Hosted by King’s India Institute the Comparative Literature Programme and the Department of English, with the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa,UniversityofWitwatersrand.

This conference will address the role comparativism has played in the development of a number of academic disciplines as they relate to Southern Africa andIndiaduring the colonial and postcolonial periods. By addressing these topics, the conference will develop the themes and practices of cross-regional comparisons in the global South. At the same time it will critically engage with the intellectual histories of academic disciplines of which we are the legatees and in which comparative methodologies have played such a crucial role. In doing so, the conference will also draw on commonalities between Comparative Literature and Indian Ocean Studies, in particular their transnationalist readings of literature and history, and their re-thinking of ‘Area Studies’.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/complit/eventrecords/indiasouthafrica.aspx

Martin Harries and Elizabeth DeLoughrey approached notions of commodities and commodification from two very different angles, yet both their papers spoke to each other in interesting and cogent ways. Martin Harries bought something a new theatrical perspective that we haven’t really explored during the course of the three workshops so far: he raised the question of how to read objects on stage and what relationship such props had with the world of commodities. His case study was the dog biscuits that Clov offers Nag in Beckett’s Endgame. These biscuits are referred to by their brand name, ‘Spratt’s Medium’, and Harries led us through the journey of nineteenth-century advertising to show how, by the time Beckett writes Engdame, the name had accrued such meaning that its mere mention was sufficient to set off a chain of associations. This accumulation of meaning, Harries argued, worked against the logic of depletion at work in the play.

Before Spratt began commercially producing dog biscuits in the 1870s, dogs were originally fed ship-biscuits from sea-voyages that were unfit for human consumption: old ship-biscuits were arrested from the descent into mere ‘stuff’ or ‘waste’ and given a value once more. DeLoughrey also interrogated the ways in which products and by-products frequently became indistinguishable in many food histories.  She focussed on the coconut: aside from the white flesh, the fruit also yields oil, milk, water, and its shell. Though DeLoughrey mentioned that greater travelling necessitated greater contact between humans and plants they would not normally encounter, her focus was on the ways in which wartime changes the ecological dynamics of the natural world. In the Second World War, coconut shells were frequently needed for gas masks: housewives were encouraged to consume more coconuts so that their shells could be used. Similarly, in wartime, soap was a by-product of glycerine, whereas in peacetime, glycerine was a by-product of soap. The peculiar quality of the wartime economy, DeLoughrey argued, was that it produced the split identity of the coconut as both product and by-product.

For me, both Harries’ and DeLoughrey’s papers resonated with unresolved issues from our last workshop in Kolkata earlier this year. Then, Stephen Muecke and Abhijit Gupta had both spoken on the topics of ivory and indigo respectively, raising questions of when objects from the natural world become commodities, how they lose their commodity status and what happens to human lives in between these two phases. I felt that both papers in this Workshop revisited and rearticulated the interstitial place between commodity and nature that objects from the natural world occupy. While I don’t think this ever became a prominent discussion thread in either this Workshop or the last, I hope that the blog dedicated to commodity histories provides a space where we can probe such questions further.

Fariha Shaikh
King’s College London

The papers of the Saturday morning session were concerned with broadening the idea of the commodity in different ways. In a fascinating study of taweezes (charms/amulets/‘fetishes’) Nilanjana Gupta drew attention to how the transactions involving a taweez were not so much about the exchange of the physical object as about the abstract power invested in the object, the rituals involved in thus empowering the object, and the piety of the person who produces the object. She argued that modern-day taweezes in the Indian subcontinent could be traced back to ancient charms, and in the process, connections may be revealed between a range of ideas and practices that may otherwise not be associated together: ideas about the body, the sacred, religion, belief, trade relations, histories of migration, syncretic religious practices, Orientalism both in the metropole and the colony. A re-reading of the the Orientalist collectors whose collections are now with the British Museum and the Wellcome Foundation can enrich our understanding of Orientalism. The fact that charms were popular in Europe in the high noon of British colonialism, when examined in the light of such evidence, could broaden our understanding of Orientalism at work. Such study of amulets can also help review the relationship between colonial rule and religious reform movements in the Indian subcontinent, and the move towards ‘radical’ Islam.

Abhijit Gupta’s paper began by reflecting on the axiomatic status of the idea of the book as a commodity in the field of book history, the divisibility of the book into its physical and lexical components, and the further divisibility of the physical components into ink, paper, leather, and so on and so forth, each of which is in turn, a commodity.  In his discussion of the circulation of books in nineteenth-century India, the book came across as a kind of anomalous commodity, which remains in circulation even after it has stopped being a commodity in any economic sense. The practices of publishing by subvention, by which books were given rather than being sold, and publishing by subscription (the latter pertaining particularly to books of a religious nature), are alternative modes of circulation that call for a broadening of the idea of the book as a commodity.

