”40 When Hamida begs her to say what is wrong, she first refuses. “When a girl is given away in marriage, God deprives her of her tongue so she may not complain.”41 She finally explains that her husband has another wife, a lowcaste woman he loves. Taru is the second wife, brought into the household by his parents so they might have a daughter-in-law of their own caste.42 She has had to work as a prostitute, she says, denouncing the injustices of marriage and the silences it requires of women and then falling into a fit, “her fists . . . clenched and her legs stiffened.”43 She does this repeatedly— exclaims injustice, then falls into a faint, “collaps[ing] like a deflated sack,” and yet Hamida had never “come across a girl who had such views and could speak her mind so boldly.”44 For readers of a different, perhaps more literal bent, such references might also suggest an appreciation of something it is tempting to call “trauma response.” In stories about retreat may be ideas about how bodies and minds respond to rupture. Certainly, accounts of unconsciousness as response to trauma figure in a long history of medical writing, literature, court cases and other South Asian sources, to such a degree that that the figuring of retreat in moral stories might be linked to histories of the body and treating it. Affliction and illness do not figure in Mrs. A.’s case. By all accounts, Mrs. A was healthy. When she spoke about bringing “Hindu socialism” to villagers and writing India’s history, Satya Nand treated these as legitimate aspirations, not grandiose delusions. When she described the possibility that her marriage was under threat, he regarded this a legitimate concern, not paranoia. And when she described past loves and expansive desires, he regarded these as normal. He did not view homosexuality as an illness, and he did not consider Mrs. A.’s “rape fears” mere fantasy. Her worries were not sickness; there was nothing “abnormal or out of the way.”45 Mrs. A. did not describe symptoms, and if she suffered traumas they were not discussed. She had come to Satya Nand, presumably, by invitation, a deeply sane young woman on the cusp of a major life decision. Yet, even without the workaday labors of diagnosis and treatment, psychiatry’s imperatives figured in her case, and its history was its underUnconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya 137

current. Ahalya scarcely feels out of place in those histories. She is an especially suitable fit for psychoanalysis, her story nestling comfortably in the sex/gender configurations of Freudian arrangements and the usually Greek stories they make as origin myths.46 Thus, where Draupadi took the case toward histories of women’s emancipation, and Shakuntala toward histories of social reform, though Satya Nand saw Ahalya as representing politics, to my mind, she turned a mirror onto his own endeavor, taking the case toward histories of medicine. Mrs. A. and Satya Nand may not have thought of Ahalya as meaningful in relation to illness or trauma, but they brought her into their scientific moment alongside rape as an analytic category and one interspersed with stories that insisted a “warped” mind might be an effect of the combined crime of sexual violation/sexual weakness. With Ahalya, they welcomed into that arrangement a state between living and dying, speech that is no speech as well as the kinds that are bold and loud. These conditions show religious and ethical formulations to feed sciences of the mind not because they say something about how medicine should be practiced (this is not “medical ethics”) but because they make medicine part of a tangle of mythmaking. Taking up where they left off, let us pull other stories into their orbit as though they have been there all along. Let us traverse a strange kind of history, skating across the mythic and the real and the real mythmaking that happens in things like medical case writing, to question the way consciousness is something that many, if not most, ethical formulations take for granted as a synonym for understanding truth. This means going beyond the edge of a view of reality that depends upon the steady work of time. Ahalya, suspended through eons, freezes time so we might glide across.

“ T H E U N F O R T U N AT E YO U N G W O M A N CO U L D N OT S U S TA I N H E R H E R O I C AT T E M P T ”

Around the end of World War II, a thirty-year-old Christian woman joined the nursing corps and began working in an army hospital in Delhi. After ten months of service, she suddenly became testy. Complaining of pain, she took to bed. Doctors found nothing physically wrong with her, but the woman was so depressed that they let her remain in bed. Her behavior grew stranger. She spoke in circuitous and fantastical ways, then stopped speaking altogether, hiding under her sheets when doctors approached. 138

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They deemed her sulky and childish, and finally convinced her to get out of bed. When she did this, she became playful and talkative, especially about the Italian nuns who had raised her in a convent orphanage. She wrote letters in a childish handwriting, using youthful prose. Over time, she grew more cooperative. Her conversation matured and she spoke with the enthusiasm of a schoolgirl about literature and theater, Shakespeare and Shaw. She became attached to her occupational therapist and flirted with her male doctors. It was as though she had returned to childhood, then grown up again. Eventually, she told them about her current situation. Orphaned as a young child, she had lived in the convent until she was twenty-one, when she fell in love with a Muslim professor. They married, had two children, and for several years lived a happy life. She felt at home in university life, enjoyed the stimulating intellectual environment and entertaining her husband’s students and colleagues. Her doctor wrote, It was to her horror that after many such happy years she was forced to notice her husband’s interest in another woman. Later, the professor decided to marry this woman and take her also into the household. The patient made it clear that she would not tolerate this, voiced her religious objections and her strong feelings about the position of women in society. Also, needless to add, she felt intensely jealous of the other woman. In spite of her arguments and entreaties, her husband remained obdurate, maintaining his right to a plurality of wives. On the arrival of the other woman she took the children and left the home. The children were placed in the convent of her own youth and she joined the nursing service.47 This had taken place one year before her illness. After leaving her husband, she worked at the hospital, ignoring his letters insisting on his right to multiple wives, deciding that there would be no reconciliation. Finally, the vigor of conviction ceded to sadness. The unfortunate young woman could not . . . sustain her heroic attempt at independent occupation and separation, but became depressed, ceased to work, and took flight into illness, which was shortly translated into a complete denial in fantasy of her situation in life, and in her reliving and dramatizing her early days (retour à l’enfance).48 Unconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya 139

The nurse’s case was published in 1950 in British army surgeon D. Wilfred Abse’s book The Diagnosis of Hysteria, a comparison of symptoms of hysteria among Indian and British soldiers. Her case is an anomaly in the book; she is its only Indian woman. She was, in all likelihood, nearly to the year, contemporary to Mrs. A.’s analysis. This proximal story has striking similarities, waves of movement away from home, religious boundarycrossing, the pleasures of intellectual engagement, universities, and educated social circles, romantic love, the threat of polygamy, the cultivation of a career as an alternative to marriage (and marital betrayal), all signaling that Mrs. A.’s marital worries were not necessarily anomalous, nor was the possibility that an educated woman in the 1940s might leave marriage and establish a life on her own. There are also a number of differences, including parentless children, whereas Mrs. A.’s case tends toward familial overinvolvement and, most crucial, that the nurse’s case was pathological. The case ends with sad and unresolved sentences. Her independence had turned to childhood regression and a “flight into illness,” a “complete denial in fantasy of her situation in life.”49 Abse attempted diagnostic clarity, declaring her condition “hysterical puerilism.” “An excursion with denial in fantasy is often a transient defensive technique utilized in childhood, it must be admitted, is often carried over into adult days by many apparently well-adjusted people.”50 Although they only appeared in the early stages of the nurse’s illness, a characteristic set of symptoms recurred in Abse’s other cases: fainting or sudden unconsciousness, muteness, and catatonias. A sense of the commonness of these symptoms in India was firmly in place by the end of the nineteenth century, persisting up to Abse’s time and onward to our own, as many observers took note of a common set of symptoms: unconsciousness, fainting, amnesia, anesthesia, trance states, muteness, and paralysis. Forty years earlier, in 1908, G. F. W. Ewens’s medico-legal guide Insanity in India described “catatonic stupor” as common in India and provided six cases, all male. Superintendent of the Lahore Lunatic Asylum (where Satya Nand later worked), Ewens (who adhered to the notion that most mental illnesses in India resulted from excessive cannabis use) described “melancholic stupors” such as that of a thirty-year-old man arrested in 1901 for wandering around the cantonment “silently breaking flower pots and window panes.”51 “While under observation he quickly passed into a condition in which he was stated to have lain continually on his back with the eyes closed, quite 140

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motionless except for some twitching of the facial muscles; he never spoke, asked for nothing, and ate only food placed in his hands, and latterly certainly passed all his excreta where he lay.”52 The man remained in that position for nearly a year, “on his side half coiled up, absolutely motionless, never speaking, never moving, paying absolutely no attention to anything, flinching perhaps at some painful stimulus, but giving no other reaction.”53 For Ewens, the cause was moral and physical, the result of “overpowering sense of dread or . . . delusion,” and a rapid rise in melancholia, from being “merely being depressed becoming more intensely so, then becoming more morose, gloomy and taciturn, until this culminates in the state of absolute silent immobility and non-reaction.”54 Such patients usually recovered (“when they do not die of some intercurrent disease such as tubercle or diarrhea”), and while some could not remember being in the state, others recalled being conscious while immobilized by “some powerful ‘feeling’ which they could not help but obey.”55 For some observers, catatonia, anesthesia, and paralysis were characteristically Indian symptoms of a range of illnesses. For others they were characteristic Indian symptoms of hysteria. For Abse, while Indian and European soldiers suffering war trauma might have had the same symptoms, it was “generally [his] experience in India . . . that hysteria predominates over other forms of mental disorder to a remarkable extent.”56 He noted “the prevalence of the disease in Bengal,” though “as yet no reliable statistics as to the gross incidence of this disease among the indigenes.”57 Alexander Overbeck-Wright, head of the Agra Lunatic Asylum, advised “The main points to look for are, in hysteria, the convulsive crises, the hemianaesthesias and segmentary anaesthesias, the contractures and paralyses, with narrowing of the field of vision and derangements of colour vision.”58 In his 1921 book, all three cases, again, male army subalterns, involved “epileptic fits,” catatonia, or muteness. Along with these, one might also find “defects of mental coordination and of the will power,” and “defects of memory as well as of the moral sense,” qualities that “render it almost impossible to catch the attention of the patient” and make it “impossible to rely on the statement of any one suffering from hysteria.”59 Not to be confused with “general paralysis of the Insane,” associated with late-stage syphilis, these conditions were seen as the result of “indulgence in either emotional or sexual passions in early life.”60 Similarly, “Intense emotional shock . . . may so intensify the activity of a presentation and the Unconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya 141

resulting disposition that its persistence in consciousness may be indefinitely prolonged, perhaps rendered even permanent. . . . Cases of rape frequently furnish examples of this aetiological factor.”61 While such cases also made it into medical books in Europe and North America, a crucial difference was that when they did so in India, a question followed that did not arise in the west: “Why here?” In the nineteenth century, hysteria in India became “Indian hysteria,” and its afflictions were made useful in theorizing difference, especially the effects of “culture,” “custom,” and “race” on mental processes. Abse’s comparative research on mental illness during World War II was part of a longer scientific rationale, dependent on the colonies for its logic, which saw in states of mind a ground for establishing various kinds of difference and equivalence. In the earliest Indian medical journals, contributors made widely divergent suggestions. A letter sent in 1835 to the Indian Journal of Medical Science from a George Spilsbury observed, “While on the subject of the female economy, is not hysteria and all its train rare among native females of this country? And is it not to be attributed to the fact that the women are not kept in an artificial state, but from puberty placed in situations God and nature intended they should be?”62 Fift y years later, surgeon and medico-legal writer Norman Chevers seemed to come to both this and the opposite opinion at the same time: “[Hysteria] being, for the most part, a disease of unmarried life, and there not being a great many single women (excepting Hindoo widows, who are especially secluded) in India, we do not see so much of this neurosis there as we do at home. Still, I think that nearly all East Indian women, and not a few of the men, are more or less hysterical.”63 Hysteria’s associations with female morality were not left out of these conversations. Doctor R. S. Khory, writing to the Times of India in 1879, wrote, “These various disorders are very commonly seen in Bombay. In a majority of cases they occur in strong girls in whom power of mutation and of moral contagion is always strong.” Comparison served many ends, some in service of gendered morality, some in service of colonial rule, some reframing or even rebuking colonialist assumptions about British medical superiority. Where hysteria’s “protean” nature might help establish moral qualities of race and gender, questions of doctors’ skill in diagnosing and treating hysteria demarcated colonial parameters of knowledge and expertise.64 Altered states of con142 Unconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya

sciousness were vital to these contests. In medical journals, muteness, faints, and catatonias elicited a bravado of cure. Doctors wrote in with one wondrous story after another, praising or decrying “native” and European doctors and their techniques. In the Indian Medical Journal, an effusive letter to the editor posted from “Lakhnau” (Lucknow) in 1835 wished to share the amazing discovery that “the application of cold water” might be revivifying.65 Having made the accidental (probably unpleasant) discovery that cold water could revive a snake appearing to be dead, the doctor, called only Davidson, found a new use for the treatment during “a festival in honor of one of those huge striding Hindu deities, who from the peak of the Himalaya placed one foot on a rock in the middle of the fair, and at another step stood on a mountain in Ceylon!”66 The gathering was awesome, the quiet of the day and “stillness of the forest” contrasting with the “simultaneous and universal clapping of hands in honor of the deity” through the night. Davidson visited a “sacred spot” where “innumerable devotees . . . were crawling up and down the hill” and was surprised to see “a very stout and handsome young woman of about twenty, lying apparently dead on the ground.”67 Finding no pulse, “but warmth in the body,” he learned from the crowd that she had been in that state for some time, “having fallen down suddenly without previous notice or illness.” Feeling the press of the “mob” around her to be suffocating, he asked the woman’s husband to clear an area. The man was reluctant. She was dead, he said, and needed to be buried. The doctor sent his groom for water. When the boy returned, he splashed it on the woman’s head until he noticed a “twinkle” in an eyelid. Delighted, he opened her shirt and poured the rest of the bucket over her body. The effect was magical, she suddenly started up with a scream; wiped the water from her face, seized her disheveled hair, twisting it behind her head, snatched her clothes, and looked round with a stare of astonishment. A loud shout of surprise rent the air, the miraculous cure of a firangee [foreigner] spread like wild-fire through the fair; accompanied by her sister and husband. I walked to my tent surrounded by a dense crowd of admirers!68 Davidson asked a man nearby who was more learned, “Mussalmans or Firangees.” The man, of course, professed that he, the doctor, was most clever, “for with his own eyes he had seen one of the [firangees] raise a dead woman to life.”69 Unconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya 143

Stories of false death were common in nineteenth-century medical writing in and about India, as they were in earlier Persian literature and Victorian gothic of the same period. The colonial variant on the theme saw physicians rescuing people thought dead, snatching them from cremation pyres, recognizing those thought ready for burial to be merely suffering hysterical catatonia. Providing a trope for the assertion of either “native” or “firangee” skill, hysteria was a punchline, a key to diagnostic wonder working and a solution to mysteries of apparent death. While accounts pitted scientific knowledge against irrational practice, their rhetorical flourishes emphasized intuition, the “miraculous,” and the “magical.” For Davidson of Lakhnau, the ineptitude of “native” healers was exposed, but the story could go the other way. In 1869, an Indian subassistant surgeon named Pandurang wrote to the Indian Medical Gazette describing a challenging he had been able to explain, but not cure. Indeed, his inability to cure helped him understand the cause.70 A twelve-year-old girl named Haribai had been brought in with what he first thought to be chorea. She had been struck dumb by the fright of seeing a snake and was beset by rapid and uncontrollable movement. He had been unable to cure her, and after three days she was taken to a priest whose “incantations” abated her symptoms. The girl had a similar outbreak a month later, and was similarly cured. Pandurang deduced that the illness was a hysterical response to the snake, not organic chorea, an understanding he came to in part because of the nature of the cure, incantations, and the “unexplicable” nature of the illness. Unconsciousness fed colonial struggles to determine whether it was hysteria that was racialized or the ability to recognize it. Some wondrous accounts rearranged the matter entirely. On a summer day in the early 1900s, a young man crossing Boston Common fell to the ground, paralyzed and open-eyed, incapable of any speech except a mumble.71 He was taken to a hospital, where a young orderly who had been experimenting with acoustic technologies brought out a hearing trumpet. He made out the man’s faint words: “Look in the back cover of my watch.” There, doctors found a folded piece of paper inscribed with a prescription. When the concoction was administered, the man revived and told this story: His first attack had occurred in India, where he was successfully treated by an Indian physician who wrote out the cure (the newspaper article does not say what it was). According to the account, which appeared in the Detroit Free 144

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Press, doctors never figured out the cause of the disease or nature of the cure. In a hive of writing about hysteria, doctors’ recuperation of the reputations of “native” physicians was not unlike their recuperation of “Indian” theories and ideas, which in turn was not unlike the recuperation of Hinduism as source of moral authority by social reformers of the early nineteenth century. To comparisons built around unconsciousness as affl iction were comparisons engineered around consciousness as religious attainment, healing, and psychological theory. “The basic principles of psychohygiene . . . form an integral part of Indian culture, and strongly influence the lives of Indians,” wrote South Indian psychiatrist M. V. Govindaswamy, who noted the therapeutic possibilities of a landscape dotted with ashrams, where healing spaces of quiet contemplation could be easily found.72 A hundred years earlier, as India offered characteristic symptoms of hysteria, it also contained consciousness practices offering a distinctly Indian repertoire for healing. In other words, a spectrum of consciousness emerged in the comparative work of colonial medicine, with therapeutic transcendence and hyperattunement on one end and pathological disengagement on the other. Satya Nand’s “samadhi state” was scarcely an innovative concept. Intense and repetitive sensory practices like drumming, dance, and, especially “chanting” were endowed with therapeutic value, conjoining the assumed modernity of medicine with a sense of timeless religious practice. Comparing a troubled man’s pacing to that of a caged tiger, psychoanalyst Girindrasekhar Bose described dance, swaying, and “incantations” as curative for neuroses such as hysteria.73 Much earlier, medical journals were full of accounts of “Indian” healing through “trance,” and various practices (many, if not most, fabricated at worst, poorly understood at best) entered the globally emerging science of hypnosis. Perhaps most infamous were the efforts of James Esdaile, the East India Company surgeon who tested the use of hypnosis to treat pain and anesthetize surgery patients in his Hooghly hospital. Esdaile’s accounts of his own efforts noted the use of mesmeric principles by Hindu “magicians” for both healing and nefarious purposes.74 Though his racist rhetoric and medical bravado were aimed at British audiences primed for negative views of “native superstition,” efforts to claim scientific legitimacy offered fodder for Esdaile’s discrediting by a public that related mesmerism to Indian practices deemed irrational or Unconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya 145

even fraudulent.75 Of course, not all of these states were the same; neither were their mechanisms. Some were lauded for heightening sensation, others for dulling it; some constituted healing, while others merely facilitated the application of other techniques. While Satya Nand’s “samadhi” method should be thought of as a modern invention, perhaps more reminiscent of hypnosis than Hindu religious practice, he was not alone in staking a claim to, and attempting to make a name for, “Indian” practices. However, especially if hypnosis had roots (of a kind) in both Indian practices and Western and Indian imaginaries of Indian practices, who is to say he was wrong? Through the later nineteenth century, another set of equivalences took shape on the ground of unconsciousness. Afflictions were beginning to be understood as translatable into religious practice. “Trance,” lauded as curative, was also translated as illness in terms announced as Western (“Trance, like catalepsy and epilepsy, is a condition allied to hysteria. In it the patient is prostrate as if dead, the respiration and circulation having almost ceased”).76 Another equivalence was especially prominent, that of hysteria to spirit possession. A new arrangement in the nineteenth century, it lives with us still as both common sense and the foundation for ethnographic discussion of spirit possession as empowering or disempowering for women.77 In the later nineteenth century, Indian medical journals and colonial ethnographies such as Crooke’s influential Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India (1894) began referring to spirit possession as hysteria by another name, an equation that became a familiar tool in a particular kind of operation, familiar from the heroic rescues of false deaths.78 So, too, this equivalence might announce the longevity of “modern” medical knowledge in India. In 1896, one of Satya Nand’s predecessors at University of Edinburgh, Bhagavat Singh Jee, Maharaja of the Gujarati state of Gondal and vice president of the Indian Medical Association, described the value of “Hindoo medicine” to a European audience with little apology for what he termed its “magico-religious” elements.79 In A Short History of Aryan Medical Science, he wrote, in by then familiar terms, that “the demoniacal diseases of the Hindoos are but other words for hysteria, epilepsy, dancing mania, and other disorders of the nervous system” and sought to demonstrated the wisdom of indigenous medical knowledge through the “many things on which both [Indian and European medicine] agree.”80 His book was widely circulated and well received, 146 Unconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya

causing an American critic to write, “Modern science is robbed of the credit of several of its most boasted discoveries by the revelations made in a remarkable book issued this week from the pen of a learned Prince.”81 Meanwhile, doctors, Indian and non-Indian, advocated their skills against those of “exorcists,” and the concept of “hysteria” (long a feature of Indian medical practice) was reimagined as a Western import and thing of universal science, a foreign equivalence that, on the one hand, could prove the value of Indian knowledge systems, and on the other, could be a means of debunking superstition. A 1911 essay in The Times of India about the rationalist Bhaskar Rao said, “His favorite author was Voltaire, his serious study was mental physiology; his daily amusement was to scoff at popular beliefs and errors; he reduced all occult phenomena to one or the other of the two H’s—hysteria and humbug.”82 In Abse’s account of Indian hysteria, the case of the Christian nurse represents a long-running comparative effort to chart social differences (polygamy, Islam, and the like) against biological differences, but unlike many of its predecessors in this conversation, it did so not just against questions of culture, race, or environment, but against universal human predicaments: thwarted love, aspiration, abandonment, resignation. This is an important difference. Another crucial difference from earlier eras was that while Indian psychiatry in Abse’s era was far more institutionalized within a more extensive and established medical system, it was far from homogeneous, and by World War II, certain regional differences had consolidated. In South Indian psychiatry, symptoms, such as fainting and fits, which Abse and others associated with hysteria were assigned different diagnoses. More concerned with organic causes that moral explanation, South Indian psychiatrists diagnosed unconsciousness as “confusional reaction,” using a prevalent catchall category for a range of symptoms (including bouts of unconsciousness, but also emotional disturbances, outbursts, fatigue, and weakness). Seen as effects of a physical conditions including syphilis, tuberculosis, anemia, and pregnancy and childbirth, as well as sheer fatigue and in some cases grief, confusional reactions tended to resolve after time in the hospital. By contrast, hysteria was more narrowly defined, according to case fi les from the Mysore Mental Hospital, and associated with theatrical behavior, bodily contortions (“striking fantastical postures”) and attention-getting behavior. Nonetheless, hysteria remained an entity to ponder for what it might say about difference, social Unconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya 147

forces, and “mental hygiene.” Writing contemporarily to Satya Nand, M. V. Govindaswamy, head of the Mysore Mental Hospital, attributed rising rates of psychosomatic illnesses to a changing society. “While psychosomatic problems are the same all over the world, their patterns are different in India due to different cultural factors. Hysterical, cardiovascular, digestive and skin disorders and chorea in girls, confusional states in boys, and stammering speech disturbances and even asthma in children are a few consequences.”83 In published accounts of specific cases, the afflicted were just as likely to be men as women. It is in more abstract theorizing that hysteria in India was associated with women. In inpatient case files to which Govindaswamy contributed notes and diagnoses, male and female cases of confusional disorders were comparable, and a number of men were diagnosed with hysteria. His published work differed, perhaps in part because it drew on Govindaswamy’s experiences with patients in outpatient as well as inpatient care. Young women are now offering another problem in mental hygiene. Most of the girls used to be engaged for marriage by the time they were sixteen. About twenty seems to be the average age now for marriage. In South India every girl is a competitor with a boy where education is concerned. She has also become his serious competitor in the professions. Marriages are no longer parent-arranged in the same manner as before, but the girls are not emancipated enough to select their own mates independently. So psychosomatic affections are on the increase, and offer a serious problem for mental hygienists. Many girls also enter  into a state of marriage unprepared, and there are the usual casualties.84 Govindaswamy, like others, considered changes in women’s education, particularly coeducation, and family pressure as contributing to increased rates of “psycho-somatic disturbances.”85 Largely a proponent of women’s emancipation, he did not seek a return to older ways, but saw the need for increased education and counseling on matters related to marriage. So education not merely on facts of life but also on those relating to life’s responsibilities, sense of values and of adaptability to the family will go

