#subaltern

By Atrayee Pal

Cloistered between the Upper Chitpur Road and the northern embankments of Ganga lies the Debotader Atur Ghar (The nursery of God’s and goddesses). Known by the name of Kumartuli, this locality of potters (Kumars) shares a space rich in historical significance and mythical glory. According to one mythological narrative, the kumar came from the term kumbhara which was given by Lord Shiva when he was in need of an earthen pot on his day of marrying sati. Driven by his dire need, he used two of his beads to bring forth a man and a woman— who were the first moulders of the kumbha— who came to be known as kumara. However, it was a dream which propelled the hands of the kumara into the making of the goddess. One such lore about the dream narrates the goddess to have appeared in the dream of Raja Krishnachandra of Nadia and ordained him to start her puja as Jagghatdhatri (one who rules the universe). This puja itself shifted to Bengal when Naba Krishna Dev wanted to celebrate the victory of British in Bengal against Siraj-ud-Daulah (the Nawab of Bengal) and thus brought the kumara from Krishnanagar all the way to Calcutta. However, with the increasing shift from bari pujas (house pujas) to barowari pujas (community pujas) the number of orders escalated and as a result more kumars were to be brought from Krishnanagar. This increase in the number of kumaras finally resulted in the carving of Kumartuli into a geographical landmark with the flow of economy sustained by the gentry of Bengal.

The location of Kumartuli is thus enmeshed in flavours from the past and present, echoing the mellow, devotional songs of Ramprasad Sen in parallel with the strong blows of the knife to carve out bamboo structures for the idols. The sonic ecology of contrasting qualities of Kumartuli thus reflects the sculptor’s daily basis of existence with clay. Both Krishnanagar and Kumartuli shares the same understanding of wet clay – clay that is moistened and rinses off any course particles to make it lighter and devoid of any impurities. In contrast to the softness of the clay, their own hands are course and rough with their tireless exhaustive routines and cumbersome lives. Hence, clay plays a double role both in contributing the moist touch to the course hands as well as serving as the foundation for creativity. For creation requires a contrasting combination of both stasis and dynamicity – like Prakriti (creativity) and Purush (repose). The calmness or the repose of the water seeps in the porous holes of the clay which melts all boundaries. From the kumara’s hands to the streets to the riverbeds they sediment along with water nourishing them to give life and to create. Hence, the kumaras of Kumartuli use the etel mati (clay soil) with bela mati (sandy soil) to get the desired texture to start off with the process. Apart from this they also use sufficient amount of pat (jute) and khar (straw) to give it a firm yet moist texture. Then they proceed to slice off the wood to make the wooden armature and then attach the straw base to it with nails. After it’s done, they put the base coat and slowly after drying it they proceed with designing the body, the hands, the face, the fingers and lastly the eyes. Most of the times, they primarily use hands, and only for intricate details they go for tools.

The gentle strokes of the potter’s fingers create a lasting impression on the divine. According to Husserl, hands are the closest tactile sensory motors that are able to sense and be sensed at the same time. The Ganges where the clay sediments and again collected and moulded into shape goes back to its origin with the immersion of the goddess. Hence, the clay soaked with the consecrated water of the Holy Ganges becomes a mediator which connects the combined energy of repose and creativity from the hands to the heart. The clay which gets rid of its impurities and becomes lighter yet at the same time balanced seeps in the body and thus calms the heart. Husserl calls this “the privilege of the localization of touch sensation which makes it an immediate and familiar embodied agency of the body. Since I can touch and also feel the touch, it becomes the site of both being sensed and able to sense”.  They also tend to wear suddho (sanctified) clothes as clothes are an extension of the skin and with the skin in contact with the Ganges absorbs the water. With hands in direct contact with clay, memories and insights previously unacknowledged are brought to mind and clay being a malleable medium with no brush or pen to afford distance from the material, the shape is in direct contact. And thus, it provides infinite potential and possibility for the kumara /artist for moving, remoulding and having a mastery over the texture and shape.

