Devotion and Discipline: Gendering the Nation in Anandamath

Daddy, I have had to kill you.

Every woman adores a Fascist,

The boot in the face, the brute

Brute heart of a brute like you.

I made a model of you,

A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.

And I said I do, I do.

So daddy. I'm finally through.

The black telephone's off at the root.

The voices just can't worm through

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

Sylvia Plath "Daddy"

Who do you think you are?

A Communion wafer? Blubbery Mary?

I shall take no bite of your body,

Bottle in which I live,

Ghastly Vatican.

I am sick to death of hot salt.

Off, off, eely tentacle!

There is nothing between us

Sylvia Plath "Medusa"

The publication of Bankim Chandra Chatterji’s Anandamath in 1882 was an event in itself. It was a cultural artefact textualized in the form of a novel that became a potent symbol of the nationalist movement and its ideological articulation. This brief paper attempts to tease out the relationship between two aspects, devotion and gender, that were central to the project of Indian nationalism. Bankim’s novel fundamentally grounds devotion and gender to articulate the struggle against colonialism. It must be acknowledged that the genealogy of nationalism in Bankim’s text could be traced productively through other conceptual vectors, including modernity, tradition, religion, caste¹,and the distinction between elite and subaltern nationalism². This essay does not seek to offer an exhaustive reading of the novel or a summary of its plot; rather, it undertakes a focused conceptual excavation to discern how devotion and gender are staged within the theatre of nationalism, and to highlight the tensions and contradictions that such staging produces.

     The narrative is situated in the village of Padachina and its neighbouring forests during the time of the famine (1771), which caused great deterioration, the effects of which were amplified by the greed of the revenue officers of the colonial government. The story begins with Mahendra, a local landlord, who, along with his wife Kalyani and their daughter Sukumari, is separated from his family owing to certain circumstances. All of them are rescued separately by the Order of the Children (Sanyasis). Mahendra is rescued by Bhavan, whereas Kalyani is rescued by Mahatma Satya, the leader of the Order. Mahendra is introduced to the goal of the Children—to liberate the Motherland—and, after initially expressing skepticism about their methods of plundering and violence, he comes to recognize the significance of their mission. To be part of the army of the Children, one must practice an ascetic lifestyle, a sign of devotion, thereby giving up sensual pleasures. Mahendra, in consultation with Kalyani, decides to join the Order and is initiated by Mahatma Satya himself. The other central characters include Jiban and his wife Shanti, as well as Bhavan. The plot progresses with the Children planning the rebellion and eventually establishing their own control over the northern part of Bengal toward the end of the novel³. More significant than the plot, however, are the dialogic exchanges that reveal some of the key tensions shaping the nationalist imagination.

The plot of a rebellion by warrior ascetics (‘Children of Mother India’) against the British and Muslim rulers⁴ amidst the backdrop of famine and widespread poverty provides the terrain for the imagination of the nation as a Mother. The fundamental aspect in the novel is the idea of devotion (Bhakti), which serves as a means to regenerate the Mother subjugated by ‘enemies’. One of the central ideas underlying the conception of devotion is the separation between mind and body. The body is seen as a limitation owing to its sensuous properties, which need to be overcome by ascetic discipline. It is only through subjugating sensuous desires that the nation can be brought into being. This is the reason why the Order of the Children takes a vow to practice a celibate lifestyle, and transgression of this norm leads to sin. Thus, the body becomes an important site of inscription, as devotion can only be achieved through the sacrifice of sexual desires. It is imperative to abandon one’s wife, as women are identified only with sensuousness, thereby inhibiting the prospect of national sovereignty⁵. Sexual repression is at the heart of the project of nationalism, as it is only by repressing sexual desires that proper devotion to the Motherland can be established.

Partha Chatterjee, in his important collection of essays titled The Nation and Its Fragments, construes a counterintuitive genealogy of Indian nationalism. He argues that the nation was imagined, expressed, articulated, and reified on a cultural rather than a political register, where the fundamental distinction between Home and the World served as the organizing principle. It was in the space of “Home” that the task of imagining the nation was conceptualized and performed.⁶ Women became both sign and symptom of the interior, with their bodies inscribing the sacred mark of the nation, whose protection was recognized by Indian nationalists as their paramount duty. Once the nation was imagined in the form of a mother, it became imperative to protect it at any cost. One could map this configuration in a nuanced manner in the narrative of Bankim’s Anandamath on several occasions.