Rangeet Sengupta’s paper dwelt on the multiple incarnations of the Gitagovinda in colonial Bengal suggesting that the rasa has a physical dimension for the sahajiyas, and that its exchange and circulation as a commodity map the flow of energy through the cosmos. It seems to me that there is a process of secularization at work here, in the sense that the sahajiyas are de-spiritualizing the exchange in their insistence on its physicality. Sengupta’s discussions of the 1887 and 1888 translations of the Gitagovinda that deploy a heavily Sanskritized poetic vocabulary to preserve the references to rati viparite, seem to me to suggest that such Sanskritization also serves to bring about a secularization in the same sense. And even if this made the text somewhat impervious to the majority of readers who did not know Sanskrit, it was felt to be necessary, and Sengupta reads this necessity as a desire for democratization of the text. In their own different ways, the three papers gestured towards the need to question the familiar definitions of the commodity of capitalist modernity, and ideas about its production and exchange. The interrogative was the perfect note to bring the New York workshop to a close, as the network now begins to examine the idea of the commodity as it has emerged over the three workshops.

Durba Basu
NYU

Though located in distinct geographical and historical moments, each of the presentations during the second panel of “Commodities and Migration: Things Out of Place” illuminated the various transformations that define the emergence of colonial commodities. Exploring concerns related to colonial Algeria, the Chinese labor diaspora, and the British Raj, each of the speakers further complicated the way we think of the “things” that defined and enabled the emergence of colonial culture.

First, Zeynep Celik’s discussion of memorialization and colonialism in Algeria simultaneously examined the spacialization of certain colonial commodities, and conversely, the commoditization of space under colonial rule. By examining the function of memorials within public spaces in colonial Algiers, Celik illustrates how the transportation of certain commodities, in this case a statue of the Duke of Orleans, becomes a way of enforcing the colonial gaze and state control. By defining certain spaces through these memorials to colonial rule, these practices convey how projects of place making can also constitute practices of commoditization.

Like Celik’s discussion of space and place, Adam McKeown’s paper seeks to unearth how practices of indentured servitude and the demands for coolie labor entailed that Chinese workers were often treated as commodities within transnational systems of colonial capital. By gesturing towards the fetishization of Chinese labor and the emergence of practices like competitive contracts, McKeown indicates the need to identify the racialized, dehumanizing dynamics of colonial globalization. Such a perspective remains relevant to our contemporary moment of globalization, as McKeown’s paper urges a further interrogation of such problematic commoditizations of human populations.

Finally, Isobel Armstrong’s paper focuses on Rudyard Kipling’s canonical novel Kim, which she argues highlights critical practices of colonial commodity culture. Focusing on the rise of the display of objects and the emergence of colonial visual culture, Armstrong suggests that certain visual representations of the colonized world served a proxy function when circulating internationally. By drawing upon key scenes in Kipling’s novel, Armstrong locates how these forms of visuality and their migrations were key to the emergence of new forms of colonial popular culture. Like the other two speakers on the panel, Armstrong challenges conventional definitions of commodities, thus questioning what is meant by the phrase “things out of place.” By expanding commonplace understandings of commodity culture, this panel opens the door for new forms of scholarship on this topic, an endeavor that will hopefully continue well after the conference.

Rajiv Menon
NYU

Session 1 of the Commodities and Migration workshop at NYU started the day off on a high note. All of the papers were fascinating in their own right but were also fascinatingly interconnected: each showed how different kinds of Victorian narratives display a deep ambivalence about the meanings of certain objects that they feature (ghosts, pawn-shop objects, cash) and that this ambivalence serves as the terrain of the narratives’ oblique but palpable comment on social relations.

Elaine Freedgood’s paper, “Ghostly Reference and the Play of Belief,” called for renewed attention to the ghost story, showing how it is structurally related to two key nineteenth-century formations: realism and liberalism. Elaine argued that unlike another popular genre of the period—detective stories—ghost stories are characterized by a lack of resolution, for most never provide a definitive answer to their constitutive question of whether or not ghosts exist. This makes ghost stories emblematic of realist novels rather than distinct from them because the realist novel, too, generates a metaleptic fracture between two different levels of reference: one of them real and historical (the world in which the novel takes place) and one of them fictional (the characters and action of the novel). This potential problem of reference is also interestingly connected to the duality required by liberalism, whereby the liberal citizen is both a ghostly, idealized abstraction and an embodied, imperfect person. Rather than being a problem and exception, then, the irresolution of the ghost story emblematizes Victorian representation and the ways in which it both acknowledges and masks its aporetic nature.