This exploration of artistic ingenuity which carves and fleshes out the divine to life is the true essence of kumors of Kumartuli and hence never leads to the shrinking of ‘art’ despite being on the face of rapid urban modernity.

Bibliography

Chakrabarti, Arindam. “Play, Pleasure, Pain: Ownerless Emotions in Rasa-Aesthetics.” Asian Aesthetics, Singapore: (2010)

Carman, Taylor. “The Body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.” Philosophical Topics 27, no. 2 (1999): 205–26. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43154321.

Buchanan, Fiona. “Touching on Emotions: Using clay work in a context of relational empowerment to investigate sensitive issues.” University of South Australia, ( 2015): 1-24.

Pietersma, Henry. “Husserl and Heidegger.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 40, no 2 (1979): 194-211.

Cairns, Dorion. The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl. Florida Atlantic University: Springer Netherlands, 2013.

Shusterman, Richard. Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics. The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008

Kumar Das, Samir and Basak Vishnupriya. The Making of Goddess Durga in Bengal: Art, Heritage and the Public. 152 Beach Rd, Gateway East Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd, 2021

Thakurta, Tapati Guha. In The Name Of The Goddess: The Durga Pujas Of Contemporary Kolkata. Virat Bhavan, Delhi: Primus Books, Ratna Sagar P. Ltd,2015

Bhattacharya, Saswati. Potters without a wheel: Ethnography of the Mritshilpis in Kolkata. 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon: Routledge :Taylor & Francis Co. Ltd., 2022.

Othered or otherized: someone who belongs to the socially subordinate category of the Other.

Within LGBT+ perspective, people represented by the plus in the acronym are usually considered the "others" (it can be a reclaimed slur), but queer people as a whole can be othered, as well as any sociopolitically marginalized people as anomie in biopolitics.

I don't disagree with you exactly, but colonization is also layered.

So bear in mind that my knowledge of decolonization is specifically subaltern (as in the Indian subcontinent) and patchy (disabled my whole adult life and a very start-stop-stagnate tertiary education). The Americas might be different. I'm completely open to being wrong.

In Sri Lanka, the Sinhalese and Eelam Tamils are "natives" while "indigenous" are considered the Adivasi and Tamil Indigenous people in the North (I'm sorry I can't remember their names, only found out about them last year). The distinction arises because they were Austroasiatic people (and the Tamils were maybe Dravidians? Wow, ethnosupremacist black hole discovered) who arrived in migrations millennia before they were colonized by later migrants from the Indian subcontinent about 2500 years ago. Those are the progenitors of both the later Sinhalese and Tamil kingdoms. (Obviously both intermarried with the indigenous populations; ethnic identities are cultural). The Adivasi never assimilated into the Indian migrants' agrarian societies. They still engage in hunting and subsistence agriculture rooted in the ecosystems of their ancestral lands. Unlike the rest of the population, being transplanted from these lands to anywhere else in the country would result in a devastating loss culture and community.

"Indigeneity" is an extremely fraught topic in post-colonial nations when conflated with being "native". It erases the actual pre-agrarian tribes that were victims of colonization two or three times over, and is used for nationalist ethnic cleansing and the creation of ethnic underclasses. The myth that all Tamils were descendants of "Chola invaders" that arrived only a thousand years ago is foundational to Sri Lanka's Tamil genocide. Eelam Tamils themselves heavily discriminated against the Malaiyyah Tamils the British enslaved and exported from India to work their cash crops (Indian Ocean slavery is as brutal and horrific as the trans-Atlantic one). The persecution of Muslims who migrated here the last few centuries from South India, Afghanistan, Turkey and Malaysia also involves seeing them as interlopers, even though they never claimed to be native because their ethnic identities are shaped by their migrant roots and the unique ways they assimilated into Sri Lankan society. They still have ancestral lands here from which they've been ethnically cleansed and are still under threat by both Sinhalese and Tamils.

