Draft of text published in Many Indias, Many Literatures: New Critical Essays, ed.

Shormishtha Panja (New Delhi: Worldview Publications, 1999), pp. 158-70. Please do not circulate without permission

Basheers Humble Historian

Udaya Kumar In the 1950s Vaikom Muhammad Basheer wrote a series of stories centred around a new topos and a new trope. The new topos was sthalam (literally, the place), an imaginary village, and the new trope that of history writing. The narrator in these texts identifies himself as the humble historian (vineetha charitrakaran), and mobilizes an apparatus of textual presentation which parodies the structuring of historical narratives produced within the academy. The locus of this narration, sthalam, functions as the miniaturized and parodic representation of a polity. In these stories, Basheer fuses a narrative of innocent mischief in the village with a rhetoric which parodies the discourses of national and international political analysis. This paper explores some of the relations between these two figures the polity and the historian, and tries to understand them in the larger context of Basheers oeuvre. It was the inhabitants of the place that discovered the Sun God for the first time in the world. Similarly, the shaving razor, the interpretation of omens, fire, possession, card-sharping, the science of dreams, the art of cooking, cock-fight, water, the bullock-cart, wrestling, black magic, the dagger - all these were also invented first by the sthalam people. According to Muzhayan Nanu, the sthalam is the dead centre of the earth. Right in the middle of sthalam is located the hill called Tigerpit (kaduvakkuzhi). Sthalam is within a total circumference of nine miles. The entire grand universe outside this nine-mile periphery is the reactionary zone of foreigners. (B, 733) On the one hand, sthalam is modelled on the small, provincial village in Kerala; on the other, it stands for the political realm in general. It presents a small polity which has escaped the rule of law and where the connections which integrate it with the rest of the country have disappeared. In fact, in the central opposition between us and them which animates the political sentiments of most of the inhabitants of sthalam, the foreign reactionary regime turns out to be the national state apparatus, its manifestations in sthalam being two police personnel. This non-integratedness of the village polity allows Basheer to use its political procedures as parodic representations of the larger integrated political spaces.

The non-integrated, extraordinary space becomes - through a familiar procedure in Basheers work - the very core of the ordinary and the integrated spaces. This enables Basheer to make an anti-world of crime stand for the normal world . It is said that the models of some of the characters in these stories were the small-time criminals whom Basheer had met while in jail as a political prisoner. Basheers conversion of this anti-world into the normal world is based on a certain tenderness and indulgence in characterization. Mucheettukalikkarante Makal (The Card-Sharpers Daughter) tells us the story of the struggle of Muthapa and Zainaba to get married against the wishes of Zainabas father Poker, although it is presented in the form of a popular movement against reactionary, anti-imperialist forces. Anavariyum Ponkurissum (The Elephant-Grabber and the Golden Cross), a story of thefts and misadventures, is also the story of Thomas generosity towards the police constable. Love or fear or generosity, pervasively present in the human drama of these stories, make them sagas of the lives of small people in small places. This, in turn, relativizes and deflates the ostensible big claims that the discourse of the polity makes as an autonomous location of human meaning. The sthalam stories speak about the major political events in this small place - the struggles against the reactionary foreign regime, the legends surrounding the heroes of this village, and the revolutions and popular movements that animate the place. There are two rhetorical strategies at work in these stories. Firstly, there is the adoption of a mock-grandiose tone, where the apparently insignificant and fictitious are elevated to the levels of the significant and the real. Accompanying this, we find a second strategy which undermines the discourse of the grandiose, and points to an emptiness at the heart of the discursive machinery deployed in the text. The object of the narrative here is the historical event. However, the event in these stories is the small event, the everyday misadventure or conflict. Often the great movements that shake the place arise out of unreliable rumours or halfheard and half-interpreted prophesies. Did you know?, Ettukali Mammoonhu would start most of his utterances with this prefatory note before proceeding to the transmission of rumours - sometimes overheard and reported, and sometimes generated by himself. That is me, he would say about a pregnancy in the village, I am a bastard who does that and even more. The historical event and its narrativization constantly undergo a process of dilution through rumour, gossip, unreliable prophesies or mere shifts in narratorial attention. The event slips away into the non-event. The poisonous worms that Thoma carries in his pocket turn out to be cashew nuts. The massive tree trunk which miraculously disappears is inexplicably discovered a few feet under the ground. What fills these narratives is a certain deployment of rhetorical elements -