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a long way in mitigating such illnesses. Marriage counselling should form an integral part of any mental hygiene programme.86 Govindaswamy incorporated the political context of colonialism and its systematic oppressions into all that characterized Indian afflictions. Amongst evacuated adults, acute panic, followed by loss of memory for the event, immobility and stupors were quite common as also depressions and hysterical states which persisted for months. . . . They are the problems which social workers may expect to find amongst the refugees.87 Asking why, if India was “storehouse of great philosophical and epistemological knowledge,” with “rich and fertile” land, was it nonetheless prone to illiteracy and “superstition,” and beset with chronic starvation and famine,88 The causes for such a paradoxical situation are not far to seek. They are historical, political and socio-economic. Centuries of foreign rule, with its inevitable economic exploitation have resulted in appalling poverty, illiteracy and ignorance. A vicious circle of chronic under-nutrition and inadequate resistance to infection has been set up, with increase in tropical diseases like malaria, cholera, and plague.89 Though they differed on many things, Govindaswamy and Satya Nand departed from colonial approaches to hysteria in an important way: Where colonial psychiatry and ethnology drew comparisons with accounts of racial and cultural difference, projects for which hysteria and unconsciousness performed especially well, early postcolonial psychiatry made room for the effects of political and social systems and for broad, even global, forms of power. These were differences which had everything to do with time, change, and a connected-up world, elements toward which Western sciences of trauma would arguably take longer to turn, as Indian psychiatry grappled with and made intellectual use of social context earlier and more consistently than its Western counterpart. In part this was because its scholarly contributions had long been, for better or worse, oriented toward comparison, the need to compare India, its afflictions, its society, its cures, with Europe. Therefore, even psychoanalytic therapies, which

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characteristically emphasized individualized and family dynamics over social patterns, could imagine psyches as products of social, even political, environments. It might be said more generally of the views of indigenous (and some nonindigenous) practitioners writing under and just after colonialism that social critique was inherent, if latent, all along. The possibility of decolonization drove some, like Frantz Fanon, to use psychodynamic concepts in asking how colonial oppression shaped the psyches of the colonized. Govindaswamy and Satya Nand may not have formulated critiques as stinging as Fanon’s, but it is not to be underestimated that their work blended psychiatry’s methods with nationalist considerations and social concerns with the community, in Satya Nand’s case, and situated bodies and minds in conditions of physical poverty, oppression, and trauma, in Govindaswamy’s. “Indian hysteria” and its core experience, unconsciousness, were not just coincidental to this history, they were integral to it, providing it with not only meanings but also structures for arranging the world and its knowledge, practices, and ideas. Although this history did not always center on women, it is still full of things particular to gendered structures of desire, kinship, and material life; it is still full of women. Govindaswamy’s published writing contains no cases like that of the Christian nurse or Mrs. A., but in clinical cases, including those he diagnosed, particularly in the gaps between sparse life details—which for women typically included little more than a list of years of birth, menarche, marriage, and the births and deaths of children—there were more than a few stories that would harmonize here.

“ S H E H A D LO S T A B A BY A M O N T H B E F O R E ”

In contrast with the evidence of early twentieth-century South India, where organic ailments dominate fi les and hysteria cases were few, in the Punjab of Mrs. A.’s youth, hysteria was, by British accounts, rampant. In 1933, British physician Ellen Farrer wrote, “It is surely not wonderful considering the unnatural conditions of pardah, etc. under which they live, that hysteria in multitudinous manifestations should be quite prevalent among Indian women, and we saw much more of it than of organic nervous disease.”90 While working at the Baptist Missionary Society Hospital in Bhiwani, through no special interest in psychiatry, Farrar became re150 Unconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya

nowned for treating hysteria, among other “women’s diseases.” She recorded numerous cases. Yesterday evening at bedtime 2 men came to call me to a woman who had been constantly crying out since the afternoon, and was apparently giving her friends and neighbours all sitting like herself on the ground, and vainly endeavouring at intervals to quiet her. She was staring about and ceaselessly repeating in a loud monotonous voice, “Hari Ram, Hari Ram”; or “He Ram, He Ram.” She had no fever or other physical illness, and the only history I could get was that she had lost a baby a month before, and a brother in law a fortnight ago. I concluded that she probably imagined herself tormented or in some way possessed by one or other of these departed spirits—a not uncommon superstition. By way of “laying the ghost” I proceeded to give her a strongly sedative hypodermic injection, which evolved a small storm of struggle and crying. . . . The report this morning was that she was all right, which confirms my diagnosis of the cause of the trouble. Such cases are very curious, and by no means easy to manage, since the patients seem to set themselves to resist all efforts to get them back into a normal state.91 What if this bundle of afflictions really was frequent in North India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or even earlier? What if recuperative writers were, in certain ways, right? One way to read accounts like Farrer’s is in terms of discourse, the imposition of “Western” categories on non-Western afflictions, or work like Singh-Jee’s as validating derided knowledge systems by forming equivalence with philologically resonant language games linking an Indian past to a Western modernity. But other ways deserve the benefit of consideration. Accounts of sudden afflictions of consciousness are remarkably common in the archive of Indian colonial medicine. They transcend authorship, social status, colonial position, and intellectual goals. Ayurvedic and Unani-Tibb texts (and those that span “indigenous” systems now deemed distinct), including those that preceded European arrival, did elaborate on crises involving unconsciousness, muteness, paralysis, and fits. Nineteenth-century medicine, itself an intricately “braided” science compiling multiple histories, ideas, and ideologies,92 did not invent “Indian hysteria,” nor did it “discover” that hysteria and spirit possession were the same or different; in a sense, it discovered the former and invented the latter, though the reverse is more likely assumed to be the Unconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya 151

case. The most critical difference is likely to be that an affliction, or set of linked ailments, which had existed for millennia in Indian lives, medical treatises, and treatments, in diverse forms, as in Europe, and that organically melded body, mind, and environment (and sometimes cosmos) had, by the nineteenth century, moved into “the mind,” become “psychosomatic,” its medical status revoked and religious status cemented. Singh-Jee was not alone in invoking the idea of “Aryan” science to showcase Indian knowledge. While he praised “Hindoo” medicine not for its theories, but its diagnosing, others, some working within philological traditions, crafted more detailed translations of Sanskrit medical texts (into European and Indian languages), equating hysteria and epilepsy with several terms, most commonly, apasmara, and afflictions of wind, or vata. Broadly speaking, to gloss the concepts that were subject to centuries of instrumental translation, Ayurveda understands the body to be porous to cosmic and material forces, a hub of flows and channels of the humorlike moral-material substances that are the dosas. Wind, vata, is one of three humors whose blockage produces illness, and its proper circulation through the body allows blood to flow and creates movement. In the earliest Ayurvedic texts, the Caraka Samhita and Susruta Samhita, vata illnesses are also those that “traverse the body”: convulsions, fits, fainting, tremors, breathlessness, grief, anesthesia, and pain, including apatanaka, apatantraka, fainting attributed to the humor wind.93 Apasmara is a separate category of disorder, involving fits, unconsciousness, fugues, and sometimes foaming at the mouth, caused by humoral imbalance, planetary alignment and misfortune, and translating as something akin to “failed memory.” In later Ayurvedic texts, often commentaries on earlier texts containing new ideas, categories, and etiologies interpellated into the original, these afflictions and their causes were explained and parsed, changes too dense to detail here, in texts that involuted time through inserted ideas rather than being legibly progressive. In some of these texts, apasmara would be a matter of humors; in others it would be associated with spirits (nonetheless a medical concept, in a world with less than delineated boundaries between “religion” and “medicine”); in others it would indicate the influence of the planets, and in yet others of sadness, love, and loss, and in many ways was a combination of these factors. Apasmara is not just a medical term but a recognizable emotional state, part of the grammar of emotions that pertain to rasa theory, and discussed 152 Unconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya

in the dramaturgical treatise Natyshastra of Bharatamuni (composed roughly 200 BCE–200 CE), the earliest rasa text. One of the “transitory” states (along with dreaming, impatience, sleeping, arrogance, intoxication, joy, and despair), apasmara is to be performed by sudden falling, trembling, foaming at the mouth, and “rising up while senseless.”94 It is described as caused by spirit possession, the memory of ghosts, “staying in a deserted house,” sleeping and eating at odd hours, and humoral imbalance.95 The Natyashastra also describes, among “temperamental states,” “fright” as to be performed by shaking, paralysis, looseness of limbs, halfshut eyes, and “speaking in a choked voice,”96 and jadata, “stupor,” (which could also be read as “idiocy”) caused by “hearing a much desired thing or a [very] harmful thing, sickness and the like” and to be portrayed by standing still, remaining silent, leaning upon others, and “looking with steadfast gaze.”97 It lists among the eight “temperamental states” stambha, standing stock-still, a kind of paralysis to be portrayed by being motionless, expressionless, “like an inert object, senseless and stiff bodied,” and “due to joy, fear, sickness, surprise, sadness, intoxication and anger.98 (Apasmara also appears in iconography personified as the dwarf of ignorance upon whose back Shiva’s foot rests as he performs the tandava, the wild dance of creation and destruction. In this movement, Shiva stills, but does not slay, illusion in order to sustain the movements of time.) One of the more intriguing aspects of this complex of afflictions of movement, sense, and consciousness, all that might have come to be absorbed into the term “hysteria” (itself taken up in Indian languages as histiriya, as in nineteenth-century Bengali literature and medical advertising), is that, for the most part, it was not gendered.99 Perhaps because as a humoral system it downplayed the role of organs, unless discussing pregnancy, the body of Ayurveda is a universal male, that is, male but could be female, and disorders that would come to be associated with hysteria had very little to do with female sexed bodies. Spirit affliction (or “possession,” bhutagrsta, as outlined in Vedic and, later, Ayurvedic texts concerned with bhutavidya, the knowledge/science of ghosts), on the other hand, did contain interesting qualifications with regard to gender. In his exhaustive study of spirit possession in India, Frederick Smith cites several instances in Ayurvedic and Vedic sources in which female bodies are deemed vulnerable to spirit attack (also a contemporary configuration).100 For instance, a Rig Veda hymn (10.162) finds the female body and fetuses to be at Unconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya 153

risk of possession by amiva, a “flesh eater . . . that separates the thighs and enters the womb while the husband and wife are sleeping together, in order to lick the inside of the womb and, presumably, destroy the fetus.”101 Though hardly a “wandering womb,” according to the Greek configuration, it nonetheless renders the female body vulnerable to entry. However, it is important to note that spirit affliction is, in Ayurveda at least, categorically not the same as afflictions of vata, responses to grief and shock, or the effect of cosmic forces (planetary alignment and such), though it may coincide with and even influence and be influenced by them. Nor can spirit affliction in premodern India be properly considered the “religious” face of “medical” disorders; indeed, if hysteria is taken seriously as a premodern condition (albeit not unified under a single category but appearing as a bundle of affiliated afflictions), then the idea of its translational equivalence to spirit possession makes no sense at all, and to call the two equivalent is to write off several millennia of medical practice and knowledge creation. In early Indian medicine, spirit affliction was a medical affliction properly speaking, just as other explanations for sudden unconsciousness, fits, muteness, and stupors might be treated with prayers, rituals, and incantations alongside medications, herbs, foods, and forms of action. Spirits and winds occupied the same body; they influenced each other. A blockage of vata might make one weak and prone to spirits; a bothersome spirit might leave one vulnerable to planetary effects and humoral imbalance. To imagine these things as being “the same” but adhering to different “explanatory models” is an arguably modern arrangement, indeed, a product of nineteenth-century games with consciousness, race, and vectors of imagined difference (those which elsewhere I have called “difference through equivalence.”102 While the arrival of European understandings of hysteria certainly added gendered associations to an affliction long established in the subcontinent, this process began much earlier, with the arrival of Arabic and Persian doctors and texts, and the influence of Greco-Islamic medicine, itself already influenced by Ayurvedic and Persian medical ideas. A new entity arrived on the scene, ikhtinaw-ar-rahm, suffocation of the womb, a literal translation of Hippocrates’s hysterike pnix, which appeared in South Asia in Persian and Arabic medical texts such as Ibn-Sina’s Canon of Medicine and the Mujaz al-Qanun, a thirteenth-century text widely circulated in India which described illnesses caused by blockages of menstrual blood 154

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and female semen, the latter generated by the womb and released during sex, and, if accumulated, a cause of fainting and madness.103 Indian medicine prior to the arrival of the British was a site of flourishing translations: Ayurvedic texts were translated into Persian and Arabic, Indian doctors traveled to the Baghdad court, and texts synthesizing Islamic, Greek, and Ayurvedic medicine were drafted in Delhi by court physicians.104 Many medical texts were meant to travel, one small enough to fit inside a riding boot.105 In Unani-Tibb, these afflictions and their cures were infused with notions of courtly virtue, the body a vessel of moral behavior and social status in ideas that would resonate with idioms of modernity in the early twentieth century when hakims warned of connections between hysteria, urban lifestyles, and women’s education.106 Swooning, fainting, and falling unconscious, especially due to anger, wrongdoing, and lost love, was neither male nor female in this literature. In Indo-Persian literature (as well as Sanskrit theater of the same era), men swoon at love’s first glance, run wild in anger, and fall unconscious in grief.107 By the nineteenth century, Bengali daktars were treating what they referred to as histiriya alongside dhat, “semen loss” as afflictions of weakness involving sexed body fluids, and ikhtinaw-ar-rahm was diagnosed in Unani-Tibb.108 In the early twentieth century, yosapasmara (apasmara afflicting young women) had entered Ayurvedic writing, first appearing in a Hindi translation, with interpellated disease categories, of the eighteenth-century Bhaisajya Ratnavali of Govinda Dasji Bhisagratna, possibly because it was already being diagnosed in practice, or possibly as an act of sheer imagination on the part of translator Brahmasankara Misra.109 Medical and religious reformers of the nineteenth century who looked to ancient texts for the historical precedence of Indian models for healing, using categories such as hysteria and apasmara as choice examples, were, in a sense, not wrong in noticing the longevity of afflictions of consciousness. Although it is difficult to know, there is much to support the idea that they were also not wrong about the consistency of certain forms of affliction, though the claims made on those grounds are a different matter. The circularity of knowledge, discourse, and reality that is colonial medicine can overshadow the possibility that some things were, and are, persistent. So, too, it becomes difficult to parse historical genealogies from claims about historical genealogies amid the establishment and codification of “indigenous” medicine and recuperative readings of religion, philosophy, Unconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya 155

and medicine. New avatars were absorbed into “ancient” medical systems, but so were the categories and structures lying in wait to be discovered by historians and others. The difference between old realities and new realities created out of claims about old realities can be elusive. It is in the effort to find gender in what became “Indian hysteria” that I am reminded that this crazy spin is crazy because it depends upon the evidence of texts and on finding bodies in sources that are defiantly disembodied. There are other places than medical configurations to look for gender, and although ahistorical, there is something to be said for imaginations that form in the synapses between textual links. In myth, literature, theater, and storytelling, afflictions of consciousness are caused by cosmic actors, sudden sorrow and loss, shock, and humoral imbalance, approaching a mythopoetic theory of trauma response. Like the speech of characters in the epics, afflictions were and are gendered in such stories less because the bodies they move through are sexed than because the social situations that encase them are defined by gender, even if bodies and persons sometimes switch genders, or transgress rules, or defy expectations. In these sources, men as well as women are afflicted by faints and muteness and tremors, but the conditions in which men and women fall into these states expose the way their worlds define relationships between men and women (rather than the biological “nature” of men and women) and build moral stories from those relationships. In other words, in the earliest texts in which it arguably appears, Indian “hysteria” (let us call it that for a moment, embracing anachronism) is not gendered because bodies/minds are gendered through any natural or naturalizing configuration, but rather because it is the fallout of gender situations. This, as much as anything, allows us to be Singh-Jees of a different sort, creatively reaching to a library of stories and ideas to link contemporary hysterias in India, with the vital roles they played in colonial and postcolonial psychiatry, to ideas and formulations that have less to do with Freud and more with Gandhari, Draupadi, Shakuntala, and Ahalya. It allows us to make, with conviction, a nineteenth-century argument: The South Asian history of what we can, for shorthand, call hysteria deserves a place in the global history of sciences of the mind, sociologies of trauma, theories of consciousness. These should make a place not only for a quiet archive of women like the Christian nurse and Mrs. A., but also for a mythic throng of Draupadis, Shakuntalas, and Ahalyas. 156 Unconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya

“ YO U W I L L L I V E H E R E F O R M A N Y T H O U S A N D S O F Y E A R S”

We have moved far from Mrs. A. and into a long story about stories about suffering, science, and colonialism and the interplay between cultural repertoires for grappling with suffering and overdetermined accounts of those repertoires. These accounts, in turn, shape how those repertoires get relearned, how they move out of the world of words and into bodies and minds and back again. It is a long entanglement. Part of that entanglement is the way this is also a story about stories about justice. It is a story about stories about justice that are also, frequently, stories about the different ethical conditions to which men and women are held accountable. Some of these stories have less to do with colonial and anticolonial inscriptions, and even less to do with archives of published and unpublished writing. This is the part that is more difficult to articulate. Yet another leap of intellectual faith is required, and this is where Mrs. A. and Satya Nand’s brief mentions of Ahalya sound a soft but persistent note. One need not accomplish gyrations of translation to appreciate that many Hindu narratives suggest a connection of unconsciousness, muteness, and crises of movement and sensation to conflict and violation. There is no need to be rigidly chronological. Pratibha Ray, an Oriya writer whose novels recast epic women’s stories, suggests that “Ahalya’s pilgrimage from Vedic literature to Ramayana, Mahabharata, Skanda Purana, Brahmana Purana, and various Puranas is a one line story eclipsing Ahalya’s true face.”110 Her “true face,” Ray says, is in the meanings people make of her in everyday life and embedded in the “sub-versions” of stories, undercurrents in texts that disrupt the ways Ahalya’s story is part of the systematic “denial of subjectivity” to Indian women.111 Mrs. A.’s version of Ahalya represents this oral, even ethereal (in the sense of coming through the ethers) tradition. It is at once a conflation of and departure from textual accounts. Perhaps she heard it as a bedtime story, or a song, or in a puja or from a friend, or read it in a book, or in all of these ways. Let us treat Ahalya cumulatively rather than historically and imagine that, in some way, all versions were available to Mrs. A., regardless of whether she actually “heard” or “read” them. There are many textual versions of Ahalya’s story, as well as those that appear in drama, dance, fi lm, television, and other media. As is the case with so many of the sources that figure here, dating is difficult, though the Unconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya 157

Ramayana versions are typically treated as Ahalya’s earliest appearance. Versions diverge on revealing points, mostly related to the crime and its punishment. In the first book of the Ramayana, the Bala Kanda, Ahalya’s story was recounted by the sage Visvamitra as he walked with Ram and Laksman by a desolate hermitage. When Ram asked what could have happened to empty such a holy place, Visvamitra told him about the sage Gautama, and his wife, Ahalya. When Gautama was away, Indra disguised himself as Gautama and appeared before Ahalya, saying that a passionate man does not wait for the appropriate time for love (either the correct time for conception, or when a woman is not menstruating). He desired Ahalya that very moment. Although recognizing him as Indra, Ahalya was curious and made love to him, then, satisfied, begged him to run away. As Indra left, Gautama returned and, seeing Indra, cursed them both: Indra to lose his testicles, and Ahalya to remain in the hermitage for thousands of years, without food or water, subsisting on air, and lying in ashes. “You will dwell in this hermitage unperceived by all created beings,” he proclaimed, until, When Rama, the unconquerable son of Dasaratha, will come to this dreadful forest, then you will become purified. By the guestly offering to him, o badly behaved one, you will assume your own body in my presence, freed from lust and delusion, yoked with joy.112 (Indra, seeking the intervention of the gods, received a ram’s testicles to replace his own.) When Ram heard the story, he entered the hermitage, where he saw Ahalya, who appeared as something made by magic, “like a flame veiled in smoke.”113 Although no one, neither humans, gods, nor demons, could perceive her, Ram could see the way her beauty had been brightened by millennia of austerities. Ahalya met his gaze and became visible. Ram and Lakshman touched her feet, and she greeted them with the hospitality of ritual, and gods and celestial nymphs celebrated her purification. The Ramayana’s final book, the Uttara Kanda, tells a dramatically different story. In it, the beautiful Ahalya was created by Brahma to “make a distinction” between men and women.114 Although Indra desired her, Ahalya was given to Gautama as a reward for caring for her during her youth and returning her still a virgin. Suff used with anger and lust, Indra 158 Unconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya

went to the hermitage and raped Ahalya. This was witnessed by Gautama, who, provoked to anger, cast a curse: Indra would fall to his enemies in battle, and the act he had brought into the world (adultery? rape?) would become common. Whenever it was committed, its moral stain would be shared between the perpetrator and Indra himself. Since Ahalya had been unfaithful, her beauty would be made no greater than that of any other woman. Ahalya begged for mercy, saying she had been taken by force by a god who deceived her. Gautama softened the curse. Ahalya would be released when Ram saw her, and Ahalya, purified by his gaze, could offer her hospitality.115 These are, of course, retellings via translation, multiple translations at that, and I have compiled stories from translations and pulled passages from writing about these texts written by others, following one particular trail along which stories move. On this path, Ahalya’s Ramayana stories have been read less for moral education or narrative pleasure (arguably) than to say something the status of women during the times when they were written. Both the Bala Kanda and Uttara Kanda have been understood to be (or at least contain) later additions to Valmiki’s Ramayana, but interpretations change depending on the way they are ordered chronologically. In a 1997 publication, Wendy Doniger considers the Uttara Kanda version, in which Ahalya is raped, as the earlier addition, suggesting that this sequence makes the curse of invisibility “merely a variant of the curse in the first [sic] text: to have the same beauty as other women is to become invisible.”116 She notes that passages in which Ahalya begs for Gautama’s understanding are later insertions into certain redactions. Pradip Bhattacharya regards the Uttara Kanda as the later addition (as does Renata Söhnen-Thieme) and its violence as representing a social “backlash” against the more positive representation of female desire in the Bala Kanda.117 Others have taken up Ahalya’s changing stories to observe a decline in women’s social position during the first millennium of the common era.118 Ahalya’s story recurs in the Puranas, a vast corpus, in all likelihood composed between the fourth and eleventh centuries CE, and though in most contemporary accounts (including the 1986 Doordarshan Ramayana television serial) Ahalya is turned to stone, in the Puranas her curse takes many forms. In the Brahma Purana, when Indra learns of Ahalya and Gautama’s happiness, he becomes smitten with Ahalya and takes Gautama’s form while the sage is away. Ahalya is fooled and makes love to him. Unconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya 159

