Why has sexuality been so widely discussed and what has been said about it? What were the effects of power generated by what was said? What are the links between these discourses, these effects of power, and the pleasures that were invested by them? What knowledge (savoir) was formed as a result of this linkage?

– Michel Foucault¹

Desiring machines are binary-machines, obeying a binary law or a set of rules governing associations... Desire constantly couples continuous flows and partial objects that are by nature fragmentary and fragmented. Desire causes the current to flow, itself flows in turn, and breaks the flows.

– Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari²

The reign of ethics is not the reign of moral judgements over the operations of art or of political action... Ethics amounts to the dissolution of norm into fact: in other words, the subsumption of all forms of discourse and practice beneath the same indistinct point of view.

– Jacques Rancière³

IT has often been said that the social and cultural mores of late 19th and early 20th century Bengal were evocative of Victorian England; if so, perhaps nowhere more so than in the knotty, twinned spheres of conjugality/ sexuality and its contentious ethics of affect and desire. The two women of Tagore’s milling fictional world whom Satyajit Ray remoulded most famously on celluloid – Bimala of Ghare Baire (The Home and the World, 1913; Ray, 1984) and Charu of Nashtanir (The Broken Nest, 1901; Ray’s Charulata, 1964) – represent in some measure the complexity with which marital fidelity and duty were perceived, negotiated and produced in a volatile, transitional society by Tagore, and then reproduced by Ray in visual mediations looking to do justice to new(er) questions of modernity and sexuality.

Tagore ruminated on the ethical and affective frames of conjugality in a range of fictional writing that bears witness to the anxiety as well as exhilaration that questions of marital transgression raised. Ray transposed a few of these ruminations into a medium that had the advantage of using different ways of seeing/showing but had to continually grapple with the threatened loss of a power only accorded by the imaginative ambiguity of the written word. In the languages of representation, interpretation and implication that stretch between Tagore and Ray, I suggest, falls the shadow: of a fraught, liminal aesthetics of affect and desire, its politics.

 

Tanika Sarkar has written extensively on enjoined tropes of ‘Hindu wife, Hindu nation’ in the pre-Independence Indian cultural imaginary, laying out the ways in which notions of womanhood-conjugality-sexuality-nationalism were explained and mediated. ‘To liberal nationalists, the conjugal connection, as it existed among contemporary Hindus, seemed fundamentally coercive. On the other hand, contemporary Hindu nationalists claimed that they were capable of a more virtuous form of nation-making than what the repressive, colonial state offered, primarily because Hindu families embodied a more loving form of domesticity than western family norms. Late 19th century revivalists, moreover, defended Hindu marriage as the country’s last, infinitely precious and fragile site of economy, which would survive western cultural onslaughts only with the unswerving commitment of the Hindu wife. To her belonged the special burden as well as the extraordinary privilege of protecting the nucleus of Hindu nationhood, Hindu men having surrendered themselves to an alien system of meaning.’⁴ 

In both Ghare Baire and Nashtanir, it is without doubt the figure of a treasured (Hindu) wife, symbolic of a home/nation guarded and defended against the threat of political, social, intellectual and emotional violation, which is central to deliberations on desire, commitment, transgression and freedom. What Tagore interrogates is an unhindered perception that the symbolic Hindu wife is, by default, a repository of unchallenged ‘virtuosity’ (where the virtuous wife is synonymous both with conjugal fidelity and complete devotion to the nation). Sarkar’s clubbing of ‘burden’ and ‘privilege’ for the Hindu wife’s role in her marriage and her country is indicative of her female spousal plight; but instead of reading her enormous responsibilities as unilaterally aimed at institutional preservation and protection, one might want to see them as a space available to her to redraw the lines, to shift around the goal posts, to challenge the rules seemingly set in ethical stone.

 

The many symbols that merge subliminally, if not sublimely, in the figure of Bimala in Ghare Baire – wife/lover and mother/nation/goddess – bear the burden of remarkably weighty considerations that Tagore examined through the actions and attitudes exhibited by her husband, Nikhilesh, and her paramour, Sandip, in their relationships with Bimala and with each other. In popular understandings of the novel, Bimala is reduced to a remorseful tragic figure at the end of the text, waiting to ‘pay’ for her transgressive behaviour with widowhood, a fate worse than death – and the focus is trained on what implications this may hold for a reading of the text both as a measure of its turbulent historical context – the Swadeshi movement in Bengal in the first decade of the 20th century – as well as a supposed marker of female emancipation through sexual liberation, which however fails and is penitential.

