Vicky Kaushal in a still from Sardar Udham. Image from youtube
Nandini Bhattacharya
–Our resentments–emotional source of every genuine morality, which was always a morality for the losers–have little or no chance at all […]
(Jean Amery, “Resentments” At the Mind’s Limits, Tr. from German, 81).
–I did it because I had a grudge against him. He deserved it. I do not belong to any society or anything […] I don’t care. I don’t mind dying. What’s the use of waiting till you get old? […] You want to die when you are young […]”
(Detective Sgt Sidney Jones’ record presented in cross examination of prosecution Mr. McClure and Hutchinson, in The Trial of Udham Singh, 144)
–In these I had to rely on memory for the actual words he [Udham Singh] used, but I still say that I have given in evidence the exact words he used.”
(Detective Sgt. Sidney Jones on cross examination by prosecution counsel Mr. McClure. The Trial…)
—In this era of globalization, it is not fair to hold on to this hatred”
(Indraadip Dasgupta. jury member on not selecting film as India’s entry for Oscars)
I. Sardar Udham the film
S
hoojit Sircar’s Sardar Udham (Rising Sun Films and Kino Works, 2021) offers a fascinating terrain for an inquiry into the ethicality of ressentiment, a French word meaning ‘krodh ko palna’ a trope on the virtue of ‘grudge. The biopic lets us venture on an exploration of those interfaces between memory, contexts of violations (genocide) and ‘retributive justice.’ Silent, and imagistic, Sircar’s cinematic portrayal focuses for the most part on Udham’s face, furrowed as it is by pain, anger, and what turns out to be an unspoken resolve nurtured over twenty-one years. Poignantly portrayed by the lead actor (Vicky Kaushal), such a face evokes the deepest of unease. The movie ends with three distinct transitioning slides, reminding the viewer of Sardar Udham’s emotive/intellectual contexts. The movie then, is not entertainment of the popcorn and coke kind, but a punctuated renewal, a continuum of wounds that have been inflicted upon the colonised subcontinent. Udham’s trauma among the mangled, ashen coloured bodies after the ‘Baisakhi’ bloodbath, is yet another wound, and ours to bear. In the final scenes, the camera pans towards Udham’s face contorted in unbearable pain, his emaciated body pushing a handcart and screaming “koi zinda hai” (is there anyone alive?) The movie is meant to shake the global collective out of its passive complicity (of its pitiless forgetting), and seek reparative justice in remembrance.
Sircar’s film operates on the inexorable logic of remembrance, as cries from the massacres punctuate its action at regular intervals. The adult Udham is haunted by terrifying nightmares, but their cause is saved for the end, as if to simulate the passing of those long years in search of reparative justice.
The backward cinematic transformation from a fuller body and filled-out adult face as Udham faces the trial twenty one years later in England, to the facial and bodily insubstantiality of an emaciated adolescent traumatised beyond description in Amritsar, is one of the movie’s memorable achievements, reflecting a tracing back of events through the vector of memory.
II. Udham Singh in history
A cultural historian would see Sircar’s Sardar Udham only to return to the Udham Singh ‘papers’ (the little that was available, and anthologised in Sikandar Singh’s The Trial of Udham Singh, Punjab, Sangrur: Unistar Books pvt. Ltd. 2008), to decode its silences. As Udham Singh clearly stated during his trial, he was not acting (or ‘speaking’ to an international community) merely as a wronged individual seeking vengeance; or representing a distinct ideology-driven society of Bolshevism In chapter xiii of his autobiographical, India as I knew it:1885-1925, (London: 1925) Michael O’ Dwyer emphasizes how the Ghadarites had by 1915, made Punjab, the centre of their political activity. Biographical evidence however fuzzy suggests that Singh had, like his icon, Bhagat Singh, Ghadarite links.
Udham claimed that he was acting upon an abstract principle of retribution for the humiliations heaped upon his people by the colonial government. He described his act as an expression of a resurgent national voice in (and forged on the anvil of) resentment. That he assumed the name- Ram Muhammad Singh Azad- throughout his trial to evince an overarching nationalist essence of his protest (irrespective of caste, creed) and jotted down several such ‘national humiliation events’ in his diary (confiscated during his arrest) with the Jallianwala Bagh event inscribed as second in the list, are cases in point (The Trial, Appendix ).