Gautama returns (with his students) and the sound of his voice tells Ahalya the man in her bed is an impostor. Indra turns into a cat, but when threatened by Gautama, becomes himself. Gautama curses them to the effect that Indra will have a body covered with a thousand vulvas and Ahalya become a dried river.119 Ahalya will only become herself when she merges with the Gautami River. Indra, too, will be purified by water, when the river’s touch will turn the vulvas into eyes. In other Puranas, though Indra takes Gautama’s form, Ahalya resists, saying he should not be distracted from his prayers by lust, and submits when Indra invokes her obligation to obey her husband. Accused by Gautama, she pleads innocence and is cursed to turn to stone or become invisible. In yet others, Indra first tries to seduce Ahalya as himself and when unsuccessful returns in disguise. In South Indian vernacular versions, Ahalya discovers she has mistaken Indra for her husband, but continues regardless, enjoying herself.120 As with the Ramayana versions, differences across time and language/place are seen to reflect social and historical approaches, particularly to adultery, and the contrast between legal codes (in which men are punished for adultery) and myths (in which “adulterous women are often mutilated or killed”) that suggest that while women may have been considered “naturally responsible” for wrong sex, given inherently “seductive” qualities, men were deemed “culturally responsible” for moral action, given women’s inherent weakness.121 As with Shakuntala, how you form an ethic from Ahalya’s story depends less on the critical unpacking than on how you tell the story, on the details upon which you place ethical emphasis. Is its weight in Ahalya’s violation/crime, her deception by Indra? In the justice/injustice of the curse? Or in Ram’s redemptive act? The moral of this shape-shift ing story is very often read as Satya Nand and Mrs. A. did, as forgiveness and release from darkness, with Ram’s act akin to Dushyanta’s recognition of Shakuntala in carrying the ethical weight. Seen via Ram, whether Ahalya is an adulteress or deceived, liar or victim of injustice, she is a piece in a larger lesson, which might look something like this (a relatively random culling from the Internet): But why did Ram decide to redeem her? Perhaps, he sensed the injustice passed on by the society on innocent women. Perhaps, he understood that the punishment was harrowing enough. Perhaps, if she were guilty, she already has been purified through repentance. Perhaps, if she were 160

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not guilty, she has realized how she should have gathered herself and stood up for herself. She were [sic], after all, a woman who had no way to redress the system that had wronged her. She awaited someone who was at the pinnacle of the system, to stand up for her, and bring her out of the meted social exile.122 From the side of Ram, we have a seemingly tight narrative, a clarity of ethical purpose conjoining recognition to redemption to critique of injustice. But perhaps it is not so tight after all. Interpretations focusing on Ram suggest simultaneous but incompatible ideas: (1) Ahalya was unjustly wronged, her misrecognition was through deception (or an accident), making its punishment an injustice and her redemption an act of justice; (2) The fact that Ram’s recognition constitutes redemption confirms the status of misrecognition as an ethical violation. There it is again, the familiar impasse around the value and purpose of recognition: It is either a basic criterion for humanity, or an effort we must make in creating a just world. When wedded to a sense of responsibility and renewal, the latter enforces the former, even in appearing to obviate it. However, told from Ahalya’s point of view, from the space of the curse, not the redemption, the story exposes the incompletion and injustice of an ethic that conjoins recognition to consciousness. We come to see that a woman might be victim of multiple, movable forces, and then have that status made over into ethical failure. We see that moral lessons focusing on Ram’s “resurrection” reiterate Shakuntala’s lesson, that recognition and nonrecognition/misrecognition may be not parallel or even opposed, but fundamentally incompatible, different kinds of acts, and the (in this case two) genders likewise not the same kind of thing beholden to different standards, but different kinds of moral entities. Doniger writes, of later versions, The curse of becoming a stone is now explicitly glossed as the appropriate punishment for the crime of nonrecognition: now Ahalya will not be expected to recognize anyone’s form of gestures (or movements, ceshtitani), all of which she herself will hence forth lack; in particular, she will not be able to recognize her husband, a petrification of the very flaw for which she is being petrified.123 The logic of the curse is thus an elaborate but consistent formula for victim-blaming. Unconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya 161

It is as if the texts assume that women are always the tricksters, never the victims, and therefore that any apparent counter-instance must be justified by arguing that the woman was not, in fact, victimized, that even when she appears to be the victim her trick consists in pretending to be tricked by the trickster. . . . When women are not being blamed for being too cunning to be tricked, they are blamed for being so stupid that they can be tricked. The argument that “she really knew” plays precisely the role in myths in which men trick women as the argument that “she asked for it” plays in sexist discussions of rape: it shifts the blame from the perpetrator to the victim.124 Some contemporary writers have noted that the bad faith of justice in Ahalya contains a statement about female desire. In Ray’s Mahamoha, marriage to an ascetic “stills the flight for the woman in [Ahalya],” and Indra offers self-fulfi llment. “That was not a moment of illusion. It was a revolt,” she says, and Gautama identifies her sin as that of “transgressi[ing] . . . a social norm.”125 In a Malayalam short story by N. S. Madhavan, Ahalya is an emotionally neglected wife in contemporary Kerala who, before marriage, longed to be a ghost so she might move through the world undetected. Her Indra is a movie star who lives in her building, with whom she has a quick affair.126 When her husband detects the scent of the man’s cologne, he breaks a glass bottle over her head. Ahalya enters a coma, regains consciousness, then slowly returns to a comatose state. Madhavan’s Ahalya’s yearning to be a ghost is an Edenic longing for a mind that might be attuned to the body’s desires. Before her final relapse, she tells the narrator, a neurologist: It was my desire for a mind that made me yearn to become a ghost. My body is my mind too. My thoughts are brought to me by its portholes. . . . Its pores. I’ve often felt that all the cavities in the body share a single emotion: urge. Nose’s urge is to breathe, the urge of Mouth is to eat. Then there is the urgent call to pee, and the other compelling urgency. The ache of urging breasts that brim with milk. My ears had an urge to listen to Malayalam film songs. I could not bear, for long, the urge of the crack between my legs. I knew the world through the Nine Orifices.127 And so, there may also be something else, the possibility that Ahalya’s punishment, her curse, is not just a critique of an ethic but a claim to a 162 Unconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya

momentary way of being, unconsciousness, as a form or effect of witnessing, as a refusal, a return to a self that is, at the same time, a communion with the world. This is the alley behind Mrs. A.’s avenues to the future. Not the same as the authorized retreat of ascetics, although it may bring about similar effects (accumulated power) and draw from a logic that values retreat, the short-circuit of unconsciousness is a quieter, but no less culturally available model which runs counter to ethics of awakening that organize the story about “resurrection.” It appears to ask, with the body, “To which kind of world are we made to awaken?” “What do we lose on awakening to this world?” In placing ethical emphasis on the stoniness, invisibility, blindness, muteness, and living on air (these are also ways that myths demonstrate the accrual of power: Ahalya’s beauty, Shakuntala’s knowledge, Gandhari’s second sight), another point of entry opens into this story, an outlet for the injustice the justice creates, an antiheroics rejecting the double standard of heroism, a counter-ethic to recognition and being welcomed back into the fold that finds in radical refusal a capacity to freeze the curse for all to see. This may also be a way to heal. Tagore envisioned Ahalya’s stony state in just this way: That place of oblivion, cool as endless night, Where millions sleep forever without fear, Resting their life’s exhaustion in the dust, Where withered flowers fall in the day’s heat, Burnt up stars and meteors, crumbled fame, Sated pleasure, grief too tired to sting? There, Earth smoothed with her soothing hand Your lines of sin and stress.128 With Shakuntala and Draupadi, counter-ethics emerged in Mrs. A.’s responses to and disagreements with Satya Nand’s analysis. With Ahalya, the process was the reverse. Mrs. A.’s first mention of “the wife of Gautama” was open to ethical complexity, ambiguous about which parts of the story mattered most, and indicating an unjust mapping of sexuality and power. However, as the case progressed, the story was repeatedly mentioned in only brief references to Ram’s redemption. Sexual violence and gender injustice were replaced with shorthand, “delusion” or “maya” (both religious principles), the details of the story covered over with neutral Unconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya 163

abstractions. Ram, not Ahalya, was endowed with the ethical agency to show compassion and restore truth. There was no further mention of the curse, and the complex violation was reduced to deception. Ram’s release was the story’s trope. If Ahalya was a figure of religious renewal for Satya Nand, for many others she is a figure of ethical betrayal. Her moral lesson is powerful because of the injustice of its mode of justice. Redemption feels unfair. Ethical action is a prerogative of male authority, while woman bear the moral condition of their own violation. The double standards are so vivid, and their stakes so high. Shakuntala is cursed for failing to properly greet a wise man. Ahalya is cursed, in the starkest versions, for being raped. Recognition matters more than violation, and this is underscored by even the recognition of that injustice, the gears grind to a halt, the machinery stops. The moral story about redemption occludes the relationship between sex, violence, and power, yet carries it along, the secret in its moral heart. In this way new stories are made, some with contrary-to-fact statements that find a counter-ethical statement not in awakening but in returning to stone. Poet S. Sivasekaram writes, Had she remained truly a stone she might have stood forever, a mountain peak, undestroyed by time.129 K. B. Sreedevi’s Malayalam story “Woman of Stone” may best condense the idea that the curse encapsulates a counter-ethic.130 “Time had changed, not Ahalya,” Sreedevi writes, her story unfolding after Ahalya’s release from her curse as she journeys through the forest to Valmiki’s hermitage, first recalling her childhood descent from skies to forest, and then reflecting on the conditions of her curse (Are all sages’ curses born of malice? she asks herself).131 Ahalya recalls the tapas she accumulated during her long period of punishment and her joy, and resulting devotion, at being released by Ram. As she stands at a river near the hermitage, a distraught woman approaches her. Ahalya asks her why she weeps, and the woman says the world is about to end, because Ram has abandoned his wife Sita when she is “full with child.”132 Aghast, betrayed in her devotion, Ahalya cries out in a “lament that tore through the air,”

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“The fire has abandoned its own flame? Prakriti has been disowned by Purusha? This terrible experience . . . his insult . . . his act of contempt.”133 As she cries out, her voice grows fainter until it can no longer be heard. “My sister . . .” asks the woman, but, “There was no response.” The woman touches Ahalya then jumps away in fear. Ahalya has returned to stone.134

“ T H E T R A N S F O R M E D W O M A N TO L D H E R S TO R Y ”

In Mangalore in the early 1980s, a woman named Grace Jayamani filed for divorce on the grounds of her husband’s sexual cruelty. Her case invoked India’s now notorious Section 377, or “anti-sodomy law,” a colonial law outlawing sexual acts “against nature,” which remained, until 2018, in postindependence criminal codes as a catch-all for nonconsensual sex and forms of consensual sex deemed immoral. The trial brief read, From the date of marriage, according to the petitioner, her life with the respondent has been one of misery, brutality and cruelty. The respondent, husband has been forcing her for sexual intercourse in an unnatural way. His treatment to her is one of brutality. Even when she was suffering from fever and even during the menstrual periods, respondent would not give her any respite with repeated acts of sex all through the night. Whenever she refused the demands in sexuality of the respondent, she was beaten.135 To make cruelty recognizable in the eyes of the law, the case invoked the “unnatural” nature of the sexual abuse alongside its “brutality.” That sexual transgression was conflated with violence demonstrated the slippery logic of the law. The case read, “The ground made out by the petitioner for dissolution of marriage in the petition is that her husband inflicted sodomy on her in the sense that he forced her for carnal copulation per anus and per os instead of in the normal way.” Jayamani’s father offered testimony on his daughter’s mental state. My son-in-law was troubling my daughter like anything. He was biting her breasts. He was beating her. My son-in-law i.e. the respdt. was forcing my daughter for sexual intercourse during menstrual period. He

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was coercing her even when she was ill. My daughter used to fall unconscious because of over indulgence on the part of respdt. In sexual intercourse.136 Jayamani’s unconsciousness was a readily comprehensible sign, demonstrating at once physical and moral violence. Unconsciousness offered evidence of abuse even as it involved failures of memory and, thus, required another person’s voice, her father’s, as witness. It was described as at once the result of trauma, the consequence of sexual transgression and marital betrayal, and moral evidence, demarcating “natural” intimacy from sexual impropriety, forming a web of connected transgressions that hinged on the moral status of marriage. Unconsciousness, which in life may have been a self-preserving and automatic effect of violence, was, in the light of law, made over into a sign through which the nature of violation might be made clear, even as it subsumed the violence of that violation to a different logic of transgression. In a medico-legal gender system in which knowing cannot be accomplished in the very spaces in which it is required (hence the need for the father to speak for the daughter), unconsciousness was at once a sign in service of a power-laden moral order and a release from the very systems of meaning in which it was a signifier, a psychic shutdown for individuals, but also a kind of shutdown in a system in which victimhood compounds in the moral systems intended to redress it. As in the cases that pepper nineteenth- and twentieth-century medical writing (and, perhaps, like Ahalya’s variant curses or Gandhari’s unconscious daughters-in-law), unconsciousness in Jayamani’s divorce case tells us that it is a consistent response to trauma and consistent, if also shifting, part of ethical arrangements. Its own ethical paradigm, unconsciousness helps other ethics happen. It can be curse as cure even as it makes diagnostic machineries stop short through the peculiar kind of evidence it is, the paradoxes it absorbs. The linking of sexual transgression, justice, and morality threads a gendered history of consciousness in India, regardless of whether and how medical models, legal structures, or mythic moral narratives are explicitly woven together, whether or how they are made to intersect with mores cultivated by colonial and postcolonial legal or Victorian or postindependence configurations. This chain of connections would seem to have brought us in a circle, from Mrs. A. to the servant girl to the Christian 166

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nurse and around to Ahalya and back to Mrs. A. via Grace Jayamani, except for one sleight of hand. There is no inkling of unconsciousness, no hysteria, no mention of spirit possession, no form of affliction in Satya Nand’s analysis of Mrs. A. There is no association of Ahalya with anything other than Ram’s “reconversion.” However, more than unconsciousness itself, witnessing speech, and the inability of witnessing speech, connect Grace Jayamani to the servant girl. For the sake of observation, let us overlay two visions of consciousness. First, there is the colonial medical spectrum juxtaposing healing consciousness practices with afflictions of unconsciousness. Then there is the Hindu (and largely epic) vision in which women respond to injustice through righteous speech or radical retreat. In their overt figuring of Ahalya, Mrs. A. and Satya Nand veer toward the first two of each pair. However, the servant girl, nameless, living in the shadows of Mrs. A.’s marital confusion, brought violation and deceit, and a sense of their deluding, mind-melting effects, to the very heart of what it is to see and, especially, tell the truth. Although the experience with the Sikh servant was distressing for the servant girl (and for Mrs. A., whatever happened, she had a lifelong fear of rats), their psychological effect was vague: “the girl’s mind is warped,” a failure of truth-telling, not a form of it, and one attributed to her in spite of her protestation. Over the course of the case, Mrs. A.’s tone changed. Perhaps the servant girl was the only person not deceiving others (or herself). As Mrs. A. began to allow into her account a sense that the servant girl had been wronged (“deceived,” even accosted, as opposed to “jilted”) she grew more willing to accept the truth of what the girl was trying, so persistently and against such resistance, to tell her. The servant girl may be the story’s unconscious, less by embodying fantastical fears or desires (though she may have done that too) than in a quiet, sober realism. Where Vidya leaps into our midst, tugging at our ears with wild possibility, the maid sidles up to whisper something we already know. The truth was not just intimate. If Mrs. A.’s intimacies were the source for her politics, so too, the maid’s sobering reminders related to Mrs. A.’s political vision as much as to her domestic arrangements. Against, an unfolding ethos that revolved around socialism, nationalism, and the need to engage with the working classes (“villagers,” “the poor”), there was in Mrs. A.’s relationship with her maid a kind of disavowed intimacy, a disavowal of Mrs. A.’s own participation in class relations, of the way she Unconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya 167

herself had mapped sexual transgression into her landscape of reform and personal accomplishment. Amidst all the intimacies colliding in this case, there was one that, unlike the others, went entirely unremarked upon, having no analytic bearing, no consequence for either the scientific, ethical, or political vision. It is the intimacy even harder to name than that represented by Vidya (even Satya Nand referred to its “homosexuality”), a closeness that could not be friendship yet involved confidence, secret knowledge, and the truths about other intimacies. In the ambiguous relationship between Mrs. A. and a woman only identified as a “servant” was a reach across class that could be neither acknowledged nor accomplished. Mrs. A.’s heartless-sounding comments about the maid are painful to read, although not surprising. But there is an added sting to the fact that they came amidst “rabid” defense of socialism and a working out of feelings about the peasantry, amidst a vision of nationalism that hinged upon both telling her nation’s truth and “reconverting” peasants to a social vision already part of their heritage. There was no mention by Mrs. A. or Satya Nand of the servant girl’s social position, her vulnerability in the household, her separation from her own family or what it might have meant for her to have been transferred from one household to another. In the servant girl’s role in the case is a sobering reminder about class relations, anticolonial nationalism, and social justice. Laboring villagers may be “the backbone of modern India,” but not the “servant girl.”137 That is why, as well as in all she has to reveal about the lies and betrayals of domestic intimacy, marital trust, and intergenerational protection and support, the maid provides an undercurrent of doubt and rationality. She, more than Vidya, was Mrs. A.’s shadow. Where Vidya represented uncharted desires and singular pleasures, the servant girl stood for dustier possibilities. Here is something other than the ethic of conjugality that would oppose marital emplacement with the imagined danger of villages and against which one might embrace singularity and risk. Here, instead, are the dangers of home, of violences in the heart of what is imagined to be most secure. So, too, here is not the sheen of national selfdetermination against colonial rule, but the burnish on that glow in a bad faith about class, the limits of social change without a radical upheaval that would include servants as well as villagers. The servant girl reminds us how contradictory it was for Mrs. A. to see herself as bearing a revolu-

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tion without considering how that revolution might jeopardize the world that made her. Here, we can recall Taru, Grace, and the Christian nurse, and wonder about all it might mean to turn to stone, or be turned to stone, in the moment of truth-telling. And we can conjoin those instances with cases in which catatonia, unconsciousness, fainting, and muteness are symptoms of disorder for women who were raped, for whom the stakes of kinship became too real, who bore domestic treacheries, even those violences that could only be understood as sexual transgression in both a legal system and a world that has long responded to women’s violation with punishment for ethical failing. These are situations with which any psychiatrist might be familiar, as would more than a few people who are members of families, seekers of love. Part of a long and complex ethical repertoire, this is also a long and complex bodily repertoire for transforming violation and its layered injustices into something other than pure punishment. It is how a technique that is at once curse and cure, lie and truth, punishment and rebuke to punishment becomes an ethical standpoint in its own right; it is mirror image to the Shakuntala paradigm. It is (to borrow Hatcher’s move) the Ahalya paradigm. At this point, it is worth rereading Mrs. A.’s account of Ahalya: I remember the play in which Rama while passing a village sat on a stone and he had to get up because the stone was turning into a woman. The transformed woman told her story to Rama, who had ordered her to relate it. She was the wife of Gautama, a sage, and was the teacher of Indra, who became king of Heaven. After having finished his training Indra came often to see his teacher. But in reality he tried to make love to the wife who did not respond. One day Indra came at a time when the sage had gone out a great distance. He made the wife drink some medicine and played such good music, that she lost control of her passion, and Indra forced her into the act. Gautama came in to discover this. He cursed both of them. Indra was made impotent and she was turned into a stone ‘till Rama was born, and went that way.138 There is something curious here. After redeeming Ahalya to the world, Ram “ordered her” to tell her story, one in which, as Mrs. A. tells it, there is little room between “losing control” of desire and being “forced . . . into the

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act,” of being drugged and deceived and being affected by “such good music.” Perhaps it is the moment from which I write that makes me hear an authoritative command to become accountable to yet another form of (male) judgment, or my familiarity with the theories discussed in the last chapter that sees the demand for self-narration as a particularly gendered form of power. It is, however, worth pausing to notice that Mrs. A.’s account of the story (as part of “relating” her own story in an exercise of authorizing recognition) contains the ambiguities, slippages, bad faiths, and unruly desires of many (if not all) of the various textual versions of “what happened” with Indra, organizing them into a legible ethic (all those slippages). This may show how conflicted Mrs. A. was about her own desires, that she was within reach of seeing her own visions, feelings, and desires as valid, but not quite there. Maybe we can wonder if she ever arrived, or wonder at the line of progress we impose in so wondering, or maybe we can wonder if here is a place we must take a stand. Certainly, there is disappointment that Mrs. A.’s luminous visions of “being loosed,” from marriage, from imperialism, to desire, that her counter-ethics of singularity, uncertainty, and nonrecognition, did not extend to the predicament of her servant or, even more upsetting, that those visions depended on it. However, we can also think about what might be happening at this stopping place. About how a future-looking ethic, posed against the principles encoded by marriage, conjoined to a suspicion of recognition and belonging, cognizant of bad faith, might have stumbled upon another piece of this vision yet failed to see it. How it might have contained the possibility of self-preserving retreat, of radical removal, one connected, not opposed, to speaking truth, one that was not crypto-truth but, like Shakuntala’s removal to a place of hermitages and political futures, of a piece with clarity and spoken truth. That connection, between speaking truth and falling unconscious, so thematic in the epics, is part of what makes states of retreat something more than trauma response and something less than alternate truth, allowing them to leave open, like a wound, the unjust consequences of ethics, to refuse to allow things to be entirely subsumed by the smooth functioning of “justice.” Singularity, uncertainty, nonrecognition, all possibilities Mrs. A. explored, were of a piece with the counter-ethical status of unconsciousness. However, the things that most suggested traumas (barely concealed) had

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no place in Mrs. A.’s vision. They appear only to us as counter-ethics to her declarations about resurrection as a political ethos. If there are hints of the Ahalya paradigm in Mrs. A.’s retelling of the story, of the way it uncannily (or cannily) traces the outlines of the servant girl’s encounter with the Sikh servant, of the way it renders Ram’s recognition a punishing demand for self-narration, they are only hints. There is no creative entering of Ahalya’s stony state, no reanimation, no lila of impersonation, only the possibility that reanimation itself may prompt counter-ethical consideration. In reviving the dead do we absolve the injustices that killed them? In psychiatry, as in its persistent presence in our cultural imaginaries, feminists and others have long viewed hysteria as a way the body says what the voice cannot. With Ahalya, there are qualities of a similar arrangement, perhaps a configuration that Indian sciences and philosophies, with all their rich theorizing of consciousness, did, in fact, articulate well before the French, or the Austrians, or the British. However, if Ahalya is seen as a piece in a bigger story, in which there are also Draupadis and Gandharis, Tarus and Hamidas, and in which we might recall that Ahalya did in fact speak against the injustice of her punishment, then there is something else, something which valorizes neither voice nor silence, but uses stillness to theorize motion. In a medical, literary, and intellectual history that has made something of that myth to juxtapose unconsciousness with outrage, and both to give the lie to structures that would seem to offer justice, and in a way of telling stories with a constant (healing?) rhythm of “yes, but,” there is a layered ethical structure, an overt story, a counterstory, and another counterstory there, hazy, not quite invisible, ghosting the plot all along. A counter-ethic that is also a symptom, a curse that is also a state of cure. Here is another way bodies can tell stories. However, unlike the muted and frozen European hysterics, to do so in a world in which voices can be, often are, raised, but for this moment are mute, or refused by being heard as just another ghost, just the sustaining wind. The servant girl reminds us that even in revaluing nonrecognition and uncertainty, something can still get said, should still get said, when the paradoxes wear off and the suspicion that one is dead is replaced by the painful clarity that one is, after all, still alive. There is ground to stand on, even if just for the moment, even if it is shaky, or slick with mud, or blood.

