The Expansive Present as a Book of Infinite Chapters

Ashoak Upadhyay

“The line is made up of an infinite number of points; the plane of an infinite number of lines; the volume of an infinite number of planes…” Jorge Luis Borges

 “…’historical time,’ the civilized superstition of progress.”-Nirmal Verma

AT first glance it was only natural, given the times we live in and the history of violent discrimination they had been subjected to  since Partition and more so in recent times, that thousands of angry Muslims should gather before Maulana Imadul Rashidi, thirsting for revenge. Violence sparked by the Ram Navami procession in the city in the last week of March 2018 had claimed the life of the Imam’s sixteen year old son; retributive justice was being demanded. They had their memories of Othering and savage humiliations and this killing seemed to strike at the heart of their faith. Maulana Imadul Rashidi, imam of the mosque in Asansol, in West Bengal, thought differently. : “My son is gone, I do accept that. But if anyone moves a little finger to take revenge on his killing, I will leave this mosque and city forever.” he declared.

This act, expressive of the need for peace at the cost of a retributive compensation, inspired S. Gopalkrishnan to compare this act with the manner in which Gandhi tried seventy years earlier at Naokhali in the then East Bengal to bring about peace in more than 40 riot-torn villages. Walking barefoot in the inflamed areas while the other Congress leaders parleyed in Delhi over the transfer of power. Naokhali would show up the frail Mahatma as the last man standing even though a bullet was waiting to snuff out his life soon thereafter. Gopalakrishnan wondered if the Imam would have had an idea of what Gandhi’s reaction would have been in a situation such as his. Perhaps he would have. Without looking back, without referring to history books, the Imam would have drawn from memories forming part of the legacies Gandhi’s work had left behind for those who cared to remember, echoing in the tenets of his own faith that an eye for an eye would leave the whole world blind. Perhaps it was the fortitude inspired by a dim memory and his own faith that worked to articulate an act of courage beyond forgiveness that can sound like condescension or cowardice, and is neither; a strength that must remain indefinable beyond its transcendence of personal gain or compensation.

** 

“…the pilgrimage of caring.” Harsh Mandar

The title ‘Fear and Forgiveness: The Aftermath of Massacre’ seems literal enough to convey a meaning even though you get little idea of what it refers to despite the familiarity the reader may have with the author’s name. Harsh Mandar’s book is a record of the aftermath of the Gujarat pogroms of 2002, the holocaust visited upon the Muslims of the state that shocked the nation with the barbarity the majority community could be capable of. But what the book leaves behind in the reader’ mind is an idea that amidst the wreckage of State-blessed violence and fanned communal hatred, a violence that not just darkened the Present but forebode an illusory and fantasy-fuelled future for the perpetrator, it was possible for ‘ordinary people’ in Mander’s words to reject that fantasy and expand the possibilities of the Present with ennobling acts of compassion.

“From the start of the pogrom seven years ago, I observed how the parched humanity of Gujarat was moistened most by the ordinary people of our land, by the the stream of volunteers, mostly young people, who poured into Gujarat, eager to contribute in whatever way they could, to show that they cared,….For many it was an act of penance, for others a pilgrimage of caring.”(152)

A group of auto-rickshaw drivers journeys from Andhra Pradesh to live in camps in Ahmedabad for three weeks at a time, forsaking their earnings back home. Led by young Saddam Basha, they endear themselves with their selfless caring so much so, that Mandar tells us, women declared them to be more precious to them than their own sons. An “unlikely band of young executives” from multi-national firms in Mumbai, moved by the carnage, travel to Ahmedabad every weekend to serve in the camps. A village volunteer from the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatan in Rajasthan visits the camps, is horrified at the filth of the toilets that had not been cleaned for days and gets down to doing a service for hours, a community service that broke caste barriers. Had he heard a call from Gandhi, from the past? A call to upper castes to clean toilets as an act of self-cleansing: as a form of a ‘cultural revolution’ made meaningful because it was transcendental? When the volunteer returned the next day to continue his service, he found his access to the toilets blocked by the inmates who told him that they had “resolved” to do the job of cleaning the toilets every day. The volunteer had become a teacher by doing.  

