This is the third of our series of blogposts in relation to the Budhan Podcast project. In earlier posts we have looked at narrations of collective suffering and the re-embodiments engendered by the shift from theatre to film. In this post we turn our attention to a particular feature of the emergent form of film, that of sublimation.
A forum theatre1 workshop conducted as part of the project produced two short plays centered on various experiences of the participants, of discrimination based on tribal identity, caste, gender, colour and class. One of these related to a young Chhara man’s experience as a reporter for a television channel. At the beginning we hear his conversation with his father, who had invested in his children’s education so that they did not fall back into the business of bootlegging, which characterises a large part of the economy of Chharanagar. ‘It is most important’, the father says when the protagonist informs him that he has been called for an interview at the channel, ‘that you represent our people. Society and the state think of us only as criminals, as thieves, as those in the daaru (alcohol) business. This must change’. He enters the interview, after negotiating the suspicions of the guard at the door, and being intimidated by aggressive expressions of social capital by upper caste candidates in the waiting room. The idiom through most of this had been humour – miscommunication, caricature, cheeky references to contemporary political moments, luring the audience into the story and marking a mutual unreadability between the characters on stage. The protagonist sits down, nervously, in front of his prospective colleagues and bosses.
‘What is your name?’, they ask. ‘Govind’, he replies. ‘Yes, we know, we have read your application, but what is your name?’. Here emerges a curious fact – Govind has dropped his surname. He goes simply by the name Govind.
The question ‘what is your name?’ in India is much more than about what one is to be called. It is the first question that one is asked – for it is through one’s surname that one’s caste is ascertained, one’s relative position in the interaction, and thus one’s status and terms of engagement. There is a long history of people, especially those from oppressed castes and tribes strategically changing their names. In the 1970s and 1980s, socialist movements such as the ‘JP movement’, led to people dropping their surnames en masse so as to disable the privilege function of caste. Today’s young generation of Ambedkarites of different caste backgrounds do the same and it is not uncommon to come across students and young professionals fighting formal systems that require a caste name as a prerequisite for entry and recognition.
On the insistence of the interviewers, Govind lets out that his ‘full name’ is in fact Govind Chhara. He is from Chharanagar, the interviewers confirm, where there is daaru business, and crime. The interviewers seem unconcerned with the fact that Govind’s expertise is in culture, that he himself is an actor and is interested in covering cinema and art. Even as they eventually give him a job, this has a very specific remit – he is to give them stories from within the world of crime. The rest of the play traces his journey through the crime beat, his engagements with the police who assume that he is intimate with petty criminals, the various ways in which his identity comes to define his career in journalism, leading ultimately to a resignation and a hard-hitting monologue about casteism.
The play had been performed and now it was time for the forum to take over as members of the audience (in this case from the community) are invited to enact other strategies in dealing with the situation that was just been performed on stage. The first person to come on stage to do things differently happened to be Dakxin. Dakxin who sometimes goes by the name Bajrange, and sometimes by Chhara. Who has taken pride in his name and written and spoken eloquently about the art of theft. It is for the art of being invisible that his ancestors had been hired by kings as spies in the colonial era, it is for their art of theft that they formed a critical part of the early resistance to British rule, and were ultimately branded as Criminal Tribes. Dakxin came onto stage to express a completely different persona to that of Govind: confident, emphasising his name, and, knowing how television works, making a case for himself by offering them connections with the real leaders of crime, the big corporate houses.
‘What was the difference in the strategy we just saw?’, I asked as the Joker, the figure in forum theatre who facilitates discussion between audience and stage. And in the discussion that followed what articulated was a crucial dilemma for not just the DNT movement, but for struggles of most marginalised and despised groups – How does one relate to the ‘injurious’ name, the name that marks us as criminals, as oppressed castes, as queers, as minority religions? Do we pick it up and instil pride in it, do we emphasise our otherness, or do we disavow the name, or indeed disavow our difference itself? Do we embrace sanitised forms of address or hold on to, and reinvigorate our ‘states of injury’ as names of pride?
