The Final Question

by Saratchandra Chattopadhyay

  What is most remarkable about this process is the extent to which it both relies upon and goes beyond the novel’s techniques of realist representation, making our experience of reading, in a deep sense, emancipatory. Early in the novel, there is a conversation between Ashu Babu and Kamal about the most splendid of Agra’s historical monuments, the Taj Mahal. Ashu Babu’s admiration is expressive of a romantic, but also conservative, idealism: the Taj is the poetry of love, an emperor’s grief and devotion embodied in pure white marble. Kamal thinks this a profound misconception. Shah Jahan, she points out, had other begums. Mumtaz’s death was not the sole event of importance in his life, only the immediate and accidental cause of this monument, which could equally have been inspired by religion or war. Is it not enough to think of the Taj as expressive of its creator’s realm of joy? Ashu Babu is shocked by this answer: for him the Taj would lose its beauty if it were not associated with an ideal love. What we admire is the very idea of such love, not the splendour of its monument. Kamal disagrees again: a love so fixed and immutable is not worthy of our admiration. Human beings change; love too must change, must attach itself to new objects in order to live and grow. Manorama, who has disliked Kamal from the start and is angered by her indecorous assertion of these opinions in male company, insults Kamal by suggesting that her own attachments have not been permanent. But Kamal is not offended. Much later, almost at the end of the novel, she tells Ajit that she wants their love to be a room where a living person might lie, not a tomb for the dead.

  The Final Question is set in Agra. The image of the Taj Mahal, both as symbol and in the reality of its historical presence, is a constant element in the novel’s structure. But what it represents is open to the novel’s chosen mode of questioning, just as the reminders of its presence are drawn into the structural pattern of repetition with difference. Kamal’s conversation with Ashu Babu recalls Rabindranath Tagore’s great poem on the emperor Shah Jahan (1914), a poem which also, in its structure of assertion, question and qualification, uses the dialogic mode of argument to make almost exactly the same point, though in the context of memory rather than devotion. Does the Taj speak to us of a never-forgotten love? Or has its creator moved away, on the path of oblivion that is also the road to freedom? At the end of the poem, it is the emperor who is absent, and therefore free; the poet, weighed down by memory, remains present before a monument whose meaning has become profoundly ambiguous. Saratchandra was undoubtedly drawing upon Rabindranath’s poem, which would have been familiar to any cultivated reader. But Kamal’s defence of change is not simply rehearsed; it is a necessary part of the novel’s engagement with its setting, its willingness to confront the problems of history and open them up to further questioning.

  History appears to be dead at the start of the novel, reduced to a customary knowledge about tombs and monuments, a habitual exercise of wonder at the fading splendours of Agra. The Bengalis resident here, we are told, have exhausted the resources of the city’s past:

  Epidemics of smallpox and the bubonic plague apart, they led profoundly peaceful lives. They had long since done the rounds of the Mughal forts and buildings; they knew by heart the complete list of all the large, small and middling, derelict and intact tombs of nobles and viziers. Even the world famous Taj Mahal had lost its novelty for them. They had wrung dry all customary ploys and stratagems to admire its beauty from both banks of the Yamuna: with a moist, languid gaze in the evening, with half-shut eyes in the moonlight, or staring vacantly through the darkness. They knew all the effusions of famous men, all about the poems and the men who wrote them, all about those who wanted to end their lives in rapture while standing in front of it. Their knowledge of history too was complete. Even their small children knew which begum used which apartment during childbirth; which Jat leader cooked his meal when and where—how ancient each charred smudge on the wall was; which bandit looted how many jewels and their estimated value. Nothing was unknown to any of them. (p. 1)

  The deadness of this knowledge is momentarily stirred by fresh curiosity when Ashutosh Gupta and his daughter come to take up residence in the city. Social life acquires a new interest and urgency; the present, if not the past, compels and absorbs attention. Yet the narrator’s amused, ironic account of the newcomers traces the possibility of their lapsing into precisely the same habitual indifference. When they undertake their late-afternoon excursion to the Taj, Ashu Babu is content to rest in the gardens below, secure in his reverence for ideal love; Manorama is anxious that Ajit, who has never seen the monument, should view it in the best light and from the most favourable angle. It is this entirely predictable social event that is interrupted by the meeting with Kamal and her husband Shibnath. The encounter not only postpones Ajit’s intended raptures; it casts the whole substance of his experience into doubt, unsettling what these characters have assumed to be settled and known.

