The Final Question

by Saratchandra Chattopadhyay

  By the end of the nineteenth century, the ideology of social reform in Bengal, inspired by Western science and morality, had given way to a neo-Hindu revivalism asserting the need for introspection and a renewal of ancient tradition. Rabindranath, in his essay Byadhi o Pratikar (‘Disease and Remedy’, 1901), written in response to a work of social criticism by Ramendrasundar Trivedi, speaks of the hesitation and uncertainty of the present moment in contrast to the ‘faith in modernity’ of the past century. In that time, he suggests:

  [Western] civilization seemed ready to honour all humanity irrespective of race and colour: such was the promise it held out. We were spellbound by this. We contrasted the large-heartedness of that civilization with the narrowness of our own, and applauded the culture of Europe.10

  But this enchantment is already, for Rabindranath, a thing of the past. The inclusiveness of Western humanism was clearly a myth: science and reason were incapable, by themselves, of regenerating in a subject people the awareness of their own dignity and freedom. At the same time, Rabindranath criticizes, in his essays on nationalism as well as the seminal fiction of Ghare-Baire, the obscurantism and self-glorification implicit in the rhetoric of the nation, as well as its distortions of history:

  for all our miseries and shortcomings, we hold responsible the historical surprises that burst upon us from outside. This is the reason why we think that our one task is to build a political miracle of freedom upon the quicksand of social slavery.11

  In Saratchandra’s fictional representation of the debate, it is impossible to miss the irony of the moment. Satish’s identification of the Hindu ashram as the core of Indian greatness comes at a time when Harendra’s ashram is in disarray. Despite Ajit’s new-found enthusiasm and the money he is prepared to spend on setting up ashrams all over India, there is already a doubt at the heart of the enterprise. It is this doubt that Satish wants to set at rest by converting Kamal to his opinion. His failure to do so marks an irreparable rift in the ideology of the modern Indian state.

  Satish’s eulogy carries the weight not only of traditional belief, but of the historical context in which such belief could be nurtured: the culture of revolutionary terrorism in Bengal, bred in clubs and gymnasia for the training of young men in the service of the motherland.12 It is no accident that Rajen is wanted by the police, though Harendra studiously avoids official interest in his ashram. The Indian ashram, says Satish, at its core feels a deep respect and commitment towards the heritage of India. Renunciation, celibacy and self-abnegation are not virtues of the weak and powerless. In these, in the past, the materials for nation-building were inherent. It’s only by this path that the dying spirit of India can be revived. Through the rituals and observances of the ashram, we are trying to keep alive this faith and reverence. Through echoing hymns and the flames of holy fires, the ashram of an austere, spiritual India had once taken up the mission of working the genuine welfare of the nation. Is there anyone so foolish as to deny that the need for it is not lost? (p. 298)

  The hypnotic rhetoric of this speech can only be undercut by mockery. Kamal’s satirical comparison of the glories of ancient India to the dinosaur deliberately uses the discourse of evolutionary science to counter that of religious faith. This evolutionary critique takes into account not only the decay of the East, but also the inevitable failure of the West. Evil is not the real enemy of the good, asserts Kamal: the enemy of the good is the better. For Satish, freedom at the cost of sacrificing ‘the wisdom and ancient doctrines of India’ is not a victory for India but a triumph of the Western ethos and Western culture, equivalent to a death of the spirit. He notes the mistakes of history, the espousal of Western forms of knowledge by individuals in the previous century; but he contents himself with the lesson that ‘our conscience revived by way of reaction. We recognized our error’ (p. 303). Unexpectedly, even Ashu Babu agrees with him at a later point (p. 329): without endorsing Satish’s intolerance and bigotry, he urges upon Kamal the need for an ascetic ideal of self-knowledge. Yet Kamal, who recognizes ‘the pious, resolute Hindu heart burning like an unquenchable lamp in some secluded depth beneath the veneer of Western habits and manners’, refuses to accept this ideal as purely Hindu, while she contests its claim to the highest moral ground. The good of a nation, for her, is the good of its people: ‘If India lets herself be bound by Western knowledge, science and civilization, it might be a jolt to her pride, but not to her well-being’ (p. 303).

  The debate is not resolved, and the novel’s structure suggests that its resolution is left open to history—a history that extends beyond the fictional dialectic within which these characters are placed. Because Kamal’s future, and Ajit’s, are made central to that history, we may feel that it is finally the argument of progress, the vision of the modern, that opens the novel out to the future. For those who are left behind, like Satish, Harendra, Akshay and Nilima, the departure of Ashu Babu as of Kamal herself, signalling the conclusion of the narrative plot, is a kind of closure, a mark of ending in lives that will continue, but which will seem less important, less touched by the urgency of the time. Yet the novel’s close is marked by an event that contradicts this reading.