Priyanka Jacob’s, “A Taste for Catholic Spoils: Fashion, Dispossession, and Equivocal Objects in Daniel Deronda,” began with an intriguing passage from Eliot’s novel in which Daniel sees missal-clasps (ornate bindings for religious texts) in a pawn-shop window. Though the clasps are only briefly discussed in the novel, Priyanka argued that they signify beyond their moment of appearance in the text by registering “entire histories of human conflict and appropriation, folded one into the other.” The clasps are at once Catholic spoils seized by Protestants; pawnshop items subject to reinvention but also redeemable by their original owners; spolia (items transposed from one religious context to another); examples of the aesthetic decontextualization performed by fashion; and feminine bric-a-brac. They are thus what the novel calls “equivocal” objects—an adjective, Priyanka noted, that Eliot also applies to women in morally ambiguous situations. Through the multiple signification generated by this equivocality, the novel frees its objects (and perhaps its women) from stable associations.

In “Money/Commodity/Fetish: Hard Cash and the Circulation of Madness,” Mia Chen looked at the ways in which various aspects of capitalist fetishism are elucidated by the novel of her title, a form of “it narrative” which features a bundle of cash as a protagonist. Mia argued that the hard cash is given both angelic and demonic properties in the novel, and that this ambivalence reflects the novel’s attitude toward labor (one of the many things the cash represents), which it figures both as alienated and non-alienated. This ambivalence is also discernible in the novel’s attitude towards money fetishism, which fetishizes money’s ability to multiply, and hence be non-identical to itself. An analogue to this is the persistent theme of madness in the novel, which emphasizes how people can be non-identical to themselves. Through this theme, the cash, in its life-likeness, reflects the instability of all subjects under conditions of speculation. The way the cash operates in the novel, in other words, alerts us to the flip side of capitalist reification and the “irreducibly irrational ontological status of all things and people” subject to it.

Tanya Agathocleous
Hunter College, CUNY

12 April, 2010

Advancing a sustainable future: strategies for cross-disciplinary practice across the Indian Ocean
Report: 12 April, 2010.

This was a conference hosted by the Indian Ocean South Asia Research Network, at the University of Technology, Sydney, 17th – 19th March, 2010. It was convened by members of the network from faculties which do not usually have the chance to work together – Heather Goodall, based in Arts and Social Sciences, Prasanthi Hagare, from Engineering and Leena Thomas, in Architecture.

The Indian Ocean region has many, complex cultures which are heir to long traditions of learning, innovative science and flourishing creative movements. Yet it also faces rising challenges generated by the impact of a globalizing economy, continuing great power rivalry and the impacts of global warming. And all of these problems demand cross-disciplinary strategies to reach solutions.

This conference brought together over 100 researchers, professional practitioners and students from Australia, India, Africa and Indonesia, to exchange views and experiences on cross-disciplinary strategies to achieve social justice as well as effective environmental sustainability in the Indian Ocean. Participants represented an innovative collaboration between researchers and professionals in engineering, architecture, history, geography, international politics and communications.

We shared three days, drawing on cross-disciplinary practice and research for sustainability on the following themes: Strategies in building & infrastructure for social sustainability; Rethinking Environmental History; Day 3: Voices & Movements: imagining the future.

Keynote speakers were Ashok Lall on innovations in low energy urban architecture; Hoysall Chanakya, on technologies for sustainability; Judith Carney & Ed Wilmsen on Africa & trans-oceanic ecological exchanges; Cynthia Mitchell on transdisciplinary strategies for sustainability; Debal Singha Roy on movements for environmental justice; Stephanie Jones on law, history & environmental sovereignty; Haripriya Rangan on ecologies on the move: Africa, India, Australia and Heather Goodall on how to use memory and oral history for sustainability research.

Workshops, discussion papers and panels were contributed from Shankar Sankaran and Chris Riedy on strategies for imagining the future; Sarath Mataraaachchi on post-tsunami planning in Sri Lanka; Ian Manock on disaster management in Bangladesh; Leena Thomas on developing build environment for climate change; Prasanthi Hagare on investigating culturally-appropriate strategies for water and waste management in Indigenous communities; Jade Herriman on global deliberative democracy on global warming; James Goodman on contesting climate policy;  Bill Milne-Holme on sustainability research in Laos and Thailand;  Juliet Willets and Naomi Carrad on sustainable infrastructure in rapid development situations; Dharma Hagare on planning sustainable urban water systems; Kumi Abeysuriya on sustainable urban sanitation; Nick McClean on protected areas and environmental justice, India & Australia; Jodi Frawley on  the politics of ‘invasive’ plant circulations; Thom van Dooren on the power of narratives in making extinctions visible.

The conference ended with a final session to workshop potential cross-disciplinary and trans-oceanic collaborations arising out of these three days of discussion, which had brought such varied participants together. Collaborations are now being developed in three potential projects which will link Australia, Africa and India in comparative and innovative inquiries, with engineering and the built environment outcomes but which will engage a range of geographic, botanical and social sciences in seeking more sustainable Indian Ocean futures.