  Kamal’s function in the novel is that of disturbing known categories of belief and experience, and in formal and ideological terms she constitutes a major problem of representation. At times her presence in the realist fabric of the novel opens up an unbridgeable gap between the probable and the possible, reminding us of The Final Question’s own uncertain status between bildungsroman and dialectic novel. Like Rabindranath’s Gora, whom she sometimes resembles in her passion for talk, Kamal is a deliberate attempt on the novelist’s part to conflate East and West, a colonial hybrid more impure but less self-denying than Rabindranath’s hero. Racially, she is the half-European product of a liaison between an English tea planter and a young Bengali widow (unlike Gora, who is an Irish child brought up by a Bengali family); but socially and psychologically, she appears untroubled by feelings of illegitimacy. She values the education she received from her father, whose saintliness and wisdom constitute one of the positive ideals she lives by; and though she tells Ajit that her first husband was an Assamese Christian, her own religion is in doubt. Yet in appearance, speech and social behaviour, she seems Bengali enough to gain entry to the society of the prabasi Bengalis of Agra. In personal life she presents an extraordinary blend of rigid self-restraint and an unabashedly hedonistic philosophy; her rationalism, absolute in many respects, is nonetheless qualified by Saratchandra’s own concessions to public taste, social morality and realist representation.

  Given the unlikelihood of all this within the nominal verisimilitude of the novel’s bourgeois realism, it is easy to dismiss Kamal as an unsuccessful, even unworkable attempt on Saratchandra’s part, late in his creative life, to construct a vehicle for his ideas about society, politics and women; and indeed Kamal’s character is something of a project, a kind of blueprint for the future, not part of the novel’s realist substance. Of all the characters in The Final Question, she is certainly the least interiorized, the least amenable to the reader’s strenuous and ceaseless absorption of fiction into inner life. In the realist novel, it is this activity of the reader that opens places and persons to hermeneutic understanding, verstehen in the classic sense, though it may also prove a realist trap in its confusion of imagination with desire. Kamal stands resolutely, almost to the very end, outside the scope of this assimilation. Her opinions are accessible to reason; her actions form part of the formal logic of the plot. But we are prevented from knowing what she feels, perhaps because we know what she thinks. This relentless exteriorization of self, even where that self is most fractured by the contrary claims of reason, passion and history—as in Kamal’s relations with Ajit and Rajen—makes her a character to be read against the grain of realism, just as she stands against the grain of social history. Her hybridity is not so much a matter of circumstance, the accidental outcome of unequal power relations in a colonial society, as a projective reading of the union of Western reason with Indian sensibility.