sometimes on the part of the characters and sometimes on that of the narrator. Trying to resolve a small conflict between Anavari Raman Nair and Ponkurissu Thoma, Chattangeri Manakkal Sankaran Namboodiripad launches into a speech on Peace: Peace, Peace - that is our slogan! We, the inhabitants of sthalam, have a tradition of valour. We are rich in culture. We will resist savagery. We will challenge violence. How many times have we not struggled ferociously against the reactionary alien regime? We say: In the name of Peace, Anavari should apologize to Kochu Thresia (B, 741). This parody of political rhetoric is further developed in later passages where Namboodiripad argues for violence, and justifies himself by saying that his policy has changed in the mean time. The opportunism caricatured here does not become an object of moral indignation. It merely fits into the ethos of the sthalam where the practice of the lie forms a part of the centre of things. Sometimes the narrator obliquely draws attention to this realm of the lie: Sthalam is the only place in the world which stands steadfastly for peace. The inhabitants of the sthalam are a peace-loving people. The small knife, the large folding knife, the carving knife, the machete, chilly powder, country bomb . . . sword, dagger, cannon, long blade, guns - all these have been used only for peaceful purposes by the inhabitants of sthalam. Rat poison is also used solely for peaceful objectives. Peace! Peace! O, Peace! (B, 735). The function of the lie in these stories is intimately linked to several other elements in their rhetorical structure. Many of the strategies used in the production of the non-event rely on a similar attitude. Rumour and gossip serve to de-realize the object of narration through continuous relativization while narrative exaggeration and fictitious posturing of authenticity undercut the very claims made by the narrator. In all these, one can find a certain preoccupation with strategies of truth-generation and with their essentially contingent character. Furthermore, through the use of an irony which renounces righteous indignation, Basheer develops a new tone in the sthalam stories which he uses in his later work as well. Along with ironic and parodic representation, one also finds a certain tone of indulgent celebration, a sense of mischievous delight in the frenetic human drama that these stories present. We saw that this tone involves a temporary bracketing of the rhetoric of moral judgements and of the sentiment of righteous indignation. This bracketing is made possible by opening the space of the moral subject to the play of parody -

the discourse of the moral or political subject does not escape the problematic of rhetoricity and therefore the undercutting effected by parody. Parallel to this, one also finds a sense of recognition in these stories that the devices of the lie and the non-event used by the characters are not merely negative, not mere devices of concealment, but also positivities. At the heart of the indulgently ironic stance of the humble historian, there is an attitude of celebration towards the positive dimension of these devices. Later, we shall see that this sense of the positive is intimately linked in these stories to Basheers changing attitudes to realistic representation and to the very notion of character-subjectivities. Sthalathe Pradhana Divyan (The Chief Godman of the Place) presents a series of events, one leading to the other in strict consequentiality, but pointlessly, without development or resolution. The syntax of consequential narration is followed here, but it is stripped of any semantic claim. The kind of consequentiality that operates in this text from one narrative moment to the next is similar to the passing of a baton in a relay race. The baton connects two sequential elements, without connecting the entire set of elements according to a single logic. This allows a space for contingency right at the heart of consequential narration. From the gift of Kochu Thresia to Thoma and from Anavaris unhappiness in sharing it to the fictitious threat of the poisonous worms, from there to a large-scale agitation against the government on account of the disappearance of Avaran and the Driver, from this to the oracle of Kandan Parayan, from there to its interpretation - the story moves from episode to episode like a relay race, each subsequent episode taking it further and further away from the original set of events. This procedure enters into a deep tension with the apparent consequential claims of the narrative. The form of historical narration adopted here assumes that the meaning of the events narrated is articulated in terms of their interconnections in the narrative. In other words, narrativization is the act of making explicit the semantic potential of events. Here, the narrative merely pretends to connect and to make those connections explicit. However, each new connection takes the narrative in a new direction, deviating from its earlier trajectory and thus altering the semantic claims of the earlier set of connections. Accentuating this tension between an apparent articulation of necessary connections on the one hand and a narrative which relies on contingent connections, these stories use the format of the presentation of academic historical research. There are footnotes and metatextual passages where the historian directly addresses the readers and draws their attention to his procedures. Some of the footnotes refer the reader to other sthalam stories - they are referred to as histories - imitating the academic procedure of intertextual validation of arguments and evidence. Some footnotes invite the reader to convert the

