COMMENTARY

The Self and the Political

A Reading of Jhumpa Lahiris The Lowland
Esha Shah

Jhumpa Lahiris The Lowland can be read as a narrative about what life could be in the absence of the ideological movements of the 1960s and the 1970s shaping the personal (and the political). This review aims to read the novel in particular as a comment on the psychology of the hyper-individualistic self emerging in the post-ideological era and its likely implications for democratic politics.

humpa Lahiris latest novel The Lowland has an epoch-dening ambition. It is, in fact, an end of the era novel. Aroused by the description on the ap and the list of citations at the end of the book referring to Naxalbari movement, I started reading the book expecting some kind of affective, perhaps an existential, take on Naxalism. One of the central characters involvement with the Naxalbari movement does provide an anchor to the unfolding life stories of the rest of the characters, however, I want to argue below that the novel is only suggestively about Naxalism. The novel, in fact, can be read as a narrative about what life could be in the absence of the ideological movements of the 1960s and the 1970s shaping the personal (and the political). I particularly aim to read it as a comment on the psychology of the hyper-individualistic self emerging in the post-ideological era and its likely implications for the democratic politics. Story of Isolated Lives The plot as such is thin which progresses glacially until the cathartic revelations in the last quarter of the novel. Subhash and Udayan, only a year and half apart in age, grow up in Calcutta in the 1950s and 1960s. The brothers are not only far apart in temperament but they eventually occupy two sides of geography and history. Udayan is an idealist who is passionately drawn to the Naxalbari movement to which he gives his life. Subhash chooses to migrate to the United States (US), earns his PhD in chemical oceanography, and lives uneventfully on Rhode Island as a scientist. They eventually end up marrying the same woman. Gauri is a philosopher in the making, falls in love and marries Udayan at the age of 23. The course of her life suddenly changes after the police kill Udayan in a fake encounter which she witnesses

from a distance. Apolitical Subhash now does the right thing; he marries pregnant Gauri and takes her to America to rescue her from the injustice of his parents and possible harassment from the police. A kind of chill sets in the novel this point on. Much of the middle half of the novel is about Subhash and Gauris humdrum life on Rhode Island and the growing up of Bela, the daughter. Gauri, however, resents motherhood and after acquiring a doctorate takes up an academic job far away. The responsibility of raising Bela now entirely falls on Subhash, when Bela is 11 years old. Bela grows up to become an environmental crusader and works as a farm labourer. She herself does a fair deal of a disappearing act making her father aching with emotional longing. After a hundred or so pages of the mundane and not-so-mundane details of their separate, hyper-atomised, and isolated lives, Lahiri returns to some drama in the last quarter, when Gauri meets 40-year-old Bela and Belas daughter Meghana. Belas hostility pushes Gauri to visit Kolkata (Calcutta) after a long time and cathartically face the buried memory and guilt of being an unintentional and uninformed accomplice in Udayans crime of killing a policeman. Against the backdrop of Gauris guilt and her suicidal instincts, Lahiri subtly invites the readers to reinterpret her detached emotional life. At the same time, Lahiri also weaves the life stories of Kanu Sanyal and Charu Mazumdar, two ideologues of the Naxalbari movement, in her concluding narrative. The Moral Self as an Affective Agent Lahiri expertly recreates the moral and the affective self of three generations. It is the generation of Subhash, Udayan and Gauri that I want to engage with. Udayan, no doubt, is the heroic character of the novel, but in my reading, the main story of the novel is a tale of what Marcel Gauchet calls the pacication of conicts in the lives of Subhash and Gauri (Gauchet 2000). The pacication or reduction of conicts is reected in the depressed and muted emotional tone in the middle half of the novel centring
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Esha Shah (esha.shah@live.com) is a Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla.