A Report by Durba Basu, New York University.

The second workshop of the network, ‘Commodities and Affect’, was hosted by the Centre of Advanced Study in English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, with the collaboration, academic support and participation of the Victoria Memorial Hall and the National Library, during 12-14 January, 2011. Each of these institutions having played a significant role in the circulation of material and intellectual commodities in the colonial period and thereafter, the choice of venues was apposite to the aims of the network, in terms of the material and period that is its subject of inquiry. It was evident from the programme that the three-day workshop was structured so as to suit the ‘sentiment of place’ at each of the venues. The staff at Victoria Memorial and National Library extended their warm hospitality to the visitors, and throughout the workshop, the students of Jadavpur ensured in every possible way that the visitors felt at home. In this post, I will try to report on some of the papers I listened to.

Jadavpur University, where the first day’s sessions were held, though established in 1955, had its beginnings in the National Council of Education, and the Society for Promotion of Technical Education, both set up in 1906, as a direct fallout of the Swadeshi and Boycott movement, and very befittingly, the day’s focus was on social history, with one of the panels being themed around the affect generated by commodities as inflected by Swadeshi politics. The workshop started with Partha Chatterjee’s talk on how the playing of football and the rise of native football clubs in colonial Calcutta served to produce collective identity. The first panel on water featured Toral Gajarawala’s paper with responses by Elaine Freedgood and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan. Toral Gajarawala read water as a secularist and literary object in Mulk Raj Anand’s 1935 novel Untouchable, where water operates as the metaphor which enables the reading of the low-caste central character Bakha as an untouchable. Mindful of the casteized value of water, and other associations, the paper went on to discuss the role of water in the Arya Samaj’s programme of shudhhi (purification) current during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The latter part of the paper used this history to consider water as a metaphor for consciousness and as a commodity, in scenes from contemporary Dalit Hindi fiction.

For Elaine Freedgood, the point of departure was Toral Gajarawala’s insight about the freedom to drink water being associated with other material and non-material freedoms. She contended that the freedom to drink water is also the freedom to metaphorize it as life itself, which does not exist for 1.3 billion people in today’s world, who do not have access to potable water. In tracing the emergence of water as a ‘purified’ commodity in Victorian Britain, Freedgood provided a startling account of the emergence, in the wake of sanitary reform, of pollution as something physical. Physical filth began to be equated with moral filth, and the poor being polluted on both counts posed a double social risk. Sanitary reform resulted in a kind of affective training of the sensory organs, so that the poor could be morally disliked for being polluted. If water, as Gajarawala suggests, is first dematerialized and metaphorized in the portrayal of the Dalit, and then re-materialized to de-caste in Dalit literature, pollution in nineteenth-century Britain has moved in the opposite trajectory, from the realm of the metaphysical to the physical.

Rajeswari Sunder Rajan’s response elaborated on water and ritual, and the affective, epistemic and political implications of the secularization of water in Indian colonial modernity. The paper began with a discussion of the contradiction between the notion of the sacredness of the river and its physically polluted state, the traditional belief of the Ganga’s purity and the new scientific belief in its pollutedness — a  contradiction that has been the legacy of the emergence of the colonial state as a ‘hydraulic society’, as Karl Marx called it. Invoking Partha Chatterjee’s Texts of Power, Sunder Rajan pointed out how the language of purity and the language of scientific pollution are both dependent on the deployment of the affect of nostalgia. The paper ended by asking whether profanation is not the logical solution to the hegemonic curse of the commodity.

Taking off from the discourse around ghee (clarified butter) in Shibram Chakrabarty’s writings, Ujjayan Bhattacharya’s paper explored how the affect around ghee contributed to the emergence of a national and regional Bengali identity in popular imagination. Though Shibram’s writings are situated in the post-Swadeshi period, swadeshi was very much in the air as part of nationalist idiom. Pivotal to the argument of the paper was Shibram’s disquiet about the monopolization of production of ghee by Marwari traders from North India that led to a replacement of traditional Bengali ghee with a hydrogenated variety poor in nutritive value, and also contributed to Bengal’s economic decline. In stressing upon the need to think of the nation in terms of its people, and giving this a regional inflection, Shibram underscores the human content of nationalism. In a closing meditation, Bhattacharya pointed out, very rightly, that Shibram’s disquiet gestures towards the overlooking of regional imbalances in questions of economy by nationalists.