On March 13, 1940, Udham Singh ‘fired’ six bullets at Michael O’ Dwyer in Caxton Hall in London where the well-heeled members of the Royal Society of Asian Affairs had gathered to hear Sir Percy Sykes lecture on “Afghanistan: The Present Position.” The bullet shots killed O’ Dwyer and grievously injured other assembled British peers such as the Secretary of State for India, Lord Zetland, the one who had chaired the meeting. Michael O’ Dwyer, the main target of Udham Singh’s resentments, as governor of Punjab from 1913 to 1919 during the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, had, in the House of Lords, ratified Reginald Dyer’s firing on unarmed crowds in Amritsar.
Singh was overpowered, charged with murder, and tried at the Central Criminal Court Old Bailey on the 4th of June 1940 by Justice Atkinson. He was found guilty of manslaughter, motivated by his (and his people’s) “grudge” towards Michael O’ Dwyer. During his trial and relentless cross –examination, Udham Singh repeatedly denied that he had uttered the word “grudge” being barely proficient in English. Detective Sgt. Sidney however, testified in court that “He certainly speaks with a foreign accent, but it seems to me he spoke good English” (Singh, The Trial, 148). The letters he wrote from prison to a mysterious “Kumari” contain misspelt words but also indicate his ability to communicate in English.
The trial was conducted in English and Singh’s replies in English appear cogent enough. Judge Atkinson, after having heard the cross examinations by the defence and prosecution, went by the written statement of the investigating Detective Sergeant, Sidney Jones. Singh had ‘admitted’ to Jones that– “I did it because I had a grudge against him. He deserved it” obviously referring to Michael O’Dwyer (CRIM, 1/1177, The Trial of Udham Singh, depositions presented to the court, 262). Udham Singh was sentenced to death by hanging in Pentonville Prison on the 31stof July 1940.
III. Grudge, Indignation, akrosh
It is difficult to verify, historically, Singh’s presence as a witness to the horrific Amritsar massacres. On that day, April 13th, “the crowd in the Bagh was estimated at more than twenty thousand people. Among them were many villagers from the surrounding countryside in Amritsar for the Baisakhi holiday and the cattle market held on that day” ( Derek Sayers, “British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre” Past and Present no. 131, May 1991, pp 130-164, OUP, 131,)
Shoojit Sircar makes Udham’s ‘immanent presence’ at the site of the massacre, pivotal to the logic of his movie. A morass of myths, legends, and unverified oral testimonies have shrouded this incident but most repeated accounts speak of Udham’s presence in Jallianwala Bagh in his capacity as a drinking-water serving boy, part of the Khalsa orphanage organized seva programme for the pilgrims. Again claims that the scars on his arms were the ‘result of firing’ remain just that– claims without empirical verification. Anita Anand’s book on Udham Singh The Patient Assassin: A True Tale of Massacre, Revenge and the Raj (Simon and Schuster, 2019) that is based on painstaking research, revives Udham’s ability to bide his time, to remember, by quoting epigraphically from Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities “Vengeance and retribution require a long time; it is the rule.” She strongly doubts the factuality of Udham’s presence in Amritsar, at the time of firing and hence takes the bottom out of Sircar’s movie, indeed the entire legend of Udham Singh, for that matter.
Sikandar Singh’s account, as Louise E. Fennech has rightly pointed out, is based partly on hearsay, partly accounts of people who knew Udham Singh from his childhood, and partly in the mode of gur-vilas, that is hagiographical mythologisation of the Sikh guru lives (Louis Fennech’s Martyrdom in Sikh Tradition: Playing the Game of Love OUP 2000) .
What is recorded however is the near unanimity of indignation that the Jallianwalabagh massacre aroused in India and abroad.
Against this backdrop, the resentment that Udham Singh carried within him for such a long period lends it a value as aan ethical as an ethical exercise of memory. It is comparable to what I believe is the finest formulation of ressentiment in our times by Jean Amery, a French Jew, born Hans Mayer an Auschwitz survivor had also borne witness to the horrors perpetrated on European Jews in the infamous concentration camps would live on to tell the tale in a work that expanded on the concept of ressentiment.
In his testimony titled At the Minds Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitcz and its Realities (1966, Tr. From German by Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), an older, and spent-out Amery expresses his anger at the rhetoric of progress in post-war Germany. He resents the celebration of calm stability, the discursive insistence of the need to forget forgive and ‘move –on’ in modern Europe. Forgetting normalises crime and evil, and in such cases, forgiveness and cultured amnesia are not virtues but tacitly support of the violation.
Ressentiment is remembering and holding on stubbornly to a grudge) in ‘virtue’ as it resists evil, refuses to normalise violations and keeps memories alive. Ressentiment prohibits the second victory of the enemy which is obliterating even the traces, the memory of the crime.