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on Subhash and Gauris life in America. In comparison, Udayans world was dened by intense and passionate political beliefs. He did not approve of Subhashs migration to the US. According to him, Subhash was not being useful to society. Subhash did not approve of Udayans Maoism either, which he thought was misplaced. But what is striking is the complete absence of any other moralcum-affective framework and/or societal vision as a driving force in Subhashs life. Except the small but laudable step he takes, marrying a pregnant and helpless woman and raising his dead brothers daughter as his own, nothing pretty much happens in Subhashs life on his own volition barring, of course, a shortlived sexual involvement with a woman 10 years older, if that counts. In Lahiris construction, at least on the pages of the novel, Subhash also has a detached relationship with the object of his profession, chemical oceanography. He uneventfully, unambitiously, grows grey hair in his quest for knowledge. The passivity in Subhashs life is glaring. It is disturbing. The pacication of the conicts goes hand in hand with the hyper-atomisation of individual lives. Subhashs expectations to make Gauri fall in love with him are not met with and for much of Belas childhood the couple remains emotionally detached from each other. The family largely functions as a managerial unit instead of providing the emotional space as a refuge from the rest of the world. In fact, Gauri eventually runs away from the family and takes refuge in the anonymity of the rest of the world. Bela herself grows up into an aloof and moody person, she travels and works as a farm labourer and develops an erratic itinerary of coming and going, leaving Subhash aching with longing for her presence the only emotional attachment he retains in his entire life. Their individual lives largely progress on their own, emotionally detached and disconnected from the others. The trend of the emergence of this hyper-atomised, ultra-contemporary (Gauchet 2000) individual is also manifested in the way the revolutionary style of the human type that characterised
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Udayan completely disappears from the pages of the novel. The affective self ensuing the ideological in Udayan the devotion, the identication with the societal whole, the rebellion against authority, the passionate love for Gauri, the fear of failure, the heroism is replaced with the cold, detached, and isolated the hyper-individualised lives of Subhash and Gauri. The basis of their being is not organised by the embeddedness within any collectivity. While Udayans frenzied participation in the ideological collectivity hovered on the borders of madness, Subhash ignores or he seems even unaware that he lives in a society. Lahiri does not even grant Subhash membership in the societal whole through the experience of a structural form of power and hence collectivity, i e, class, gender, race, nationality, or ethnicity. Looking from Subhashs position of postidentity, this is the tale of individualism of disconnection and disengagement. It is the tale of the disappearance of the dignity and respect for the shared dimension within society that transcends the individual into a community. It is a novel of an end of an era of conict personal and political. Hyper-Contemporary Individual The life of the hyper-contemporary individual is dened not only by the larger trend towards scaling down of the conict with the others, but also with the self (Gauchet 2000). Compared with the emotional barrenness of Subhash, however, Gauris character has more edges, sharp ones. Gauri is the most fascinating and intriguing character of the novel, sculpting whom Lahiri is at her weakest in the novel. In Gauris life too, the larger trend towards the pacication of conicts cannot be escaped, despite the eventual cathartic return to the past highlighting the conict. In fact, in the light of these cathartic revelations, Lahiri retrospectively attempts to hang whole of Gauris life-project on the peg of her guilt, the guilt of being an accomplice in killing a policeman who was also a father and a husband. Lahiri invites the readers to interpret Gauris guilt mixed with anger against Udayan as an explanation for her resentment of
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motherhood and the eventual abandonment of Bela. The guilt is unbearable which even triggers the extreme instincts to not exist. These cathartic revelations make Gauri resemble a classical ascetic individual of the 19th and 20th centuries, the golden age of conscience and responsibility. The spirit of this age could be described as the duty is what imposed itself on me, that, which I must individually and consciously will. Despite the ideological differences, in her catharsis, Gauri shares with Udayan the primacy of the moral cause driving her personality the personality shaped by the necessity of situating itself according to the view of the whole, the personality dened by the persecuting internalisation of the norm, the personality of guilt and hence conict. In her cathartic guilt, Gauris affective self is closer to Udayans than Subhashs despite the ideological differences. However, I found Lahiris cathartic Gauri rather too dramatic an afterthought, not quite gelling well with the intellectual Gauri Lahiri recreates in the rest of the novel. This Gauri writes her doctorate dissertation on Epistemology of Expectations in Schopenhauer. In addition, she publishes two books: A Feminist Appraisal of Hegel, and An Analysis of Interpretive Method in Horkheimer (233-34). In her academic job she specialises in German idealism and philosophy of the Frankfurt School. At some point I felt that Gauri reected the traces of one of my favourite literary characters J M Coetzees Elizabeth Costello (Coetzee 2003). Gauri approaches her lessons in philosophy with the single-minded dexterity of Costello. But she shows no signs of Costellos obsessive devotion to the moral crusade (against animal slaughter), her intensity, her compelling need to bring everything in her surrounding down to her moral crusade, her dazzling brilliance, her compulsive and repetitive dialogue with the self, her inner conicts, and above all her alienation and fatigue of bearing such an intense self. In fact, it is hard not to believe that it is Coetzee himself incarnated in Costellos character that is what makes Costellos opacity highly
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convincing. In comparison, Gauris intellectual self remains inert to her guilt. Lahiri paints Gauri as the one who long ago...wanted her work to be in deference to Udayan, but eventually her work turned out to be a betrayal of everything he had believed in (p 234). How? How does Gauris take on German idealism and the Frankfurt School stand in deance of everything that Udayan so believed in? And how does Gauri arrive here, from deference to betrayal, from madly loving a man to deeply resenting him? Lahiri does not allow Gauris transcendent intellectual self to have a conversation with her guilt, and with Udayans ideology. Hence, the portrayal of Gauris intellectual self becomes merely a name-dropping of some of the philosophical honchos of the 20th century. The emotion of guilt and the intellectual self, therefore, remain extraneous to each other. Lahiri misses a great opportunity to weave the intellectual and the affective in one tapestry and that is the greatest disappointment of the book. Gauri, therefore, looks like a split personality, the part of herself is practising the avoidance of conict and detachment like Subhash does and the part is stuck with the dutiful and hence the conictual identication with the ideological Udayan. And there is a contradiction in the kind of the self that is prerequisite to each of these states. Gauri resembling Subhash begins with the primacy of the singular individual and proceeds to universalise it, and the one stuck with Udayan begins with the general societal whole and proceeds to particularise it. In other words, in the ultra-contemporary world of Subhash you can only be yourself if you keep yourself within yourself and keep others at a distance, but in Udayans ideological world the ideal societal whole is the most important thing and the individual is worth nothing. It could be read that Gauris instincts towards self-extinction are perhaps a result of this irresolvable contradiction in one personality. Society of Individuals Hyper-individualism creates a society of individuals, a contradiction in the term. And still, there is something deeply
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democratic about Subhashs hyperatomised passivity. Gauris sudden departure, especially her abandonment of Bela, produces deep anguish in Bela which survives even after she is 40 years old and when she has become a mother herself. But Subhashs life-long reaction to Gauris departure remains subdued, he is neither anguished nor pained, he refuses to go after her, and also steadfastly respects her wish not to be contacted, never writes to her, except until he desires a divorce much later in his life. In a way he deeply respects Gauris right to self-determination and her assertion of freedom and autonomy. More so, the family of Gauri, Subhash and Bela similarly remains non-coercive it is a voluntary, and therefore, precarious bond (in fact, a lack of it) between individuals. The involvement with the others, even in the family, is purely psychological and hence private. Gauchet argues that this privatisation of family is the key to understanding the pacication process. Family is no longer a source of violent conicts that resulted from the hierarchical, formal relations, when family worked as a domestic government. This new family largely hangs together by the historical accident of biology, but is also formed on the basis of the deep recognition of the right to self-determination of the individuals. However, there is a paradox here. Hyper-contemporary individualism and its deeply democratic respect for selfdetermination have serious ramications for the political. The political now revolves around the recognition and protection of individual rights and interests. An elaborate legal system is required to