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In that space of pause, time’s temporary stoppage and temporary restart, against the loud voices, and against the songs and silences, it is possible to say something. There is not any one endpoint, but there are a great many stopping places to whisper, or shout, what we saw, heard, and sensed. And there is a way of announcing, with the body, the world’s many failures to listen. The ethical difference may not hang on whether one uses that voice, against the punctuated fall from consciousness, but on whether and how, when it comes, as it will, we choose to hear it.

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P O S T S C R I P T: T H E S H A P E OF THE COUNTERETHIC

Now I will leave Mrs. A., Satya Nand, Vidya, the servant girl, and all the rest in their stilled quadrant of time. I have already put too much pressure on Mrs. A.’s words, already violated the experimental sanctity of her conversation with Dr. Satya Nand. I have overstayed my welcome. They had no idea they were being so generous. I take with me some of what feels unfinished: the sense of a shape, a choreography, a pattern of movement. There are still things I would like to say about that. It is midnight, October, in the year 2015. It is New York City’s Times Square where the massive electronic billboards have gone dark. Now a strange and jittery movement replaces their glare. Small shapes (bats? birds?) are swarming into the rectangles of light. They are forming flocks, then, finally, spheres. Part of the Times Square arts initiative “Midnight Moment,” artist Shahzia Sikander’s video installation Gopi Contagion brought into the heart of insistent commerce images of beauty and uncertainty, tentative choreographies formed out of chaotic movement, loose stases of circular movement.1 Gopi Contagion shares with other of Sikander’s installations the motif of moving spheres. In this and other pieces, “singing spheres” align in a row, each composed of particles moving according to different principles. In some, the particles surge outward from an invisible core, in others they swarm against a spherical surface, and in yet others they slowly accumulate, bringing the shape slowly into view. Also appearing in Sikander’s paintings and prints, spheres made up of thousands of the same shape

bring to themes like crisis and contagion a sense of the plurality of possibility. These small, dark shapes can be traced across Sikander’s work of vastly different scales, from tiny paintings to massive electronic screens. They come from her work in the miniature form, work that utilizes motifs from Rajput and Basohli painting. What Sikander calls “gopi hair,” they are the outline of the hair of the consorts of Krishna, topknotted and dislocated from their place atop female bodies and put into flight (the transition is animated in the video SpiNN).2 In many of Sikander’s earlier paintings, the gopis are represented as nudes, sometimes embracing, sometimes in masses, sometimes entering the frames of other images. In certain works their embraces allow a female erotic associated with their mythic roles, with play, love in separation, and joyful abandon, to overlay vulnerability and mutual protection, and in some it interrupts the masculine posturing of courtly portraiture. However, when the hair shape leaves the bodies and is put into motion, first in smaller works and animations, then later on the massive screens of large-scale video installations, it is separated from the symbolic orders of the gopis, vocabularies of desire and power that involve recognizable human form and recognizable referents. By taking flight, the gopi hair in Sikander’s words, can “cultivate new associations,” associations of meaning and with each other.3 As components of swarms, flocks, and spheres, the hair shapes suggest a set of themes, or thematic kinds of movement, their ability to form shapes out of loose organization, choreographies of not quite random movement, suggests the blurring of solidarity and containment, singularity and dislocation, intimacy and confrontation. Tracing the gopi hair across works, other, more social and political, more readily contextual associations come into play. Considering the work as a whole, one wonders how abstract qualities of movement relate to more tangible themes like female sexuality, exposure and protection, the body politic, actual bodies. As the shapes leave the frame of one work to enter another, do they bring their old associations with them, or do they form something new? As they coalesce in self-organizing and diverse patterns of movement, as they suggest at once solidarity and its impossible completion, do they, can they, continue to tell us about intimacy, desire, gender, and power? Across different media, Sikander invites us to consider genre and form without being locked into concepts of “Westernness” and its others, or into 174 Postscript: The Shape of the Counter-Ethic

a particular form of reading, or into a Euro-centered picture of global mobility. Where her miniatures blend European, American, and South Asian genres, later work, such as the installation Parallax, created at the Sharjah Biennial, explores migration, dislocation, environmental degradation, and violence, confronting non-Arabic speakers and readers with untranslated text and song and reminding viewers of geographic location even as, in configurations of sound, color, and movement, she suggests the liberating potential of deterritorialization.4 In Gopi Contagion, she makes use of the very materials of the global order she seeks to revise, including the electronic billboards of Times Square. Sikander’s work is often discussed in relation to political geographies, its refusal of colonial “West-and-the-rest” maps of the world, its ability to at once land in places and allow images, words, sounds, and color to transcend them.5 However, in relation to the way her work destabilizes the need for context to anchor meaning (while showing geopolitical processes to reorder those contexts), it is also possible to imagine her flocks and spheres as the shape of an approach to ideas. The shape of Sikander’s deterritorializations and loosenings brings into view the pluralistic way in which abstractions and derivations might prompt possible futures, comment on presents or pasts, the ways imagination may work and press forward through time. There is a sense of tension and torque, of hope and caution, creation and risk, of “yes, but” and “no, except,” openness and closure, incursion and containment. These resonate with the movements I sense in Mrs. A.’s ethical engagements and in those from beyond them that crowd into her short, paper purchase on time. I find in Sikander’s work, especially her “singing spheres,” something not only inspiring but topographically resonant with the case and its themes, sometimes in content but especially in form. I therefore end by turning to Sikander, rather than the usual sources in philosophy or critical theory, to close Mrs. A.’s case by opening it further. If counterethics have a shape, it is this.

SINGING SPHERES

Spheres, yes. But how? What makes the eye see “edge”? What carves a limit or even a shape into our consciousness, and what allows us to assign to that strange, boundaryless boundary the term “sphere”? There are five of them. But then again, they are comprised of the same moving particles, so how Postscript: The Shape of the Counter-Ethic

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are they separate? How do they evoke the sentence, “There are five of them?” The sphere to the far right is formed of a mass of particles pushing against one hemisphere, launching (from where?) toward it then reverberating around an “edge” that appears as a density on the right. But you also see edge on the left, in the absence of particles. A trick of the eye? The next one (we are moving right to left, as though reading nastalik script) is densest at its core, particles ricocheting out then floating along the “surface” like caddis flies on a still pond. Next over, in the middle is the most riotous of all. It holds your gaze, pulls it to its empty center, around which the particles soar, orbit, and dip. And next to it, a similar dance, but slower, as though still learning. And finally, to the left. Now you must turn your head to see the two spheres, asking, do they overlap? The denser, stiller one shadows the more thinned out version of itself. Or is there a transit from one to the other? Their edges are rough, there is less urgency, less absolutism, but also less beauty, less pattern, less identifiable movement than in the others. They are just two swarms that fail to accomplish their extent. One is crowded, almost opaque, the other wan. Spheres, yes. But how? There are no edges, and yet there are. The edges are formed of movement. You might perceive their limit as an invisible force, a wall, or you might perceive it as a choreography, a pulling back, the inscription of a limit as a trick. Now, invest, for a moment, in synesthesia. Let the possibility of crossed perceptions allow you to trade discursive concepts for form. Let the spirit of synesthesia offer to a relationship between a lived world and the figural something that goes beyond what modeling or representation allow. Many of us see discursive concepts as form, or feel them as shape or movement before we learn to fit that sense to language. Computationally driven images (like Sikander’s gopi hair, but also in the socially and movementdriven light installations of Adrian Mondot and Claire Bardainne) and concepts of choreography (notably interactive choreographies such as those of John Forsyth) suggest a possibility of thinking with form without formalization, to feel things like social process, or sense discursive concepts as shapes. Parallax was on exhibit at my university’s art gallery in the same month when I first read, really read, Mrs. A.’s dream analysis. The resonances were loud, though they were not where I might have thought to look for them. That is, they were not, or not as much, in the narratively rich and symbolically dense worlds of the miniatures (also part of the exhibit) or in 176 Postscript: The Shape of the Counter-Ethic

larger paintings deploying both gopis and their detached hair, or in any visual content that clearly evoked “South Asia” or its artistic traditions. They were in apparently “cultureless” shapes, especially the singing spheres that mark the “end” of Parallax and Gopi Contagion. There was an emotional impact as well, but one it was hard to label, and when I turned to critical writing on Sikander’s work I was somewhat disappointed to find that it was in Sikander’s relationship to geographically localized traditions that most writers showed interest. The gopi hair actually didn’t work for me as a symbolic point of entry into the mythopoetics of female power; Sikander’s gopi hair is tightly bound, seldom loose and flowing as in so many mythic, artistic, and everyday understandings of the relationship between hair and power in South Asian bodily poetics. The tightness of the hair, however, suggested a kind of resistance to easy meaning-making; its ability to at once spin out and remain tied, if loosely, to a symbolic order was more resonant for me than obvious symbolism or attachment to any particular tradition (in part because it was, quite literally, not attached). That the hair was allowed to “form new associations,” even singing spheres, in which they moved according to different principles of movement, never absolutely ordered but never chaotic. Why do these shapes sing for Mrs. A.? Is it possible that counter-ethics can have a shape? Or, at the very least, that shape is good to think with, for the moment (a moment that should only last until it is no longer helpful)? Now, instead of a sphere, imagine an asymptote, conventionally speaking, the line a curve approaches but never meets as it ventures to infinity. Imagine the curve formed in the same way as the singing spheres, not by a line but by the sense of limit produced by myriad forms of movement. If you see ethics with an anthropological inclination, as a composite of statements, actions, thoughts, things said or written, sung or danced, ideas entertained, can you see the curve as an ethic? Can you imagine a buzzing, swarming, flock, condensing against a curve, or dispersing upon it, describing a bulge, as it ventures toward infinity, toward a kind of accomplishment, toward, maybe, an ideal? If it helps to be narrative for a moment, can you see the infinite particulates as things people do together, the things people do, say, think, feel, and so forth that lean toward a purpose, goal, or ideal, heterodox, but not unpatterned? You can call it an ethic, because that is what we are talking about, but perhaps another word is a better fit. That is fine. Accumulation. Iteration. Instantiation. Moral. Theme. Postscript: The Shape of the Counter-Ethic

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Now put yourself in the negative space, the invisible edge, the trick of the eye that reads as “curve,” or “edge.” If you are mathematically inclined, you might consider this the choreography or even equation of the curve; if not, you might feel the curve as formed by something that presses back. What is it that happens here? Might this choreography, or pressure, too, be acts, statements, expressions, and imaginations, heterodox but not without coherences? If an ethic (or something like it) is the curve that verges toward a line, the asymptote, might a counter-ethic happen in the gap between the curve and the asymptote? Perhaps this is not a perfect fit for all that has come before this chapter. Perhaps you are thinking, to all these questions, “No.” That is also fine. Nothing I say is intended to be perfectly correlated (actions to points on a graph, and so on); there are many sound rebuttals to this picture. Feel, then, just the whirr of the singing spheres. Wonder at the edgeless edge, all that can inscribe a curve. There are many possibilities, no one choreography, no single point of friction. Perhaps the counter-ethic is the thing that prevents the ethic from accomplishing itself. Perhaps it emerges in the accidental space of the ethic’s own impossibilities. Perhaps it is the confrontation of ethical goals with a reality they cannot accommodate, or perhaps it is blind spots, internal inconsistencies, or the way effects contradict aims. Or it might be resistance, alternatives in a more dialectical sense. It is not a singular kind of critical action, but compressions, or eruptions, buddings, many metaphors are possible, that happen at the edge, that make the edge, and that are also the coming-into-being of other possibilities. There may be involution here, too, or something more fractal (though open to transformation, not sheer repetition). Counter-ethics can have their own counter-ethics; they can also be curves against which a crowd of things presses. A counter-ethic should not be mistaken for an ending point. These images are, of course, nothing more than helpful guides for thinking, or, better, for noticing the ways others seem to be thinking, what Tim Ingold refers to as a “pictogram . . . by means of which we tell particular stories about ourselves and about our understanding of the world we inhabit.”6 “Shape” is just a placeholder for a way of thinking about what the stakes might be for imagining, establishing, enacting, and questioning what is right and good and just, or for, as Satya Nand put it later in life, “having authentic horizons of fantasy or imagination.”7 178 Postscript: The Shape of the Counter-Ethic

I just stumbled into definitions of ethics. I did not mean to. I have wanted to avoid a settled sense of what ethics are, to lean instead on the sense that “ethics” is just a convenient though imperfect gloss for multiple, different focused ways of being in the world and imagining being in the world. In my view, it is not one thing. In Satya Nand’s view, centrally at stake was imagination, self-realization as a “system of experimentation” that, in fostering ethical growth, tends to define ethics. It is a person’s central “goal,” for herself and her society, indeed for the cosmos, to not only cultivate love but to “manage hate,” and to do so through interdependence, our mutually “paracitic” [sic] relationships with each other.8 He wrote, In the absence of a dynamic external soul of Frazer or God of popular conception, whom we could manipulate, there is an internal soul, the human endogenous computer life cybernetic system, call it by any name you like, which can be understood, serviced and allowed to selfexponete. In the absence of life after death, there is a technique to die every moment and allow deeper in-laid life, more and more to live through to a new life, before death. This is just as adventurous and thrilling. It is the enjoyment of working through.9 He may have been influenced by Mrs. A. in seeing imagination, “working through,” and the pressure of life-in-the-shadow-of-death as “adventurous and thrilling,” and in shaping these qualities into something like ethical principles. However, in Objective Method, such formulations are merely budding. There is, instead, a subtler quality to these things, to the way the paired questions, “how is the dream interpreted?/what should Mrs. A. do with her life?” tend to verge upon the questions “how might one be among others?/how can imagination serve a life?/how can it serve the world?” In my discipline there is a growing conversation about what ethics are and what we make of them; it is important, but I will not delve too deeply into it here, because defining ethics is not my concern. However, it is worth noting that while I write from a tradition capable of finding ethics to be diverse and malleable to time and circumstance, I also write from a moment in which scholarship has turned toward the normative, a turn, or return, to virtue ethics and encompassing abstractions. I am more inclined to the former, wary of the expansive claims of the latter. Both approaches, the ethnographic and the normative, contain explorations of the “the everyday” and “ordinary” nature of ethics, including an interest in Postscript: The Shape of the Counter-Ethic

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“affordances,” life’s offerings for ethical working-out.10 And yet there is also, in this literature, the shadow of the idea that ethical claims can also be practices of power, or a concern with ethical violence, both invested in the idea that modern ethics establish the self as something to be cultivated, an object of care.11 While emphasis on the movable, contingent, inexpert faces of ethics are capable of sharing with more critical approaches a basic sense that ethical claims to universality are just that, mere claims, these are not necessarily compatible approaches. At times it is the confrontation between or coexistence of ethics as operations of control, normalization, or subjectivization and ethics as other diverse modes of being that attracts us.12 Against-the-grain and in-motion readings of how people take in and on the world can be made possible by taking up differently nuanced aspects of the way ethics come from somewhere, serve someone, and have effects on people, or that they work at the interface of abstraction and life, the places where categories happen.13 For me, it is worth keeping open the possibility that not only might the content of ethics differ from place to place and time to time, but the very notion of ethics itself, and the places we might look to find it, can be wildly divergent. In many places, “ethical” is a descriptor of actions. In others, while this may be true, an ethical (or moral) status can be material, a matter of substance, being, and body, as well as action, things bodies are, as well as things they do. This is important to recall in moments when even anthropologists make assumptions about the nature of our analytic categories—assuming, for instance, that happiness is not something you swallow or sin not something you can absorb through your skin. It is, then, a moving sense of form that guides my orientation to ethics. I have intentionally left the term more or less undefined. I am interested in contrasting, even competing senses of what ethics are, not just what fi lls them in, and in the nature of the category: what, in any given moment, we are talking about. Indeed, I am less interested in “ethics” than in the “counter,” the work of and at the edge of the curve. And so, if there is a more narrative, or social, analogy for all of this, it is less in scholarship on ethics than on uses of the “counter,” most notably for my purposes, Michael Warner’s book Publics and Counter-Publics.14 The counter-ethic is structurally not unlike what Michael Warner refers to as a counter-public, a mode of social action and an imaginary of solidarity that, while potentially encompassed by the larger public in which it is situated (or within which it hides) 180 Postscript: The Shape of the Counter-Ethic

at the same time comes about precisely because of that public’s limits, constraints, and demands. It is a pressure point as well as a product. Warner writes, “the public” is a concept with a “metacultural dimension,” which “gives form to a tension between the general and particular that makes it difficult to analyze from either perspective alone.”15 An ethic (which is, in a sense, a kind of public) may do something similar. The public is never addressed without some degree of “struggle . . . over the conditions that bring [people] together as a public,” a process that happens “at varying levels of salience to consciousness, from calculated tactic to mute cognitive noise.”16 Similarly, an ethical principle, or paradigm, or model, is, in practice, often established in frictive encounter with all that stands as its other, including its own dialectical emergences and internal conflicts. The counter-public is in many ways a product or result of the public, and its potentiality lies in, not in spite of, the way it “gives form to” the claims and limitations of the public. Ethics and counter-ethics can have a similarly structured relationship. If a range of interactions (on a range of scales of intimacy) we might understand as “queer or minor publics” can “be seen as attempting to create rival publics, even rival modes of publicness,” then enunciations, actions, and intimacies can pose rival ethics and rival ways of doing ethics.17 Where publics create the counter-publics that press against them, ethical paradigms can create, like pockets of air, counter-ethics that bubble precisely from the infrastructure of the ethic. If a counter-ethic is a small revolt, it is a revolt inside the revolution, or a departure at the point of limits, of failure. It might be pulled together out of marginal-seeming consequences, or implications, into a position of its own. It is by definition derivative, but no less vital for being so. It is the element or elements that keep an ethical goal from being complete. It is a place in a map of ideas, a pattern of movement, not a specific body of content. It is not a space of pure opposition, but of “yes, but.” A counter-ethic might be a way of saying to ethical claims, “Don’t get too comfortable.” It could be a reminder to be modest about the things that are assumed to be right or just, or to be an all-encompassing cultural repertoire. A counter-ethic has risk, and it reminds us that all ethics are risky, that they flirt with dogmatism, failure, and contradiction, and that people find relief from those things in imagining other ways. There is force in this. It may involve a celebration of outlandish or quiet imaginaries, of strange romanticizations in the face of dominant romances.18 In Postscript: The Shape of the Counter-Ethic

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Warner’s formulation, the counter-public is a conceptual location and condition, not a discrete set of practices or social networks (though it is often queer in practice as well as structure); the counter-ethic, too, does not assimilate to any social identity, power structure, or ethical position. It may highlight the prejudices of even the most well-meaning ethical positions, or the excluding or delimiting (or worse) effects of even the most inclusivesounding ideals. Sikander has said, “This ‘hair bird’ is a symbolic representation of feminist agency rather than a direct statement of political resistance.”19 Reappearing across works, the gopi hair, the particles that make up the singing spheres, suggest a surprising tension between choreography and shape, in which shape is an artifice of choreography. They make us ask what work indeterminacy might do, and remind us that not all uncertainty is chaotic, that corrosion can be an opening. In Gopi Contagion and Parallax, these things and their movement offer particulation to portray movement as both beauty and dislocation. In Parallax, the gopi hair begins as a menacing swarm, becomes wildly synchronized flocks, and ends in rotating spheres. The framing as parallax suggests possibilities of knowing through distortion and misrecognition (we cannot possibly recognize the hair for what it is), while their patterning without synchronicity suggests multiple forms of association. Importantly, the gopi hair does not just describe (a shape, an ethic, a counter-ethic, and so on). It invites a question: What is happening t/here? To the anthropological impulse to ask how ideas, images, and words rise from and land down in worlds of context and meaning, they also make us ask, what happens to make them take flight? What makes ideas, images, gestures, and words leave their landscape? Where definitions of ethics are concerned, these, too, may be among the forms we can set aloft, among the forms at whose aloft ness we can ask “what happened?” If we move toward the points of traction at which shape and signification can meet, we might find ourselves delighting in possibilities of new associations, not for their newness, but for all they derive and reanimate. We might at once take pleasure in the way a thing might be given movement and meaning, content and direction, and turn our attention to what has made it so, not only how it reorients relations to other things, makes new shapes from old ones, but how, in nitpicky, cosmic, or worldly ways, that happens. Put to ethnographic or historical or everyday use, these 182 Postscript: The Shape of the Counter-Ethic

shapes give us a place to inhabit, from which to notice things that happen both at the verge and in the movement of internally expanding swirling spheres. We might even imagine leaving language aside. We might turn to dance, or art, or music, or food, or the soil for direction. We might accommodate rather than parse, or at the very least be open to epistemologies other than those that figure the world and its productions as, in Foucault’s terms, “dangerous,” or ethics as one kind of thing.20 This does not mean we cannot attend to those scripts and their broad embraces, but we can also seek other expanses, our senses wide to diverse possibilities, to the shapes we have inscribed in the world. And we can go somewhere else from there.

