Nandu was worried. His son, Ajay, should have been home by now. While parental concerns for one’s child’s safety and whereabouts seem normal enough, in Nandu’s case these were always exacerbated by the secret about his son’s identity that he had fought hard to harbor. Uneasy and restless Nandu starts to search for his son. He would later learn of a lynched corpse hanging near the Dimapur train station. Despite being defaced, the corpse had been identified as Muslim. It was as though Nandu’s worst fears had been realized, because he instinctively knew that the corpse was his son’s.
This forms the denouement of a short story titled, “The Platform” that appeared in Temsula Ao’s last published collection, The Tombstone in my Garden. The story follows the life of a migrant worker in Nagaland around the 1960s who ends up finding work as a porter in the Dimapur train station. He is referred to as a “Bihari” a term used for most migrant workers in Dimapur at the time, often regardless of which part of India they came from. As the years roll by, Nandu becomes increasingly aware of a new kind of outsider called the “Bangladeshis” whose presence becomes increasingly unsettling in Dimapur. It is not the “natives” who are quite as troubled by the rising ranks of the new outsiders, the narrator tells us, but rather other groups of outsiders who unlike the Biharis or the Bangladeshis had established stakes in the macro-economies of Nagaland. The story subtly alludes to the ensuing refugee crisis from the Bangladesh Liberation War when Nandu ends up fostering an orphaned refugee boy he finds cowering in a corner of the Dimapur station. He tries and fails to get the boy, who seemed to be in a shock induced stupor, to wash and clean himself. Taking charge of the situation he decides to bathe the boy and discovers that the boy was Muslim.
Overcome with panic, Nandu tries to calm himself by resolving to conceal the boy’s true identity. He impresses upon the boy that his name would now be Ajay. The boy as though gradually emerging from a long torpor finally speaks, ‘My name is Ajmal’. Nandu starts to panic again, and shouts at the boy saying that he would henceforth only answer to the name Ajay. The frightened boy concedes, and in the years that follow Nandu goes to great lengths to conceal the boy’s true identity and raises Ajay as his adopted son. As Ajay grows up, tensions around the increasingly visible presence of the newer unwelcome outsiders rise, but Nandu is able to shield his adopted son from being discovered as a “Bangladeshi” and a Muslim. However, through a cruel turn of events, Ajay’s true identity is discovered. By the end of the story, we are told that Nandu was never seen in the Dimapur train station again. Both his presence and his grief over his son’s brutal death were, “wiped off the face of the earth without anyone noticing that anything was amiss.”
In trying to find a language with which to understand such erasures, I am often reminded of two insights that have left a lasting impression on me as a reader. The first comes from an observation Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak offers in Death of a Discipline, “Whatever our view of what we do, we are made by the forces of people moving about the world.” The observation is contextualized within a history of the 1965 Immigration Reforms enacted by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the United States. It is, however, hard to imagine that its purported significance is to be limited to such a contextualization alone. I think of Nandu, whose character in Ao’s short story is that of a migrant worker who settles in Nagaland. I also think of Ajay who was a child refugee orphaned and displaced by the forces of war.
The second insight invokes the frame Arundhati Roy sets up in The God of Small Things, that such forces have been circumscribing our places in the world for much longer than we probably realize or care to acknowledge. The conflict at the heart of her narrative, the narrator of Roy’s novel suggests, harks back to a prehistory when the “love laws” were made, the laws that laid down who should be loved, how and how much. It may be argued that the same is true of difference as an existential reality that stems from the fundamental separation between beings—between Self and Other. Difference in such a sense is never wholly reconcilable but facilitates a movement of endeavoring towards one another. For example, such a radical separation between Self and Other is a necessary precondition, according to philosophers such as Roland Barthes or Emmanuel Levinas, for desire or love. However, such a separation that precludes the possibility of ever entirely knowing another, can just as easily be the source of fear. One could think here of the famous passage in Abert Camus’ L’Étranger when the protagonist, Meursault, shoots “the Arab”, feeling threatened by his presence.
While I refrain from a detailed philosophical or anthropological discussion of how an engagement with difference or otherness is foundational to an understanding of the human condition, I do wish to posit the same as a basis for comparison as an interpersonal or intersubjective practice. Given the locus of my academic training, I am especially thinking Comparative Literature as an academic discipline in terms of how it has been situated over the years within discussions of inclusivity, often based on an assumed correlation between a politics of inclusion and an ethics of comparison. To begin with, can one broach such a question of inclusion, both ethically and politically, without first acknowledging marginalization as a precondition? Furthermore, do such claims towards inclusivity also run the risk of disremembering our complicity in violences of marginalization? And lastly, do such acts of inclusion run the risk of coopting the Other in self-serving ways?
In contexts such as the United States in the years following World War II, we see how the immigrant experience starts to become increasingly central to a practice of Comparative Literature. A concern for marginality, one might argue, emerges as a result of marginal experiences finding an academic home in this discipline. In an autobiographical piece she wrote for a volume titled Building a Profession edited by Lionel Gossman and Mihai Spariosu, Anna Balakian poignantly mentions, that she was born in Constantinople, “just before it turned into Istanbul”. She goes on to reminisce about her childhood as an émigré, moving from one national education system to the next, as her parents made their way across Europe, until they finally settled in New York which she describes as a polyglot and international city. Despite her initial hesitations regarding calling herself a comparatist, Balakian recounts, there was something almost organic about such a practice that resonated deeply with her life’s experiences. Being a child of immigrants in America, the pressure to master the English language without any trace of an “ethnic” accent dominated her early years, and yet she could not think of life monolingually. Her love for the French language would lead her to study French at college and university, where she was taught by Paul Hazard, the famous French littérateur and historian of ideas.
In such a sense comparison as a foundational practice within Comparative Literature has always had a strong experiential aspect to it. Scholars in the field have often opined that a methodology for practices of this discipline has in fact emerged from experiences of having lived “comparative lives”. In the aforementioned piece, Balakian states that when she thinks of what it means to be a comparatist, she thinks of someone like her teacher Paul Hazard, whom she describes as having a refined and cosmopolitan worldview. It is often such a sense of cosmopolitanism that suggests, as I mentioned earlier, a correlation between inclusivity and comparison. As a comparatist inhabiting a context that is markedly different while at once being impinged upon by globalist modalities of thought and knowledge, I frequently imagine the work of comparison on more cellular levels. What does a comparative life look like when circumscribed by an incontrovertibly localized experiential frame?
When I think of comparative lives as an experiential and historical frame, I cannot help but think of Ajay, who was once Ajmal. He had spoken this name in Bangla and was shouted at in Hindi to never go by it again. I think of this child, displaced and orphaned by war. He was a war refugee, adopted and nurtured by a migrant worker. A less tolerable outsider loved and cared for by another slightly more tolerable outsider. I think of the life Ajay could have had. I think of his lynched corpse, of how everybody knew but chose not to utter his name, and of Nandu’s grief that remained forever unspoken. I often wonder whether their lives too count as comparative lives.