Engaging in dialogue new imperial histories and the ‘nonhuman turn’ in science studies Rohan Deb Roy’s paper studied the history of malaria from 1890 to 1910. Deb Roy focussed on the ‘co-constitutive nature’ of colonial governance, pharmaceutical business, scientific knowledge and colonial markets. Deb Roy closed by positing quinine as a metaphor for empire, being “bitter, expensive and transformative, which could be mutated variously to appear as charitable, reasonable and even palatable.” By demonstrating the ‘side-effects’ of empire the paper argued that empire could not be attributed a coherent intentionality always. If such ‘side-effects’ of empire might be taken to mean that the colonized’s perception of imperial rule could be contingent as well, then this was a segue to John Plunkett’s paper that opened the next day’s proceedings at the Victoria Memorial Hall.

The day closed with a performance of Rabindranath Tagore’s play Arup Ratan, by the students of the Department of English, Jadavpur University, and directed by Ananda Lal. Arup Ratan is a later version of another of Tagore’s plays, Raja, and circulates in a corrupt, unauthorized English translation titled The King of the Dark Chamber (Macmillan 1914). Edited and contemporized, it was the annual dramatic production of the department, as well as its offering for the Tagore sesquicentennial, and also entertained the audience with the ‘uncommodified affect’ of Tagore’s text.

The Victoria Memorial, dedicated to the memory of Queen Victoria as its name suggests, is located in the heart of the Maidan (literally, large, open field), in Kolkata’s bit of what once corresponded to the ‘white town’ of Frantz Fanon’s Manichean colonial city. Inaugurated by the Prince of Wales in 1921, it was the British attempt to rival the elegance and splendour of the Taj Mahal— a rare instance of mimetic impulse in the colonial encounter operating in the reverse direction so obviously. The colonizer hardly ever leaves such spectacular testimony of wanting to imitate the colonized, let alone a piece of fine architecture that is so firmly a part of the colonized’s cultural heritage. It is as if the centre, despite itself, acknowledged for once in the periphery, the fact of its permeation by the periphery. Memory and desire remain intermeshed in the marble poetry of the Victoria Memorial, as an exceptional instance of overt, officially endorsed colonial desire, which in its other iterations operates covertly, as Robert Youngshows in Colonial Desire. Later in the morning, John Plunkett was to recount Lord Curzon’s wish to rival the Taj in memorializing Victoria. Little children playing on the gravel or posing for photographs in front of Victoria’s statue flooded me with memories of my earliest visits— I did not know then Tapati Guha-Thakurta’s paper would remind me of them yet again, and make me recall everything I have ever done in the vicinity of a public statue in Kolkata. Courteous student volunteers ensured I did not even have to produce the invitation card to enter, and shepherded me past the Queen’s milling visitors to the Eastern Portrait Gallery.

The museum houses a collection of artefacts and memorabilia from the colonial period, which the guests at the workshop were invited to view. The day’s sessions started after an introductory address by the Secretary and Curator, Chitta Panda. John Plunkett argued that print media and communications technology worked hand in hand to commodify the affect around the figure of Queen Victoria so that it became centrally constitutive of British imperial mythology, both formal and informal. The maternal representation of Victoria made way for representing empire as a project of familial affection and responsibility, a suggestion which recalled the ‘benevolence’ of the ‘civilizing mission’. However, the portrayal of Victoria as imperial matriarch, and the resultant contradiction between familial affect and the injustices of colonial rule was occasionally appropriated by nationalists, for contesting structures of imperial power. Plunkett gestured towards the need for more in-depth reading of the Indian responses, the need for evaluating the extent of their representativeness, and the extent to which they signify the loyalty of the colonized. The paper elicited several reactions among the audience about the representations of Victoria in popular culture and ways of reading them: Partha Chatterjee asked how much of it was officially generated, Tapati Guha-Thakurta pointed out that in the Kalighat pats, both the Rani of Jhansi and Victoria appear as maternal figures, and Margot Finn asked if the trope of the family could be regarded as universal, and if the trope worked differently in the colony. The paper ended by leaving us with a crucial question on the nature of affect: is affect something that intrinsically defies determinism? Perhaps it is a question that the network will return to when considering the theoretical frameworks that inform the field of inquiry.