  That event, the news of Rajen’s sacrifice of his life to save the image of a Hindu deity from fire, can only be understood symbolically. Just as the heroism of the act consists in its significance for the believer, so too for us as readers, this is not an event in real time so much as a sign or token. The question—perhaps the final question—is: what kind of sign? Does Rajen’s sacrifice validate—comfortingly for Satish and his friends—the ideology of sacrifice, the meaning of ritual, the faith of religion? The nature of the act may itself be taken as a corrective to the confusion of ritual with faith. What Rajen saves is the image of the deity in the temple’s heart: everything else is burnt away by fire. The significance of his self-sacrifice lies in its identification of something at the core of religious faith that needs preserving. Stripped of ceremony and ritual observance, purged by fire, the living image of the god is seen as worthy of Rajen’s instinctive devotion.

  Yet the villagers who take out a procession to honour Rajen after his death have re-absorbed him into the fabric of their daily religious observances, blurring inevitably the distinction between the singularity of his act and the social practices that will naturalize it. The responses of Rajen’s friends in Agra are also almost wholly conventional. This may be a concession to those likely to be offended by the radical content of Kamal’s earlier critique of conventional idealization. Kamal’s own uncharacteristic enthusiasm for Rajen’s heroism is a means of reclaiming her for the nation. The incident and its aftermath offer a fiction of resolution, a means of closing the narrative plot while opening the plot of history. But in fact nothing is resolved. The incident retains in our minds the dramatic and unreal quality of nationalist myth, while inviting rational criticism. Is such a sacrifice either necessary or worthwhile? In a novel which chooses to ask questions rather than answer them, this last problem may prove the most intractable of all.

  The Final Question is a novel that needs to be read today, in the context of current debates on nationalism and on women’s freedom. More than half a century after Independence, we are faced with a crisis in the ideology of the nation-state: a crisis in which the historical and literary imagination must ‘anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past’ in order to understand the circumstances in which we find ourselves in the present.13 The project of modernity which Saratchandra represents through Kamal in The Final Question is necessarily unfinished in the novel; to look back on it from the perspective of the present is to ask how well its premises have served us. For we know that reason and freedom, whether in public life or in private relationships, are not absolute values; they are constructed differently by different discursive imperatives. Kamal’s own subject-position, the hybridity of her consciousness, her awareness of being a woman in a world largely determined by men, inflect her rationality and her power of choice. The strugg
le of the modern we witness through her is never free of its historical burden of debt, complicity and dependence. This is what makes Rajen’s death, with its converse idealization of tradition and spirituality, symbolically so powerful.

  Yet the very simplicity of this symbol, especially as read in present-day contexts of fundamentalist Hindu politics, is unsettling. As a character, Rajen is singular, even eccentric; so far as he possesses the capacity for personal attachment, he is attached to Kamal. His sacrifice is reductive of his personality in many respects while enhancing it in others. We would be doing an injustice to the insistently dialectical structure of the novel if we were to read Rajen’s sacrifice as summative. Rather, it helps us to see, at the close of this narrative, the nature of the oppositions that Saratchandra has tried to represent in the nation’s history. For us today, these oppositions are still valid, still unresolved. In our daily experience, we are called upon to negotiate the content of modernity (as Western liberal culture or as forms of political ideology) with religious belief or traditional ethics in complicated, unsatisfactory ways that may remind us of the unfinished conversations of this novel. At the same time, The Final Question may suggest to us, in its startlingly modern representations of a society struggling to come to terms with its own changes, the impossibility of a nationalism locked into a single, integrated mode of self-development.

  Saratchandra is a supremely intelligent writer, never blind to the problems he has created for himself and his readers. The Final Question is a book in which he takes unprecedented risks. In earlier novels he may be seen as risking a great deal for the sake of the unfree women at the centre of his plots; here, he places his whole narrative in danger in order to imagine a free woman. In trying to do this he draws upon himself the shadows of history, of politics, of social reality. No model of freedom can be valid without them; yet to some extent, as I have suggested, Saratchandra’s conceptualization seeks to go beyond what is historically or socially probable. That he should attempt this is a gesture to the future: it is a way of speaking to us, as readers of his novel several decades after it was first printed.

  SUPRIYA CHAUDHURI

  Translators’ Note

  1. All English words present in the Bengali original have been retained in italics. They indicate the interlarding of Bengali speech with English words, a growing practice among educated Bengalis to the present day. The social and class message should not be missed, though the specific nuance might vary greatly from occasion to occasion.

  2. A few Bengali terms of address need explanation.

  ‘Babu’ is added to the first name of an adult male, usually of the speaker’s own or superior class, as a formal or respectful mode of address or allusion. It is roughly equivalent to the use of ‘Mr’ with the surname among Englishmen. The first name might be clipped for the purpose: thus Ashutosh Gupta becomes ‘Ashu Babu’.

  ‘Babu’ can also be appended to words denoting real or assumed relationships. Thus Kamal calls Ashu Babu ‘Kakababu’ (roughly, ‘respected uncle’).