R E P E R TO I R E S A N D P R O V I S O S

Counter-ethics is an open and, to my mind, quite basic idea. But there are possibilities that its openness might make it easily subsumed to other, more established arguments about the form of ethics and its challenges and transformations. Similarly, while counter-ethics might, in certain instances, be a good fit with those approaches, it should not be seen as always or necessarily synonymous with them. The details of Mrs. A.’s case should demonstrate this, but in case they do not, it is important to clarify. I could frame this negatively, as provisos, or as indicating multiple repertoires (what counter-ethics might be). Three provisos seem important to highlight in establishing the extent of repertoires. (1) Counter-ethics need refer to one specific form of power or resistance. (2) Counter-ethics does not necessarily refer to encounters between the abstract and the everyday (3) Counter-ethics does not assume a single understanding of the self. Counter-Ethics and Power It might be tempting to associate counter-ethics with subaltern positions, the disempowered, and forms of “small” resistance in the sense James Scott has elaborated.21 However, if we stick to the idea that a counter-ethic is a shape/motion, one that might map any imaginary, it is clear that the concept of counter-ethics does not attach to any one form of power or resistance. Put differently, that it shows that power comes in many forms and injustice in many moments. Postscript: The Shape of the Counter-Ethic

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Mrs. A. is a good example. She was of a privileged social class, uppercaste Hindu, and from a progressive family which valued female education. She was highly educated and English speaking. She was the daughter of a physician, brother of a cloth merchant, and married to a successful businessman. Hers was a life of comfort. Her family members were Gandhian nationalists, open in their religious views (at least to Sikhism; Islam did not arise). She was a “family friend” of her analyst and his willing partner in efforts to develop a new method of analysis, not an exploited subject whose desires were overwritten by her doctor’s account. Mrs.  A. was not “subaltern,” and though her gender shaped her life’s possibilities, it was not unthinkable for her to imagine education, travel, and a career. Her reflections did not make pleas for the validity of ways of being or thinking which might be defined in cultural terms (“non-Western,” etc.), at certain moments they were downright liberal, but they also rejected the idea that Europeans might “tell India’s story,” and found in resources such as Kalidasa’s play Shakuntala an ethos of singularity. That is not to say that counter-ethics cannot come from a position of disempowerment or social exclusion, or from misread or obscured cultural models. It is also the case in the scenes from my own fieldwork in which I have found reminders of similar things in matters that land heavily on caste, poverty, and social exclusion. If, however, we want to be rigorous about the concept, counter-ethics should not be seen as always heroic, or even necessarily on the side of justice. If anything, it may highlight conflicts, contradictions, and inconsistencies inherent to visions of justice or virtue or heroism. By the same token, counter-ethics are not necessarily counter to the forms of power that characterize modernity. To take perhaps the most important expression of this view, the Foucauldian sense of ethics as a technology of power is foundational for critical concepts such as ethical limits and ethical violence. Upon these concepts, a method of critique rests, one that organizes approaches to ethics as modern operations of self-making discipline. As I discussed in Chapter 2, making critical method is a form of ethical practice.22 Circularly, ethics in this sense requires inquiry into itself to take a particular form, and fashions the world in its image. It is possible to think of counter-ethics in this light, as aligned with rebuttals to forms of modern power, especially those that resonate with the tenets of liberalism

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and the world-altering work of colonialism, a way of exposing Conradian lies at the heart of modern power. Such arguments are important, but they are not always a perfect fit in in places where the terms of liberalism’s lies are cross-hatched with both long-standing contestations to liberalism and long-standing revisions and embraces: these are not only translational but take seriously the ways non-Western, even anticolonial sources influence liberal imaginaries. “The colonized” are not a singular group; there are subalterns to subalterns to subalterns in relationships that are not linear or vertical. Othernesses can be layered. Tanika Sarkar notes a scholarly tendency to exaggerate the impact of colonial cultural imperialisms, with the effect of denying “any substantive autonomy or authenticity to modern Indian discourses” and the requirement to take for granted the “presumed Western origins of Indian modernity.”23 One has only to juxtapose the politics of the suit of B. R. Ambedkar (Dalit leader and framer of the Indian constitution), and Gandhi’s dhoti, or be reminded of Gandhi’s hunger strike in opposition to a separate Dalit electorate, which would have established a distinct political voice, or Ambedkar’s rejection of Hinduism to recognize the complex relationship between ethics, power, liberal principles, and their assumed “others.” Similarly, for feminism, there is no uniform postcolonial actor and no uniform stance on liberalism. Taking up important questions about the complex relationship between liberal feminisms and non-Western feminisms, or Western and Southern feminisms, or white feminisms and intersectional feminisms or feminisms of color, we can consider how clusters of ideas work by at once attending to their locations and genealogies and dislocating them from the labels, locales, and voices from whom they are assumed to issue, all the while attending to the ways those labels are deployed and new ones created. We can interrogate liberal feminism while taking seriously the claims women and disempowered and marginalized people have staked in expressions with no easy alignment with or against what we deem liberal. Counter-ethics may involve confrontations over systems of power, small or vast, “modern,” “Western,” or otherwise, but they are not the products of any one sort of contest, not necessarily the result of contests at all. They could be. But they could also highlight strange, twisting, shape-shift ing qualities of different sorts of power, the different sorts of openings and limits they provide, or other things entirely.

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The Everyday One of the most important contributions of anthropologists writing about ethics is the orientation toward the “ordinary” and “everyday,” and the insistence that ethics are changeable, malleable things most often worked out in fraught lived moments, perhaps, though not necessarily, posed against the abstractions of philosophical formulations or state, scientific, or institutional imaginaries.24 In much important work, there is a critical drive to the idea that ethics come out of human experiences: To call the spaces in which we spend our lives “moral laboratories” is to stake a claim on meaningful thought and social action, takes ethics back, in a sense, from authoritative voices who might imagine they have the final word.25 To consider patients and clients “moral pioneers” is to reclaim bioethics from doctors and scientific authority; to show that bioethical standards do not enter the world completed along with new technologies, and that everyday folks find ingenious ways to resolve the dilemmas scientific systems pose to them.26 At the same time, to render narrative a both privileged and everyday mode of ethical reasoning, a place to work out paradigmatic ideas, is to value the things normal people do and recognize the expansive nature of thought.27 People can work hard to make conceptual what is material and immediate, or not stop to consider the immediate nature of their ethical musings, or grapple with abstractions at a remove from everyday considerations. “Category work” may be where ethics happen in the nitty-gritty of activism, or it may be in “critical events,” moments in which the everyday was ruptured, or in the enfolding into the everyday of qualities against which the “everyday” might be imagined (imagination, abstraction, the event, and so on).28 There can remain an openness to ethical abstraction as the work of the everyday, to the work people do to bring ideas to the muddy ground of life’s dilemmas, and vice versa, the way abstractions can “make the world look different.”29 Not unrelated to this are approaches that view the disjuncture between ethical formulations and the contexts in which they are applied as sites of potential “ethical violence,” a categorical distinction between the “operation of universality” and “lived” or “cultural particularity,” and a sense of the resistance of form to change.30 For some, moral dilemmas are inevitable.31 Often the problem is not the paradigm but life, “It is not merely failures of will, or failure of reason, which thwarts moral maxims from 186 Postscript: The Shape of the Counter-Ethic

becoming universal laws. It is the contingencies of this world.”32 In such moments, messy selves-in-formation encounter “norms that decide in advance who will and will not become a subject.”33 Counter-ethics may involve such movements, and emerge in moments or systems of ethical violence, taking on the vigor of the rather rigid sense of time and human action contained in the phrase “in advance.” But it may also involve a messier sense of ‘norms’ and their creation, where “in advance” is just as often in the moment, and ideas and interests morph even as they become fi xed.34 The figural quality of counter-ethics reminds me of another way we might envision the force of abstraction, of removal from the peopled, placed, evented world. Abstract form, placeless patterns, movable shapes with little or no inkling of “real life” are powerful and impactful ethical guides. I am thinking of the kolams, rice drawings, which Margaret Trawick gently connects to kinship abstractions that found desire as an ethic, and of the way Isabelle Clark-Decès considers similar Tamil abstractions to be monumental forces guiding people’s feelings about whether their lives permitted them to access “rightful” objects of desire.35 In short, a sense of the “everyday,” however understood, as a point of tension is but one among many possible arrangements of counter-ethics. It is not necessary to it, neither its ground nor its structure. Indeed, counter-ethics might remind us of the limits and effects of a universalized ethic of the everyday that is part of the call for attention to everyday ethics. Though epistemologies oriented toward “things that really happen” may offer means for contesting universalizing claims, counter-ethical moments are not necessarily pleas for this side of things. At times, they express caution of the dangers of the pragmatic, at times they reach for something beyond immanent conditions, at times they cast ethics through abstract form, swooping digital shapes, rice flour on floors, paint on walls. The Self For Foucault, if modern ethics is a mode of power, it is so via a relationship to the self, and in seeing ethics as a way of working on the self we have a tool for understanding “ethics” as instrument of normalization, of bringing selves into line according to a particular vision of feeling, behavior, and relations. For anthropology, as I have mentioned, this can be a precarious Postscript: The Shape of the Counter-Ethic

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argument, steeped as we are in efforts to pluralize definitions of selfhood and pressures to establish just what we mean when we invoke it, at the same time that we try to identify the self-shaping demands of a connected up world, European colonialism, postcolonial modernity, and capitalist expansion, the agents of modernity which institute ethics as self-making. On the one hand, critical apparatuses (as Marilyn Strathern reminds us) may depend on folk concepts of knowledge, truth, perception, and understanding.36 Thus, when we theorize ethics, and theorize the theorizing of ethics, we are similarly reminded to ask what maps, folk or otherwise, motivate our efforts. On the other, however, we deploy those apparatuses in a linked-up world in which even the folk knowledges we call theory have been in circulation (and translation and reappropriation and contestation) far longer than we tend to appreciate. Where the self is concerned, counterethics may work not just by provincializing terms of the content of selves under “construction,” so to speak, but also by relativizing notions of ethics as self-making. Just as counter-ethics do not require a particular place on a map of power or hierarchy, context or abstraction, they do not require or provoke a specific understanding of the self or how ethics attends to selves. They might even help us find the ways critical visions reiterate specific pictures of what a subject or self is, the ways normative selves emerge amid considerations of ethics’ production of normative selfhood. For instance, to continue with the formulation referenced earlier, critiques of ethics of recognition hinge upon “suspending the demand for self-identity” as a “counter” to ethical violence.”37 Likewise, if ethics demand subjugation, then “desubjugation” is a “politics of truth.”38 In this arrangement, a particular kind of critical self becomes entrenched. It is a self that cannot be accommodated by normalizing mechanisms (regardless of their content), that is motivated by the force of a thing called “particularity,” which is defined as the limit point of the “universal.” Certainly, countering the demand for coherent self-identification with the inherent particularity of selfhood is central to many critiques of liberal visions of selfhood, a counterfactual to assertions of self-determination and individuation, to fetishization of the will, to ideals which have no room for the lives and bodies of many, except as signs of failure and lack. Alternatives to such approaches emphasize creative self-making in modes other than discipline.39 If theories of social construction “leave little 188 Postscript: The Shape of the Counter-Ethic

room for negotiation,” and their “negative” orientation obscures the productive, creative, and positive work people do in envisioning different lives and worlds, personhood is labile and relational, in constant motion, and engaging with the world through self-emergent creativity that is never wholly individuated, affirmative-in-connection rather than singularly productive or compressed by social worlds and their norms and subjectmaking processes.40 At one level, we can hardly disagree that selves are incomplete and who we are is difficult if not impossible to narrate. (There are more than a few shades of such a self in this book.) But I am also wary of its appeal. There is in it a tendency toward a rather fi xed vision of the self, what we might call a normative critical subject. This subject has its own choreography: It evades demands that it be a subject, its status as relational and incomplete counteracts demands that it act as though otherwise. Relevant and inspiring as these visions are, they are, like anything, vulnerable to fetishization. They may foreclose certain possibilities, the ways truth-telling can come close to truth-telling, or assertions of incomplete subjecthood can be used to keep people in their place, or feeling oneself to be cohesive and singular might allow a woman to leave an abusive spouse, or insist on remuneration for labor, among other things. There are many forms, tools, purposes, and means of self-narration. In other words, reappraisals of selfhood may be true, but they are also stories for the moment, hair-birds to be put into flight. Counter-ethics, as a concept, does not require a particular kind of self or subject. In part, this is because the concept is permitted to turn on itself. It is not immune to its own reasoning. But, in larger part, it is because counter-ethical movements do not need to be about the self, or founded in self-constitution, or reasserting a denied set of self qualities. The “self,” however imagined, may not be their goal or effect; “desubjugation,” if it happens, may be a side-effect of a process that does not begin or end with “subjects” at all; choreographies of presence may be evoked that are precisely indifferent to that dance of subject-making power and critical becoming. In some instances, that is precisely where the critique, the “counter” move, lies, in others, it simply does not appear in the equation. Butler writes, “part of what I find so hard to narrate are the norms—social in character—that bring me into being.”41 Yes. But it is possible that many who work with and against ethical projects do not struggle with this, and it is possible that counter-ethical formulations may begin precisely in the Postscript: The Shape of the Counter-Ethic

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ways the possibility for speech is opened up, not as against the injunction not to speak, but as part of a picture that makes speaking the truth a possibility among others, as with Gandhari, as with Ahalya, as with Draupadi, Shakuntala, and so many cursed women in the epics. Counter-ethics allow us to see our critical methods for the shapes they are; that is, to make the same operations on our own revisions that we make on the dominant paradigm. They allow us not only to seek out the desubjugation in the midst of subject-making ethics, or relationality amid demands for unitary selfhood, but to ask what moves against that dance, too, to make apparent the stakes of even our own methods. If we listen, might we find things other than selfhood that matter, and people doing things other than trying to be selves, or attempting to make themselves, in all their truthhood, heard? Might we relocate, even resuscitate, claims made on particular kinds of subjects, including quite conventional looking ones, including those that appear “liberal” or “individualistic,” from a slightly askew position, which asks where those claims might sit in relation to swarms of critiques, ethics, and positionings, rather than vis-à-vis an “in advance”? While on the one hand, we should take up questions about the conditions in which subjects are formed and the acts of desubjugation by which they are undone, at the same time, we can localize that particular map of this thing we are calling a “subject” and those things we are calling “norms” (in the guise of ethics), not of the relationship of the self to “regimes of truth” that constitute it, but the very picture of a self as a thing that is “constituted” and an entity “in” and “in relation to” a set of powerladen claims. Let us visualize and enflesh the metaphors, follow others in finding other metaphors, accumulate more ideas about how things might work. Let us not forget that the argument is still, really, just another picture, and could, in certain moments, harness all that we are, do, and feel to another scaffolding of being.

HAIRBIRDS

Enter a singing sphere, or a shifting flock. Join up with a particle and follow its circuits, riding its back or wings. Now leave aside the turns it makes and trace its own outline. Now ask, again, does it matter that such particles, the “gopi hair” that, swarming through Times Square and comprising the singing spheres, allows us to consider knowing through misrecogni190 Postscript: The Shape of the Counter-Ethic

tion, association without synchronicity, limitless limit, comes from the heads of the female consorts of Krishna? The cowherder consorts/devotees of Krishna, and friends/consorts, sakhi, of Krishna’s principle consort, Radha, the gopis are often understood to represent, particularly in miniature paintings, viraha, or longing-inseparation, and the playfulness of desire. A special kind of gopi, the nitya sakhi gopi, has no interest in Krishna, existing for one another and to serve Radha, and, in some texts, intimate with one another. The term sakhi itself denotes close female friendship, and can suggest physical intimacy (one of the first lesbian NGOs in India was called Sakhi). Two nude embracing gopis figure in several of Sikander’s miniatures. In Perilous Order they enter the frame around a regal looking Rajput, easily read in intimate embrace, interrupting courtly masculinity with a selfcontained erotic.42 The embracing pair, relocated from other of Sikander’s work, is reproduced from an eighteenth-century Basohli miniature depicting Krishna’s theft of the gopis’ clothing. In that image, they may not be embracing with desire but for protection from exposure. Sikander’s replication and dislocation of this couple shifts its meaning, or at least heightens its ambiguity, emphasizing, without fi xity, the erotic over vulnerability. Do we read the gopis under the sign of violence or that of erotics? Are they huddling or embracing? Are the acts necessarily separate? Also, if we find the hair shape atop those bodies, what does it take with it when put into flight and permitted “new associations”? What does it bring from the small frames of the miniatures to the massive scape of the installations: interruptive erotics or the scene of violation and protection? Do we treat it as a synecdoche of the images from which it is removed? With knowledge of its origins, does it become a derivative object, or is it precisely in its derivative capacity, loosed from its origins, that it might create new “associations” while retaining the possibilities from which it emerged? If we think both about shape and content, that is, about the gopi hair’s movement across works and the derivative nature of creative potential, Sikander’s gopi hair highlights the way categories can work by being dislocated yet responsive, with the freedom to stand for something bigger than their positioning (something female characters are seldom allowed to do). They also point us toward the ways things are set free from context as much as the ways they are beholden to it, the ways they also, in turn, build new Postscript: The Shape of the Counter-Ethic

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contexts from which other things will take flight, taking with them, perhaps, a refrain, a scrap of melody. We can see some of this play with decontextualizing and derivatives in Mrs. A.’s musings with her mythic heroines. We can even detect elements of it in Satya Nand’s science, in his insistence on the nature of the objective, of the “whole truth,” and the peculiar arrangement of his science of the mind by which imagination is a material process of social and ecological proportion, the creative nature of an objectively knowable mind, an objectively present person, the “man in time” who, for now, is here, and who exists in order to continue to explore the nature of his existence. And there it is again, in Satya Nand’s “horizons of fantasy” that are also, always, horizons of self-knowledge by which we emplace ourselves in the very real world. Yet neither Satya Nand nor Mrs. A.’s theorizing can be contained by counter-ethics or by Sikander’s vision, nor can they contain them, which brings us back around to the way this book has been less about their theorizations than about what their conversation demonstrated, what it allows us to see, from the distance of time and through the willingness to put aside some of what we know now in order to hear what they thought they knew then. The smallness of their encounter (it was just a little experiment, a small conversation in an inconsequential book, about a derivative effort to make a better science from old materials) reminds us that counter-ethics are just creative moments comprising smaller moments, momentary big statements made of smaller ones. Temporary places we might stand. Ethics happen in multiple universes and at many scales, involving multiple kinds of limit, failure, ending, and obstruction. Contestations to them do not necessarily hinge on power, or the encounter with the everyday, or demands made on the self. If ethical failures generate something new, it is not always the case that they do so in terms of resistance.43 At the same time, it is not always the case that they don’t. They direct us to ask what it is they do depend on, what it is that brings them into being, what gets enlivened, what gets redirected, what comes up, or out. Ethical emergences happen in many ways. These can include the “negation of the negativity,” the provincializing of the provincializing move, the relativizing of the call for relativity, and the like.44 Such moves are not meaninglessly circular so much as they are acts of rigor that do more than highlight limitations or demand alternatives, opening up the world to reformation, or suturing closures from which to start anew. Counter-ethics can also become dominant 192 Postscript: The Shape of the Counter-Ethic

and delimiting, generating their own counter-ethical spurs, the way things turn in on themselves, and then out again. The way we can often go somewhere, even if that somewhere is nowhere new, the way something happens, even if it happens because, as in Ahalya’s stony stare, nothing does. Part of the conceit of counter-ethics is that, as a concept, it is indifferent to content, that it is a position not a set of principles. Yet, it is evident, with Sikander’s singing spheres in mind, that this, too, is a goal rather than a point of arrival, because form and content are only held apart by force. My arms are now weak from the effort. Perhaps it is the influence of too many months reading the work of Dev Satya Nand, or too much pleasure taken in his insistence on the social, indeed cosmic value of imagination and experimentation, but it would seem that if there is content to this form, it is the demand to keep alive the possibility of a world in which creativity exists and is evenly distributed, evenly allowed, in which, for the occasional moment, all might partake of the possibility that, as E. M. Forster wrote of the terrible, awesome caves of Marabar: “Everything exists; nothing has value.”45 Or of the flight of hair-birds, the way their livid existence is simultaneously and ambiguously connected to and dislocated from their worlds of value. In such places, something can come into being with the materials at hand, and perhaps also with a bit of something else. These moments cannot, should not last forever. It is therefore a relief that in certain ontologies nothing lasts forever, that the place we stand is only our ground for the time being, just as the possibility of being groundless is a temporary opening, a door blown open. Like Mrs. A., we do not know what comes next, even if we think we do, even if we are sometimes right. Even if our world is upended, we have hair-birds to ride as we endure until we do not, and others to meet, to swoop and soar, or crawl and swarm with, along the way.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not exist were it not for one person, Dr. Sanjeev Jain, who generously shared knowledge of Dev Satya Nand, Objective Method of Dream Analysis, and of Mrs. A. with me. So, too, the generosity of the Psychiatry Department at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in hosting me and permitting me to read archived case fi les, provided both an education in the history of Indian psychiatry and the fertile intellectual ground in which this project grew. This book has drawn upon resources generated through many separate projects, projects that were never defined as “a study of a twentieth century Indian psychoanalysis.” Thus, it has benefitted from the generous support of a number of sources. The American Council of Learned Societies awarded a Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship, which I held at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies in 2012–13. I did not know while at Radcliffe that the work I was doing there would feed a project on twentieth-century myth, medicine, and ethics, but I am grateful for its intellectual universe and for the brilliant souls I met there. The American Institute of Indian Studies supported research at NIMHANS and in Kolkata with a Senior Short Grant, and Tufts’ Faculty Research Awards Committee supported research in Kolkata, Delhi, and Varanasi. Initially, this book was conceived as a collection of essays, of which one was to be a piece on Mrs. A. This was the idea of Ritu Menon, at Women Unlimited, who has nurtured this project and supported its (radical) changes in direction, even as it left the ocean of counter-ethics and ethnography and sailed into the sheltered harbor of Objective Method. Bhrigupati  Singh and Clara Han, and Tom Lay at Fordham University Press,

did not know that earlier version, but they have also nurtured this book’s development, providing not only a welcome into the “Thinking from Elsewhere” series but also an enthusiastic group of readers for a book workshop at Brown University, in February 2018. These readers offered invaluable insights; they included Dwaipayan Bannerjee, Tulasi Srinivas, Aniket De, Aarthi Sethi, Annabelle Suitor, Alhona Palchoudhuri, Louise Christensen, and Grace Cardogno. Mrs. A. has seen many readers along the way, including several writing groups I have been fortunate to be part of. I am grateful for the careful, rigorous, sometimes vigorous reading and comments of Jyoti Puri, Banu Subhramaniam, Elora Chowdhury, and Ayesha Irani (who have read every chapter, and several versions at that); of Projit Mukharji, Dwai Bannerjee, Bharat Venkat, William Stafford, Harris Solomon, and Amit Prasad, and other attendees of the “Science, Technology, and Medicine in South Asia” preconference at the Annual Conference on South Asia in 2016 and workshop at MIT in 2017; of Alex Blanchette, Emilio Spadola, Tatiana Chudakova, and Cathy Stanton in the Tufts Anthropology Department Brown Bag lunch talks series in 2017–18; and the many other smart and generous souls who have read some or all of this manuscript, including Saiba Varma, Andrew MacDowell, Alisha Rankin, Rosemary Taylor, Ursula Rao, Matthew Halkes-Carey, Heiko Henkel, Morten Pedersen, Durba Mitra, and Susanna Trnka. Some readers have been so consistently generous with their time and insight that they deserve mention twice, especially Tulasi Srinivas, Bharat Venkat, Andrew MacDowell, and Dwai Bannerjee. I presented segments and versions of segments of this book as talks at Harvard’s Friday Morning Seminar in Medical Anthropology, the University of Leipzig, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Brown University, and the Psychiatry Department at NIMHANS, as well as conferences and workshops, but the real inauguration of Mrs. A. and counter-ethics was at the University of Copenhagen in a workshop on “Infrastructures of Certainty and Doubt,” and I am indebted to the marvelous group of scholars who attended that workshop and offered feedback on a very raw paper and set of ideas. A version of Chapter 1 appears in the special issue that resulted from that event, “Singularity and Uncertainty: Religion, Sexuality, and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis,” The Cambridge Journal