Tapati Guha-Thakurta’s study of the public statuary of Calcutta produced during the colonial period unveiled complex histories of travelling raw material, plaster of Paris models, and relocation of statues— statues newly made, being sent from metropole to colony, or after decolonization, being sent back from colony to metropole, or off to another colony on being displaced by the statues of nationalist leaders or other public figures. Guha-Thakurta argued that the marble and bronze imperial men, now mostly relocated to the grounds of the Barrackpore Flagstaff House or the Victoria Memorial gardens have made the transition from being merely dead statuary to being pure sculpture, in contrast to the statuary that have often displaced them, which are part of the social-realist iconography of the postcolonial nation. The paper drew our attention to histories that must be engaged with when considering Indian colonial statuary and their postcolonial counterparts. If post-Independence public statuary are dead because they do not command significant urban spectatorship and only fulfil a commemorative function if at all, their production often involved a good deal of affective investment on the part of sculptors. For example, Debiprosad Roy Chowdhury’s statue of Gandhiji, for which he had to melt a bronze bust of his father to repair a leg of the father of the nation (damaged while being lifted on the pedestal), there being an acute local shortage of metals. While the context of developments in the history of sculpture in Europe can explain the richness of colonial statuary, the fraught relationships between schools of Indian modern art come into play when considering the statuary of a later period. The displacement of colonial statuary which was intrinsic to the commemorative endeavour of postcolonial (in a temporal sense) statuary, has paradoxically transformed colonial statuary into pure sculpture (as opposed to ‘dead’ statuary), and also imparted to them an affective resonance, as Guha-Thakurta argued through her reading of the statue of Lord Canning, now at the Barrackpore Flagstaff House, overlooking the grave of his dead wife, and by invoking the imaginary conversations Gopalkrishna Gandhi had with the twelve Raj statues in the gardens, who for him were the only true residents of the Governor’s residence. The various trajectories of affect that this study revealed returned us to the question that John Plunkett’s paper raised about affect and determinism.

Lunch in the Eastern Quadrangle after this session, with Lord Cornwallis masquerading as a Roman Emperor presiding over us, seemed to be steeped in history. I do not recall another visit to the Victoria Memorial when the statuary around me has seemed so eloquent. Gazing at Cornwallis, I relived every visit there since I was a four-year old, and do not think I shall go again without the experience being palimpsestic. We returned from lunch to the Eastern Portrait Gallery, to a session on the feeling of networks, with the statues of Lords Dalhousie, Hastings and Wellesley for company. This session took up some of the conceptual issues germane to the network’s subject of study, and offered a discussion prior to individual presentations. Josephine McDonagh emphasized how the global circulation of commodities in the Victorian period, such as the novel, served to disseminate affect. Clare Pettitt took the point further saying that such circulation literally puts up affect for sale as a commodity, though there would always be local exceptions in the response for commodification, and underscored the need for questioning the efficacy of ‘commodity’ as a unit of analysis, and for freshly examining Marx’s account of it. Referring to Megan Vaughan’s work on how Africa resisted integration into what Chris Bayly has described as the ‘birth of the modern world’, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan commented on how there have always been cultures that have resisted commodification. Ian Henderson’s paper made a persuasive case for A.A. Phillips’ essay ‘The Cultural Cringe’ (1950/1958) as a seminal text in the postcolonial analysis of affect. The paper offered a comparative analysis of Phillips’ text, which outlines three ways of consuming Australian culture (corresponding to three physical poses, namely, ‘Cultural Cringe’, ‘Cultural Strut’ and ‘a relaxed erectness of carriage’) and Anthony Trollope’s accounts of his travels in Australia and New Zealand (1878). What was uncovered was Trollope’s problematic notion of the Antipodean colonist’s confused feelings about how to respond to England, and what he thought was inordinate pride in local cultural heritage, which were both caused by being distant from England— problems to which Trollope’s antidote was his dictum of ‘Don’t blow’. The paper juxtaposed this dictum with Phillips’ ‘Cultural Strut’ to argue that Trollope could very well be the model of the menacing Englishman that was the root cause of the cringe, although Phillips’ antidotal posture is very possibly only white.

Supriya Chaudhuri’s paper on art manufactures of colonial India focussed on the catalogues produced by Trailokyanath Mukharji, to uncover the affective investment that such cataloguing often involved on the part of catalogue-makers. Chaudhuri stressed on Trailokyanath’s interest in the revival of declining or lost arts for the benefit of poor craftspersons as evidenced in his catalogues to argue that this went much beyond a native expert’s being a cog in the wheel of imperial interests, and neither can it be adequately explained as an instance of the enlistment of native expertise in colonial knowledge-production working at cross-purposes with its foundational principles. Trailokyanath’s affective investment is borne out in the tendency towards anecdotal descriptions of the articles to be displayed, and what is more, this affective excess survives as a kind of surplus that has not been fully absorbed by the figure described. Chaudhuri reads this as indicative of the emergence of a new kind of sensibility that informed the revivalist programme at the turn of the century that though investing in the taxonomic work associated with commodity production and display, is contrary to the kind of commodity fetishism Walter Benjamin describes in his famous characterization of it in ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century.’

The proceedings at Victoria Memorial were brought to a close by a special lecture, ‘Writer’s Cramp’ by Gopalkrishna Gandhi, former Governor of West Bengal, co-sponsored by the Centre for Advanced Study in English, Jadavpur University, the Victoria Memorial Hall and the Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival. The lecture took place in the Western Quadrangle, with a pensive Lord Hastings gazing at the audience from behind the speaker. The former Governor’s lecture was a timely meditation—especially so given the turn of local politics—on the need for writers to work autonomously of forces of commodification, and by extension, on the social responsibility of the intellectual.

