The Final Question Read online

  Nilima sees Kamal’s freedom as realizable in an ethic of engagement within the home, a commitment to meaningful domestic activity:

  Not to work, not to know grief or sorrow or want or complaint, only to wander about everywhere—can this be the measure of a woman’s freedom? God Himself has endless things to do, but who thinks He is in bondage? Don’t I myself work hard in this household? (p. 275)

  In the end it is the household that Nilima considers the site of a woman’s work: her ideal is an image of fulfilled domesticity, in many respects more characteristic of her than of Kamal. She conceives of Kamal’s freedom as a self-sufficiency within this space, a giving of the self which can still hold in reserve the power to withdraw the gift if attachment ends. It is impossible not to feel, even in the poignancy of this model of a free woman as projected by a childless young widow without a home, Saratchandra’s own surrender to a deeply male fantasy of voluntary domestic devotion, not only free in itself, but free of compulsion, restraint and social determination.

  Nilima describes Kamal, in her untroubled social interaction with men (she has just spent ten days unchaperoned in the house of an Anglo-Indian widower), as being like a fish in a river: ‘She doesn’t worry about her living, she has no guardian to control her, and no community of her own to frown on her. She’s utterly free’ (p. 273). This assessment makes Kamal’s freedom a condition of her race: because she is situated both within Bengali society and outside it, one way for others in the novel to understand her is by seeing her as a stranger. Through the course of the novel, it is possible to trace the process whereby Kamal is estranged through this growing perception of her as a foreigner. The parallel with Tagore’s Gora (1909), though not exact, is important. Initially regarded as Shibnath’s wife, condemned for her low birth even if admired for her beauty and intelligence, Kamal steadily moves away from the social orbit in which she is first perceived. Isolated by Shibnath’s abandonment of her, her movements are restricted by her poverty; at the same time, she forms intimate ties of affection with individuals whose final response to her is to note her difference from them. ‘Kamal is Eastern to look at,’ says Harendra resignedly, ‘but her nature is Western … She has neither belief nor sympathy for anything in our tradition’ (p. 304). Ashu Babu too is struck by this alterity: ‘Life means something different to her—it has nothing in common with our view. She doesn’t believe in destiny; past memories don’t block her path … How young she is! Yet she seems already to have understood the true nature of her mind’ (p. 271). That Kamal is constituted by Western knowledge, as by Western reason, is crucial to other people’s perception of her. It is also one of the ways in which her freedom is understood—as a form of otherness, explained now by gender, now by culture, now by race. At the end of the novel, Ashu Babu says that he has learnt from her the truth that liberation comes not from imitation, but from knowledge. Kamal is free because that is her nature; for others to imitate that freedom might result in disaster. Yet it is, as Kamal puts it, her nature and her duty (p. 338) to initiate change in the world she inhabits, to destroy the past in order to create the future.

  As a thinking subject, Kamal is articulated chiefly through two lines of critique which run through this novel—the critique of sexual morality and the critique of Hindu nationalism. It is important to understand the positions Saratchandra assigns to her in these debates, but to do so adequately we need to understand the contexts of time and place in which they are constructed. The Final Question is set, not in the conflict-ridden, self-doubting climate of Bengal in the first decades of the twentieth century, but amidst the relocated (prabasi) community of Bengalis in Agra, hungry for novelty and gossip, curious about one another’s affairs, but lacking the strict hierarchies of caste or social rank. It is a community whose chief solace is visiting and news—even where news is scanty and belated, as in the case of the Guptas, father and daughter, whose arrival in the town constitutes the novel’s inaugural event. The narrative is well advanced before we learn that the Guptas are Hindus, not Brahmos; that the beautiful and educated Manorama is not single by choice, but engaged to the engineer Ajit; that the wealthy Ashutosh Gupta, with his deep reverence for Hindu ideals, is a barrister educated in England. For the women in the novel—Kamal, Manorama, Nilima, Bela, even the magistrate’s wife Malini—this society provides a relatively neutral, relatively unthreatening space where personal and social identities can be articulated without immediate danger to their existence. What is at issue, for them as for the men, is not so much the question of suffering as the question of happiness. Yet just outside this space, on the margins of the fiction, there are women whose existence is suffering in quite as fundamental a way as for the heroines of Saratchandra’s earlier fiction—Shibnath’s abandoned and ailing wife, whom he dismisses with cynical rationality, and the widow of his partner, whom he has cheated of her share in their business. These figures, mentioned early in the novel, exist almost as ghostly reminders of another world and another kind of fiction concerning women, a world of injustice and deprivation which has only been set aside, not superseded.