These are not just records of our yesterdays; not stuff of history books or reportage but constituent elements of an expanding Present; they define the Present’s infinite possibilities by expanding our own, by willing us to forsake the idea that generosity is philanthropy, a corporate social responsibility that gets you tax write offs, that only when you accumulate wealth at some time in a hazy future can you think of others not so blessed as yourself. In the meantime just work your butt off for the jet-setting philanthropist and feed your gross appetites because they fuel economic growth; your growth mirrored in the GDP, that little big number.  

What the Imam and those volunteers that traveled to Gujarat for their “pilgrimage of caring”, the Sikhs setting up langars at the anti-CAA protest sites, feeding penniless migrant workers left stranded by an uncaring state power and most lately, farmers braving the winter cold, police water cannons and the accusations of being terrorists have done is to have turned their back on the Future; striving to make whole the wreckage at their feet. Walter Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’ in Paul Klee’s painting ‘Angelus Novus’ is unable to do that. Impotent, eyes fixed on a single moment in the past, wings spread out, and he stands amidst the wreckage of a storm that will not let up.

 “The angel would like to stay, awaken this dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has caught in its wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” ( 257-8)

Benjamin’s angel stands in for both immobility of praxis and a rootlessness that turns us into the victims of that storm called progress. Perhaps recognition dawns, of the devastations around us but roots do not provide us the strength to resist, to call upon the past that has become merely a record, a chronology of events and not a memory we can seize in a moment of crisis for hope, for resistance. The Imam and those volunteers at the camps in Ahmedabad, the organizers of the langars had found those roots to sustain their nonconformist practices of service and caring. 

**

“In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.” Walter Benjamin (p 255) 

Much has already been written about the long struggle by the Dongria Kondh, a small Adivasi community in the eastern ghats of Odisha to save their habitat in the Niyamgiri Hills from the destruction that would inevitably follow if Vedanta Alumina Ltd, a powerful conglomerate capitalist firm was allowed free rein for bauxite mining. The local government seems hell bent on proceeding with this development programme despite the acknowledged sacredness of Niyamgiri, the community’s culture and identity and the displacement of the tribal world that would follow in the wake of the extractive industry planned as progress. These hills are in danger of being sucked into the vortex of what the late Gandhian economist J.C. Kumarappa called the ‘economy of violence.’

The Niyamgiri Hills struggle represents not the desperate attempt of a ‘primitive’ people to keep alive their antediluvian practices; nor is it just a ‘human rights’ issue. The Dongriya Kondh are resisting the idea of development to assert an epistemology of wellbeing that is timeless. It stands in stark contrast to the existing hegemonic one based on a stagist view of history in which Progress is always meant to be a materiality based on scientific and rational utilitarian ideas of, among other things, the relationship of man vis-a-vis nature. For the tribal community and the others that live off the forests and hills their relationship with nature is one of reciprocity not domination an extraction. The small adivasi community in Niyamgiri communities is engaged in a struggle for cognitive justice, the struggle to retain traditions that have sustained modes and customs of living incorporated within a world view that clearly sets it against the prevalent threatening one. It is a struggle against what Santos has called epistemicide. 

 In their essay, The Niyamgiri Story…’ Meenal Tatpati, Ashish Kothari and Rashi Mishra provide insights into this world view. What the details hint at is a radical challenge to the Idea of growth; limitless growth as the authors term it. From the viewpoint of cognitive justice, their world view resists the idea of growth as an evolutionary concept leading us by the nose, blindfolded, to an illusory future. The episteme of the Niyamgiri peoples is radical in not being evolutionary; it is revolutionary because it is traditional and Timeless, outside the limits of ‘Historical Time’. THz Niyamgiri resistance, rooted in a Timeless Present offers a critique of what Benjamin called |homogenous, empty time.”

