I stood theoros to your most rational actions of abstraction and civilization.
Your civilization destroyed me, destroys everything, including itself.
I couldn’t help but breathe the stench of blood when you further groped the entirety of my existence with your bloodied hands.
Your filthy gaze reduced me to terra nullius.
And today, I express my condolence to Fanon,
as it’s no more Black skin or white skin,
To Cesaire’s abomination, Hitler has escaped the cage of Europe,
And to repugnance, Mahatma’s death didn’t conclude the endless assaults on him.
I am old and tired but not bored yet. In my unflinching journey, I fall. I rise. The waves took a part of me last day. I am not lost. I am in the air. I am under your feet. I thrive; you dance. I crumble, and your heart stops. I am where the green ants dream. I am where the diamonds await to be tainted in blood. I am wretched. You divide me. You name me. Yet never ask me.
The last thing I want to do is confuse you but aren’t you already confused, living a life full of contradictions?
24th January 1907, Jugantar, 93/A Bow Bazar Street
Please pardon me if, in the course of the story, the narration engulfs me, and I forget to name my characters. I am a voice from the colonial world, and the true masculine and civilized people have claimed a monopoly over naming and defining binaries. The disenchanted secular identities called a war against the traditional orders and forms.
He was more an English that any English living back in Great Britain. Under Barin Ghosh, he spent four days a week in the Akara and he spent rest of his time learning how to make bombs. The call for muscles of iron and nerves of steel somewhat convinced him that playing football was undoubtedly better than reading Gita. He decided to estrange and hang his effeminate ‘other Indian self’ to fight Britishers.
Last evening he was given a pistol along with three of his other friends. And today was the day. The thud of the first two bullets at GPO echoed back in his village, where a shot hit his father.
It has been 8 months since he had seen his father. It has been 8 months since he left his village.
Near Madhnipur, his father and other villagers wouldn’t let the East India Company cut the tree, which they believe is God Kartik’s resting place. Six years ago, during Maa Saraswati’s Puja, three peacocks were spotted under that tree. God Kartik’s vehicle, peacock, imbued the tree with divinity, which the white men were unable to understand or define. The company wanted the tree down for their new railway project. With garland and tilak on the tree, the only project the villagers and his father had was to protect the resting place of Kumari Saraswati.
But unlike his father, like those white men, he was masculine and rational enough. He knew the game well. In fact, everyone had internalized the game and its rule till an old, emaciated man arrived and starts his struggle, a non-violent one.
5th May 1949, Punjab High Court, Peterhoff, Simla
I witnessed a man defining the new India. He was the conclusion of the tradition started by Vivekananda, Michael Madhusudan, Bankim Chandra etc. He felt that an old man was effeminate enough to be killed. According to him, the old man’s title Mahatma was paradoxical and armed resistance to aggression was the most just response. He said that killing Mahatma would make the nation follow that path of reason.
He didn’t desire any mercy to be shown, yet I pity him. That young individual was convinced enough that he was committed to the cause of his nation, though he was using the vocabulary of dichotomy that the preachers of modernizers left behind. To the mind, which sees masculinity as the antonym of femininity, Mahatma was a cause of disgust.
9th September 1948, Somewhere near the India-East Pakistan Borders
I wept. I was wounded.
Those barbed wires pierced through me, throbbing me. I see bodies.
With my throat slit open, I won’t describe the blood all around. I won’t tell the stories of violence that I witnessed. That’s for some other day.
I am dying.
I…
I was yours. Now the land where Toba Tek Singh’s body is rotting belongs to no one.Nation-State.
Which nation? And who formed the state?
The East will hold the idea of West in trusteeship while the West moves forward. It’s no more the black skin or white skin.
Oh! I forgot to introduce myself.
I was land. I was soil.
Then I became India. I became Pakistan.Now I forgot how I was.
And I don’t know what I am.
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About the Author ….
Tanay Thakur is currently studying MA Political Science at the University of Hyderabad. His areas of research interest include representations of political violence, technology and politics, post-colonialism in IR, and migration discourses. He leads the IR Cluster in the South Asian youth network- The Pioneers Youth- and is an active participant in IR conferences.
Perhaps the only thing left past the etching of cartographic boundaries on landscapes and mindscapes are the memories. The stories. Good one, storyteller.