The venue of the last day’s sessions, on print culture, books, archives and libraries, was the National Library. The library, on the Belvedere Estate, was the erstwhile residence of Warren Hastings when he was the Governor-General. Having its beginnings as the Calcutta Public Library, it was renamed as the Imperial Library in 1891, and was given its present name after Independence. As a depository library it has been central to the circulation of printed material since the colonial times. During lunch, the visitors were escorted to an exhibition of rare archival material.

Swapan Chakravorty, Director-General of the National Library, opened the day’s proceedings with his paper on the library as affect. Through a thorough textual study of Rabindranath Tagore’s meditations (both in fiction and non-fiction) on the library and the printed book, at various times of his career, Chakravorty argued that there were two kinds of attitudes to the colonial public library that persist to this day in our thinking about libraries. One is the valorization of exhaustiveness, that equates comprehensiveness of stocks with quality (which Tagore feared as ‘the historian’s fetish’) and the other is the Tagorean ideal of the intimate library where dead words wake to life at the interested reader’s touch, a library that places more premium on its ability to be selective in its stocks than comprehensive, and where the librarian is more of an ‘host’ than a ‘storekeeper’. Abhijit Gupta’s paper revealed print to be an arena of proxy warfare in the indigo uprisings in nineteenth-century Bengal. Print appeared to have mobilized affect in various ways, especially as the English translation of Dinabandhu Mitra’s play Nil-darpan was both printed and distributed on government initiative, with a section of the government obviously sympathizing with the lot of the peasants. Tanya Agathocleous’s paper examined the history of the English-language periodical East and West to trace emergent cosmopolitan ideals in the period, and identified several trajectories for it within the journal itself. If one variety advocated assimilation for Indians into British norms, there were at least two other varieties—a commodifiable variety corresponding to Srinivas Aravamudan’s characterization that owed its origin to the perception of Indian spirituality in the West, and a non-commodifiable variety that Agathocleous characterizes as close to the incipient internationalism of what would later emerge as the Non-Aligned Movement. Rangana Banerji’s paper on the performance of Hamlet in translation in the nineteenth-century fairground in Bengal argued that what was in fact a ‘culturally translated’ version of Shakespeare’s text had become incomprehensible to the English viewer R.E. Vernède through the use of a range of objects. If the objects seem to metaphorically represent a Victorian cornucopia, then what they accomplish is a metonymic shift in the affect produced by Shakespeare’s text. The question of cultural translation in the paper led me to think that some kinds of affect may be extremely localized in that they may resist linguistic translation. What challenges do such untranslatable affect pose for postcolonial historiography, in making intelligible the fruits of research in a shared language?

At the end of the day’s proceedings, Margot Finn summed up the ideas that emerged in the workshop, and emphasized that the understanding of commodity as a process or concatenation of processes needs further exploration. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan observed that the role of affect in the resistance to the commodity had emerged very fruitfully in the discussions. In the discussions during an earlier session, Isabel Hofmeyr mooted the idea of ‘print mercantilism’ (after Sheldon Pollock’s ‘script mercantalism’) as a substitute for use in contexts where ‘print capitalism’ may seem anachronistic. Rimi B. Chatterjee cautioned that we need to remember that how we look at commodity and affect is different from what it meant during the period under study. Stephen Muecke noted that it may be worthwhile to consider the commodity in terms of development and uneven development, for what is being sold is the desire to be modern. Clare Pettitt urged for the necessity to consider disagreements about how the commodity may be defined across time and localities, and several speakers observed that ‘glocality’ had emerged as a mode for considering the relationship between commodity and affect. With such reflections, and farewells over coffee, the Kolkata workshop came to an end, and I am sure that these questions, and many others, will be explored at the final workshop in New York.

04 February, 2011

Commodities and Affect: Fariha Shaikh (KCL) February 2011

The Kolkata Workshop was a collaborative effort organized by three institutions - Jadavpur University, the National Library of India, and the Victoria Memorial Hall. All three contributed hospitality and academic support to the Network, in the belief that the university, the museum and the library were sites for the circulation of material and intellectual commodities in the colonial period and thereafter, and each had a distinct role to play in understanding this history. The Kolkata Workshop was therefore planned in such a way that the focus was on social history on the first day at Jadavpur, on art, memorials and exhibitions on the second day at the Victoria Memorial, and on print culture, books and libraries on the third day at the National Library. At both the Victoria Memorial and the National Library, delegates were offered the opportunity of viewing the special exhibitions, which offered a visible testimony of the material culture of the period under study, in the shape of artefacts and printed books.

