Homecoming

 

I have never been able to identify the component parts of that distinctive smell that hits you when you step out of the plane into the arms of Kolkata. The humidity is part of it, and it creeps over your skin in a sensual caress of petrol fumes and dust and all the other unidentified particles of the Kolkata air. The moment it hits me something inside me changes, something as unidentifiable as the smell itself. I confess to being disappointed as I settled into one of the city’s new white and blue ‘AC Taxis’. I watched with nostalgic envy as the people before and after me stepped into rattling yellow ambassadors which, in legions, fill Kolkata’s highways like cheerful golden beetles carrying on through the day and the night.

This time it had been a particularly horrible journey. I came alone, having packed up my room and my job in London, not yet knowing where I will live when I start my PhD in an unfamiliar city on my return. Fate (or human frailty) added an extra helping of unexpected personal heartbreak to the precarious inbetweenness of things which, exacerbated by a less than judicious choice of plane literature, had me sobbing like a madwoman all the way. For the first time in my life I felt I have ‘run away’ to Kolkata. But then, where else should I run?

 

As a number of anthropologists who have gone before me have noticed¹, the peoples, locations and social phenomena individual researchers end up working on are not arbitrarily linked to our own needs and life experiences as human beings. It is probably not an accident that my first full dissertation on my research in India revolved around complex notions and experiences of ‘home’, of ‘amar jayga’ [my place], and the peculiar predicament of those who, for whatever reason, don’t feel they can be entirely ‘themselves’ in the place in which they live. It is also no accident, on reflection, that I work with groups of people for whom different aspects of their personal identity compete and conflict, sometimes jarring (or seen to by other people) with Indianness, Indian womanhood or Bengaliness, whatever these things are purported to mean. In England, the country of my birth, I’m exoticised. In India, the country of my cultural heritage, I’m occidentalised. In each place I am called upon to demonstrate the veracity of my claimed identity. Everybody demands to know where I belong. Nobody would like to know that more than me.

 

Home is a funny concept. It’s tied up with different trappings wherever you go. A typical Euro-American interpretation might conjure up a private, personal space, a safe place where one’s identity can be explored and expressed fully, a relief from the rules of the outside social world. There are other factors. Family. People who are like you. Perhaps, people who you have chosen, and who you have played a part in creating. I still don’t have the answers.

 

My Kaku and Kakima² opened the door with as little fuss or surprise as if I’d rolled back home from a day’s work. It’s a mystery to me how, standing in the centre of my uncle’s little flat, I feel comforted by the faded pink and yellow walls that now surround me. Those emotions of despair, uncertainty, pain, stress and pressure are tenderly replaced with a feeling of peace across the breadth and depth of my chest. Here is safety and continuity. My black and white grandparents gaze solemnly at me from their elevated position near our household Hindu shrine. We drink thick, sweet tea around the red lacquered dinner table and live out within a day our familiar patterns of provoking and enjoying each other. Nothing is demanded of me here. My Kaku accepts my scolding him about salt and tobacco consumption as I accept Kakima’s gentle observation that, despite my protests, I need to catch up on forgotten sleep. They know the hesitations in my Bengali speech will disappear with the weekend, and there’s no need to blame it on Englishness. Rather it is to be blamed on being away from here for so long.

There isn’t an exact word for ‘home’ in Bengali. Use of the possessive pronoun amar indicates that sentiment of belonging through ownership. In a few days I’ll be itching for a piano, missing Western Classical Music, and fawning for the ones that I love who aren’t with me. I fill that hole in my arms with my bolster pillow at night. However here my heart steadies me, and as I press my face to the pillow Kolkata’s air slips its arms about me, kisses my hair and holds me tight.

Notes

1. Navaro-Yashin, Y., 2012. The Make-Believe Space. Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity, Duke, Londres.
   Thiranagama, S., 2011. In my mother’s house: Civil war in Sri Lanka. University of Pennsylvania Press.
2. Kaku – Father’s younger brother; Kakima – Kaku’s wife

Sukanya : A Review of Ravi Shankar’s only Opera

Opera is one of the great loves of my life, and yet it is an art from which I feel sometimes helplessly absent. It is, by its nature as a Western European art form, largely written by white ‘Western’ composers using the languages and symbolisms of these cultures. Symbols like white weddings and black funerals, symbols that are so hegemonically ingrained that most of the world don’t perceive them as symbols, systems of meaning, iconographic worlds that stir some folk more deeply than others. Other folk have different ways of loving, of being, of making meaning of out life.