information given in the text to modern-day parameters - from annas to paisa or from pounds to grams. Self-referential passages within the text tell us about the interviews or empirical data collection which the narrator-historian undertook and indicate some of his own personal preferences: This humble historian interviewed everyone involved in this history. Right at the beginning, I also committed my moral support to some of them. Do you know, to whom? Altogether, the matter is very complicated. I shall record this history here slowly, for the benefit of the students of history (B, 652). Along with this mobilization of the textual apparatus of academic historiography, these stories also use elements from the discourse of political analyses of historical events. Here, Basheer uses elements from Marxist historiography. The characterization of the government as reactionary, the description of the art of the pickpocket in Mucheettukalikkarante Makal in terms of the ascesis of political activism, the saga of Karumban Chennans death in terms of political martyrdom, the presentation of Zainabas and Muthapas struggle as a peoples movement all these rely on the rhetoric of radical political analysis and activism. We will be mistaken if we identify some simple anti-communist liberal sentiment in this. This rhetoric, while being tantalizingly evocative, remains elusive of any easy identification as a mere caricature of communism. The object of parody, as in the case of sthalam, is that attitude to history which ascribes determinate meanings to events and human actions in terms of the polity and in terms of a master political discourse. The discourse of Marxist political analysis functions as the major example of this attitude. It is against this context that we would need to interrogate Basheers strategies of the mock elevation of the small event into the historical event, and his production of the non-event as the point of arrival for his pseudo-analyses. We saw earlier that the lives of characters, the small events that constitute their lives, becomes the object of a twin gesture - ironic and celebratory. This gesture finds its fullest development in the stance of the humble historian. On the one hand always in search of a meaning, and on the other hand always arriving at pseudoexplanations or pseudo-resolutions, the humble historian seems to write a history which does not explain anything, and which does not really preoccupy itself with the question of meaning. The interpretation of Kandan Parayans prediction - an indiscernible set of syllables - provides a figure for the procedure of historical explanation in these stories: All of them meditated. Meditated thinking about Thorappan Avaran and Driver Pappunni. Meditated concentrating on the reactionary alien government. Meditated remembering Karamban