Bimala’s passage – from conjugal innocence to illicit experience, from the andarmahal of her stately bedroom to the bahir of her opulent drawing room, from her gentle, genteel zamindar husband Nikhilesh to her passionate, unscrupulous activist lover Sandip – involves, crucially, a return journey, despite a general impression of it as a centripetal movement. In this return there is indeed pain and remorse, through a complete rejection of sexual possibilities that is probably Bimala’s final punishment.

 

In Ghare Baire, Tagore explores both the confusion and the exhilaration of an emergent modernist, gendered, nationalist sensibility in Bengal with admirable commitment. Bimala’s sexual awakening, described in a rich colloquial prose in the original Bengali text, is then rendered visual by Ray through carefully constructed images and arrangements that highlight and question the very notion of Bimala’s emergence from the inner to the outer world propelled by both her own, hitherto unrecognized, physical desires and her husband’s aspiration for her release that catalyzes it, all played out along a melodramatic sexual register.

Ironically enough, what most redeems Tagore’s novel – that it is strung together by successive epiphanic moments of self-realization and self-knowledge for all three of its protagonists, through separate narratives or ‘atmakatha’ (the ‘soul’s story’) – is lost in Satyajit Ray’s cinematic adaptation of Ghare Baire (1984), in which all philosophical dilemmas are reduced to a sensational extramarital peccadillo against the backdrop of a flaming swadeshi sky. The two kisses in the film shared by the illicit lovers, Sandip and Bimala, that are Ray’s interpolation (unnecessary in Tagore where far greater passion is suggested by a sexual tension in which touching is almost precluded), are perhaps indicators of what the ‘sexing up’ of the great central debates of the text fail to achieve. However, a reading of both the novel and the film which privileges the singular appraisal that the illegitimate burgeoning of Bimala’s latent sexual desires is symptomatic of the ‘dangers’ of both an imported modernity and a fiery misplaced nationalism, is essentially problematic.

 

Latent female sexual desire – unawakened, untapped, unacknowledged – is generally always perceived as a potential threat, and its awakening as a transgression. Female sexuality, therefore, latent or realized, has consistently remained a hazardous artistic subject, eminently flammable and capable of torching the message it is expected to bear. Tagore’s experiment in Ghare Baire – then interpreted more obviously by Ray in his film – may suggest that an obsession with Bimala’s sexuality as guilt finally obscures the real intent of the novel, to debate on forms of revolutionary patriotism in Bengal during the Swadeshi movement. What was perhaps conceived as a grand metaphor for conflicting intellectual opinions on larger perceptions of ‘freedom’ and ‘truth’ in the context of a looming modernity dissolves into a battle of two fallible men over a woman they both desire to possess, in sexual, social, emotional and intellectual terms.

What is ironical is that the ‘modern’ ideals that Nikhilesh and Sandip construct for themselves are not as polarized as one may reasonably expect. Somewhere along the way, Nikhilesh’s aspiration to be a modern (that is, enlightened) husband and allow his wife freedom to know (and then to choose) the man whom she ritualistically adores and worships is peculiarly shadowed by Sandip’s declaration that he would desire Bimala to be/come modern, to exercise her new found freedom of choice by validating a passion not sanctioned by society. Nikhilesh’s progressive attitude to love and marriage is tainted, however, by a more believable human frailty, his innate (and ruefully acknowledged) hope and belief that Bimala will, indeed, choose her husband over all other men after she has been exposed to them. Sandip’s evil intentions, of course, are never disguised, though Ray portrays him blacker than the original literary character.

 

It is surely significant that a final understanding of the seemingly impossible paradox that Bimala represents in Ghare Baire – as Hindu wife/lover and nation/goddess – is recognized by Bimala herself, apparently the least enlightened of the protagonists and certainly the one who is denied any real agency by both the men who supposedly want her to be ‘free’. In her retrospective ruminations in the opening paragraphs of the novel, Bimala recalls wistfully the privilege of being a traditional Hindu woman like her mother, a tradition she had inherited as an honour until her husband decided otherwise.