There are multiple elements to this dilemma, but in this post we hone in on the imperative of respectability in representation. This, we find, has been an underlying tension in the podcast series. On one hand we see the framing of the Chhara self (and of other DNT communities) as respectable citizens, speaking purely of the violence visited upon DNT communities, demanding witness to their struggles for survival and worthy for that reason of dignity. This is the voice of dignified victimhood structurally expected in the documentary form, especially where film is conceptualised as an antidote to injurious stereotypes. It is the impeccable saree of the widow we encountered in our second blogpost, it is the quantified data on school dropouts in policy briefs, it is the measured tone of activists laying down facts which might speak for themselves. It is the face of the unfairly marginalised evoking a moral economy.
This, in turn produces the affect, if not the figure, of the somehow justifiably marginalised. This is the other face. This is the face of the women who run the production side of the alcohol business, the young man who chooses to work in the business of bootlegging, or indeed of petty theft. In other contexts, this is the sex worker who refuses to occupy the palatable image of victimhood, the working-class queer who emphasises her sexualness publicly (rather than the desexualised ‘good gay’ that the law is willing to accommodate in the realm of citizenship), it is the Adivasi community that maintains its non-vegetarianism and alcohol consumption in the face of either Gandhian or Hindutva imperative of transformation into upper caste Hindu aspirational forms. The public transcript, to borrow a phrase from James Scott (1990), in other words, effectively, and at times aggressively, pushes a fundamental truth of being into the realm of the hidden transcript. It creates that which cannot be spoken.
That which cannot be spoken, does not, however, disappear. It insists, it rearticulates. Episode 4 of the first season of the podcast, titled ‘History of pre and post-independence’ was made specifically to commemorate ‘Vimukti Divas’, the 31st of August, the anniversary of the day in 1952, 4 years after India has itself gained independence from British rule, when the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 was finally repealed. This is now celebrated as the actual Independence Day by millions of people from De-notified Tribes. The episode is a melange of historical retellings tracing the political and legal history of DNTs, interviews with community leaders and most remarkably a conversation between two old women recollecting their childhoods and the various shifts in lives and livelihood. This is all mostly in the measured tone of the respectable citizen. The rupture in the episode, however, comes in the form of a compelling rap song, Hun Janmjat Chor Kada Tiya (‘I was not born a criminal’) a collaboration between young men from Chharanagar, and Bhantu musicians from Maharashtra, that brings the history of DNT and nomadic tribes into lyrical manifestation, starting with the period before criminalisation and laying out the various ways in which the promise of post-coloniality, and of citizenship has been denied. In the song we find a striking disjuncture between spoken word and image, as the chorus ‘I am not a criminal’ contrasts with the affect of the song, the anger in its choreography and the unapologetic ‘bad boy’ aesthetic. Here, for the first time in the series we see that other self, one that expresses a pride in being able to feed one’s people through the art of theft, which expresses anger at the failure of the state and the violence meted upon its people, one that expresses a revolutionary impulse without being tamed in to a policy negotiation. Scott’s hidden transcript has ruptured onto the main stage, partly in words, but most effectively as aesthetic.
This combination of the respectable, measured voice and a revolutionary voice unfettered by the imperatives of palatability emerges throughout the podcast series. This category of that which cannot be spoken is not, of course limited to the question of respectability. We saw in earlier blogposts, something similar with the experience of pain and the melodramatisation necessary for conveying the experience of death and loss during the pandemic. In the context of indigenous film, a similar technique has been discussed in terms of hyper-realisation. Drawing on Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor, Biddle and Lea (2018) for instance conceptualise of a “hyper-real of survivance” that uses art (including practices of artificial intensification and faking with the truth) “to make the real more real, when the real is itself what is at risk, at stake: namely, Indigenous history, language, presence”. It is an “hyper-real of survivance” in contexts of erasure of indigenous life and experience and in the absence of responsible media journalism. The striking recurrence here is the role of aesthetics in the expression of that which cannot be spoken, whether this be through music, through dramatic performances and monologues, through evocative cut-aways, soundtrack, poetry or indeed techniques in camera work and editing.