Chennan and Kandan Parayan. Meditated focusing on the seven major powers in the world. One can only call it a miracle, then Ettukali Mammoonhu, sitting under the tree, received a divine revelation . . . Immediately a lizard tittered from the tree. Now, what room is there for any doubt? (B, 762-3) There is a parodic debunking of historical explanation in the way the humble historian narrates and explains. In this process, the very notion of history gets caught in the problematic of the lie which we saw earlier as central to the universe of the sthalam stories. History writing becomes a celebratory production of discourse, in imitation of the energetic production of truth in the sthalam. The lies and thefts and pseudo-struggles in the sthalam - through their indulgently ironic narration - stylize the protagonists and their drama in ways which are different from that of realist writing. The characters - neither full-fledged realistic characters nor types in the sense of being representative specimens - take on a stylized exaggeration as in the art of cartoons and animation. Their flamboyant gestures - without the seriousness of realistic representation - produce only indulgent appreciation and laughter, even when they go against the moral norms of the spectator. This is achieved through a stylization which effects a suspension of the question of reality. Rather than representing the real, these characters invite attention to their own status as stylized entities. M. V. Devans cartoon-like illustrations had accompanied some of these stories when they were originally published. The realm of graphic stylization - cartoon and animation - is central to the notion of the real and the historical in the sthalam stories. The transformation of characters into animation or cartoon figures effects a certain reduction in their stature. They are not realistic, life-size figures; they appear small in front of the readers eyes, and their actions evoke indulgent laughter precisely because they appear as exaggerated - but miniaturized imitations of human gestures. The combination of strategies of exaggeration and miniaturization allows a de-realization of the moral implications of the actions of these characters. Those tiny flamboyant gestures appear as if they formed an unselfconsciously stylized performance by tiny creatures - it is almost as if we are among the gods, looking down on these small creatures with indulgence and sympathy, without worrying about the tiny immoralities behind their ridiculously flamboyant gestures. But, is that really the case? There are two points to be understood here. Firstly, the notion of character undergoes a change in these stories. The dimension of creatureliness surrounds these characters like an aura, making them appear in a light different from the visibility of realistic representation. Basheers later work integrates the creaturely aspect of the human into the realm of autobiographical reflection, and evolves the figure of a reduced, almost disappearing subject in some texts. Secondly, the

minaturization and the exaggeration of these characters do not give the reader an easy seat in the gallery of the gods - the narrator-subject, the humble historian is part of the theatre of animation figures. Although not fully elaborated as a cartoon figure, he is located on the fringes of the world of his characters. He does not use a discourse of superior intelligence or moral judgement, and he also makes the tiny flamboyant gestures that characterizes the people of sthalam. His historiography, the exaggeration and the miniaturization that characterize it, bears the indelible signature of the figures in sthalam. The play of rhetoric in these stories therefore does not allow a superior vantage point to the reader. To explore the implications of this stylization further, we need to understand the context of these stories in the development of Basheers own art. History has been a constant presence in Basheers work, dating from his early realistic writings to his later preoccupation with cosmic histories. Along with the historical event which invites narrativization, in his early as well as in his later work, we also find the figure of the first-person narrator. In a profound sense, the relation between these two figures - the world and the I - define one of Basheers life-long preoccupations in his writing. That preoccupation concerns the space of the witness who articulates a testimony about his experience of the world. The problematic in terms of which this witness locates and understands himself changes several times in Basheers work. Here the sthalam stories of the 1950s mark an interesting and important point of transition. In his early stories, Basheers I-narrator presents his testimony of the world in terms of fragmented images. Some of these images are traumatizing and painful, as in many of Mantos stories. The raped and murdered body of a girl clutching a sheaf of false currency notes (B, 264), or the pool of blood which the soldiers mistake for water at night (B, 425) are images of this kind. The senselessness of the world appears in the form of limit experiences; they can only be articulated in terms of images which cannot form part of any meaningful totality. The traumatizing image in the early stories functions alongside discontinuous and heterogeneous spaces such as the prison spaces presented in Mathilukal (Walls) or the broken world evoked in Sabdangal (Voices). Objects remain meaningless and fragmented in these stories, and the narrators stance is that of despair and anger at his inability to put them together, to find some meaning, to discern some meaningful totality. The necessity and the impossibility of achieving a recognition of meaning is simultaneously affirmed here. Central to this problematic is the figure of the victim. The victim is identified in these stories as a victim insofar as his/her suffering exceeds the economy of explanations and remains essentially meaningless. The I-protagonist of Basheer himself is a victim figure in many of his early stories. The sthalam stories we discussed above mark a point of transition from this