IV. Rituals of recollection
The Amritsar massacre of 1919 has had its fair share of official rituals of recollection as exercises in erasure/obiliteration. Sircar’s Sardar Udham competes with such ‘official’ memory rituals as have occurred repeatedly. A conversation between a British arms dealer that invites Udham Singh to his home, initiates this competition of remembering within the ambit of Sircar’s movie. The British government had given out the official version of people killed as 488. On 14th October, 1997 Queen Elizabeth II and Royal consort the late Prince Phillip visited the memorial site in Amritsar and offered floral tributes. Meant to be a ‘reparative’ gesture, the royal visit didn’t quite add up to any sort of reparation. Prince Phillip reacted sharply to the number of martyred imprinted on the memorial plaque at the site -“This place is saturated with the blood of about 2000 Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims who were martyred in a non- violent struggle”. Prince Philip blurted “that’s a bit exaggerated, it must include the wounded […] I was told about the killings by General Dyer’s son. I was with him in the navy?” (told to his guide P.S.. Mukhrjee during the visit and as recorded in the news journal-Frontline ).
The last official British visit the site in 2013 by David Cameron (the then British Prime Minister) didn’t turn out as expected either. In his writings in the Visitor’s Book at Jallianwala Bagh memorial site, Cameron recollected Jallianwala Bagh as a “deeply shameful event” that “we must never (underlined) forget.” In a response to reporters as to why he did not apologise for Jallianwala Bagh massacres, (and something that Shoojit’s movie metatextually demands) Cameron foregrounded remembering as more ethical than regretting-“the right thing is to acknowledge what happened, to recall what has happened, to show respect.” (TOI report, Srijana Mitra Das, TNN, Feb 21, 2013, 06.43 AM IST).
Once chief minister of Punjab and President of India the late Gyani Zail Singh enabled another punctuated renewal in 1973, when supported by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, he brought back Udham Singh’s remains from Britain after a great deal of diplomatic manoeuvring. Udham Singh’s memorial statue was built in his birthplace in Punjab and he was recollected as a turbaned Sikh martyr that had died for his country’s honour. The last punctuated renewal of recollection occurred in 2018, when the gateway to and premises of the Jallianwala Bagh were redecorated and a statue of Udham Singh with a bit of soil in his hand, (which he is rumoured to have collected to remind him of the place where his people were butchered) was installed.
V. Udham Singh and the virtue of ‘grudge’
Udham Singh’s deployment of the affect of ‘grudge’ as virtue, forges the vital and transactional links between violations, and the ethics of recollection. Udham insisted that he recollected and remembered the massacres well enough over a span of twenty one years.
When Udham Singh conceptually articulated grudge in his trial in 1940, he harped on its legitimacy, its virtue. This deployment of ‘grudge’ as a cultural category (fostering/enabling retaliatory hatred/ violent retribution) must be seen as a mode of resistance to a discursive political ambience of non-violence, forgiveness, and loving the enemy. Udham Singh’s act was almost universally condemned as un-Indian within the Gandhi-informed Indian cultural ethos in which, by the 1940s, non-violent resistance and non-violence per se had assumed normative and fetishised proportions.
The same Mohundas Gandhi who had protested the Jallianwala Bagh massacres and helped raise funds to the tune of 10 lakhs, to help build a memorial on that site, condemned Udham Singh’s act that ‘remembered’ the killing, all too well! While Rabindranath Tagore had condemned the killings in Jallianwala Bagh roundly and renounced his knighthood on the grounds of human rights violation, he refused to participate in Gandhi’s commemoration- act in brick and mortar structure.
Both Jawaharlal Nehru and Krishna Menon (though the latter did act as defence counsel for Udham Sigh when the clamour to recognise Udham Singh’s shooting as a matter of pride grew shriller) condemned Udham Singh’s act. Among other reasons, his deed was seen as inadequate because it was visited upon not General Dyer, who had by then died, but an official, Michael O’ Dwyer who had not actually pulled the trigger.
The time lag of twenty one years between the massacre and the retaliation lent it the colour of a deferred, cold blooded, criminal act (as opposed to a virtuously passionate and instantaneous retaliation) and somehow far in excess of the original violation. And all of this because Udham Singh had recollected the events sufficiently well enough!
Udham Singh’s recollection was racialised as typically Asian; as embodying atavistic inscrutability in its harbouring of resentments and cognitively inferior in its inability to move on with the times and look towards the future. The potentially sinister dimension of such ‘racially othered’ minds was explored in Victorian novels such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four and Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone among many others. The revenge that the priests/acolytes of the moon god revisit on Westerners (that have desecrated the temple and the idol) is seen as remorseless, sinister, beyond enlightenment (and Christian) logic of closure. That discursive legacy lives on.