  This is of importance in the understanding of Kamal’s feminism, a crucial element in the novel’s substance and differing in many respects from the liberal feminist ideology espoused in Saratchandra’s other fiction.
Much of Saratchandra’s work concerns itself with the condition of women, whether in the rural settings of Bardidi (The Elder Sister, 1913) and Pallisamaj (Village Society, 1916) or among the more urban, displaced middle class of Grihadaha (The Burning of the Home, 1920). It is this concern, looking on the one hand towards contemporary campaigns for social and legal reform, and on the other towards the stubbornly local character of individual distress, that is the source of the characteristic pathos of his writing, as well as of its sharp edge of social satire. In the early novels at least, the treatment of suffering itself becomes a powerful instrument of censure; sentiment, here the sign of sympathetic identification, becomes a means through which public sensibility can be radically transformed. It would be a mistake to minimize, or to treat as merely sentimental the impact of such writing on the manners and mores of the Bengali middle class of the 1920s and 1930s. Nevertheless, in The Final Question Saratchandra consciously chooses a more intellectualized, in some respects more neutral and deliberative treatment of private lives and public identities. The feminism of the earlier works is inseparably linked to the moral function of sentiment, enlisting sympathy for women’s suffering in an oppressive or cruel patriarchal order, and directing us towards a liberal advocacy of the right of choice while it enlarges our sense of the complexity, pain, and conflicting loyalties of women’s inner lives. This advocacy of the right that women, no less than men, have to a personal good, is more open in the later writings, especially in the complicated patterns of freedom and responsibility traced in such works as Charitrahin (The Rake, 1917), or Grihadaha (1920). Yet it could be argued that liberal sympathy, produced by the imaginative ability to identify with the sufferings of a representative female character, is unthreatening to one’s own sense of place in the established social order. This order can absorb without much disturbance to itself a certain idealization of women’s suffering and sacrifice, as well as a reformist emphasis on the virtues of compassion, justice and even a restricted social freedom. Indeed, these become, as social historians have shown, an inseparable part of the ideology of nationalism and the construction of a Bengali personal identity from the late nineteenth-century onwards.

  Unlike, say, Ghare-Baire, Shesh Prashna is an unfashionable point of reference in discussions of the narrative formation of female subjectivity in this period. Part of the reason for this may be the discomfort produced by Saratchandra’s characterization of Kamal. It is important to realize how crucial this narrative formation was to national and social self-consciousness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Bengal, especially as inflected by reformist social ideology.2 Beginning with hortatory school primers for the education of young girls, and continuing through various kinds of writing aimed not simply at women, but at the men whose assumed responsibility it was to enlighten and educate them, we can trace a variety of efforts to construct models of female selfhood. Fiction might become the instrument for the invention of a new kind of woman, a woman who could both objectify the ideals of liberal education and bear, like Sucharita in Tagore’s Gora (1909) and Bimala in Ghare-Baire, the burden of modernity, internalizing its problematic and offering a site for the uneasy resolution of a struggle between old and new which is almost entirely determined and directed by men. Women were urged to remake themselves in terms of these fictional projections while, at the same time, they were beginning to discover in their own efforts at fiction or autobiography the possibility of claiming a self through personal narrative. I am thinking here not only of the writings of early women novelists like Rabindranath’s accomplished elder sister Swarnakumari Debi, Sharatkumari Chaudhurani, or Nirupama Debi (Saratchandra himself wrote a critique of the work of some female writers including Nirupama Debi3), but also of the emergent forms of autobiography or personal diary as attempted by Rassundari Debi, Kailashbasini Debi, Debi Saradasundari and Nistarini Debi4—or, for that matter, the actress Binodini Dasi whose autobiographical fragment Amar Abhinetri Jiban (My Life as an Actress) appeared in a journal edited by Saratchandra5 in the 1920s. Saratchandra’s own work, in the early twentieth century, had an important role to play in its idealization of female suffering and sacrifice, as well as its openly expressed indignation at women’s dependence and deprivation in an unjust social order. The Final Question is clearly intended as Saratchandra’s most considered and extended contribution to larger debates over the place of women, sexual morality and nationalist politics; but it is also a considerable departure from his earlier practice.

  Instead of offering us a subject whose internalization of suffering is a means through which the reader can share in the process of self-realization, the painful growth and understanding of a personal identity, Saratchandra presents Kamal as a character whose identity is already formed, and who insists on subjecting the world and its inhabitants to an unsparing, rational critique of behaviour, belief and morality. The identity claimed for Kamal here is in a sense hypothetical; it is instrumental to the critique, which would be impossible without it. In his earlier novels, Saratchandra had used sentiment itself as a moral instrument; but The Final Question, remarkably, does not use sentiment in this way. This is an important departure, not simply in the treatment of the central figure of Kamal, but also in that of other women in the novel such as Manorama, Nilima or Bela (though Nilima may be a partial exception).