Sarkar reads such an unmooring as ‘catastrophic’. Bimala’s inheritance of a secure role in the family ‘squandered by Nikhilesh and his experiments with liberal-reformist visions of the equal and companionate wife… this dangerous freedom… disrupts moral and social orders fatally and destroys Bimala’s feminine selfhood by presenting her with difficult choices that she cannot handle. Bimala thus concludes her final narrative with the conviction that the new modernity is incompatible with Hindu female selfhood.’⁵ 

Deleuze and Guattari’s interrogation of Freudian and Lacanian formulations on desire in Anti-Oedipus are predicated in some sense on the dismissal of the imaginary/fantastical for the ‘Real’, the ‘machinic’ that engineers the unconscious as much as it propels the symbolic. In their selective appropriation of Lacan, they emphasize the autonomy of the libidinal Object without the signifying Other; while apparently attempting to demolish psychoanalysis what they take on as a task is the establishing of its subversive core. It is this combative speculation – of the ‘real’, the subversive core as opposed to the imaginary effect – that I would like to retrieve here, to read Bimala’s and Charu’s predicament of female sexual desire in relation to the ethics of conjugal affect, duty and devotion.

 

Bimala and Charu have much in common in Tagore’s explorations of the dilemma of extramarital attraction, not least the good fortune of having spouses who are nurturing and loving and inclined theoretically toward allowing spaces in their marriages for their wives to seek and find themselves. The ‘reality’ of female desires that are in excess of the spaces they are generously allowed to roam, however, may constitute what Deleuze and Guattari seem have identified as a choppy, edgy movement: the ‘flow’ along with what causes the ‘current to flow’ and then breaks it in turn. Of course, it must be recognized that the idea of possessing such a space at all within marriage – in a gesture of semi-transactional largesse from the male spouse – is largely out-of-step with the acceptable structure of conjugal ethics in colonial (or, in fact, postcolonial) Bengal, and would mark a modernity of sensibility that would, ironically enough, be perceived as a legacy of western thought and education imbibed by indolent upper-middle class Bengali men of the time.

Rochona Majumdar, in her study of marriage and modernity in Bengal, has commented on how this perceived legacy works as a conundrum in the face-off between (extended) family values and nuclear, companionate (if not individuated) marriages in the non-western tradition: ‘I argue that certain concepts – such as the property owning, contractual, individual citizen subject, the nuclear family, and companionate love – whose intellectual provenance and climactic expression lie in the course of European Enlightenment and the 19th century, do not adequately describe the condition of modernity in other parts of the world (in this case, Bengal). But that does not render these concepts as ineffectual as evaluative norms in non-Western modernity.’⁶ 

 

It is indeed true, as Majumdar discusses at length, that the joint or extended family has played a central role in the imagination of a successful Indian marriage, as has the concept of an ‘arranged’ marriage. In Ghare Baire and Nashtanir, however, the two husbands are engrossed in giving shape to an intellectualized dream of a companionate marriage in which their wives are equal partners of a sort, though it never occurs to them that an equality accorded without any real respect to intellect can be partial and short-lived at best.

In Ghare Baire, Bimala’s political naivete is a source of indulgent amusement to Nikhilesh, who for a critical stretch of time fails to realize that his Sandip-struck wife is also engrossed in the process of transforming into a being with strong and definite ideas about swadeshi – that do, in fact, outlast and outweigh her fire-and-brimstone passion for her unscrupulous hero-lover. In Nashtanir, it is Charu’s intellectual affinity with her youthful and exuberant poet-cousin-in-law that lights in her the fire of utter adoration.

 

Set in the last quarter of the 19th century, Charu is the literary-minded, sensitive, bored wife of a well-meaning westernized newspaper editor and publisher Bhupati. Charu craves attention and conversation, both of which she finds in abundance when Amal, her husband’s young cousin, comes to their home for a holiday. She is romantically and sexually enamoured and ensnared, it is true: but the truly significant fix lies in the creative exhilaration that they instantly and instinctively share. Charu’s intellectual and artistic aspirations swell and soar – and finally rise above the petty Amal and find her a life of her own. While Charu is devastated when the cowardly young man decides to escape (without so much as a farewell) what would surely have erupted in a domestic tempest – caused by a burgeoning intimate entanglement with his comely sister-in-law – it is the remaindered worth of this passing encounter that is far more remarkable.