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Acknowledgments

of Anthropology 35, no. 2 (2017): 30–46. Several people have been instrumental in sharing their work, suggesting texts and discussing ideas, especially Brian Hatcher, who offered guidance on Shakuntala as I engaged with his excellent work, and Vivek Narayanan, who directed me to sections of the Ramayana and shared his poetic insights into Ahalya. Lauren Minsky alerted me to the existence of Ellen Farrar and very generously shared archival notes with me, which appear in Chapter 3. Moon Duchin helped me understand mathematical concepts of singularity and provided the phrase “singular exotic potential.” Ongoing conversation with Projit Mukharji spawned many of my thoughts on context and the uses of history. Three anonymous readers for Fordham University Press offered invaluable comments and critiques. My astoundingly smart and capable research assistants were instrumental in all phases of this book’s existence: Tara Kola, Aniket De, Saba Dave, and Sisanka Jinadasa. In Delhi, the Chawla family has long given me a place in the world; in the case of this book, their generosity also supplied inspiring memories. I thank them both for their continued hospitality and for the1997 trip to Amritsar. Diya Mehra has been generous with her time, home, and ideas on this and other projects. My tiny, rural Massachusetts community has supported my work, inspired thoughts on time, place, and history, and nurtured my family with love and care. My family not only has been supportive of my long hours of going into “writing brain,” a state of near dissociation that lingers long after the computer is shut, but also has provided inspiration, though they may not have known it. For that, and for being a font of knowledge on clinical psychology and gender, I thank my sister and collaborator, Kristina Pinto. My grandmother Theodora Heathcote, who is roughly Mrs. A.’s age, was on my mind nearly every day as I wrote this, and my parents have remained steadfast in their support of weird projects and strange languages. Dennis Michaud, my intellectual champion, kept the home fires burning, the intellectual gears turning, and the love flowing, conjuring celebrations at every stage when it seemed like “the book is finished!” Eve continues to motivate all I write, especially now that she approaches Mrs. A.’s age at marriage, and a world radically changed yet much the same. Thea embodies so much of the wild, wondering, and creative intelligence I have decided to celebrate here. My contrarian sprite, for the time I have stolen away from the summer

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of your fourth year, and again the summer of your fift h, this book is hardly compensation, but it is for you. Finally, I do not know whom to acknowledge for the fact of Mrs. A. and the unwitting gift of her words. If she had children, grandchildren, nieces, or nephews, or if she is still alive, I thank her and them for her company and her courage in the face of the unknown.

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NOTES

I N T R O D U C T I O N : M R S . A . A N D D E V S AT YA N A N D

1. Dev Satya Nand, The Objective Method of Dream-Interpretation: Derived from Researches in the Oriental Reminiscence State (Lahore: Privately published, 1947), 109; Unless otherwise noted, all italics, spelling “errors,” and punctuation that appear here are present in the original text. I mostly refrain from using “[sic]” to designate the ways the text departs from the grammatical conventions to which I adhere. 2. Ibid., 109. 3. In an earlier publication, I dated both the text and the account to 1946. I have reconsidered and now think the case itself was taken during the war, and closer to the beginning of Nehru’s final imprisonment. See Sarah Pinto, “Singularity and Uncertainty: Counter-Ethics of Gender and Sexuality in an Indian Dream Analysis,” Cambridge Anthropology 35, no. 2 (2017): 30–46. 4. Satya Nand 1947, 109. 5. Ibid., 216. 6. Ibid., 109. 7. See Anjali R. Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 8. Tanika Sarkar, Words to Win: The Making of a Modern Autobiography (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2014); Anshu Malhotra and Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, eds., Speaking of the Self: Gender, Performance, and Autobiography in South Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 9. Sanjeev Jain et al., “The Story of Satyanand,” Indian Journal of Psychiatry 57, no. 4 (October–December 2015): 419–22. 10. Ibid., 421. 11. Satya Nand 1947, vi. 12. Ibid., vii.

13. Ibid., 47. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 48. 16. Ibid., 46–47. 17. Ibid., 34–35. 18. Ibid., 35. 19. Charles James Lodge Patch, A Critical Review of the Punjab Mental Hospitals from 1840–1930 (Lahore: Punjab Government Printing Office, 1931). 20. See Waltraud Ernst, Colonialism and Transnational Psychiatry: The Development of an Indian Mental Hospital in British India, c. 1925–1940 (Delhi: Anthem Press, 2013). 21. Patch 1931, 31. 22. Ibid., 25. 23. Ibid., 94. 24. Ibid., 97, 104. 25. Ashis Nandy, The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Christiane Hartnack, Psychoanalysis in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001). 26. This is an extensive literature, including but not limited to the following, Manasi Kumar et al., eds., Psychoanalysis from the Indian Terroir: Emerging Themes in Culture, Family, and Childhood (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018); Sudhir Kakar, The Analyst and the Mystic: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Religion and Mysticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Sudhir Kakar, The Inner World: A Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India, 3rd ed. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008); Stanley N. Kurtz, All the Mothers Are One: Hindu India and the Cultural Reshaping of Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Gananath Obeyesekere, Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 27. Satya Nand 1947, xiv. 28. Jain et al., 2015. 29. Ibid., 421. 30. Satya Nand 1947, xiv. 31. Dev Satya Nand, “A Correlative Study of Some of the Findings of Child Psychiatry with Recent Advances in the Field of the Biological Sciences,” Indian Journal of Pediatrics 28, no. 9 (1961): 375–88; Dev Satya Nand, Design for a Man (Theory-Methods, Finding, and Applications): Oriental Psycho-Analysis, Experimental Religions, Philosophy, and Sociology, Psycho-Cybernatics, Biology of Ego (Delhi: Atma Ram, 1967); Dev Satya Nand, Dynamic Psychology of the Gita of Hinduism, abridged ed. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press & IBH, 1972). 32. Satya Nand 1967.

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Notes to pages 11–14

33. Ibid., vi. 34. Ibid., vii. 35. Ibid., 1, xx. 36. Ibid., ii. 37. Ibid., xv. 38. Anonymous, “Review: The Objective Method of Dream-Interpretation Derived from Researches in the Oriental Reminiscence State.” JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association 141, no. 15 (1949): 1106 39. Satya Nand 1967, v. 40. Jain et al. 2015, 420. 41. Barbara Stoler Miller, Theater of Memory: The Plays of Kalidasa (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 34. 42. Satya Nand 1947, 112. 43. Jain et al. 2015, 420. 44. Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 45. Thomas Strong, “Kinship Between Judith Butler and Anthropology? A Review Essay,” Ethnos 67, no. 3 (2002): 401–18. 46. Isabelle Clark-Decès, The Right Spouse: Preferential Marriages in Tamil Nadu (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). 47. Strong 2002. 48. Bhrigupati Singh, “How Concepts Make the World Look Different: Affirmative and Negative Genealogies of Thought,” in The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy, ed. Arthur Kleinman et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 49. Veena Das, “Sexuality, Vulnerability, and the Oddness of the Human: Lessons from the Mahabharata,” Borderlands E-Journal: New Spaces in the Humanities 9, no. 3 (2010). 50. Simona Sawhney, “Bhagat Singh: A Politics of Death and Hope,” in Punjab Reconsidered: History, Culture, and Practice, ed. Anshu Malhotra and Farina Mir (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), 377. 51. C. A. Bayly, Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1–2; Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). 52. Joseph S. Alter, Gandhi’s Body: Sex, Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). 53. Geraldine Hancock Forbes, Women in Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 54. Anand Pandian and Daud Ali, Ethical Life in South Asia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).

Notes to pages 15–26 201

55. Gananath Obeyesekere, Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 56. Anand Pandian, Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 57. Usha Menon, Women, Wellbeing and the Ethics of Domesticity in an Odia Hindu Temple Town (New Delhi: Springer, 2013). 58. Margaret Trawick, Notes on Love in a Tamil Family (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Lawrence Cohen, “Where It Hurts: Indian Material for an Ethics of Organ Transplantation,” Zygon 38, no. 3 (2003): 663–88; Clark-Decès 2014. 59. Vrinda Dalmiya, Caring to Know: Comparative Care Ethics, Feminist Epistemology, and the Mahabharata (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 60. Bhrigupati Singh, Poverty and the Quest for Life: Spiritual and Material Striving in Rural India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 61. Joseph S. Alter, Moral Materialism: Sex and Masculinity in Modern India (London: Penguin Books, 2011). 62. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: An Essay on the Caste System (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). 63. Gloria Goodwin Raheja and Ann Grodzins Gold, Listen to the Heron’s Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Smita Tewari Jassal, Unearthing Gender: Folksongs of North India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger, When the World Becomes Female: Guises of a South Indian Goddess (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); Kalpana Ram, Fertile Disorder: Spirit Possession and Its Provocation of the Modern (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013); Gayatri Reddy, With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Menon 2013; Antoinette E. DeNapoli, Real Sadhus Sing to God: Gender, Asceticism, and Vernacular Religion in Rajasthan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 64. Alter 2011; Nandy 1983. 65. Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 66. Veena Das, Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 67. Veena Das, “Ethics, Self-Knowledge, and Life Taken As a Whole.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8, no. 3 (2018): 537º49. 68. Pratibha Ray, “Ahalya’s Voyage: From Transgression to Transcendence” In Revisiting the Pancha Kanyas, ed. Pradip Bhattacharya (Calcutta: Eastern Zonal Cultural Centre, 2007), 22; see Miller 1984). 69. Raheja and Gold 1994; Jassal 2012.

202 Notes to pages 26–29

70. Anshu Malhotra, Piro and the Gulabdasis: Gender, Sect, and Society in Punjab (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017). 71. DeNapoli 2014. 72. Miller 1984, 23. 73. Menon 2013. 74. Uma Narayan, Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third-World Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1997). 75. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Translator’s Preface,” in Mahasweta Devi, Imaginary Maps: Three Stories, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Routledge, 1995), xxv. 1 . S I N G U L A R I T Y A N D U N C E R TA I N T Y: D R A U PA D I

1. Dev Satya Nand, The Objective Method of Dream-Interpretation: Derived from Researches in the Oriental Reminiscence State (Lahore: Privately published, 1947), 110. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 110, 115. 7. Ibid., 110. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Anshu Malhotra, Gender, Caste, and Religious Identities: Restructuring Class in Colonial Punjab (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002). 11. Ibid.; Kenneth W. Jones, Arya Dharm: Hindu Consciousness in 19th-Century Punjab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 4. 12. Satya Nand 1947, 119. 13. Ibid., 118. 14. Ibid., 119. 15. Ibid., 133. 16. Ibid., 110. 17. Ibid., 113. 18. Ibid., 110. 19. Ibid., 113. 20. Ibid., 110. 21. Ibid., 109. 22. Ibid., 120. 23. Malhotra 2002; Veena Talwar Oldenburg, Dowry Murder: The Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

Notes to pages 29–43 203

24. Satya Nand 1947, 120. 25. Ibid., 110. 26. Ibid., 120. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 126. 29. Ibid., 125. 30. Ibid., 133. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 114. 33. Ibid., 123, 117. 34. Ibid., 115. 35. Ibid., 133–34. 36. Ibid., 120. 37. Jones 1976, 57. 38. Ibid., 69. 39. Satya Nand 1947, 125. 40. Malhotra 2002, 116. 41. Ibid., 62. 42. Ibid., 117. 43. Ibid. 44. Satya Nand 1947, 134. 45. Ibid., 147. 46. Ibid., 120. 47. Ibid., 110. 48. Ibid., 127. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 115. 51. Ibid., 127. 52. Ibid., 128. 53. Ibid., 127. 54. Ibid., 109. 55. Ibid., 110. 56. Ibid., 109. 57. Ibid., 125. 58. Ibid., 117. 59. Ibid., 111. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., 113–14. 62. Ibid., 133. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid., 124. 65. Ibid. 204

Notes to pages 43–49

66. Ibid. 67. The young man conducted research into “the older systems of psychoanalysis” with the aim of rediscovering psychological science in Hindu concepts; we can be forgiven for imagining the analysand is Satya Nand himself, although certain details do not add up, and unless Satya Nand performed roles of both analysand and analyst exceptionally carefully on the page, it appears unlikely to be him, and though the similarities are uncanny, they suggest the richness of psychology and psychoanalysis in late colonial India. 68. Satya Nand 1947, 84. 69. Ibid., 98. 70. Satya Nand borrowed this binary from William MacDougall, a psychologist, student of Jung, and proponent of theories of motivation (and, later, eugenics); Satya Nand may have taken more than one cue from him. 71. Satya Nand 1947, 124. 72. Ibid., 132. 73. Ibid., 113. 74. Kevin McGrath, Stri: Women in Epic Mahabharata (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press for the Ilex Foundation Center for Hellenic Studies, 2009), 14. 75. Satya Nand 1947, 118. 76. Ibid., 138. 77. Geraldine Hancock Forbes, Women in Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 124. 78. Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 223. 79. Satya Nand 1947, 208. 80. Ibid., 140. 81. Ibid., 135. 82. Ibid., 142. 83. Ibid., 125. 84. Ibid., 135. 85. McGrath 2009; Alf Hiltebeitel, The Cult of Draupadī (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 86. Satya Nand 1947, 118. 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid., 138. 89. Ibid., 145. 90. Ibid., 140. 91. Ibid., vi. 92. Gregory Bateson, Naven, 2d ed. (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1958). 93. Satya Nand 1947, 124. 94. Ibid., 116. Notes to pages 49–56 205

95. Ibid., 117. 96. Ibid., 135. 97. Ibid., 136. 98. Ibid., 124. 99. Ibid. 100. Ibid., 140. 101. Jones 1976, 156. 102. Satya Nand 1947, 118. 103. Ibid., 119, 115. 104. Ibid., 119. 105. Ibid., 128. 106. Ibid., 118. 107. Ibid., 134, 132. 108. Ibid., 119, 132. 109. In one of the indications that the case transpired during the war, Mrs. A. described him as “one of the many brave soldiers, of whom India is proud to-day. He is one of the sword arms, which will keep off the disintegration of this great Community of Nations called the English Speaking World, which I sincerely hope is in the process of making,” Ibid., 119, 135. 110. Ibid., 135. 111. Ibid., 132. 112. Ibid. 113. Ibid. 114. Ibid. 115. Ibid., 128. 116. Ibid., 133. 117. Ibid. 118. Ibid. 119. Ibid., 132–33. 120. Ibid., 125. 121. Ibid., 126. 122. Ibid. 123. Ibid., 127. 124. Ibid., 125. 125. Ibid., 128. 126. There was another triangulation; both girls admired Nehru: “When I was teasing Vidya about getting married to Arjan Dass. She had mentioned she would like to get married to only a man like Pundit Nehru. I shared her views, in that I have been admiring the Punditji from my adolescence. Many a girl friends have teased me about being a hero worshipper of him, and that my coldness to their affection was due to my sub-conscious love for him.” Ibid., 126.

206 Notes to pages 57–60

127. Ibid., 127. 128. Ibid. 129. Ibid. 130. Malhotra 2002, 64. 131. Satya Nand 1947, 127. 132. Ibid., 126. 133. Ibid., 127. 134. Lawrence Cohen, “The Kothi Wars: AIDS Cosmopolitanism and the Morality of Classification,” in Sex in Development, ed. Vincanne Adams and Stacey Leigh Pigg, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 135. Satya Nand 1947, 127. 136. Ibid., 128. 137. Ibid., 134. 138. Ibid., 93. 139. Anjali R. Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 140. ‘Is.mat Cug̲ h̲ ta’ī, The Quilt: The Story in Multiple Translations (Bhubaneswar, India: Four Corners, 2008); Rabindranath Tagore, Fakrul Alam, and Radha Chakravarty, The Essential Tagore (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011). Anthropologist Naisargi Dave quotes Abha of the organization Jagori recalling the “the beauty of silence” prior to the era of coming out politics: “Secrecy, contrary to what people think, is not a bad thing. There is tremendous spiritual possibility in those bonds.” Naisargi Dave, Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 104. 141. Lawrence Cohen, “Song for Pushkin,” Daedalus 136, no. 2 (2007): 103–15; Dave 2012. 142. Satya Nand 1947, 136. 143. Ibid., 131. 144. Ibid., 132. 145. Ibid., 128. 146. Ibid., 143. 147. Ibid., 218. 148. Ibid., 115. 149. Ibid., 140. 150. Ibid., 127. 151. Ibid., 129. 152. Ibid., 143. 153. Ibid., 209. 154. Ibid., 116. 155. Jones 1976.

Notes to pages 61–70 207

156. Anshu Malhotra, Piro and the Gulabdasis: Gender, Sect, and Society in Punjab (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017). 157. Malhotra 2002, 82. 158. Ibid., 110. 159. Ibid., 161. 160. Satya Nand 1947. 161. Ibid., 128. 162. Ibid., 118. 163. Ibid., 117. 164. Ibid., 141. 165. Ibid. 166. Ibid., 142. 167. Ibid., 141. 168. Ibid., 140. 169. Rama Jha, “An Interview with Amrita Pritam,” Indian Literature 25, no. 5 (1982): 126. 170. Veena Das, “Sexuality, Vulnerability, and the Oddness of the Human,” Borderlands E-Journal 9, no. 3 (2010). 171. Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan, and Shilpa Ranade, Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets (Delhi: Penguin, 2011), 124. 172. Ibid., 60 173. Satya Nand 1947, 140. 174. Forbes 1996, 190. 175. Ibid. 176. Ibid., 117. 177. Ibid., 116. 178. Ibid., 91. 179. Ibid., 114. 180. Ibid., 118. 181. Jha 1982, 188–89. 182. Veena Talwar Oldenburg, “Lifestyle as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow, India,” Feminist Studies 16, no. 2 (1990): 259–87. 183. Dave 2012, 145. 184. Satya Nand 1947, 109. 2 . B E YO N D R E C O G N I T I O N : S H A K U N TA L A

1. Dev Satya Nand, The Objective Method of Dream-Interpretation: Derived from Researches in the Oriental Reminiscence State (Lahore: Privately published, 1947), 145. 2. Ibid., 115.

208 Notes to pages 70–84

3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., 121. 5. Ibid., Diagram XI. 6. Ibid., 114. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 115. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 145. 11. Ibid., 137. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 118. 14. Draupadi and Shakuntala are married into the same royal lineage; Shakuntala is the mother of Bharat by Dushyanta, king of the Puru lineage, from whom the Pandavas, Draupadi’s husbands, descend, which makes Shakuntala Draupadi’s great-great-grandmother-in-law. 15. Satya Nand 1947, iv. 16. Ibid., i. 17. Ibid., 137. 18. Ibid., 129–31. 19. Romila Thapar, Śakuntalā: Texts, Readings, Histories (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1999). 20. Rabindranath Tagore, “Sakuntala, Its Inner Meaning,” in Sakuntala, by Kalidasa, Prepared for the English Stage by Kedar Nath Gupta (London: Macmillan, 1920), xix. 21. Ibid., xvii. 22. Ibid., xiv. 23. Ibid., xv; emphasis in original. 24. Ibid., xvi. 25. Ibid., xxvii. 26. Ibid., xxvii–viii; emphasis in original. 27. Barbara Stoler Miller, “Kālidāsa’s World and His Plays,” in Theater of Memory: The Plays of Kālidāsa, ed. Barbara Stoler Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 27. 28. Roshni Rustomji, “From Shakuntala to Shakuntala: Strength Rather Than Beauty,” Pacific Coast Philology 10 (1975): 45. 29. Miller 1984, 36. 30. Edwin Gerow, “Sanskrit Dramatic Theory and Kalidasa’s Plays,” in Miller 1984, 61–62. 31. Satya Nand 1947, 131. 32. See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Grove Press, 1965); Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967); Ashis Nandy, The

Notes to pages 84–93 209

Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). 33. Satya Nand 1947, 137. 34. Nehru was akin not only to Arjun, husband of Draupadi, but also to “Shakuntala’s great sage,” Marica, with whom she lived in exile. Thus, “The socialist sentiments and motivations conflict with the religious sentiments and motivations, both of whom are embodied in Nehru identification. The path before marriage was clearly a socialist one. She was regarding Nehru as the Arjan of Socialism. But during marriage, the hope of a son, had revived Shakuntala’s identification.” Ibid., 139. 35. Ibid., 140. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., 138. 38. Ibid., 114. 39. Ibid., 120. 40. Sarojini Naidu, Speeches and Writings of Sarojini Naidu (Madras: Natesan, 1919), 55. 41. Kenneth W. Jones, Arya Dharm: Hindu Consciousness in 19th-Century Punjab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). 42. Ibid., 8. 43. Ibid., 94. 44. Ibid.; Anshu Malhotra, Gender, Caste, and Religious Identities: Restructuring Class in Colonial Punjab (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002). 45. Vir Bharat Talwar, “Feminist Consciousness in Women’s Journals in Hindi,” in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 205. 46. Malhotra 2002; Veena Talwar Oldenburg, Dowry Murder: The Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 47. Jones 1976. 48. Malhotra 2002, 61. 49. Markus Daeschel, “Being Middle Class in Late Colonial Punjab,” in Punjab Reconsidered: History, Culture, and Practice, ed. Anshu Malhotra and Farina Mir (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), 335. 50. Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 51. Daeschel 2012, 331. 52. Ibid., 335. 53. Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (New York: Routledge, 1998). 54. Jones 1976.