  Freedom is the most important constituent of Kamal’s feminist ideology, a freedom asserted in the most unpropitious, circumscribed social conditions. Her poverty and the necessarily restricted nature of her social interaction are never allowed to stand in the way of her insistent claim to the life of reason. It is in the exercise of this reason, not in social choice, that Kamal is free. The radicalism of The Final Question consists not only in the nature of the rational critique of tradition that she offers, but also, much more importantly, in that it is articulated by a woman. By the time Saratchandra came to attribute these opinions to Kamal, they had already become part of the discourse of reason in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bengal, a discourse shaped by the thought of the European Enlightenment and later influenced by the Positivism of Auguste Comte. What is remarkable about Saratchandra’s choice of a vehicle for these ideas is his effort to conceptualize reform in the person of the new woman born of the unhappiness and inequality of the colonial encounter. Kamal’s rationality, though it must inevitably sometimes appear to be the echo of a larger (and largely male) discourse, is also specifically the rationality of a female subject struggling to find her place in a changing world. It is a world in which—in real terms—the opinions of women are not of much moment; that they become so in this novel is also a gesture, on Saratchandra’s part, towards the future.

  Kamal can therefore refuse to idealize the widower Ashutosh Gupta (like the Taj Mahal, to which he is compared) as an embodiment of undying attachment to his dead wife, just as she can reprove Abinash’s widowed sister-in-law Nilima for sacrificing herself to the ‘duty’ of caring for Abinash’s household; she can accept the reality of Shibnath’s abandonment of her, as well as the probable outcome of Manorama’s elopement with him; she can freely choose to live with Ajit and not marry him. Moreover, she can defend these choices in lengthy conversations about marriage, religion, morality, the influence of Western ideas, the value of tradition, the nature of national identity, the lessons of history, the inevitability of progress. It is from the position defined through these conversations that she will criticize the unrewarding and often harsh asceticism of Haren’s ‘ashram’, which imposes much physical hardship on its inmates, while she dissents from the backward-looking and obscurantist ideology of Hindu revivalism on which Satish seeks to found it.

  In an important passage, late in the novel, Nilima speaks of the bitterness of being a woman in a society made and controlled by men. Her own situation as a childless widow, taught by convention to subdue her desires and satisfactions to those of others, makes her conscious of the falsity of a forced selflessness or self-sacrifice. Kamal had not
ed, almost on first acquaintance, the hollowness of Abinash’s domestic idyll. This image of domesticity, like others in the novel, is now in disarray; directly or indirectly, Kamal’s disruptive presence has forced a variety of individual rearrangements. But Nilima has nowhere to go; unlike Kamal, she lacks the confidence to choose her place. For her, she says, women’s liberty or independence (the English word emancipation is also used later by Kamal) had remained empty terms until Kamal made her realize that liberty was a matter of self-knowledge:

  I’ve now found out that liberty can be obtained neither by theoretical arguments, nor by pleading justice and morality, nor by staging a concerted quarrel with men at a meeting. It’s something that no one can give to another—not something to be owed or paid as a due. Looking at Kamal, you can easily understand that it comes of its own accord—through one’s own fulfilment, by the enlargement of one’s own soul. (p. 274)

  Kamal’s own indifference to public opinion, her calm pursuit of a chosen mode of life, and the honesty with which she is shown to face the world make her a model of this inner freedom. It is a freedom conceived independently of social constraints, indeed of the restrictions of the real. It could not have been articulated had it not been disinvested of the burden of suffering, yet this results in a necessary falsification. For Saratchandra, a male writer struggling to conceptualize the new woman born of a colonial society in the process of self-modernization, it is a model which has to carry the discursive burden of Enlightenment reason, biological and evolutionary theory, Spencerian sociology and sexual ethics, as well as contemporary critiques of nationalism. It would be surprising if the model were able to bear this weight, and indeed there are moments when the strain is more than apparent.