realise and protect these rights, which means the deep inroads of the state into the society, and therefore, the reconstitution of the political and the democratic. The society of individuals, therefore, simultaneously facilitates the micro-democratic upholding of individual rights, while it erodes the legitimacy of any collectivity other than the state and thereby reconstitutes the political and the democratic.1 Conclusions In conclusion, the novel, in my reading, inspires the examination of the issues and questions with which the hermeneutic, interpretative social sciences have inadequately engaged. How does the affective/psychological self relate to the intellectual and the political? How has the end to the ideological era inaugurated a new psychology of the self? And how does this emerging psychology of our times inaugurate new politics? In what way is this self embedded in a new collectivity or societal whole in the absence of the ideological providing the moral ground? All in all, Lahiris thought-provoking novel invites us to intimately examine the loss of the era of the ideological in our times.
Note
1 For further discussion on Marcel Gauchet on society of individuals, see Antoon Braeckman, The Closing of the Civic Mind: Marcel Gauchet on the Society of Individuals , Thesis Eleven 94(2008): 29-48.

References
Coetzee, J M (2003): Elizabeth Costello (Australia: Secker and Warburg). Gauchet, Marcel (2000): A New Age of Personality: An Essay on the Psychology of Our Times, Thesis Eleven, 60: 23-41.

EPW Index
An author-title index for EPW has been prepared for the years from 1968 to 2012. The PDFs of the Index have been uploaded, year-wise, on the EPW website. Visitors can download the Index for all the years from the site. (The Index for a few years is yet to be prepared and will be uploaded when ready.) EPW would like to acknowledge the help of the staff of the library of the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai, in preparing the index under a project supported by the RD Tata Trust.

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