It may be immediately pointed out that Shanti and Kalyani inhabit two different worlds, as Shanti is a fierce, courageous, patriotic woman occupying the outer domain, as formulated by Chatterjee, whereas Kalyani recognizes her “proper” position in the domestic realm⁷ and her task is to allow Mahendra to transcend his sensuous desire so as to properly serve the Mother/Nation by joining the Order of the Children. In this mode of reading, Shanti appears to invalidate or transgress the boundary of “home”; thus, Chatterjee’s formulation seems ineffective. A close reading of the text suggests otherwise. Shanti’s transgression of the inner domain is premised precisely on her childhood experiences of growing up without a mother, socializing only with boys, and cultivating an intellect receptive to “sacred” texts. Thus, a certain set of dispositions habituates her to imbibe and perform a masculine identity. This becomes more pronounced in the dialogue between Mahatma Satya and Shanti, where Mahatma Satya, upon discovering Shanti’s real identity, is infuriated and asks her to undergo a test that is emblematic of masculine courage. Although Shanti replies to Satya, “Is it a sin for a wife to join her husband in order to help him in his national duties? If the Children call this a sin, then their conception of sin is defective indeed,” this social critique is immediately undercut in the next few lines, where she asserts that, “And I mean to remain a Brahmachatini while living near my husband. I am here to perform the duties of the Children and not to perform my duties of wifehood.”. This properly keeps intact the discourse of the home and the world, as Shanti recognizes that the “outer” domain is not for women as a wife and affirms the masculine logic of asceticism and self-discipline in the outer world.

When she passes the test, Satya is “astonished, awe-struck, and speechless” and asks “What! Are you a women or goddess in disguise?’.⁸ This remark highlights the space that nationalist discourse assigns to women: either a domestic wife or a goddess. No other identity is possible for a woman to inhabit in the “imagined community” that Bankim creates. The impossibility of women participating in nationalist politics on their own terms is reiterated throughout the novel.

Like all narrative constructions, there are holes, slippages, and gaps, which, if discerned, illuminate alternative possibilities and imaginations. These gaps cannot always be attributed to the conscious intentions of the author, as writing, especially narrative, is an autonomous act.⁹ In Bankim’s text, the minor figure of Nimi, the main protagonist Jiban’s sister, occupies the liminal space of this gap. The context for this conversation is provided by Jiban’s return to the forest to hand over Sukumari to Nimi. When Nimi requests Jiban to see his wife Shanti, living in the neighboring cottage, Jiban is infuriated at her for even expressing this thought, as this stands in conflict with the vow he undertook as part of the initiation. For him, service of the Mother/Nation is sacrosanct, and any transgression is equivalent to death. On further insistence, Jiban gets so angry that he threatens to kill her by saying, “Do you realize how many enemies of our Motherland I have killed so far.” In response to Jiban’s vitriolic assertion, Nimi responds: “What a thing to be proud of? You renounce your wife. You kill human beings… then kill me, and you will have a chance to brag of having killed your own sister. Shame on you, to kill human beings and then boast of it ¹⁰. This assertion by Nimi is a powerful social critique, which calls into question the logic of devotion on which nationalism is construed. Her critique immediately transcends the binary of colonizer-colonized and offers a humanistic articulation of social and political relations that betray the logic of nationalist demand of sacrifice for a future sovereignty grounded on the nexus of the theological-political. It is not at all surprising that she is never found singing Vande Mataram in the novel. After almost 140 years of its publication, the relevance of Bankim’s novel lies today, for me and, I hope, for the readers, in resurrecting and recuperating these minor voices, like Nimi, that actively refuse the vitalist and sacrificial temptations, impulses, and excesses of nationalism in our contemporary proto-fascist moment.

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¹ A complex entanglement between caste and nation is at play in the text. For example, when initiated into the Order of Children, caste privileges have to be abandoned, but restored when victory is attained.  This dialectic of initial disavowal and eventual embrace of hierarchical order offers a way of conceptualizing the tensions inherent in the fashioning of national community. Needless to say, this falls outside the scope of this brief piece.

² It is interesting that Mahatma Satya, while explaining the vow to Mahendra, remarks that “Children are of two classes—those that are initiated and those that are not. Those that are not initiated are either householders or beggars. They present themselves only in time of warfare.” (Bankim Chandra Chatterji, Anandamath, trans. Basanta Koomar Roy [1882], 99).

³ This is according to Basanta Koomar Roy’s translation. There is a different conclusion to the novel in other translations, in which the British establish their control and it is revealed to the Children that their task is to overthrow Islamic rule and facilitate British rule, since British governance provides the Hindus with scientific knowledge and prepares them to govern their country better in the future. Footnote 4 discusses this issue.

