Brahmos

Rupturing the ‘political’: Socialist-Utopian Performatives in Satyajit Ray’s Seemabadhha (Company Limited)

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Dwaipayan Chowdhury, University of Amsterdam

Abstract

The article delves into Satyajit Ray’s film Seemabadhha (1971), as a pamphlet for social critique in the politically turbulent decade of 1970s Calcutta, with the aim to decipher the possibilities of the socialist-utopia it carries.[1] The focus will be on the politics of Ray’s film aesthetics that project the vision of socialist-utopia on the audience community and predicate an emancipatory potential for the future. In doing so, the focus will be on the film’s aesthetics that rupture the fortified notion of the ‘political’ and catalyse a process of mobilisation through the redistribution of the sensory experiences.[2] By socialist-utopian performatives, I mean – those performative nuances contained in the sensory registers of the medium of film, which crystallises hope for a more just future. The ethical-intellectual drive in Seemabadhha does not let the audience (the social agent) remain shrouded in pure contemplation. Instead, the audience becomes the active community, who see the representations of “configurations”[3] in the cinematic space with an immanent quality of approaching a fulfilment, which forms the basis of what should come, which is, the emancipatory promise generated by the socialist-utopia.

Seemabadhha stands out in the entire Ray repertoire for it spells out the paradox, in vivid detail, of the post-independence Indian civil society by portraying the dialectics inherent in its construction, from the perspective of the urban white-collared middle class, which is completely absorbed by the State, so much so that it snatches from this class its identity.[4]It is through this dialectics that Ray challenges the “aggregation” of the history of post-independence India.[5] Ray’s aesthetics in Seemabadhhastands out in its disagreement with the homogenous linear model of development of the Nehruvian socialist dream and are manifested in the film through various devices such as- acting strategies, camera positioning and sharp cuts.

Ray’s Seemabadha and the other two films of the Calcutta trilogy, were representative of the conception of a decade marked by exponentially growing rates of economic investments from the Western countries in India, increasing expenditures on the processes of militarisation, public announcements of growing antagonisms across international boundaries, unemployment, inflation, failure or exceptional delay in implementation of government policies. The decade of the 1970s were part of the process of a massive democratic impulse in West Bengal, which had seen a recent large-scale peasant uprising in Naxalbari in 1967.[6] The collapse of the movement resulted in further fractures within the Indian left. Such disjunctures within the left democratic movement on the one hand, and on the other hand, the anticipations of massive political upheavals provided the backdrop to Ray’s Seemabadhha, which has to be seen within the larger process of the democratic cultural mobilisation of the decade. However, my study here is concerned withthe subversive impulses that the film generates,contextualising it within the ambit of socialist-utopia, pertaining to specific moments in the film.

            Here one must deal with the concept of utopia as a paradox. Firstly, it negates its own possibility. Secondly, and most importantly, out of its self-negation it becomes discontent with the ‘here-and-now,’[7]thus initiating a promise of material change. It is in the constant reiteration of utopia that the emancipatory potential of humankind is strengthened. It needs to be mentioned that, this article does not deal with the concept of socialist-utopia within the purview of “The utopian socialists” of the early nineteenth century Europe. Nor, is utopia here associated with the narcissistic view of the private individual.[8] My enquiry is to look at socialist-utopia through the notion of emancipation in the Marxist-Leninist trajectory.[9]

Rolling, Camera, Action

Seemabadhha opens with the shot of the employment exchange in Calcutta. We see the long shots of the youths stranded on the roadside sitting idly on the stairs of the pavements, or with applications forms they are filling up to get their names registered in the exchange in front of the closed doors of the colossal buildings. All the while, we hear the honks of the roadside vehicles, which whizzes past the screen on the horizontal axis thereby hindering the sight of the stranded youths momentarily. From the beginning, Ray harps on the invisibility of a large section of the populace. This is contrasted with the close-up shot of a high-rise in the city, from where the camera is zoomed out at a massive diagonal towards the audience. The spatiality of the audience here coincides with the street view of tall high-rises as is seen by the pedestrians. We then go inside the building and observe the name of the company limited. A close up of a hand is seen, cleaning the nameplate with the words written on it which reads as follows.

[1]The English title to film was given as Company Limited. It was the film rendition of the novel by Bengali writer Mani Shankar Mukherjee of the same name, who adopted the pen name Shankar. However, this article only deals with the film version.