The Niyamgiri hill range is spread over 250 sq. kms in part s of the districts of Rayaggda and Kalahandi in Odisha. The rich deciduous forests are home to several endogenous and increasingly threatened flora and fauna. The Kondhs have been dwelling in these hill tracts for centuries. The tribal community believe in Niyamraja (King of Law) as their supreme deity and their ancestor. As Tatpati and associates point out, the Niyamgiri hills are the Hills of Law; abode of Niyamraja who rules over these domains along with other subordinate deities.  “The structure of the Dongria Kondh society is linked to the sacredness of the mountains and the laws prescribed by Niyamraja.” Just how much of an outlier from mainstream society the region’s cultural landscape is can be gauged from the fact that the Dombs, a Scheduled Caste community settled on the plains have developed close affinity with the forests and have become an integral part of the social and economic ecosystem developed over the decades.

The Dongria Kondh believe that everything in their world, in Niyamgiri belongs to Niyamraja and “Niyamraja is everything.” Their way of life is aligned with and governed by sacred laws best summed up in “the lament of Niyamgarh” sung by the late Dambu Praska” a dirge for an existence threatened by ‘development’ and the illusion of a future to be built on the destruction of a sacred Present, on the annihilation of the economy of caring and guardianship by the economy of violence

“Niyamraja created fruits in the hills grains in the
Plains. He is the first of the Dongria Kondh”
…”After making pineapple, mango jackfruit and grains
Niyamraja said to us ‘Live on what I have given you
Niyamraja decided where there should be fruits and
Grains
Which seed would be soft and which one would be hard
What will we do without the fruits, grains and 
Buffaloes
What will we do without Niyamgiri
What will the animals do without the big forests? What will we do without the plants that save lives” (Tatpati, p 92)

** 

In Gadchiroli district in the state of Maharashtra (India), the village of Mendha-Lekha is known for its bio-diverse, dry deciduous forest. It has also been the site for the struggle of its tribal community for self-rule. Their struggles have paid off; in 2009 Mendha Lekha became the first village in the country to secure Community Forest Rights (CFR) under the historic Forest Rights Act passed in 2006. Nearly 80 per cent of the village area is forested and has been held and administered by the village that in 2018 had approximately 400 residents, all belonging to the Gond tribe. 

The movement towards self-rule and forest conservation in Mendha forms a template of an alternative Present, a movement away from the idea of a formal democracy based on a top-down governance model and the constriction of the space and time for publicness in political participation. This attenuation is exclusionary; it is a tradable commodity contracted out to power seekers once every five years… In the marketplace of representative democracy, even the lower tiers of governance suffer from the same restrictions of jurisdiction, of spheres of influence.

In Mendha Lekha, the villagers redefined self-rule, broke through the barriers of representative politics and the confines of govern mentality to expand its influence over human and non-human lives all the better to integrate them into communitarian wellsprings of the good life. The sphere of publicness, of public discourse expanded, confirming the Socratic ideal of man as a political animal, creating a political consciousness of wellbeing.

The story of that consciousness begins in struggle, after sustained opposition to a series of hydroelectric dams, proposed by the government in late 1980s. The dams, those temples of progress, would have submerged large stretches of dense forests and tribal lands, displacing thousands of tribals in this region, submerging memories and myths. In 1985, after prolonged and determined tribal resistance, the government shelved the project. 

The new consciousness of publicness was born, reflected in determination of the tribals to take decisions at a local level for activities directly affecting their lives. The discussions honed in on key village issues: creating an equal status for women; reducing alcoholism, and most crucially, engendering greater personal and collective responsibility in framing ways to protect and regulate the use of the surrounding forests.

Public conversations, discussions generated ecology of knowledge encoding positive social, cultural and environmental changes, including the development of a forest protection and management system in the village. On 28th August 2009, Mendha became one the first village in India whose rights and responsibilities to use, manage and conserve the 1800 hectares of forests falling within its traditional boundary were legally recognized as Community Forest Resource (CFR) under the Schedule Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act of 2006.