⁴ The reason for clubbing the British and Muslims arises from the vexed issue of translation. The text was originally composed in Bangla and has since been translated into several languages. My inability to access the original, owing to my inadequacy in the original language, should be acknowledged, but at the same time the issue at stake is greater than this. Even the Bengali version has several editions with great modifications, and many have suggested that there is no one ‘authentic’ version. The version consulted for this essay is the one translated and adopted by Basanta Koomar Roy in 1941. This translation seriously modifies the narrative and replaces the Muslim Nawab with the British on the grounds that Bankim’s actual target was the British, but that he refrained from stating this explicitly owing to fear of seditious laws and the loss of his position in the colonial bureaucracy. Cross-referencing other translations reveals that it is very difficult to come to a conclusion as to whether this was really the case. Many scholars, such as Partha Chatterjee, argue that Bankim’s writing from the 1880s onwards did in fact express anti-Muslim sentiments quite explicitly, thus invalidating the theory of self-censorship. Thus, translation, a powerful political act in itself, poses a significant problem and at the same time highlights the authoritative position of the translator in shaping the perception of the text. Owing to my linguistic limitations, the rest of the essay follows Basanta Koomar Roy’s translation at face value and thus does not engage with the “Muslim question,” but acknowledges the complicity of Bankim in contributing to a certain strand of Hindu nationalism. It is because of the complexity of translation and my non-proficiency in the original language that this paper focuses on the politics of gender and devotion rather than on religious-political struggle.

⁵ This issue is quite complex as normative prescription is betrayed in several instances by the characters. The two main protagonists, Jiban and Bhavan, in several instances succumb to their sensuous desires for Shanti and Kalyani, respectively. Jiban says he does not mind violating the vow for the love of his wife. Ironically, Shanti, who has completely internalized the hegemonic project of nationalism, reminds him of his duty toward the Motherland. On page 79, Jiban makes a profound statement: “Place religion, money, vows on one side of the scale and you on the other, and I swear by the holy name of Mother India herself that I do not know which side weighs heavier… What shall I do with the country?” Similarly, Bhavan falls for Kalyani while he is taking care of her. Thus, the proper displacement of love for one’s wife to love for the Motherland is always imperfect.

⁶ Chatterjee argues “so called spiritual domain” becomes the site of nationalism’s “most powerful, creative and historically significant project: to fashion a “modern” national culture that is nevertheless not Western” pg. 6 Chatterjee, Partha. The nation and its fragments. Princeton University Press, 1993.

⁷ After the revelation she has in a dream, Kalyani immediately asks Mahendra to join the Childrens to serve the nation.  See pg. 61.

⁸ This construction of Shanti reverberates in our contemporary moment, as the underlying structural logic is very much similar in the way contemporary right wing politics constructs the figure of “Nationalist Muslim”, a figure whose primary function is to affirm the “Hindu” past of India and shed its religious-cultural identity in order to be recognized as ‘properly Indian’.

⁹ Barthes, Roland. “: ‘The Death of the Author’." Image—Music—Text (1967).

¹⁰ Thus an interesting parallel could be drawn from the previous paragraph. Unlike Shanti who is interpellated by the ideological formation of nationalist call for sacrifice, Nimi’s act is that of refusal as she doesn’t imbibe the hegemonic ideals of nationhood as does Shanti. It is difficult to argue that her critique was purely grounded on feminism but nonetheless it is definitely humanistic and hints towards other imagination of nation which unfortunately, is not present in Bankim’s text thus, she finds no other mention in the novel. She is an anti-national, not the Schmittian enemy, in quite literal sense at least in the discursive elaboration of nationhood in the novel. See Pg 76 in Anandamath.

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Bibliography

Barthes, Roland. "Roland Barthes:‘The Death of the Author’." Image—Music—Text (1967).

Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and its fragments. Princeton University Press, 1993.

Chatterjee, Partha. "The nation in heterogeneous time." Futures 37, no. 9 (2005): 925-942.

Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist thought and the colonial world: a derivative discourse?. Zed Books, 1986.

Chatterji, Bankim Chandra. "Anandamath, trans. Basanta Koomar Roy." New Orient Paperbacks (1882).

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Vaibhav is a doctoral candidate researching agrarian history in nineteenth-century colonial North West India.

He reads, writes, and thinks to overcome the despair, drudgery, and dilapidation resulting from being thrown into this grotesque, unequal world, neither of our choosing nor our making, of competition, individualism, and meritocracy. More than research objects, more than disciplinary fidelity, more than political commitments, Vaibhav approaches intellectual pursuit as a matter of cultivating an ethos and orientation that attune him to grapple with and make sense of the imperceptible and structural forces that organise everyday life under capitalism. He is drawn to issues, themes, practices, and objects that refuse and elide easy systematisation and explanation—problems that, in their complexity and difficulty, challenge our moral and political imagination. He wishes to arrive at a method that ties, in a non-deterministic manner, the intimate and impersonal, the psychic and the global, and the aesthetic and the rational, to generate imaginative insights about some of the pressing issues of our times, including but not limited to technology, fascism, climate change, urban governance, care, love, and sex. Not only does he find a great thrill in being disciplinarily disobedient, but he also sees great analytical value, even virtue, in it. His intellectual concerns extend beyond academic writing to fiction and film, where he attends to the ways aesthetic form renders visible the contradictions, violences, and longings that structure modern life. When not engaged in intellectual matters, he can be found in the kitchen trying new recipes for friends and family, learning the names of wild plants and grasses through ChatGPT during evening walks, reading poetry, doom-scrolling short-form content, or watching films.

Reach Vaibhav at - vs374@snu.edu.in