[2]   By “fortified notion of the ‘political’ I connote to the concept of police through which the transformative potential of the political society is thwarted by imposition of stringent structures by the State. The politics of the private individual are negated in favour of a ‘political’ determined by public visibility that places the concept itself in the public sphere regulated in and by a civil society absorbed by the State.

[3]   Jill Dolan in “Utopia in Performance” (2005).

[4]   This dialectics is the confrontation of the politics of the police which I refer to as the ‘political’ which is ruptured by Seemabadhha, and the politics of the “autonomous domain”. (Guha 2005).

[5]RanajitGuha in “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India” (2005).

[6] The Naxalbari movement was a massive peasant insurgency in the northern part of West Bengal.

[7] Madhava Prasad in “Satyajit Ray: A revaluation” Economic & Political Weekly (January 19, 2008).

[8] Ruth Levitas in “The Concept of Utopia” (2010). By the nineteenth century “utopian socialists” in Europe I mean here Levitas’s reference of Saint-Simon in France, who envisioned a more just society by the “harmony” of “three human types”, namely the “scientists, artists, and producers”, Charles Fourier, also in France who schematised a just social structure in terms of “harmonious community” by deriving “810 different temperaments” of humans, and Robert Owen of England who tried to solve unemployment by planning the “model factory at New Lanark”.

[9] V.I. Lenin in “State and Revolution: Marxist teaching about the theory of the state and the tasks of the proletariat in the revolution” in 1978. Lenin forwarded the concept of Marx’s dialectics by conducting revolutionary class struggles in the domain of emancipation which firstly implies the proletarian takeover of the bourgeoisie state followed by the abolition of the concept of state resulting in the formation of socialist communities.

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Challenging Enlightenment Paradigms: Responses of Benjamin and Tagore

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Debmalya Das, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India

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European Enlightenment in the eighteenth century marked a paradigm shift in its perception of time and in the practice of historiography. The idea of linear/teleological classification of time and the notion of empirical documentation of history was combined with the notion of progress, which saw civilization as a development from the state of barbarity to that of refinement. The appropriation of this progressivist ideology by the powerful in society has served as a tool of domination. Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940) and Rabindranath Tagore’s “Crisis in Civilization”(1941), written in the wake of World War II, provide us with two radical perspectives which challenge such progressivist assumptions. Expanding the critical span into their other writings, this paper seeks to historicize the two figures in their varied positions of marginality as two counter-Enlightenment ideologues, writing at a moment of human history when the idea of being civilized was continually threatened by manifestations of barbarity in the socio-political/cultural dynamics of the entire world. Keep Reading

Tagore’s Educational Experiments and Right to Education Bill: a Comparison

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Falguni P. Desai, V. S. Patel College of Arts and Science, Gujarat, India

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As one of the earliest educators to think in terms of the global village and free education for all, Rabindranath Tagore’s educational pattern Loka-siksha has a distinctive understanding and suitability for education within multi-racial, multi-lingual and multi-cultural situations, amidst conditions of acknowledged economic discrepancy and political imbalance of contemporary times where education and cost are twined. The paper proposes to focus on Tagore’s philosophy on education an idea of extending equal right of education for all. Keep Reading

Tagore’s Paintings: a Creation of Genius[i]

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Rajdeep Konar, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

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Standing even at his 150th birth anniversary, there still remains a tendency to see Rabindranath Tagore’s paintings as “aberrations” to his aesthetic creed. This article makes an attempt at understanding the “thought gesture” behind Tagore’s paintings and thus relocating them in his personal tradition of art. This argues that the significance of Tagore’s painting will be fully realized not in a minute technical analysis of his painting. There have been numerous attempts at asserting judgmental views on Tagore’s paintings concerning the absence of any “methodological approach” to his painting. Rather, the pertinent questions which should be posed are: Why did Tagore essentially began painting? And why did he paint what he did? These questions could lead us towards comprehending the potentially infinite “thought gesture” which lies beneath the finite, pragmatic act of painting. This could let us into a greater understanding of his act of painting as not an event of ‘exception’ but as a development of the very ideas and concepts which constituted his consciousness in whatever he did. Keep Reading

Two Cosmopolitan Friends: Tagore and Cousins

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Utpal Mitra,Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India