Mendha-Lekha’s publicness-based democracy demonstrated that struggles inspired by a collective consciousness of community that had endured for centuries could redefine the Present: the investiture of the legal right by the state certainly helped but the fatal attractions of the development project and its devastations will always destabilize the fruits of that reluctant concession. And facilitate the erasure of this chapter.

**

““And yet, past is not over there, it is here, lodged in the very heart of the present.” Nirmal Verma 

To the seers or monks of Matri Sadan (Home of The Mother) in Hardwar, the Ganges is not just a river, the mother of all rivers in India; it is a sacred river and it is their duty to save it from the depredations of progress that permit the mining of sand from its bottom and alterations in its natural flows. For decades the sadhus of Matri Sadan have been at the center of resistance and mass mobilization. The love of nature, awareness of the environment not just as capital stock to be preserved but as an organic part of the ecosystem that has to be nurtured not conquered. Spirituality and religion meet Gandhi, creating an episteme of conservation not just of the physical resources embodied in the river’s ancient and natural flows but in the memories it evokes out of its basic health, rhythms and its capacity for self-renewal.

In the resistance to development and the superstitions of Progress peddled with a boot on the human face, Matri Sadan sadhus present an alternative episteme to the binaries encoded in the scientific-rational. In a vein similar to the Mendha-Lekha experiment or the preservation by adivasis of sacred groves across India, the sadhus of Matri Sadan offer eloquent testimony to an ecology of knowledge that draws sustenance from tradition and is invested radically in the Present not in delusions of a future Paradise of prosperity. In Matri Sadan we see confirmation of the same episteme that inspires the Dongria Kondh of Niyamgiri, based on an economy of restraint and caring.  

**

In Borges’ story The Book of Sand, a travelling salesman sells the protagonist a book bought in Rajasthan from a member of the lowest caste who told him “his book was called The Book of Sand, because neither the book nor the sand, has any beginning or end.” That book serves as an allegory for the expansive Present barely touched upon here; a Present that is part of continuous Time and Space. The chapters cannot be ascertained to have started at any point in historical time nor can the ‘reader’ arrive at its last word. Social activism need not be the product of secular, scientific-rational ideals of utilitarian concern fired by what-should-be but by what is; being as a condition sustained by hoary traditions and memories, a life that allows you to articulate the past not as a record of events but as a redemptive force that allows you, as Benjamin notes “to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger.”  

Every chapter of the expanding Present constitutes an understanding of the world, a way of knowing the world that has been demonized as inferior, backward, primitive, savage and pushed off the rungs of Historical Time’s ladder. The dominant discourse that assigns and endorses hierarchies of knowing/understanding is not just adopted by ruling powers alone. It even spread among and influences those who profess to effect transformation and revolution. So the tribal is considered primitive; her ways of living backward. Often times such backwardness, or aspects of it can be eroticized, commoditified, such as tribal art, food or drink. But at the core, the hierarchies remain. And inform our attitudes to struggles that at the very core of their momentum cry for cognitive justice, a shout-out for ways of knowing the world as a ‘multiversal’ Present.

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Notes 

Epigraph sources:
--Jorge Luis Borges: The Book of Sand. Translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni. Penguin Books. England. Reprinted 1980. p 87
--Nirmal Verma Word And Memory  Vagdevi Prakashan. Bikaner. 1989. p 21

--Harsh Mander. Fear and Forgiveness. The Aftermath of Massacre  Penguin Random House India 2009
--Meena Tatpati et al in Singh, N., Kulkarni, S., and Pathak Broome, N., (Eds) Ecologies off Hope and Transformation. Post-Development Alternatives from India. Pune, India. Kalpavriksh and SOPPECOM. 2018
--Walter Benjamin. Illuminations. Essays and Reflections. Translated by Harry Zohn. Edited and Introduced by Hannah Arendt. Schocken Books New York. 2007 
--More on Mendha Lekha:
https://www.thebeacon.in/2018/06/24/a-community-of-beings-reclaimed-tradition-regained/