210

Notes to pages 93–97

55. Bose and Jalal 1998. 56. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Mani 1998. 57. Bose and Jalal 1998, 81. 58. Radha Kumar, The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women’s Rights and Feminism in India, 1800–1990 (London: Verso, 1993), 21. 59. Ibid., 19. 60. Brian A. Hatcher, “The Shakuntala Paradigm: Vidyasagar, Widow Marriage, and the Morality of Recognition 1,” Journal of Hindu Studies 6, no. 3 (2013): 365. 61. Brian A. Hatcher, Vidyasagar: The Life and After-life of an Eminent Indian (Delhi: Routledge, 2014). 62. Hatcher 2013, 367. 63. Hatcher 2014, 83. 64. Ibid. 65. Hatcher 2013, 375. 66. Ibid. 67. Hatcher 2014, 84, 85. 68. Hatcher 2013, 369. 69. Hatcher 2014, 45, 46. 70. Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Short Stories, trans. William Radice (London: Penguin, 1991), 41. 71. Hatcher 2013, 378. 72. Satya Nand 1947, 143. 73. Ibid., 140. 74. Ibid., 143. 75. Ibid., 145. 76. Ibid., 129. 77. Ibid., 131. 78. Ibid., 137. 79. Wendy Doniger, On Hinduism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 577. 80. Kevin McGrath, Stri: Women in Epic Mahabharata (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press for the Ilex Foundation Center for Hellenic Studies, 2009), 197. 81. Ibid. 82. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (Delhi: Penguin, 2004), 21. 83. Ibid., 21–22. 84. Satya Nand 1947, 113.

Notes to pages 97–106 211

85. Sarah Pinto, “Rational Love, Relational Medicine: Psychiatry and the Accumulation of Precarious Kinship,” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 35, no. 3 (2011): 376–95. 86. Janelle S. Taylor, “On Recognition, Caring, and Dementia,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 22, no. 4 (2008): 313–35. 87. Sarah Pinto, Where There Is No Midwife: Birth and Loss in Rural India (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008). 88. Ibid. 89. Lucinda Ramberg, Given to the Goddess: South Indian Devdasis and the Sexuality of Religion (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Svati Pragna Shah, Street Corner Secrets: Sex, Work, and Migration in the City of Mumbai (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Pinto 2008. 90. Katherine Mayo, Mother India (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927). 91. Ibid., 91. 92. Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 223. 93. Ibid., 224. 94. Ibid., 225. 95. Ibid.; Chatterjee 1993. 96. Satya Nand 1947, 120. 97. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 108, 114. 98. Ibid., 32, 108. 99. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). 100. Ibid., 37. 101. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 17. 102. Ibid.; Butler 2005, 42. 103. Kamal Amrohi, Mahal (fi lm, 1949). 104. Meheli Sen, “Haunted Havelis and Hapless Heroes: Gender, Genre, and the Hindi Gothic Film,” in Figurations in Indian Film, ed. Meheli Sen and Anustup Basu (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 119. 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid. 107. Ibid., 129. 108. Banu Subhramaniam, “Like a Tumbleweed in Eden: The Diasporic Lives of Concepts,” Keynote Address, 20th International Conference on Conceptual History, September 20, 2017, Oslo, Norway. 109. Satya Nand 1947, 129.

212 Notes to pages 107–18

110. Hatcher 2014, 87. 111. Sheldon I. Pollock, ed., A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 112. Miller 1984, 13. 113. Ibid., 14. 114. Wendy Doniger, The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was: Myths of Self-Imitation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3. 115. Ibid., 3. 116. Ibid., 205. 117. Butler 2005. 118. Ibid., 17. 119. Ibid. 120. Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of a Work in Progress,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, 253–80 (New York: New Press, 1998). 121. Gerow 1984, 59. 3 . U N C O N S C I O U S N E S S A N D V O I C E : A H A LYA

1. Dev Satya Nand, The Objective Method of Dream-Interpretation: Derived from Researches in the Oriental Reminiscence State (Lahore: Privately published, 1947), 125. 2. Ibid., 125. 3. Ibid., 132. 4. Ibid., 134. 5. Ibid., 125. 6. Ibid., 127. 7. Ibid., 136. 8. Ibid., 128. 9. Ibid., 127. 10. Ibid., 140. 11. Ibid., 206. 12. Ibid., 93. 13. Ibid., 84. 14. Ibid., 94. 15. Ibid., 98. 16. Ibid., 102. 17. Ibid., 123. 18. Ibid., 124. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 134.

Notes to pages 119–29

213

21. Ibid., 124. 22. Ibid., 125. 23. Ibid., 132. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 141. 26. Ibid., 124. 27. Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 28. Satya Nand 1947, 112. 29. Ibid., 116. 30. Ibid., 162. 31. Ibid., 139. 32. Ibid., 210. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 142. 35. Stephanie W. Jamison, Sacrificed Wife, Sacrificer’s Wife: Women, Ritual and Hospitality in Ancient India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 13; Kevin McGrath, Stri: Women in Epic Mahabharata (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press for the Ilex Foundation Center for Hellenic Studies, 2009), 13. 36. Mahabharata 11(81)16: 47–54; James L. Fitzgerald, ed. and trans., The Mahābhārata, Book 11: The Book of the Women; Book 12: The Book of Peace, Part One (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 56. 37. Ibid., 59. 38. Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 57; Veena Das, “Sexuality, Vulnerability, and the Oddness of the Human,” Borderlands E-Journal 9, no. 3 (2010). 39. Amrita Pritam and Khushwant Singh, Pinjar: The Skeleton and Other Stories (New Delhi: Tara Press, 2009). 40. Ibid., 43. 41. Ibid., 46. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., 47. 44. Ibid., 48, 49. 45. Satya Nand 1947, 109. 46. See Wendy Doniger, “Sita and Helen, Ahalya and Alcmena: A Comparative Study,” History of Religions 37, no. 1 (1997): 21–49. 47. D. Wilfred Abse, The Diagnosis of Hysteria (London: Wright, 1950), 97. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid.

214 Notes to pages 130–40

51. G. F. W. Ewens, Insanity in India: Its Symptoms and Diagnosis: With Reference to the Relation of Crime and Insanity (London: Thacker, Spink, 1908), 71. 52. Ibid., 78. 53. Ibid., 71. 54. Ibid., 77–78 55. Ibid., 78. 56. Abse 1950, 47. 57. Ibid. 58. Alexander William Overbeck-Wright, Mental Derangements in India: Their Symptoms and Treatment, Etc. (London: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1912), 122. 59. Ibid., 122–23. 60. Ibid., 123. 61. Alexander William Overbeck-Wright, Lunacy in India (London: Baillière, Tindall and Cox, 1921), 125; emphasis in original. 62. George Spilsbury, “Letter to the Editor,” Indian Journal of Medical Science 1, no. 5 (May 1, 1834). 63. Norman Chevers, A Commentary on the Diseases of India (London: J. and A. Churchill, 1886), 733. 64. Sarah Pinto, “ ‘The Tools of Your Chants and Spells’: Stories of Madwomen and Indian Practical Healing,” Medical Anthropology 35, no. 3 (2015): 1–14. 65. Dr. Davidson, “On the Stimulating Effects of Cold Water,” Indian Medical Journal 2, no. 19 (July 1, 1835), 251–52. 66. Ibid., 251. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., 252. 69. Ibid. 70. Pandurang, “Hysteria,” Indian Medical Gazette, March 1, 1869. 71. Detroit Free Press. “Appeared as Dead, Yet Alive.” July 6, 1913. 72. Moti Venkatarao Govindaswamy, Dr. M.V. Govindaswamy: Lectures and Writings, ed. Saligrama Krishna Ramachandra Rao (Bangalore: Vimala Govindaswamy, 1970), 74, 79. 73. Girindrasekhar Bose, Concept of Repression (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1921), 89. 74. James Esdaile, Mesmerism in India, and Its Practical Application in Surgery and Medicine (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1846), 14. 75. Waltraud Ernst, “Colonial Psychiatry, Magic and Religion: The Case of Mesmerism in British India,” History of Psychiatry 15, no. 57 (2004): 57–71; Waltraud Ernst, “ ‘Under the Influence’ in British India: James Esdaile’s Mesmeric Hospital in Calcutta, and Its Critics,” Psychological Medicine 25, no. 6 (1995): 1113; Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

Notes to pages 140–46 215

76. R. N. Khory, “Trance: To the Editor,” Times of India, June 24, 1879. 77. See Gananath Obeyesekere, Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Sarah Caldwell, Oh Terrifying Mother: Sexuality, Violence, and Worship of the Goddess Kāli (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 78. William Crooke, An Introduction to the Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India (Delhi: Government Press, North-Western Provinces and Oudh, 1894). 79. Bhagavat Simhaji, A Short History of Aryan Medical Science (London: Macmillan, 1896). 80. Ibid., 21. 81. Chicago Daily Tribune, “A Few Things Under the Sun: Vaccination, Anaesthesia, and Antiseptic Surgery Were in Vogue Two Thousand Years Ago,” December 20, 1896. 82. “Behind the Indian Veil,” Times of India, May 19, 1911. 83. Govindaswamy 1970, 87–88. 84. Ibid., 87. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid., 94. 88. Ibid., 74. 89. Ibid., 75. 90. Ellen Farrer, “Professional Work at the Farrer Hospital, Bhiwani,” c. 1933, Baptist Missionary Society Archives, BMS IN/148, IN/148, 1891–1933. 91. Ibid., no. 9. 92. Projit Bihari Mukharji, Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 93. Jean Filliozat, The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and Its Greek Parallels (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1964). 94. Bharata Muni and Manomohan Ghosh, The Natyasastra: Ascribed to Bharata-Muni (Calcutta: Manisha Granthalaya, 1956), 137; see also Sheldon I. Pollock, ed., A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 95. Muni and Ghosh 1956, 137. 96. Ibid., 142. 97. Ibid., 137. 98. Ibid., 144. 99. See Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, The Poison Tree, in Bankim Racanabali, vol. 1, ed. Jogeshchandra Bagal (Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 2004); Mukharji 2017. 100. Frederick M. Smith, The Self Possessed: Deity and Spirit Possession in South Asian Literature and Civilization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 216 Notes to pages 146–53

101. Ibid., 474. 102. Pinto 2015. 103. Guy N. A. Attewell, Refiguring Unani Tibb: Plural Healing in Late Colonial India (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007), 226. 104. F. Speziale, “The Relation between Galenic Medicine and Sufism in India during the Delhi and Deccan Sultanates,” East and West 53, nos. 1–4 (2003): 149; F. Speziale, Soufisme, religion et médecine en islam indien (Paris: Karthala, 2010). 105. Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, Catalogue of the Arabic Books and Manuscripts in the Library (Calcutta, 1899). 106. Seema Alavi, Islam and Healing: Loss and Recovery of an Indo-Muslim Medical Tradition, 1600–1900 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 107. Aditya Behl and Wendy Doniger, Love’s Subtle Magic: An Indian Islamic Literary Tradition, 1379–1545. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 108. Mukharji 2017; Attewell 2007. 109. G. Jan Meulenbeld, A History of Indian Medical Literature (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1999). 110. Pratibha Ray, “Ahalya’s Voyage: From Transgression to Transcendence,” in Revisiting the Pancha Kanyas, ed. Pradip Bhattacharya (Calcutta: Eastern Zonal Cultural Centre, 2007), 22. 111. Ibid. 112. Jamison 1996, 156. 113. Arshia Sattar, The Rāmāyana: Vālmikī (New York: Penguin Classics, 1996), 75. 114. Vālmikī, Śrīmad Vālmiki-Rāmāyana, Part I and II (Gorakhpur, India: Gita Press, 2011), 708. 115. Wendy Doniger, “Sita and Helen, Ahalya and Alcmena: A Comparative Study,” History of Religions 37, no. 1 (1997): 38. 116. Doniger 1997, 38. 117. Renata Söhnen-Thieme, “The Ahalyā Story through the Ages,” in Myth and Mythmaking, ed. Julia Leslie (London: Curzon, 1996), 39–62; Pradip Bhattacharya, “Five Holy Virgins, Five Sacred Myths: A Quest for Meaning,” Manushi 141 (2005): 5. 118. Ibid.; Doniger 1997; Smith 2006; Jamison 1996. 119. Söhnen-Thieme 1996, 52–53. 120. Doniger 1997, 42. 121. Ibid., 37. 122. Gitika Naithani, “Love and Compassion: Ramayana Story of Ahalya, Gautama, and Ram,” Gitika Naithani, March 13, 2013, http://ggiittiikkaa.blogspot .com/2013/03/love-compassion-ramayana-story-of.html#.Uyh-ko2yevY (accessed March 16, 2014). 123. Doniger 1997, 42. 124. Ibid., 49. Notes to pages 154–62 217

125. Ray 2007, 28. 126. N. S. Madhavan, “Ahalya,” in Ramayana Stories in Modern South India: An Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 160–72. 127. Ibid., 167. 128. Rabindranath Tagore, “To Ahalya,” trans. William Radice, in Festival (Calcutta: Statesman, 1995). 129. S. Sivasekaram, “Ahalya,” in ibid., 159. 130. K.B. Sreedevi, “Woman of Stone,” in ibid., 141–45. 131. Ibid., 141. 132. Ibid., 144. 133. Ibid., 145. 134. Ibid. 135. Karnataka High Court, Grace Jayamani vs E.P. Peter, July 17, 1981, 1. 136. Ibid., 2. 137. Satya Nand 1947, 117. 138. Ibid., 112. P O S T S C R I P T: T H E S H A P E O F T H E C O U N T E R  E T H I C

1. Shahzia Sikander, Gopi Contagion, digital animation, 2015. 2. Shahzia Sikander, SpiNN, digital animation, 2003. 3. Shahzia Sikander, “Artist Statement,” Signs, http://signsjournal.org/features/ virtual-issues/visibility-and-visuality (accessed June 30, 2016). 4. Shahzia Sikander, Parallax, digital animation, 2013. 5. Shahzia Sikander and Homi Bhabha, “Chillava Klatch: Shahzia Sikander Interviewed by Homi Bhabha,” in Shahzia Sikander: The Renaissance Society, March 8–April 19, 1998 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998). 6. Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (London: Routledge, 2011), 114. 7. Dev Satya Nand, Design for a Man (Theory-Methods, Finding, and Applications): Oriental Psycho-Analysis, Experimental Religions, Philosophy, and Sociology, Psycho-Cybernatics, Biology of Ego (Delhi: Atma Ram, 1967), iii. 8. Ibid., xi. 9. Ibid., xiii. 10. Veena Das, “Ordinary Ethics,” in A Companion to Moral Anthropology, ed. Didier Fassin (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2012), 133–49; Michael Lambek, ed., Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010); Webb Keane, Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Paul Brodwin, Everyday Ethics: Voices from the Front Line of Community Psychiatry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).

218 Notes to pages 162–80

11. Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of a Work in Progress,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1998), 253–80. 12. Lisa Stevenson, Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); Bhrigupati Singh, Poverty and the Quest for Life: Spiritual and Material Striving in Rural India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Clara Han, Life in Debt: Times of Care and Violence in Neoliberal Chile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 13. Lawrence Cohen, “Song for Pushkin,” Daedalus 136, no. 2 (2007): 103–15. 14. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002). 15. Ibid., 11. 16. Ibid., 12. 17. Ibid. 18. Naisargi Dave, Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Lawrence Cohen, “The Kothi Wars: AIDS Cosmopolitanism and the Morality of Classification,” in Sex in Development, ed. Vincanne Adams and Stacey Leigh Pigg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Cohen 2007. 19. Sikander 2016. 20. Foucault 1998, 256. 21. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 22. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 8. 23. Tanika Sarkar, Rebels, Wives, Saints: Designing Selves and Nations in Colonial Times (London: Seagull Books, 2009), 2. 24. Keane 2016; Michael Lambek, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, and Webb Keane, Four Lectures on Ethics: Anthropological Perspectives (London: Hau Books, 2015); Michael Lambek, The Ethical Condition: Essays on Action, Person, and Value (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Arthur Kleinman, Writing at the Margin: Discourse between Anthropology and Medicine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 25. Cheryl Mattingly, Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 26. Rayna Rapp, Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America (New York: Routledge, 2000). 27. Kirin Narayan, Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989).

Notes to pages 180–86

219

28. Cohen 2005; Veena Das, Critical Events Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996); Veena Das, Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). 29. Bhrigupati Singh, “How Concepts Make the World Look Different: Affirmative and Negative Genealogies of Thought,” in The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy, ed. Arthur Kleinman, Michael D. Jackson, Veena Das, and Bhrigupati Singh, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 30. Butler 2005, 6, 3. 31. Ruth B. Marcus, “Moral Dilemmas and Consistency,” Journal of Philosophy 77, no. 3 (1980): 126. 32. Ibid., 135. 33. Butler 2005, 9. 34. In India alone, see Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Kim Fortun, Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Akhil Gupta, Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Rashmi Sadana, English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 35. Margaret Trawick, Notes on Love in a Tamil Family (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Isabelle Clark-Decès, The Right Spouse: Preferential Marriages in Tamil Nadu (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). 36. Marilyn Strathern, Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives Are Always a Surprise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 37. Butler 2005, 42. 38. Ibid., 37. 39. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 40. Ibid. 41. Butler 2005, 82. 42. Shahzia Sikander, Perilous Order, watercolor, 1994–97. 43. Braidotti 2011. 44. Ibid., 285–86. 45. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (New York: Harcourt, 1924), 165.

220

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Bibliography 231

INDEX

Abse, D. Wilfred, 140, 141, 147 acting, 84, 85 Agra Lunatic Asylum, 141 Ahalya, 28, 30–31, 125–72; curse of, 132, 133, 158–61; Doniger on, 159, 161; ethics and, 25; Gautama as imposter to, 160; Indra and, 158; Madhavan on, 162; Puranas story on, 159–60; Ramayana version of, 4, 20–21, 158, 160; Ram release of curse of, 133, 158–61; rape of, 131–32, 159; Ray on, 157; reconversion of, 132, 133; religious renewal of, 163; resurrection and religious reform of, 132; resurrection of, 132, 133, 161, 163; story versions of, 157–58; Tagore on, 163; unconsciousness of, 163 Ahalya paradigm, 169, 171 Ambedkar, B. R., 185 Amritsar, 34 Amritsar Medical College, 6, 34 anticolonialism, 6; sovereignty, recognition and, 105, 113 Antigone’s Claim (Butler), 23 apasmara: rasa theory and, 152–53; spirit possession and, 153; symptoms of, 152 Arjuna, 18

army, 6, 34, 138, 141 arranged marriage, 5 art, 45; “Midnight Moment,” 173; puja, 108, 157; of Sikander, 173–77, 182, 190–93; of spheres, 173–77, 182–83, 190, 193 Article 377, 165 Arya Samaj, 70, 96, 97 ashramas (stages of life), 70 Ashwa-Megha Yug, 91 asylums: Agra Lunatic Asylum, 141; epidemics in, 12–13; at estate of Rana Suchet Singh, 12; at Punjab Mental Hospital at Lahore, 6, 12–13, 140 Austen, Jane, 17 Ayurveda, 152; medicine texts of, 155; on unconsciousness, 151; on vata, 154 Bala Kanda, Ramayana first book of, 158, 159 Baptist Missionary Society Hospital, 150 Bardainne, Claire, 176 Bateson, Gregory, 56 bathing ghats, of Haridwar, 95 Bengali Renaissance, 97

Berkeley-Hill, Owen, 9, 13 Bhagavad Gita, 135; Hindu socialism and, 94; Hippocratic fields and, 14 Bhaisajya Ratnavali, of Bhisagratna, 155 bhakti (devotion), 70 Bharat (son of Shakuntala), 20, 84, 86, 91–92, 94, 209n14 Bhattacharya, Pradip, 159 bhutagrsta (spirit possession), 153–54 bhutavidya (science of ghosts), 106, 153 binary gender positions, 81; Bateson on, 56 Booth, Katherine, 42 Brahmo Samaj, of Bengal, 97 Braidotti, Rosi, 192 Browne, Thomas, 82 Butler, Judith, 23, 120–21, 184, 188, 189 cannabis use, 140 capitalism, 52, 55; Duryodhana association with, 94 Caraka Samhita, 152 caste, 107–10,185 catatonia, 140–41, 143, 144, 147, 149, 166, 169 Chevers, Norman, 142 Christianity, 6, 10; missionaries of, 70, 96, 150–51 Clark-Decès, Isabelle, 187 class, 8, 26, 49, 63, 65, 100, 127, 168; middle-, 79, 97; upper-, 2–3, 34–35, 96, 184; working/villagers, 50, 129, 167. See also caste; servants Cohen, Lawrence, 62, 186 colonialism, 29; oppression, 115, 149, 150; in Punjab, 25; recognition and, 115; self-expression and, 114–15. See also anticolonialism community mental health care, 14 confusional reaction, 147–48