I'm not sure whether this is something unique to countries where the Europeans actually did fuck off forever. But if even if they never did, how do we discern our layers of colonization and oppression if we all believe we're indigenous? Do we ignore that the pre-agrarian societies* here are rooted primarily in the custodianship and protection of their ancestral lands, unlike the rest of us that thrive in mono-agriculture, industrial encroachment and urban sprawl (and constant ethnic violence)? Do we have to center European violence in our own understanding of ourselves and our responsibilities to acknowledge the histories and rights of minorities vulnerable to us?

To my understanding, the difference between "anti-colonial" and "decolonial" is that one is conceptualized as "resistance" and the other as "re-existence". What I've been taught is that seeing our place in the world through the white colonial lens and defining ourselves by colonial proximity is to give up our power of self-determination. We were native to this island before these violent borders imposed on us by the British ever existed, and we were native whatever kingdoms configured and reconfigured themselves over millennia. But we have also been violent colonizers of the people who were here before us, even during and after the Europeans came and went. Indigeneity afaik is acknowledging their identities and respecting the history that formed them, and the restoration of their long-obscured sovereign right to their lands independent of the nation state.

a feeling that people should have equal say in making group decisions, and

a coercive apparatus capable of enforcing those decisions.

For most of human history, it has been extremely unusual to have both at the same time. Where egalitarian societies exist, it is also usually considered wrong to impose systematic coercion. Where a machinery of coercion did exist, it did not even occur to those wielding it that they were enforcing any sort of popular will.

It is of obvious relevance that Ancient Greece was one of the most competitive societies known to history. It was a society that tended to make everything into a public contest, from athletics to philosophy or tragic drama or just about anything else. So it might not seem entirely surprising that they made political decision-making into a public contest as well. Even more crucial though was the fact that decisions were made by a populace in arms. Aristotle, in his Politics, remarks that the constitution of a Greek city-state will normally depend on the chief arm of its military: if this is cavalry, it will be an aristocracy, since horses are expensive. If hoplite infantry, it will have an oligarchy, as all could not afford the armor and training. If its power was based in the navy or light infantry, one could expect a democracy, as anyone can row, or use a sling. In other words if a man is armed, then one pretty much has to take his opinions into account. One can see how this worked at its starkest in Xenophon’s Anabasis, which tells the story of an army of Greek mercenaries who suddenly find themselves leaderless and lost in the middle of Persia. They elect new officers, and then hold a collective vote to decide what to do next. In a case like this, even if the vote was 60/40, everyone could see the balance of forces and what would happen if things actually came to blows. Every vote was, in a real sense, a conquest. Roman legions could be similarly democratic; this was the main reason they were never allowed to enter the city of Rome. And when Machiavelli revived the notion of a democratic republic at the dawn of the “modern” era, he immediately reverted to the notion of a populace in arms. This in turn might help explain the term “democracy” itself, which appears to have been coined as something of a slur by its elitist opponents: it literally means the “force” or even “violence” of the people. Kratos, not archos. The elitists who coined the term always considered democracy not too far from simple rioting or mob rule; though of course their solution was the permanent conquest of the people by someone else. And ironically, when they did manage to suppress democracy for this reason, which was usually, the result was that the only way the general populace’s will was known was precisely through rioting, a practice that became quite institutionalized in, say, imperial Rome or eighteenth century England. All this is not to say that direct democracies— as practiced, for example, in medieval cities or New England town meetings—were not normally orderly and dignified procedures; though one suspects that here too, in actual practice, there was a certain baseline of consensus-seeking going on. Still, it was this military undertone which allowed the authors of the Federalist Papers, like almost all other literate men of their day, to take it for granted that what they called “democracy”—by which they meant, direct democracy—was in its nature the most unstable, tumultuous form of government, not to mention one which endangers the rights of minorities (the specific minority they had in mind in this case being the rich). It was only once the term “democracy” could be almost completely transformed to incorporate the principle of representation—a term which itself has a very curious history, since as Cornelius Castoriadis notes, it originally referred to representatives of the people before the king, internal ambassadors in fact, rather than those who wielded power in any sense themselves—that it was rehabilitated, in the eyes of well-born political theorists, and took on the meaning it has today.