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The word cosmopolitanism has different connotations. According to the philosophical cosmopolitans, who are also designated as Moral Universalists, there does not exist any boundary between nations, states and cultures, as they believe all human beings to be fellow citizens and compatriots. This article attempts to address the cosmopolitan ideas of Rabindranath Tagore and James H. Cousins. Moving beyond the parochial notion of nationalism, both Tagore and Cousins adopted the notion of universalism that assimilates all cultures, races and religions under the broader category of Humanism. Keep Reading

Signifying The Self: Intersections of Class, Caste and Gender in Rabindranath Tagore’s Dance Drama Chandalika (1938)

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Sutapa Chaudhuri, Dr. Kanailal Bhattacharyya College, Howrah, India

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Much has been said about the way Tagore views his women in his poems, essays, novels and drama. Yet it is the dance dramas of Tagore, a genre quite unique in his time and milieu, which portray the radical nature of Tagore’s conception of women and the maturation of their selfhood. The dance dramas illustrate Tagore’s bold and perceptive experimentation with various literary forms and techniques and the radical nature of his ideological orientation. Among the dance dramas of Tagore, Chandalika has a special place as it foregrounds the theme of female desire in an untouchable girl, a tabooed subject in his times, indeed even now in Bengali writings. This paper tries to show how Tagore uses the nuances of the dance form to showcase the intersections of caste, class and gender as well as the evolution of selfhood in Prakriti, the Chandal girl. Keep Reading

‘There is Nothing as Old as a Child’: Childhood and Language in Rabindranath Tagore’s The Crescent Moon

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Josephine A. McQuail, Tennessee Technological University, USA

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Rabindranath Tagore was influenced by the British Romantic poets as well as by the sights, sounds and tradition of his own Bengali culture.  Tagore’s attitude to childhood is certainly similar to the adulation of the child begun as a cultural movement by the British Romantic poets. Tagore praises both the purity of the child as well as the Platonic essence of childhood in his writing on nursery rhymes. The child’s perspective is delightfully captured in his volume The Crescent Moon (1913). In a sense, through his exploration of the unconscious components of the mind of the child, Tagore in essence becomes father to himself:  his language eludes the Order typically imposed on linguistic expression in the Oedipal stage of development. Tagore’s recourse to childhood freedom arguably translated in his poetry to his radical experiment with language, which unfortunately cannot be reproduced entirely in translation. Keep Reading

Tagore’s Philosophy of Life – a Study of Sadhana

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Marie Josephine Aruna, Tagore Arts College

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This paper seeks to study the collection of Tagore’s lectures in the book Sadhana which deals with his philosophy of life. At various instances in his lectures Tagore repeatedly emphasizes on the Indian philosophy of oneness of Being that is the cause for the progress of the soul towards the union with the Brahman. The collection is compiled of eight lectures, based on ideas of the individual’s relation to the universe, soul consciousness, evil, self, of love, of action and of beauty and finally the nature of union with the Infinite. The Infinite can be attained through endless means of activities found in joy and love. His sadhana has been in writing poetry and in living his life in all its hues and colors and thereby attaining realization of life. Keep Reading

Love of Creation and Mysticism in Tagore’s Gitanjali and Stray Birds

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Paula Hayes, Strayer University, USA

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This paper is concerned with examining two of Tagore’s collections of poems, Gitanjali and Stray Birds, from the perspective of the poet’s love of nature and of God. The paper seeks to find a religious explanation for Tagore’s perpetual praise of the natural world, a praise that he was able to connect dynamically to his love of God. The explanation given is that Tagore’s repetition of nature motifs and his ability to link these motifs to a harmonious pursuit of the divine is rooted in an appreciation for cosmogony of the Rig Veda. The paper ends by addressing briefly how Tagore’s naturalism, rooted in a tradition extending back to sacred text, leads the poet to a mystical expression of personality through his poems. Keep Reading

The Scientist and the Poet: Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose and Rabindranath Tagore

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Biswanath Banerjee, Visva-Bharati, India

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This article attempts to explore the scientific discourses of Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose and Rabindranath Tagore, to whom science did not signify a mechanistic analysis of facts, but rather a broader interpretation, a wider perception of the universe. Having their beliefs firmly rooted to the preachings of the ancient Hindu Upanishads and the Vedas, they conceived Nature not merely as a physical phenomenon, but a living spirit, which could help man to realize the essential Truth of Life. Keep Reading