234

Index

conjugality, 61, 62–63, 66, 76–77; ethic of, 168; kinship and, 72; sexuality and, 67 contest to determine husband (swayamvara), 18–19 conversion: 10, 70; and Ahalya, 132; villages and, 53–54. See also reconversion counter-ethics, 27–30, 38, 83, 123, 163, 170–71, 173–93; ethics, mythopoetics and, 17–31; ethics relationship with, 181; everyday orientation and, 186–87; of nonrecognition, 112, 116, 123, 170; oppression and, 111; power and, 183–85; of retreat, 170–71; risk in, 83; self and, 187–90; of singularity, 28, 75, 78, 170; transfiguration and, 27; unconsciousness and, 162–64, 170–71, women’s expressions and, 29 courtesans, 82 creativity, 11, 193 critique, Butler on, 120–21 Crooke, William, 146 cross-cousin marriage, 23 curses (in myth): of Ahalya, 132, 133, 158–61, 169; of Draupadi, 19; of Shakuntala, 19–20, 91, 92 damaged masculinity, 93–94 dance, 29, 45, 88, 105; desire of Mrs. A. to, 84–85; dream smudge of, 85; hysteria and, 145; Mrs. A.’s solitary, 84, 87–88, 124 Das, Veena, 24, 75, 186; on ethics, 27–28; on Gandhari, 136 Dasji Bhisagratna, Govinda, 155 Dass, Arjan: marriage proposal of, 58–59; triangulation and, 60–62, 206n126; Vidya, Mrs. A., and, 59–63, 206n126

daydream, of Mrs. A., 1, 2, 47–50, 55–56 Design for a Man (Satya Nand), 15–16 deterritorialization, 37 Detroit Free Press, 144–45 devdasis, 79 devotion (bhakti), 70 dharma (sense of moral rightness), 1, 25, 47, 51, 70, 73, 79–80 Dhritarashtra, 19 The Diagnosis of Hysteria (Abse), 140 dice game, in Mahabharata, 19, 24, 50–51, 130, 135 Discovery of India (Nehru), 104 discrimination, 108–9, 111–12 displacement, in Hindu epics, 136 dissociative disorders, 107 Doniger, Wendy, 104; on Ahalya, 159, 161; on self-impersonation, 120 Dosas (in Ayurveda), 152 dowry, 43, 67 Draupadi, 4, 28, 41–83, 72–75, 209n14; as female suffering symbol, 51; in Mahabharata, 3–4, 18–19, 24, 50–51, 72–75, 130, 135; marriage and, 72–75; psychoanalytic concepts of, 50, 86, 87; and Shakuntala, 87; swayamvara of, 18–19; Vidya as, 67; in villages, 103; women’s emancipation and, 138 dreams: free association and, 11; interpretation of, 2, 10, 89; manifest, 10; organic theory of, 14; psychoanalysis and, 11; villages and, 48, waves, 69, 127 Drupada, 18 Duryodhana (Daryodhana): capitalism and, 94; dice game of, 19, 24, 50–51, 130, 135 Dushyanta, 20, 90, 92, 93, 102; marriage, 20; recognition and, 92, 93101, 102

Edinburgh, University of, 9, 146 education, 87, 92, 100, 130, 195; of Mrs. A., 44–45, 184; of women, 96, 112–13, 140, 148–49, 155 emancipation, of women, 79, 81, 138 emotional states, as biological, 14 emplacement, marriage and, 75–76 epidemics, in asylums, 12–13 epigenetics, 14 Esdaile, James, 145–46 ethics, 8, 178–83, 186–88, 189–90, 192; Ahalya and, 25; anthropology and, 179–80, 186–87; as arts of living, 17; of certainty, 76; of conjugality, 168; counter-ethics relationship with, 181, 188–90; Das on, 27–28; Foucault on, 121, 187–88; gendered, 26–27; Hindu epics and, 18, 24, 134; kinship and, 77, 187; marriage and, 28, 72, 75–78; mythopoetics and, 17–31; political, 25–26; power connections with, 22–23, 29; of recognition, 95, 99–100, 105, 111–12, 113; The Recognition of Shakuntala and, 20, 24–25, 92, 95; Satya Nand on, 179; Shakuntala and, 24–25, 92, 95,105 ; Spivak on, 36 ethnography, approach to ethics, 179–80 eugenics, 15 European Mental Hospital, at Ranchi, 13 everyday orientation, counter-ethics and, 186–87 Ewens, G. F. W., 140 fainting, 99, 143, 152; Abse on, 140; gender and, 156; spirit possession and, 137; symptoms of, 147; as trauma response, 137 false death, 143–44

Index 235

Fanon, Frantz, 150 fantasy, 35, 130; horizons of, 192; psychoanalysis and, 7; of rape fears, 137 Farrar, Ellen, 150–51 female sexuality, 6, 8 feminism, 71–72, 185; socialism and nationalism dilemma for, 78–79 Fire fi lm, 82 First World War, soldiers as hospital staff, 13 folk songs, 29 forest: freedom in, 104–5; Mrs. A.’s following Shakuntala to, 103–4, 124 Foucault, Michel, 120; on modern ethics, 121; on power, 22–23; on self, 187 Franciscan nuns, at Punjab Mental Hospital, 13 free association, 11 freedom: 61, 63, 78–81, 82, 83, in forest, 104–5; and lesbians, 61, 63, 82; nonrecognition as, 113 freedom movement, 45, 52, 78, 80, 81, 104 Freud, Sigmund, 11, 87 Gandhari, 19, 135–36; Das on, 136 Gandhi, Mahatma/Mohandas K., 52, 80, 184; Krishna association with, 94; noncooperation of, 43; on self-rule, 25–26 Gautama, 131, 132, 158–59, 160, 169 gender: Bateson on binary positions of, 56; emancipation, 79; ethics and, 26–27, 31; fainting/unconciousness and, 156, 166–72; hysteria and, 148; in Indian hysteria, 156; morality and, 93, 142; villages and, 49, 56

236

Index

ghosts, stories of, 126 Gopi Contagion, of Sikander, 173–74, 175, 177, 182 gopi, 191; Sikander on, 174, 176, 177, 182, 190–93 Govindaswamy, M. V., 15, 145, 148–49 Greek myths, 17–18 happiness, 69, 71, 81, 105, 118, 124; nonrecognition as, 102–3, 124 Haridwar, bathing ghats of, 95–96, 97–99, 100, 101 Hatcher, Brian, 98, 101, 114 Hindu epics, 3–4, 18, 25, 30–31, 134, 136; ethics and, 18, 24, 134; psychoanalysis and, 24; women in, 3–4, 134, 157 Hinduism, 10, 145; nationalism, 6, 9, 28, 42, 45, 78–79, 80, 86; reform movements, 79, 96, 99, 138; Sikhism and, 133; widows and, 97 Hindu medicine, 146–47, 152 Hindu missionaries, 6, 70 Hindu myth, 21; psychoanalytic models and, 13; kinship and, 34; universal application and potential of, 6 Hindu socialism, 5, 8, 52, 73, 101, 132; Bhagavad Gita and, 94; dream interpretation and, 10; Mrs. A.’s vision of, 28, 137; nationalism and, 9; religious nationalism of, 53 Hindu Widow Remarriage (Vidyasagar), 98 homespun cloth, 43 homosexuality, 49–50, 61, 62, 65, 66 137, 168; marriage solution to, 66; Mrs. A.’s memories of, 63–65; Objective Method on, 63; in youth, 66. See also lesbians hope, 59, 78, 83, 94, 98, 102, 175

horizons of fantasy, 192 hysteria, 138–56; Abse on, 147; Chevers on, 142; dance and, 145; gender and, 148; India history of, 32–33, 140–42, 150–56; morality and, 142–43; Overbeck-Wright on, 141; symptoms of, 140; unconsciousness and, 139–40, 144 imprisonment, of Nehru, 2, 41, 70, 199n3 IMS. See Indian Medical Service independence: concept of, 37; movement for India’s, 1, 2, 75 Indian Journal of Medical Science, 142 Indian Medical Journal, 143 Indian Medical Service (IMS), Punjab Mental Hospital directed by, 13 Indian National Congress, 80 Indian Psychiatric Society, 13 Indian Psychoanalytic Society, 13 individualism, 4, 14, 15, 29, 50, 86, 87, 114, 188 Indra, 89–92, 131, 158, 160, 131 Indraprastha, 19 Ingold, Tim, 178 insanity, 12, 106, 140–41 Insanity in India (Ewens), 140 interpretation, of dreams, 2, 10, 89 Islam, 10, 132, 147, 184 Jain, Sanjeev, 14, 17 Jallianwallah Bagh, 25 Jats: marriage practices of, 61–62, 66–67; social reform and, 96 Jayamani, Grace, 165–67 Jung, Karl, 2, 14, 205n74 Kadambini, in Living and Dead, 99 Kalidasa, 19–20, 84, 88, 92–93, 98, 100 karma, 26

Kaur, Amrit, 72, 79 Khamoshi (1970 fi lm), 106 Khan, Sameera, 77, 83 Khatri community, 42, 96 Khory, R. S., 142 kinship, 99, 107; Butler on, 23; conjugality and, 72; as ethics source, 77; Hindu myth and, 24; Mahabharata and, 92, Strong on, 23; violence of, 137 Krishna, 48, 51, 54, 119, 133, 174, 191; Gandhi and, 94; gopis and, 174, 191; Radha and, 87 Lahore, 2, 34, 115 Lahore Mental Hospital, 6, 12–13, 140 law, marriage, 165; reform, 79, 80 lesbians, 61–67, 81–82; Fire fi lm on, 82; and freedom, 61, 63, 82; plural marriage and, 67 leucotomy/lobotomy, 12 liberalism, 185 lila, 119, 171 Living and Dead (Tagore), 99 lobotomy. See leucotomy Ludhviani, Sahir, 73–74 MacDougall, William, 205n70 Madhavan, N. S., 162 Madhumati (1958 fi lm), 106 Mahabharata, 50, 74–75; Das on, 24; Draupadi in, 3–4, 18–19, 50–52, 72–75; kinship in, 92; Shakuntala in, 19–20; women and, 3–4, 134, 157 Mahal (1949 fi lm), 116, 117, 118 Mahamoha (Ray), 162 manifest dreams, 10 marriage: abandonment from, 105; arranged, 5; cross-cousin, 23; dowry, 43, 67; Draupadi and, 72; emplacement and, 75–76, 105;

Index 237

marriage (continued) ethics and, 28, 66, 72, 75–78; homosexuality and, 61–62, 66; law, 165; life after, 69–71, 78 102; pativrata and, 45–46, 51; plural, polyandry, 61–62, 66–67, 139; plural, polygamy, 61, 66–67, 139; proposals, 43, 58–59; reform of, 79, 98; servants and, 47, 126–27; sex in, 46; in Shakuntala 92–93; social values of, 5, 45, 48; unhappiness in, 3, 44, 112–13; villages and, 48 masculinity: damaged, 93–94; political ethics of, 26; slave mentality and, 112 massacre, at Jallianwallah Bagh, 25 Mayo, Katherine, 112–13 middle-class, 79, 97 “Midnight Moment” Times Square arts initiative, 173 missionaries: Christian, 70, 96, 150–51; Hindu, 6, 70; women as, 6, 70–71 Mondot, Adrian, 176 Mother India (Mayo), 112, 113 Murthy, Prathima, 14, 17 muse-state, samadhi as, 9 Mysore Mental Hospital (NIMHANS), 32; confusional reactions at, 146–47; M. V. Givindaswamy at, 148–50; hysteria at, 147–48; leucotomies at, 15 mythopoetics: counter-ethics and, 17–31; theory of trauma response, 156 Naidu, Sarojini, 41, 72; law reform and, 79; on Mayo, 112–13 Nanak, Guru, 42, 58 National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro-Sciences. See Mysore Mental Hospital

238

Index

nationalism, 6, 28, 42, 45; feminism and, 78–79; Hindu socialism and, 9; of Mrs. A., 86; women’s movement and, 80 Natyashastra of Bharatamunni, 152–53 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 72, 94, 104, 210n34; as father-substitute, 94; imprisonment of, 2, 41, 70, 199n3; Mrs. A., admiration of, 53, 54, 86, 102, 133, 206n126; Satya Nand on, 54–55; Shakuntala and, 85 nonconsensual sex, 165. See also rape/ sexual assault Noncooperation Movement, 43, 79, 105 nonrecognition: counter-ethics of, 112, 116; as freedom, 113; as happiness, 102–3, 124; of Mrs. A., 104–5 Northern Army, 6, 34 objective method, 4; truth and, 11–12, 16, 35, 69, 192 Objective Method of Dream Interpretation: Derived from Researches in the Oriental Reminiscence State (Satya Nand), 2, 9–10, 16, 63 Oldenburg, Veena, 82 oppression: colonialism and, 115, 149, 150; counter-ethics and, 111 oriental method, 4, 9, 11; European models adapted to, 13–14 Overbeck-Wright, Alexander, 141 Parallax, of Sikander, 175–77, 182 Partition, 2, 6, 38; abducted women and, 115; Pritam on, 136–37 Patch, C. Lodge, 12–13 pativrata (moral wife), 45, 46, 51 patriliny, 95, 105 patronage, 96 Perilous Order, of Sikander, 191

Phadke, Shilpa, 77, 83 Pinjar (Pritam), 136 plural marriage: lesbian sexuality and, 67; polyandry, 61–62, 66–67, 139; polygamy, 61, 66–67, 139; religion and, 66 political ethics, 25–26 politics: Nehru and, 104; patriliny, terms of, 95, 105; sexuality of, 82; of truth, 121 polyandry, 66–67; of Jats, 61–62 polygamy, 61, 66–67 Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India (Crooke), 146 power: counter-ethics and, 183–85; ethics connection with, 22–23, 29; Foucault on, 22–23; postcolonial psychiatry and, 149; psychoanalysis and, 7 prayer, 53; healing by, 1, 106 Pride and Prejudice (Austen), 17 prison, 12, 78; Nehru in, 2, 41, 70, 199n3 Pritam, Amrita, 71, 73–74, 81, 136–37 prostitution, 137; widows and, 98 psychiatry: electrical and chemical shock therapies, 12; history of 138–51; hysteria in, 145–51; leucotomies in, 12, 15; in mental hospitals, 12, 13, 141, 148; North Indian approach, 15; South Indian approach, 15, 147; talk therapy, 12; water cures, 12 psychoanalysis, 13; Ahalya and, 138; dreams and, 11; fantasies and, 7; Hindu epics and, 24; in Indian psychiatry, 15; power and, 7; truth in, 7 Publics and Counter-Publics (Warner), 180–81 puja (ritual), art of, 108, 157

Punjab, 5, 6, 34; asylum at, 12; colonialism in, 25; in wartime, 31; women’s suff rage in, 80 Punjab Mental Hospital, 13 Punja Sahib, 58, 60 Puranas, Ahalya’s story in, 159–60 Radha, 87, 191 Rama, 52, 54, 131; Ahalya and, 132, 133, 158–61, 167; Sita and, 135, 164 Ramakrishna Mission, 1, 2, 47, 54; Mrs. A.’s sexual experience at, 48–49 Ramayana, 18; Ahalya in, 4, 20–21, 158, 160; Bala Kanda book of, 158, 159; Sita in, 52; television serial, 159; Uttara Kanda book of, 158–59; women in, 134 Ranade, Shilpa, 77, 83 Rana Suchet Singh, 12 Ranchi, European Mental Hospital at, 13 Rao, Bhaskar, 147 rape/sexual assault, 50, 55–56, 130, 138, 142, 165–66; of Ahalya, 131–32, 159; effects of, 166, 169; fantasy of, 137 rasa, 119–20; apasmara and, 152–53; Natyshastra of Bharatamunni on, 152–53 rats, 129, 167 Rau Committee’s report, 80 Ray, Pratibha, 162; on Ahalya, 157 Recognition, 88–89; anticolonialism and, 105; caste and, 107–8, 110; colonialism and, 113, 115; ethic of, 99–104, 111–12, 113; Indra failure of, 89–92; interventions for, 111; Mayo on, 112; mini-moral tales of, 107; as moral act, 101, 102, 114; Mrs. A.’s rejection of, 116; social reform and women, 96; women as objects of, 99–100. See also nonrecognition

Index 239

The Recognition of Shakuntala (Kalidasa), 19, 84, 88, 98; ethics and, 20; Tagore on, 92 reconversion, 101, 131; of Ahalya, 132, 133, 167; of villagers, 29, 52–53, 56 Reddy, Muthulakshmi, 79 reform movements: Hindu, 79, 96, 99, 138; Shakuntala and, 99, 138; social, 45, 96, 97, 98–99 religion, 14, 146, 164; plural marriage and, 66; social reform and, 96–97 religious chauvinism, 9, 137 religious nationalism, 53 religious reform, 6, 79, 96, 99, 133, 138; Ahalya and, 132 remarriage of widows, Vidyasagar on, 98–99, 114 resurrection, 171; Ahalya and, 132, 133, 161, 163; of Hinduism, 133 Rig Veda, 153–54 Roy, Rammohun, 97 safety, 3, 37, 56, 77 samadhi (state of concentration), 2, 4, 6, 145, 146; creativity in, 11; hyperstimulation in, 11; as muse-state, 9 Sarin, Alok, 14, 17 Sarkar, Tanika, 185 sati (widow immolation), 97 science of ghosts (bhutavidya), 106, 153 Scott, James, 183 Second World War, 1, 2, 138, 206n109; mental health research during, 142 self: counter-ethics and, 187–90; Foucault on, 187 self-expression, colonialism and, 114–15 self-impersonation, Doniger on, 120 self-realization, ethics and, 179 self-rule, Gandhi on, 25–26 Sen, Meheli, 117

240

Index

servant girl, 168–71; dream smudge and, 129–30; Mrs. A.’s memories of, 128–29; “The Sikh servant” and, 125–26, 129–30; on Vidya and Mr. A.’s affair, 57, 61–63, 68, 126, 167 servants, 123; second marriage and, 47, 126–27; sexuality of, 49–50 seva (service), 70 sexual abuse, 165 sexual assault. See rape/sexual assault sexuality: conjugality and, 67; female, 6, 8; homosexuality and, 62; lesbian, 81–82; liberal attitudes toward, 13; Mrs. A.’s marriage and, 46; of politics, 82; of servants, 49–50; single women and, 71; of Vidya, 81; villages and, 48–50, 57, 71. See also homosexuality Shakuntala, 4, 5, 19–20, 28, 50, 84–124; Bharat as son of, 20, 84, 86, 91–92, 94, 209n14; Draupadi and, 87; Dushyanta and, 20; ethics and, 24–25; forest and, 103–4; Indra and, 90; in Mahabharata, 19–20; Mrs. A.’s identification with, 4, 67–70, 72, 86, 89–95; reform movements and, 99; Satya Nand’s narrative of, 89–91, 93; social reform and, 138 Shakuntala Paradigm, 98, 112, 115 sharam (shame), 109 A Short History of Aryan Medical Science (Singh Jee), 146–47 Sikander, Shahzia: Gopi Contagion of, 173–74, 175, 177, 182; on gopi hair, 174, 176, 177, 182, 190–93; Parallax of, 175–77, 182; Perilous Order of, 191 Sikhism, 6, 42, 59, 132–33; Hinduism and, 133 Singh Jee, Bhagavat, 146–47, 152 single women: 28, 71, 75, 77 Sinha, Mrinalini, 113

Sita, 52; Ram abandonment of, 164; Ram grief on abduction of, 135 Sivasekaram, S., 164 Smith, Frederick, 153 Sobti, Krishna, 71 socialism: feminism dilemma for, 78–79; Mrs. A.’s support of, 101; women and, 78. See also Hindu socialism social reform: pativrata and, 45; in Punjab, 96; religion and, 96–97; Shakuntala and, 138; Vidyasagar on, 98–99; women and, 96 Society for the Acquisition of General Knowledge, 97 Söhnen-Thieme, Renata, 159 South Indian psychiatry, organic approaches in, 15 spheres, art of, 173–77, 182–83, 190, 193 Spilsbury, George, 142 spirit possession, 137, 146, 151, 152, 153, 154; apasmara and, 152, 153; women and, 153–54 Spivak, Gayatri, 36 Sreedevi, K. B., 164 stages of life (ashramas), 70 state of concentration (samadhi), 2, 4, 6, 9, 11, 145, 146 story: Ahalya versions of, 157–58; of Ahalya, in Puranas, 159–60; dice game, of Draupadi, 19, 24, 50–51, 130, 135 Strathern, Marilyn, 188 Strong, Thomas, 23 Susruta Samhita, 152 swayamvara (contest to determine husband), 18–19 Tagore, Rabindranath, 65, 95; on Ahalya, 163; Living and Dead of 99; on Shakuntala, 92, 111; on widows, 99

talk therapies, 12 Thug cult, 12–13 The Times of India, 147 trance, 146 transfiguration, counter-ethics and, 27 trauma, 156; of kinship, 137; response to, 137, 166; Western sciences of, 149 Trawick, Margaret, 187 truth: objective method and, 11–12, 16, 35, 69, 192; politics of, 121; in psychoanalysis, 7 Unani-Tibb, 151, 155 unconsciousness, 29, 125–72; of Ahalya, 163; Ayurvedic and Unani-Tibb on, 151; hysteria and, 139–40, 144; of Jayamani, 166, 167; as trauma response, 166; Western sciences on, 151 upper-class, 2–3, 34–35, 96, 184 Uttara Kanda (of Ramayana), 158; Bhattacharya and Söhnen-Thieme on, 159; Doniger on, 159 Uttar Pradesh, 31, 110, 115 varna caste system, 42 vata, 152, 153, 154 Vidyasagar, Ishwar Chandra, 97; on Shakuntala and Hindu women, 101; on social reform, 98–99; on widow remarriage, 98–99, 114 villagers: reconversion of, 29, 52–53, 56; working class of, 50, 129, 167 villages, 47–48; conversion and, 53–54; dream impossibility and, 48; as gender model, 49; Mrs. A., daydream and, 47–48; Mrs. A. following Draupadi to, 103; sexuality and, 48–50, 57, 71; Shakuntala and, 85 violence, 28–29, 35, 114, 137, 162, 166, 167

Index 241

war: First World War, 13; Second World War, 1, 2, 31, 138, 206n109 Warner, Michael, 180–81 water cures, 12 Why Loiter? (Phadke, Khan, and Ranade), 77 widow immolation (sati), 97 widows: Hinduism and, 97; prostitution and, 98; Tagore on, 99; Vidyasagar on, 98–99, 114 A Wife’s Letter (Tagore), 65 “Woman of Stone” (Sreedevi), 164 women, 81, 95, 109, 110, 127, 135, 150; adultery and, 160; counter-ethics and, 29, 111; disorders and, 151, 156, 166, 169; Draupadi and emancipation of, 138; education of, 96, 112–13, 140, 148–49, 155; emancipation of,

242

Index

79, 81, 138; epics and, 3–4, 134, 135, 136, 157; ethical failure and, 134; missionaries, 6, 70–71; recognition of, 95–96, 99–100, 116; repatriations of abducted, 115; single, 28, 71, 75, 77; social reform and, 78–79, 80, 96, 112; socialism and, 78; spirit possession and, 153–54; Tagore on, 65, 92, 95, 99, 111; Vidyasagar on, 101; violence against, 28–29, 137, 162, 166–67 women’s movements, 26, 28, 78–79; emancipation and, 79, 81, 138; marriage reform, 79; nationalism and, 80; voting rights, 79, 80 writing, 17, 20–21, 24, 26; of Foucault, 22–23; of Satya Nand, 14, 16 youth, homosexuality in, 66

Sarah Pinto is Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University. She is the author of two other books on the gendering of medical practice in contemporary India: Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India (Penn, 2014; winner of the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize) and Where There Is No Midwife: Birth and Loss in Rural North India (Berghahn, 2008). With Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Sandra Hyde, and Byron Good, she coedited Postcolonial Disorders (California, 2008).

Thinking from Elsewhere Robert Desjarlais, The Blind Man: A Phantasmography Sarah Pinto, The Doctor and Mrs. A.: Ethics and CounterEthics in an Indian Dream Analysis