Arrivals

Now that I have arrived in Chittagong to work at Asian University for Women, I will be posting more frequently than of late. Building a business and growing children are very time-consuming activities, and over the last year I’ve had time to write academic papers but not this blog.

I want to begin with an auspicious quotation from Lalon, dearly beloved to folk here:

কেঊ মালা কেঊ তোসবী গেলে

তাইত রে জাত ভিন্ন বলে

যাওয়া কিম্বা আসার বেলায়

জাতের ছিহ্ন রয় করে

(I will attempt a translation, borrowing from the work of Carol Salomon and others, but adapted for my purposes here. Suggestions gratefully received.)

Some wear a mālā, some a tosabi, so are called by different castes. But when we are arriving or leaving (this world), where does the sign of caste remain?  

Both ‘mālā’ and ‘tosabi’ (= tasbih) would be translated into English by the Christian term ‘rosary’ — they are circular strands of beads for reciting prayers, but the word ‘tosabi’ is from the Arabic and ‘mālā’ from the Sanskrit. I have two with me. Most translators will say that the word mālā, for Lalon, points to Vaiṣṇava affiliation, but in fact Buddhists and Jains also recite their mantras with mālās; I’ve even written a paper about them.

Lalon prods here at how power—the power of healthy and enfranchised adults to wear and manipulate objects in public—is used to differentiate the meaning of materially similar strings of beads. Not only do newborns and the dying/dead lack that power, but in a manner familiar to Bordieu or Foucault, an infant is differentiated by their new kin from other infants born on that same day through a process of socialisation that enculturates and teaches them to embody difference, leading eventually to the point where two adults wearing strings of beads know they are signs of opposition (or alternatively, they are fortunate enough to know Lalon and see them as signs of subverting difference!).

Elsewhere in this song, he points to other signs of caste/religious affilation, such as the yajñopavita (sacred thread worn by upper-caste male Hindus) and circumcision (again, a feature of Muslim men): healthy adult men. Those same infants are developed into gender roles, with implications for the perpetuation of power differentials and oppositions — differences that make a difference and that are crucial to the reproduction of families and their enculturation. Lalon asks, how can you tell/make the difference between kinds of people if it’s only healthy, privileged adult men who get to wield these signs?

For my part, I will spend a great deal of my time here in Chittagong asking about another kind of difference which I suspect Lalon may also have pondered, though it was not so salient a political, social, or muktological (can I coin that word? the study of liberation?) concern in his time — the difference between the Modern Individual Human who Buys and Votes, and all the other kinds of person there are. It’s a difference that connects the postcolonial and posthumanist challenges.

To that end, here is a photograph.

These three were kinds enough to let me take their photograph yesterday, though they were all watching quite carefully to make sure I did a good job. The bull had been beautifully garlanded, a garland which would also be called a mālā.

I took the photograph the day before Eid al-Āḍhā. It is possible that the animal will be killed today, and its meat might be shared out into three parts, one for the poor, one for friends and acquaintances, and one for family. Given that there is a large Vaiṣṇava temple just near here, it is also possible that this young bull is not being fed in order to be killed and eaten. In either case, he is clearly being treated with pride and affection by the two humans who are feeding him.

There is endless coverage in the English language press just now about the mass slaughter of animals for Eid al-Āḍhā, much of it a thinly veiled excuse for further Islamophobia. In Scotland, when a male calf is born on a dairy farm, unless he will be used for breeding (a very slim chance), he is almost immediately killed, and that is one small part of the meat business that puts chicken, steak and sausages on the table every day. I am not at all qualified to offer an opinion on the meaning of Eid al-Āḍhā, but at least here, the sense of connection between these three suggests to me that the affection that precedes and constitutes sincere sacrifice can be contrasted usefully to the economics of killing young male calves in an industrial dairy farm. To kill and eat another living being with affection and awareness of the sacrifice is a particular kind of relationship that cannot be conflated with industrial meat production.

These are murky waters, and one may well object that (1) there is industrialised production of animals for ritual slaughter, or (2) killing non-humans as food is never acceptable if there is an alternative source of food. Both are viable objections, just as one might object to Buddhist animal release rituals on the ground that they (1) create serious problems with invasive species, (2) drive industrial production and recapture of animals for ritual use and (3) lead to the hasty death of many of the animals released.

However, my purpose here is only to invoke my mentor Lalon as I begin this new work—and especially his play, devoted resistance to received norms, and artful teaching; and perhaps also to hope that the view from Chittagong offers a helpful perspective in future writing.