Modern societies have effectively divorced remembering from questions of reparative action; recollection is therefore increasingly interiorised and constituted as an emotional category, associated with card-exchanges and candle-light vigils. Inevitably when such a conceptual divorce between reparative praxis and recollection is normalised, harbouring resentment over a period of time is seen as psychologically debilitating with the potential of turning the resenting person into a socially dysfunctional, maladjusted ‘problem’ a ‘misfit.’
Udham Singh was deploying ‘grudge’ in awareness of its ethicality and in response to an Indic situation; a genocide that remained like a scar upon the national consciousness. Singh did not evoke the idea of grudge in self -defence as he was aware that the penalty for his action was death in a British court of law, and that the judgement was a mere formality.
A dalit orphan, from Punjab, adopted by a Sikh orphanage in Amritsar and brought up as a Sikh, Udham Singh’s ressentiment, his long nurtured ‘grudge’ could be seen as ethical recollection/recognition of the events of 1919. Such recognition of ressentiment, grudge, abhimaan, enables retributive justice and enables closures in cycles of violence.
To recognise Udham Singh’s ‘grudge’ (or any equivalent term he may have used in Urdu or Gurmukhi) is to retrieve self-worth, national pride/worth, human dignity.
Sircar’s film is an exploration of that grudge and induces motivation to consider recollection as an act of caring. Such exploration is imperative for our times, marked as they are by genocides, violations on an unprecedented scale and desperate perhaps futile attempts to evolve mechanisms of conflict resolution.
Such a field, recognised as transitional justice studies takes its cue from the theory and praxis of post- holocaust trials, the post- apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa being one of the latest of such attempts at transitional justice based on recpollection/retribution.
Paradoxically our times are also marked by “ceremonies of culpability” and a foregrounding/normalizing of the virtue of forgiveness that the world has not witnessed before. The universalising of the ethics of forgiveness, also makes an examination of forgiveness’ dark ‘other’– grudge, ressentiment, indignation, resentment–imperative.
Though Singh purportedly uses the English word ‘grudge’ in a British court of law, its equivalents within a South Asian cultural context and an Indic -Sanskritic language context involve concepts of honour, self- worth that are vital. Being aware of its impossibility, the act of translation is also inevitable: conceptually, the Indic-Sanskritic equivalent for ‘grudge’ (as Singh used it in the sense of indignation, righteous anger) is- manyu. The indignant person is manyuman. Self-pride or self-worth is abhimaan. Hinsa, pratihinsa, and akrosh are close equivalents but do not carry the exact virtuous charge of manyu. Note that in Monier Williams’ Sanskrit-English dictionary, manyu is defined as passions, noble anger, the sacrificial fire itself, the untamed horse, and the virtue of a vir or a noble person.
Udham Singh’s trial was brief, the verdict nearly pre-deteremined, and the judges loathe to allow Singh to ventilate his feelings in the court, Udham Singh defended his action as reparative, seeking amends for a gross violation committed upon his community. He emphasized recollecting the violation he had witnessed as a child (and remembering it only too well over a protracted period of 21 years) and his recollection being informed by grudge, in the sense of a virtue, a noble indignation that sought appropriate closures to the gross violations witnessed and remembered.
V. ‘Grudge’ in European intellectual tradition
Etymologically derived from German ‘groll’, but related to the French ‘grouchier’the word ‘grudge’ is nearer in meaning to the Latinate ‘ressentiment’ and the English ‘resentment.’ It is a “reactive” affect that recollects in indignation; re-feels resentment over a period as response to an initial injury, or violation. The English word ‘resentment,’ in any case has lost the original connotation of remembering with intensity, and while exploring the affect, the North American philosopher, Margaret Urban Walker flatly concludes that ‘resentment’ is a kind of anger.
As a bilingual and bicultural product of the colonial intervention, and a teacher of English in India I believe that, ‘grudge’ is the unlikeliest of words that could have been deployed by a self -educated, quasi-literate person such as Udham Singh in 1940s to describe his motive for killing. I could provide instances from three major writers of Indian English during the mid-thirties and early-forties (Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao and R.K. Narayan) and show that grudge is a virtually non-existent term in their novels.
‘Grudge’ is more likely (being a common English expression) to have been used by a British ‘bobby’ during interrogation as an approximation of Udham Singh’s ‘explanation’ for shooting Dwyer. Possible Indic equivalents could range from khobh, akrosh, rosh, pratihinsa, manyu -all of which carry the charge of reaction, a re-active affect.