Though born in Yorkshire, in many ways I am and I feel myself one of those ‘others’. Of course what I love most about Opera is that, through music, it transcends these worldly differences and aims (often) to tackle the heart of something that is above all divisions, to explore those things that are universally human – love, death, hate, dilemma, identity. Yet  the anthropologist in me wants to remind you that all human experience, even these universals, are expressed in culturally specific, meaningful ways. In this sense, in opera, I am (as a young British South Asian woman of mixed heritage) utterly unrepresented.

Image Source : The Guardian

There was a lot riding on Ravi Shankar’s Sukanya for me. After seeing Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers at ENO last year I was so set back by the sense of disenfranchisement I felt from two hours of inaccurate, reductionist and (to me) frankly offensive Orientalism was so acute that I couldn’t even bring myself to write about it. I’ve dreamed for myself about what an opera bringing the two parts of me together would look like. I was simultaneously afraid and excited to experience Sukanya. If anybody could achieve a sure representation of Indianness through Opera, surely it would be Pandit Ravi Shankar. Ten minutes into the opera I was weeping like I wept at the end of Der Rosenkavalier – I felt real. I was seeing something of myself, something true about my life, in operatic art for the first time.

Sukanya will touch and stir people from diverse backgrounds (as it did last night), if through nothing other than the unspeakable beauty and elegance of its music. The music is, in its own right, thrilling. Between the vision of Ravi Shankar and the dedication of arranger and conductor David Murphy there is an imaginative fusion of Indian and Western Classical styles, forms and principles that is simultaneously true and authentic to both traditions in their vast complexity, without reducing or compromising either one. Indian instruments play alongside Western Orchestra. The arias and choruses make use of konnakol (spoken Indian rhythmic patterns) and improvisations on ragas, and the libretto travels through English story-telling to the words of Hindi prayers and shamelessly Bengali declarations of love.

Image Source : The Guardian

The expression and Anglicised pronunciations of the Indian elements is curiously insignificant, even adding to the charm and the sense of art rising above divisions. The two traditions were full, supple, and unified, complementing one another, even elevating one another in new and jarringly peculiar ways. The singers were every one of them exceptional, and their bravery and skill in working between Western art music and raga-based improvisation effective and impressive. It was a joy also to see such an ethnically diverse cast – I have never seen so many different backgrounds represented on an ‘opera’ stage.

Akash Odedra’s company of dancers punctuated and enhanced the story through a fantastical fusion of Indian classical dance styles (which lend themselves to story-telling) and contemporary interpretation. Although semi-staged, this production was fully absorbing, and the dancers can take a large degree of credit for generating and cementing this effect.

 

For me personally this Opera was the most tender, affirming and terrifying work I’ve seen. After a lifetime of craving a way to bring together the two inseparable sides of myself – British and Indian, always neither, always both – now there is an Opera that communicates what that is like, what it looks like and sounds like and sings like, to the world. I wondered whether my response might be biased – but I know that if after all this time somebody had staged something so intimate as an operatic love scene in Bengali and missed the mark even a little it would have hurt me ten times more than the Orientalism of The Pearl Fishers and its ilk. This is a very special piece of work, musically groundbreaking and wonderfully crafted, and I look forward to its staging in a long-term run sometime soon.

“As an Anthropologist…”

Anthropology ruined my life. After three years of not having time to finish a (fiction) book for pure pleasure, despite my habit of always carrying one with me, I went into a bookshop the other week to pick up something to read while travelling. I found myself stopped dead, captivated, and struggling to choose two from a selection including Hegel’s Philosophy, Aquinas, Kirkegaard, Aristotle’s Nichomadean Ethics, and even titles such as Leviathan and Wealth of Nations. I have just graduated (maybe that’s part of it), and here I am sitting in a patisseries in my free time, reading “Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs!”. I don’t know whether to embrace it, or kick myself in the head.

However, that is not the main part of it. Anthropology has changed me, fundamentally. It has given me new eyes and a new mind, and now I simply can’t function in the world without my brain launching a critical analysis of the most basic or mundane things that may go on in front of my eyes. Actions, events, sentences, marketing campaigns…. I describe film endings as “problematic” and flinch at portrayals of “the poor” in charity videos. When something like this happens (which is a couple of times a day), I either suffer the frustration of a suppressed polemic in my head, or I say to the nearest person who will listen, “As an anthropologist…” and proceed to describe The-World-According-to Sahlins/Affect Theorists/The Subaltern Studies Group/Strathern [the possibilities are endless] and why they and/or the subject in question are right, wrong, peculiar, fascinating. happening, impossible, or really about something entirely other than they appear.