  ‘Mashai’ (Mahashay) is another way of addressing or referring to an adult male—sometimes formally, sometimes familiarly or jocularly. It is usually appended to the surname. Thus Nilima talks to or of Abinash Mukherjee as ‘Mukherjee [Bengali Mukhujye] Mashai’.

  Bengalis, like other Indians, commonly use familial terms for persons not related or even well known to them. Thus:

  ‘Dada’ (elder brother) and ‘didi’ (elder sister) are widely used of men and women of appropriate age. The words are sometimes curtailed to ‘da’ or ‘di’ and affixed to the first name of the person, which may also be curtailed for the purpose. Thus Harendra’s younger friends and associates refer to him as Haren-da.

  No clear distinction is made between siblings and cousins. ‘Dada’ and ‘didi’, like other terms for ‘brother’ and ‘sister’, can be used of siblings, cousins and indeed people with whom the speaker has no blood relationship and whom he or she may not even know very well.

  ‘Ma’ (mother) is used to address women of all ages, from a small child to an elderly person, with many shades of affection, respect or formality according to context. In most cases, even a rough translation is impossible, but the emotional implication is too important to miss. The term has been rendered in various ways. Where an elderly man like Ashu Babu uses it to address his daughter or some other young woman like Kamal, ‘my dear’ often appears to be a feasible equivalent.

  1

  AT VARIOUS TIMES AND FOR VARIOUS REASONS, MANY BENGALI families came westwards to settle in the town of Agra. Some had lived there for generations; others, recently arrived, were still at the lodging house stage. Epidemics of smallpox and bubonic plague apart, they led profoundly peaceful lives. They had 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 of admiring 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.

  Then suddenly one day there was a flutter in the Bengali community, shattering this knowledge and serenity. Groups of travellers passed through Agra every day; there were occasional crowds, from American tourists to Vaishnavas returning from Vrindavan. Nobody took any interest in them; each day passed like the rest. But around this time, a middle-aged Bengali sahib with a charming, educated, grown-up daughter took a large house at one end of the town, giving out that he had come there to recoup his health. With him came a bearer, a chef and a doorkeeper; housemaids, servants and a Brahman cook.1 His car, carriages and horses, chauffeur, coachman and grooms filled up every corner of the vast house overnight, as though through a magic spell.

  The gentleman was called Ashutosh Gupta and his daughter Manorama. They were obviously very rich. But the flutter had less to do with their imagined wealth and property, or even with the spreading fame of Manorama’s education and beauty, than with Ashu Babu’s simple, unassuming, courteous ways. Along with his daughter, he sought out and called on everybody. He proclaimed his ill-health, described himself as their guest, and indicated that he and his daughter could scarcely survive in exile if everyone did not, of their own kind natures, draw them into their fold. Manorama went into the inner quarters of every home to make the acquaintance of the womenfolk. On behalf of her ailing father, she also pleaded that they should not be treated as outsiders, with more to the same agreeable effect.

  Everyone was pleased by this. From then on, Ashu Babu’s carriage and car would do the rounds of various houses, fetching both men and women guests and taking them back. Conversations, entertainments, music and repeated visits to the local sights so cemented relations that it did not take more than a week for everyone to forget that these people were outsiders and immensely rich. However, nobody asked one question openly—perhaps out of embarrassment, perhaps because they felt it unnecessary. The question was whether they were Hindus or Brahmos.2 It did not really matter much outside Bengal. From their customs and practices it was clear that whichever sect they belonged to, like most well-educated upper-class Bengali families, they were not conservative about food and drink. Even if not everyone knew that they employed a Muslim chef,3 everyone could tell that a person who had let his daughter remain unmarried so long as to give her a college education, had freed himself from many narrow prejudices, regardless of the sect he might belong to.

/>   Abinash Mukherjee was a college teacher. His wife had died long ago, leaving a ten-year-old son; but he had not married again. Abinash taught at a college and spent his time with friends in various pleasurable ways. He was well off and led a peaceful, untroubled life. Nearly two years earlier his widowed sister-in-law had come to stay with him for a change of climate after an attack of malaria. The fever left, but the brother-in-law would not let her leave. She was now the mistress of the house, in charge of running the household and bringing up the boy. Friends joked about the relationship. Abinash would smile and say, ‘Don’t torture me with more embarrassment. It’s my misfortune—I spared no pains. I think I would rather have been assailed by robbers searching for my rumoured wealth.’

  Abinash had loved his wife deeply. One could see her photographs all over the house—of different sizes, in different poses. A large portrait adorned the bedroom—an oil painting, expensively framed. Every Wednesday morning Abinash would hang a garland over it. She had died on a Wednesday.

  Abinash was a cheerful person. He was addicted to cards and dice, so that people gathered at his home on almost every holiday. One day, when the local offices and the college were closed for some festival, the community of professors arrived at his home after lunch. Two sat over a chessboard on the broad mattress spread across the floor; two others squatted beside them to watch the game. The rest were noisily discussing the disproportion between the merits and salaries of deputy magistrates and local judges, and airing their righteous indignation and contempt for the government.