Friedrich Nietzsche, was the first (within a post Enlightenment epistemic frame) to conduct a systemic exploration of ressentiment, grudge, rancour as conceptual categories, examining their ethicality (‘value’); and their interface with memory.
He critically uses French (etymologically Latinate) ressentiment in his essay Zur Genealogie der Moral, (translated into English as On the Genealogy of Morals by Walter Kaufmann, 1967), a use informed by the distinct semantic charge of ‘remembering- vividly- something- that- had- happened- in- the- past-as-if -it-were-the-present.’
Max Scheler, his ideological follower, later transmits the extreme complexity of this feeling when he defines ressentiment as:
[…] the repeated experiencing and reliving of a particular emotional response reaction against someone else. […] It is not a mere intellectual recollection of the emotion and of the events to which it “responded”—it is a re-experiencing of the emotion itself, a renewal of the original feeling (“Prefatory Remarks” 27).
The “quality of this emotion is negative”, reminds Scheler, and “it contains a movement of hostility”. “The thirst for revenge is the most important source of ressentiment […] the very term ressentiment indicates that we have to do with reactions […] and “reactive emotions” notes Scheler (“On the Phenomenology and Sociology of Ressentiment” 29).
The Nietzschean position (and its critical roots in recollection) is fractured from within and ressentiment is radically recast as ‘virtue’ by Jean Amery (originally, Hans Mayer), victim of anti- Semitic persecution in Nazi death camps during the 1940s. Amery lived the horrors of violation as an individual and part of a community before theorizing it. He differs from Scheler in positing vital connections between violation, memory and ressentiment and restoring to the French word its signification of ‘remembering repeatedly.’ There is greater contiguity between Nietzsche and Amery (more than maybe Amery would care to acknowledge) in that both choose the word ressentiment because of its innate semantic charge of remembering a violation over a period and remembering it too well as a violation. Unlike Scheler who is forced to use the term because he finds no German equivalent and who describes it as a kind of critical impotence, Amery forges dynamic and transactional links between ressentiment and memory in a German language lecture (translated later as At the Mind’s Limit). Nietzsche’s figure of the impotent, slavish man that remembers too long and too well so that his soul “squints; his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything covert entices him […]” (40) is radically recast as a person of virtue who remembers too well and remembers violation as a violation.
For Amery, remembering in resentment is the ethical way to be because to forget or to remember injuries as ‘not-a-violation’ or assume a position of victimhood, for example, is to replicate/perpetuate the crime.
Amery’s formulations on ressentiment’s virtues inform post -holocaust ethical memory studies and praxis. His critique of cheaply granted, unthinking forgiveness as actually producing/replicating violations, prefigure (or are contiguous to) Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Vladimir Jankelovitch, Jacques Derrida, Alain Finielkraut and Avishai Margalit’s enrichment of this debate. Together these debates represent a complex and ever growing intellectual corpus on genocide, ethical recollection, transitional justice, the virtue of remembering in resentment; the ‘vice’ of fetishising forgiveness.
Vladimir Jankelovitch for example, evokes and urges. Ressentiment as a virtue that prohibits the second victory of the enemy, the obliteration of ‘traces’ of ‘memories’ of the crime. As a literal “re-feeling of a feeling”, ressentiment can be a renewed and intensively experienced passion for that which is unreconciled […]; it upholds the flame of disquiet, the flame of conscience and justice, while maintaining the vow to the disappeared and absent. Resentiment thus has the character of fidelity because it does not lose sight of virtue, regardless of the opinion of the day. Jankelovitch repeatedly reminds of the simple fact that one must first remember in order to forgive.
Finally, I would like to defend the exercise of reopening wounds, revisiting crimes in terms of Jean Amery’s statement “What happened, happened.” Janekelovitch for one has theorized the idea of imprescriptible, or the impossibility of making something that has happened, not-happen. This is especially true in the case of crimes against humanity and attack against the very notion of the human.
Sardar Udham again
Against this backdrop and context, it is possible to view Udham Singh deploying ‘grudge’ (or its Indic equivalent) in response to a genocide that remained like a scar upon the national consciousness, in awareness of its ethical value. Singh did not evoke the idea of grudge in self -defence as he was aware that the penalty for his action was death in a British court of law, and that the judgement was a mere formality. And Shoojit Sircar’s Sardar Udham rekindles our memories and revives ressentiment as a virtue, even as it seeks apologies as reparative justice for that imprescriptible act of the British Raj in Amritsar in 1919.
Lest we forget and forgive…
******
Nandini Bhattacharya is Professor, Department of English and Culture Studies. The University of Burdwan.
Nandini Bhattacharya in The Beacon
Leave a Reply