Will to Argue
Author : Sumanyu Satpathy
Publisher : Primus, Rs 850
This book would undoubtedly appeal to researchers, literature enthusiasts, as well as general readers interested in a deeper understanding of this multifaceted nation, says KAlYANEE RAJAN
Today’s globalised world is fraught with a set of controversies affecting all domains of human existence and occupation, as has also been the case throughout the history of mankind and civilisation, with the immediate concerns varying perhaps only in degree, not in the substance per se. Controversies pertaining to nationalism, and identities whether national, linguistic, religious or communal, gender or sexual choices, continue to be volatile talking points and people continue to be pushed against the wall for not conforming, for being a certain kind. What then is it to argueIJ Is it simply an effective stamping out of all the voices dissenting against each other’s view pointIJ Is it unabashed dominion of the old over the young or vice versaIJ Or, maybe in a now-archaic sense, an act of a rational mutual exchange of ideas, eventually aimed at persuading others to concur with a leading narrative. The last would be the fast-depleting sense of the term, conveniently laid to rest in the increasingly unfair game of dominion being played out at both private and public platforms of the world as we face it today. Classical Sanskrit records would point to a vibrant culture of vaad-vivaad, or tark-vitark, or the shastrarth where erudition was sparred and honed on regular basis, a practice which is nearly extinct now. Semantically speaking, the dictionary informs us that a controversy is ‘a prolonged public disagreement or heated discussion’, while an argument is ‘an exchange of diverging or opposite views, typically a heated or angry one’. The similarity is only offset by the public nature of a controversy; and so the roots of a controversy, which is defined as an overtly “public” matter disagreed upon, lie in an argument, which operates at the level of individuals or at best, two sparring parties.
In his foundational and almost a decade-in-the-making study published as Will to Argue: Studies in late Colonial and Postcolonial Controversies, Sumanyu Satpathy, established academic and critic, succinctly explicates through wide-ranging archival research how deeper questions concerning nationalism and the process of identity formation assume different hues under the evolutionary lens of controversies surrounding them.
For Satpathy, controversies provide useful entry points into understanding how the world around us shapes itself at various planes, be it political, social, economic, scientific or cultural. In this one-of-its-kind book, he scrutinises with clinical precision, several regional and national controversies pertaining to the two crucial time-periods etched in public consciousness in these times, those of the colonial and postcolonial eras, dealing with subjects ranging from khadi, sexuality, language, nationhood, partition, identity, authorship and textuality, to detailed notes on authors and public figures like Fakir Mohan Senapati, Premchand, Radhanath Ray, Sarala Das, Rabindranath Tagore, and Mahatma Gandhi. The meticulously researched book contains seven chapters, an appendix containing rare documents, and an exhaustive bibliographical treat for litterateurs and researchers alike.
The insightful blurb by veteran scholar and translator Harish Trivedi highlights Satpathy’s “lively exploration of the literary culture of his mother tongue, Odia,” and his meticulous engagement with Hindi and Bengali “to generate a multi-lingual public discourse embedded with archival nuggets”. The longish acknowledgements section lays out the process of what one may call, the making of the book, and is worth a read for its candid freshness and gentle appreciation of all those who were a part of the author’s journey.
Without a perfunctorily named introductory chapter, Satpathy plunges into the pithy first chapter titled “Uses of Controversy: Texts, Identities and the Nation”, where he begins by tackling head on the idea of the nation and the several controversies that beset its formation as well as evolution. Deftly unveiling the bridges between local and national controversies using instances from several areas such as political and social discourse, literature and popular culture, Satpathy argues for a nuanced and powerful definition of certain kind of controversy as “a cultural text — verbal or non-verbal — where members of the public participate in, argue, and debate, by making various organs of the media, any issue arising of the utterance or action of an individual or group of individuals within or outside the community, but which directly or indirectly affects the community’s self-image and identity”. Taking valuable cues from Habermas, Sumit Sarkar, Ashis Nandy, Partha Chatterjee, Gandhi and the like, Satpathy delimits controversies “among typical products of the era of print nationalism and mass media” and further fleshes out his definition of controversy as a genre, as being “coeval with the emergent discourses of nationalism”, as contributing to “the construction and strengthening of national identities”, as being “distinctly a by-product of modernity”, “as a source of narrativising nationalist history” and so on. In subsequent chapters, Satpathy innovatively uses controversies not merely as direct subjects for examination or interpretation, but also as a starting point, as well as recurring concerns whose influence ranges far and beyond their original, perhaps local perimeter.
The second chapter addresses language controversies in late colonial India through Fakir Mohan Senapati and Premchand, while the third chapter uses Radhanath Ray’s Mahayatra, crisscrossing through his influencers Milton, Macaulay and Michael Madhusudan Dutt, to reflect upon the hostility the text generated in the Odia literary arena in terms of its depiction of caste and religion. Satpathy’s language is crisp as well as fluid, spurring the engaged reader to marvel with comprehension at the significant linkages exposed through following the different threads of the controversies. The fourth and fifth chapters deal with Sarala Das’s Mahabharata, interrogating questions of textuality and authorship; and contemporary queer adaptations of Rabindranath Tagore’s Chitrangada, a “radical reinvention” of an episode form The Mahabharata. The latter chapter provides fascinating insights about Tagore’s appropriation of the original Chitrangada episode from Vyasa’s Mahabharata and interpreting it in a way so as to hold the potential for a contemporary queer reading, which in turn finds its way into Rituparno Ghosh’s film Chitrangada that catered to the ongoing queer discourse of that time. In the penultimate chapter titled “Gandhi before Gandhi: Two little Pre-histories of the Great Soul”, Satpathy launches into an extremely engaging discussion about Gandhi and his ideals which seem to have been patented as Gandhian by latter-day scholars as being indigenous and distinctively pre-Gandhian. The parallel that is drawn to elaborate upon the controversies therein is between two sets of covert relationships: of Gandhi and Sarala Devi and, the major Odia poet Radhanath Ray and a bright Bengali poet Saraswati Nagenderbala. The chapter is a glittering example of meticulous excavation and analysis of several rare archival sources by Satpathy, and helps to open up a number of ideas pertaining to life-writing, the confessional mode of writing, and the different approaches of public figures towards relationships outside marriage and their subsequent pursuit of greater “pure” agendas in life.
The final seventh chapter is titled “Minute by Minute: Impossibility of a Conclusion” and seeks to put forth a few more critical contestations that Satpathy skilfully foregrounds through instances backed by conclusive archival research. He reiterates that “there exists an inextricable link between the coordinates of an argument and issues of identity or nationalism” which he has amply and effectively demonstrated in the previous chapters. The book traverses a vast canvas of the progressing discourse of Indian nationhood and nationalism through the colonial and postcolonial times, and offers an acute insider’s view of rich Odia literary culture. Satpathy’s flawless and sprightly writing style, as well as his astute analytical observations are commendable for instantly capturing the reader’s attention and seamlessly navigating through complex concepts in a not-as-complex manner. The publisher Primus Books must be praised for their reader-friendly typesetting and an apt cover illustration of the book. It is innovatively designed, displaying a fascinating interplay between the object and its reflection.