The programme boasted an impressive range of events, that extended beyond the usual staple of lectures, to a student production of Arup Ratan (a play by Rabindranath Tagore and directed by Ananda Lal), a talk by Gopalkrishna Gandhi, and an exhibition of archival material at the National Library, Kolkata. On each day, we were escorted by student volunteers to a different location: on the first, to Jadavpur University; on the second, to Victoria Memorial Hall and on the third, to the National Library. It was an exciting time to be in Kolkata. We experienced at first-hand the generous hospitality of the students of Jadavpur University and the staff of all three institutions who worked tirelessly to make sure our stay in Kolkata was a pleasant one and the Workshop a fruitful intellectual partnership, a true ‘network’ of relations.

Over the course of the three days, we explored how affect politicises even the most basic things, for example, food, water, books and land. Each of the papers came at the intersections between ‘commodity’ and ‘affect’ from a different angle, producing a rich dialogue across different periods and disciplines. Here, I have been able to touch upon many, but not all, of the papers presented.

The NYU panel on water explored the different symbolic meanings water acquires across time and space. Toral Gajarawala argued that water in Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935) is an ‘idle metaphor’: it is a scarce commodity in the novel, yet there is an abundance of it in metaphorical terms. She posed the question of what it means to use water as a metaphor when there is a material lack of it in the novel. Her argument came to rest on the thesis that water in the novel is ‘secularized’: it is the ‘metaphoric consciousness’ of the novel, present not as an object in religious worship, but in connection with questions of casteized labour. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan took up the idea of water as a sacred object, specifically in the context of the water of the River Ganges. Her question, ‘How can the world’s most sacred river be so heavily polluted?’, highlighted the competing scientific and religious attitudes towards the river. Rajeswari argued that such discrepant attitudes have not aided the ecological stability of the river. The religious belief that the holy water of the Ganges is able to break down toxic elements is contested by the fact that it is heavily polluted and under threat from global warming, but in its ‘modern secular mode’, Rajeswari argued, the government had failed to clear up the Ganges. Elaine Freedgood coupled the notion of pollution with that of consumption: she explored the rhetoric surrounding the purification processes of water in the nineteenth century. The sanitary reform movement, she argued, did not just emphasise the need for the physical purity of water: it also aimed to cultivate feelings of disgust and repugnance towards drinking diluted sewage.

In the response session to the panel, Nilanjana Deb (Jadavpur University) commented on how sacred water is also commodified – bottled and sold as ‘Gangajal’ (Ganges Water), for example. Her comment elicited a number of responses from the audience. One member argued that ‘when you want to remove water from common use, you render it sacred’, exposing how ‘the sacred’, as a form of affect, calls into play notions of access, use and power. Another member of the audience commented that deep ecologists see water as a source of life, not just as a resource: was the division between secular and sacred so clear-cut?

The workshop interrogated the politics of consumption by examining the affective lives of food – ‘consumption’ in the literal sense of the term. Ujjayan Bhattacharya (Vidyasagar University), in his talk ‘The cultures of Swadeshi’, looked at the heightened awareness of a particular food, ghee (clarified butter), in the pre-Gandhian struggles to overcome British rule. He argued that in an effort to cultivate the feeling of belonging to the nation, nationalists encouraged the boycotting of non-Bengali ghee by casting it as ‘bisri’ (awful) and ‘bhajal’ (having other ingredients mixed in). Ghee thus became implicated in a nationalist discourse. Modhumita Roy (Tufts University, Boston) continued to explore the link between foodstuff and nationalism in her paper on mulligatawny soup. She presented us with a brief history of how the Indian soup became absorbed into the British diet, first as a fashionable soup in the nineteenth century and later on as a commodity, as companies such as Heinz capitalized on it. Through the varied history of the soup’s uptake by British people, Modhumita read mulligatawny as an object that blends the domestic and foreign and cuts across class boundaries.

In his paper on the ‘Side-Effects of Empire’, Rohan Deb Roy (CSSS) argued that quinine was the ultimate metaphor for empire: it was government-administered medication and could be cast as bitter, a burden and disagreeable, but simultaneously, as charitable, beneficial and helpful. The pictures accompanying Rohan’s paper raised tangentially the question of how temporal difference transforms the affective field. Whilst adverts for commodities such as anti-malaria soap, for example, were taken seriously in their time, they were the subject of light amusement for the audience. The focus on archiving in Hardik Brata Biswas’s and Amlan Das Gupta’s (Jadavpur University) papers highlighted the temporality of affect more directly. Together, their papers showed that although we may succeed in preserving the aural or visual object, we cannot preserve the affect that the object once produced. Indeed, archiving itself displays a transformation of affect, as those who work in archiving engage with the objects not as consumers of popular culture, but as scholars.