I have to laugh at myself when I do this now, not least because I hadn’t noticed that I did it until one friend quipped, “Don’t you ‘As an Anthropologist’ me!”, and another burst into hysterical laughter. Apparently, I do it all the time. In fact the raison d’être of this blog is not least to be an outlet for those frustrated and out-of-place thoughts that constantly disrupt my experience of everyday life, and which when voiced threaten to disrupt my company’s patience – among other things.

I think that the problem is well approached by thinking about what Martha Nussbaum said about teaching anthropology. I quote extremely loosely from I-can’t-quite-remember where, but she said that the aim of teaching anthropology is to get students to rethink and challenge pretty much everything that they have taken for granted about the world. As the trusty formula goes, the role of the anthropologist is to “make the strange familiar, but to make the familiar strange” (Miner 1956). Which is great. Anthropology opens your eyes to a million and one things you never even knew how to see before – some of which you grow to wish, at times, that you never had. On the other hand, this can make it extremely difficult to have a basic conversation with somebody.

The thing is, once you have deconstructed the taken-for-granted, familiar concepts of daily life and human culture, you find yourself having new taken-for-granteds that are different to everybody else’s. After that, you start to take for granted those deconstructed taken-for-granteds, in all their strangeness, without even noticing. You don’t know how to think of nations as other than imagined, or of geography as any kind of real other than a politico-historical ‘hyperreal’, not to speak of how you think of ‘history’ and the ‘politico-historical’. Anthropologists do not (generally) take for granted (these days) that ‘sexuality’ is always a meanginful and locatable concept, that ‘biology’ and ‘sex/gender’ are self-evident, immutable, concrete and infallible referents. Anthropologists even question the idea that there is such a thing as an individual or personal ‘self’. However, when you make a reference to one of these concepts in everyday conversation it can in fact stop the conversation dead – like the time when my family friends, around the dinner table, were talking about birds as if they had human-style family relationships, and I pointed out that it was arguably only possible to think in such a romanticised, detached way about animals because of the emergence of the middle class in the late medieval period, before which both peasants and the aristocracy had, at opposite ends of the scale, closer relationships with animals and maintained no illusions about animals’ actual behaviour. The table was silent, almost comically, for a full two minutes…

This is not the only such incident. When you make use of these concepts, putting them back into the world you took them out of, you can feel the discomfort and confusion around you (after all, you are flash-bombing peoples’ taken-for-granteds, without so much as having the presence of mind to think twice about whether it is appropriate or called for). In fact, you feel like, look like, and actually are, the idiot in that situation. In that situation, you are the one who cannot see the obvious and is talking nonsense. By some bizarre twist, what you “know” not to precisely be the full story is still very much “the case” in the actual world, and still holds as if it were the full story without an anthropologist talking nonsense. And what nonsense it is, too!

Despite this, I hold that it is the very same kind of critical deconstruction of given assumptions that makes anthropology so valuable in its own right. I maintain that, of any one discipline, it has the most potential to contribute meaningfully to the world, to society and to human life. Anthropology has the potential to provide explanations, interpretations, translations, reflections, critique, and expose grossly generalising and sometimes damaging assumptions where nobody had hitherto noticed there were assumptions being made at all.

How to realise this potential is, of course, the subject of sore debate, undertaken with crippling embarrassment among anthropologists. Anthropologists are uncomfortably aware that for the most part, it is only other anthropologists who read ethnographies (anthropologist research). When policy-makers do get their hands on anthropology, it tends to feel more like appropriation and twisting of words than the otherwise desired engagement, leading sometimes to what are ‘disastrous results’ from the anthropologists’ perspective. Worse still, the anthropologists and anthropological concepts which parts of the general public may have heard of – such as Lévi-Strauss or Cultural Relativism – are often grossly misunderstood, outdated, and/or completely unrepresentative of the discipline now. Whence this irony whereby anthropology, the discipline that is supposed to be least disjunct from the ‘real’ world, often lands me in a situation where I realise just how little my own now-taken-for-granted (post-deconstruction) view of the world is not only unusual and profoundly off-the-wall, but at times quite absurd?

There is something anthropologically fascinating about the ways in which the ontological position I take within or in relation to a taken-for-granted world when I speak [less as a person than] “as an Anthropologist” so often leaves me outside that world, or misunderstood, creating jarring moments within it (sorry guys. That one was for the anthropologists – it’s supposed to be funny, honest). However, I am more than happy to suffer a few nodes of confusion and disjuncture in my daily life. I don’t often feel that way at the time it happens, but the thing is, when you habitually stop taking the taken-for-granted for granted, you realise something that takes your breath away: there is no such thing as “the mundane” or “the ordinary”. Everything is extraordinary – such that the ordinary itself is impossible to find once you really start looking.