That is, there is an important, intrinsic connection that is being drawn here, I suggest, between (sexual) desire and the igniting of like intellects and ideas, proposing that the ethics of conjugal affection (and duty/fidelity) may be sacrificed at the altar of a desiring that is as much passionately sexual as it is intellectually and creatively inspiring and sustaining. It is not an altar that the transgressors may worship at without punishment and with any promise of permanence, perhaps; and yet there is an exultant ebullience in the equating of a sexual and emotional desiring with a creative, passionate, ideological and intellectual pirouetting outside the tidy fold of conjugal commitment.

 

Such dangerous crossings as a politics of aesthetics appear to be recognizable in Tagore, implicated as he must be in the stirring movement toward a western modernism even as he participated in sounding the drum-roll of a non-western modernity. But what Ray – the quintessential urban, intellectual, bhadralok filmmaker of modern, postcolonial Bengal – does with incendiary moments of conflict and confluence between conjugal and non-conjugal love, desire, affection and duty may point towards a depoliticizing of desire as an aesthetic propulsion.

Is Ray’s ‘ethical turn’, to employ Rancière’s term, mounted on an instinctive refusal to see transgressive desire as an interruption, as dissent – or as Deleuze and Guattari put it, as flow, its source and that which breaks it, all at once – but to blur the boundaries so that politics and art, both essentially troubled and troubling, fuse into an indistinct haze, an indeterminate consensus, a ‘partage du sensible’ of the common/shared space of conjugality and its Other(s)?

Let us take, for example, the last few minutes of Ray’s cinematic interpretation of Tagore’s Nashtanir. In what is unarguably one of Ray’s finest, most sensitive, films, Charulata deviates from the its literary source by transforming a marital disaster into a promise of reparation: while in Tagore’s text there is little doubt that Charu and Bhupati’s conjugal bond is unequivocally destroyed upon the revelation of her infidelity, in Ray a filmic freeze shot is strategically deployed to stop in mid-screen a pair of outstretched hands as they reach for each other, presumably in pursuit of marital reconciliation.

The moment of the freeze – after reaching out, but before the touching of hands – has been read as rich in possibility, of capturing the exquisite moment of the pause, of an uncertainty filled with trepidation and anticipation at the same instant. I would suggest that this cinematic device is Ray’s artistic acknowledgement of the need to subdue dissensus, to pull into the ambit of the indistinct the ‘fact’ of what might otherwise cause havoc and tumult in the ‘form’ of conjugal understanding and affect. To have declared boldly that extramarital desiring had caused an interruption in the ethics of a ‘modern’ companionate union would have been to reject what Rancière calls the ‘fantasy of their purity, giving back to these inventions their status as cuts that are always ambiguous, precarious, litigious.’⁷ 

It is crucial, of course, that we distinguish between the indistinctness of what could be read as Ray’s careful, considered ethical intervention in the contretemps of marriage – and the ambiguity, the precariousness of ‘cuts’ in the ur-text that continue to resist consensus and dog it with a definitive discord embedded in a fraught, overreaching desire. If such desiring is embodied, material(ized) dissent, then, to the norm/‘form’/sociality of late 19th century Bengali companionate conjugality, there appears a crack between the politics of acknowledging its disruptive, destructive potential in Tagore and of veiling it with a promise of the restoration of marital harmony in Ray. The aesthetics of ‘fact’ and ‘form’ continue to struggle under shadows bristling with the breaks and flows of erotic charge; and such an aura of conflicted desire is clearly incommensurate with an ethical turn toward a mature consensus for the restoration of the normative in conjugal relationships.

 

Footnotes:

1. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol 1, (transl. R. Hurley), Penguin Books, London, 1998, p. 11.

2. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Continuum Books (repr.), Minnesota, 2004, p. 5.

3. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, Continuum, London and New York, 2010, p. 184.

4. Tanika Sarkar, ‘Many Faces of Love: Country, Woman, and God’, in P.K. Datta (ed.), The Home and the World: A Critical Companion, Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2003, p. 28.

5. Tanika Sarkar, ibid., pp. 28-29.

6. Rochona Majumdar, Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2009, p. 15.

7. Rancière, Dissensus, p. 202.