framework. The victim figure disappears from these stories, although victimisers themselves do not. This is because the problematic of meaning on which the very idea of the victim depends is abandoned in these stories. The conversion of the small event into the historical event and then its dissolution into the non-event is one of the main strategies through which the abandonment of the problematic of meaning is accomplished here. As we saw, this is underscored by the use of a pseudo-historiographical textual apparatus which leads us nowhere if we search for meaning. If the problematic of meaning and explanation is abandoned, what is it that remains? The answer to this is also indicated in the sthalam stories - an answer which Basheer elaborates and amplifies in his later work. This answer is not in the form of a statement, but in that of a manner of attention - an attention that turns towards practices and actions, towards the ways of living or ethos rather than to the principles of the polity. In the sthalam stories this takes the form of a celebration of the very energy of life of which the ceaseless production of discourses and actions is a manifestation. Here, the production of the lie takes on a positive status, not as the concealment of the true, but as a productive machinery which carries the narration and the action forward. It does not matter what Kandan Parayan actually said or meant - what matters is that it was interpreted in a certain way, which consequently leads to the further moves in the progress of narration. In other words, it is not the truth-values of statements which become important, but their performative value. The abandonment of the problematic of explanation and meaning, indicated in these stories, signals a turn in Basheers work towards the problematic of performance. The humble historian of Basheer does not explain; he performs. The signs of this performativity are amply evident in his gestic narration which begins, May I say with the blessing of God, there are two elephants in sthalam (B, 799), and ends Mangalam, Shubham (B, 795, 820). Explanations have value as elements in the historians performance. The value of explanations in these stories cannot be assessed through an interpretation and evaluation of their meaning, but rather through a consideration of the role they fulfil in the overall performance. This turn towards the dimension of performance in Basheers writings can be seen as a turn towards ethos, away from the claims of the polity as an autonomous realm. Basheer shifts his attention from the statement as text to the statement as a mode of saying, as a mode of living. Here, the sthalam stories reveal an energetic ethos, where the production of the lie and the non-event are seen also as a celebration of life and its endless performance. In Basheers later texts, beginning with Pathummayude Aadu (Pathummas Goat), we can see the further trajectory of this shift. Abandoning the problematic of fictitious locations, Basheers writings become insistently autobiographical and

locate themselves in the world of the everyday. This world is presented as the realm of the non-event. The narrative format remains the same, but the story itself - in the sense of a meaningful organization of events - disappears. The domestic space in the later texts of Basheer is not the stable locale of realistic narratives, but the location of a non-narrative performance. The performance of story-telling goes on, but the story has disappeared. In many of his later writings, Basheer explored the deep alliance between this attitude and interrogations into the sources of values and religious sentiments. This exploration is carried out through a privileging of ethos and performance over statements and principles. Statements and principles are seen as reliant on a deeper grounding. Their grounding can be thematized if one restores the creaturely dimension to the human figure and begins to see its actions as a tiny, flamboyant performance. The figure of the witness also undergoes a transformation in some of these texts. He seems to speak from a disappearing location, as he assumes a posture of self-annulment. In other words, the witness is a figure who exists only through his performance of acts of witnessing. The sthalam stories indicate a middle period in Basheers work, prior to the development of the domestic non-story. Here the discourse of historical witnessing is used in order to indicate a shift which abandons the problematic of historical explanation. It. parodies the pretensions of the polity as an autonomous ground of meaning, and points to the grounding of the polity on ways of living. Basheers polity is a sheet of paper on which his animation figures carry out their flamboyant and harmless drama. These figures appear as infinitesimally small creatures against the ground on which this paper is spread. In Basheers later work, there are meditations on the infinite expanse of that grounding. Reinscribed against that ground, the polity itself appears a theatre of creaturely human drama. The celebration of this drama - the indulgent, mischievous tone of these stories - justifies itself not in terms of the claims of the polity but in terms of an immemorial, creaturely pathos of the human and in terms of an ethical sensibility which emerges from the recognition of this pathos.

Notes