Freud’s notion of ‘Sublimation’ is a useful starting point for a theoretical meditation on the relationship between these voices as articulating in the podcasts. We may reframe ‘sublimation’ for our purposes, as a mechanism through which an impulse that is too terrifying, or is culturally ‘inappropriate’ to express, re-articulates in another form that is culturally acceptable. In Freud this process is evidence of maturity, whereby the sexual dimension of an ‘infantile erotic wish’ is dispelled in favour of socially acceptable behaviour (Laplanche and Plantis 431-34, cf Buckner). In Freud, we already see this as one of the ‘origins of artistic activity’ (Freud and Strachey, 1905[1953], p. 238). Rather than an evasion of the impulse, its denial, projection or displacement, here we see its transformation, significantly carrying within it the kernel of the impulse itself. There are multiple critiques of Freud’s theory of course, the most striking of which is perhaps Oswald de Andrade’s notion of anthropofagia, a form of cannibalism, as articulating in his 1928 piece, at the same time as we see the publication of Breton’s Surrealist manifesto. The Brazilian artist does not simply reject or resist the idiom of the coloniser, but rather ‘consumes’ it, transforms it and utilises it (Maddox 2014). What we see here is a resistance to the cleaving of the civilised from the savage, and the inversion of the teleology – the indigenous ‘consume’ the coloniser, just as the idiom of respectability is deployed in the podcasts, and yet transformed by their being engulfed in an aesthetic of hyper-realisation.
A second frame here is the Lacanian approach seeing the inevitable failure of the Symbolic in articulating the Real. Here we see the Real, which by definition cannot be symbolised, constantly returning to haunt the attempts at representation. This haunting in the podcasts is through ruptures generated by aesthetics, a subtle (and often not so subtle) reminder that the voice of respectable victimhood is a failure of representation that nevertheless indexes that which cannot be spoken. The rap song thus ruptures through the respectability of the symbolic and sustains it as an always incomplete object.
A final theoretical resonance lies with Deleuze’s meditation on the notion of discourse, where he insists that in Foucault’s Archaeological project, every stratum must be understood to be a relationship between the ‘articulable’ (the realm of word, what can be said, what can be written), and the ‘visible’ (that which can be seen). In modernity the articulable gains primacy, and yet, argues Deleuze, “visibilities…remain irreducible to statements and remain all the more so for developing a passion for the action of statements.” (Deleuze 1988:43) What then is the relationship here, between that which is said and that which is made visible? Deleuze conceptualises ‘two lights’, again in reference to Foucault. “…a first light opens up things and brings forth visibilities as flashes and shimmerings, which are the ‘second light’…” (Deleuze 1988:50). The first light, in other words, is the condition for the second being sensed. It is the visible (here, the aesthetic, the musical, the aural) that allows for the articulable (the words of the respectable marginalised) to be experienced beyond itself. In indigenous film we thus see this strategy of surrounding that which can be said, with the aesthetic of that which cannot, which enables the colonised to consume the coloniser and utilise it, for the Real to rupture through the symbolic, refusing erasure through civility.
Biddle, Jennifer L. and Lea, Tess. Hyperrealism and Other Indigenous Forms of ‘Faking It with the Truth’, in Visual Anthropology Review, 34 ( 1): 5–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/var.12148
Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault (trans by Seán Hand) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Freud, Sigmund (1905 [1953]), trans. James Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. VII, London: The Hogarth Press. p. 238
Laplanche, Jean. 1997. Aims of the Psychoanalytic Process, JEP: European Journal of Psychoanalysis, 5, Spring-Fall.
Maddox, John T. 2014. AfroReggae: “Antropofagia,” Sublimation, and Intimate Revolt in the “Favela” Hispania, 97 (3): 463-476
Scott, James C. (1990), Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven: Yale University Press.
akshay khanna is a Delhi-based Social Anthropologist, International Development Consultant, theatre practitioner and amateur chef, with training in Law and Medical Anthropology and the author of Sexualness (2016, New Text), which tells a story of Queer movements in India, develops a framework to think the sexual from the global south, and introduces Quantum Physics into the study of the sexual.
Alice Tilche is a lecturer in Anthropology and Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, UK. Her research at the intersection of art and activism employs visual, collaborative and arts-based methods to research social transformations – including work on the cultural politics of indigeneity, migration, nationalism and most recently Covid-19. Alice’s book Adivasi Art and Activism: curation in a nationalist agewas published with Washington University Press in 2022. Her collaborative film projects including Sundarana (2011), Broken Gods (2019) and Budhan-Podcast (2021) have been selected for a number of international film screenings and festivals.
We very much welcome questions and feedback @ alice.tilche@leicester.ac.uk and xaefis@gmail.com
Cite as: Tilche, Alice and khanna, akshay. 2022. “That which cannot be spoken.” Focaalblog, 5 September. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/09/05/alice-tilche-akshay-khanna-that-which-cannot-be-spoken/