  Kamal’s fate is also to be an abandoned wife, but she accepts this with equanimity, recognizing the emptiness of the marital tie when attachment has ceased. Herself a widow, she has gone through some form of Shaivite marriage with Shibnath, clearly a euphemism for the absence of a legal bond.6 Symbolically, she qualifies as a colonial subject of a peculiarly representative kind. She is the illegitimate daughter of an English tea planter and a Bengali widow of uncertain reputation. While she refers briefly at one point to the arrogance and contempt she has seen among the tea garden Europeans, she is deeply reverential towards her father, who is consistently described as noble and virtuous. This contrast may look back to Rabindranath’s distinction between the chhoto and boro ingraj (small Englishman and great Englishman), but that was a distinction Tagore ultimately rejected as false.

  It is perhaps more perturbing that the novel fails at any point to comment on the conditions of the tea plantations of Assam where Kamal spent her youth, conditions which could be described as near slavery. Wages were lower than anywhere else in India, and the law still required discharge certificates (mostly denied by magistrates on the grounds of non-fulfilment of contracts) for ‘coolies’ who wanted to go home. Saratchandra could scarcely have been unaware of the unrest created among the tea-garden labourers by the Non-Cooperation Movement in 1921, and of the mass exodus of upcountry labourers from Assam in the summer of that year, a trek which brought them to Chandpur in East Bengal in May, where they were brutally prevented from boarding a steamer by the Gorkha military police. This event led to strikes and hartals in the nearby towns and on the Assam-Bengal Railway as well as the steamer service. Domestic servants deserted their European masters: the local bar, schools and colleges were closed, and Chittaranjan Das rushed to Chandpur to direct the steamer strike at Goalando. Following this, cholera broke out in the refugee camp at Chandpur, and C.F. Andrews, who worked with volunteers from the Non-Cooperation Movement among the cholera-stricken refugees, spoke of the experience as a deeply humbling and moving one, calling up ‘a deep feeling of charity’ which united Bengal.7 These events must be placed somewhat later than the presumed time of this novel, but they would have been part of the novelist’s memory, especially because of the extraordinary public sentiment they aroused and the light they cast on the structures of colonial domination.

  Yet Kamal’s account of her origins fails to emphasize the vulnerability and sexual exploitation of women, as doubly colonized subjects, in these structures. In fact she never mentions her mother, who belongs if anything to that spectral company of destitute and dispossessed women mentioned at the start of the novel. Kamal’s unproblematic acceptance of her paternal inheritance is something of a difficulty for us, especially when it is combined with the easy passage she secures, by virtue of her beauty and charm, into the heart of Bengali society. (It is true that there are some who condemn her, like Akshay, and some w
ho dislike her, like Manorama, but they are in a minority.) We could respond by reading this situation, not in terms of realist representation, but allegorically, as Saratchandra may have intended. In that case we must take note of the paternalist bias of Kamal’s theoretical convictions. Late in the novel (p. 291), we find her explicating the English word emancipation by telling Ashu Babu that in history it was the masters who freed the slaves: the strong must emancipate the weak, men must liberate women, fathers must set their daughters free. Implicitly, there is also the assumption that it is the English who must free India; that it is Western reason and Western morals, not a revival of Hindu values and ideals, that can release India from bondage.

  In a midnight conversation with Ajit, Kamal says that she is not the kind of woman to attract men’s lust (p. 232), and there is indeed something coolly intellectual about her personality. Nevertheless, one function she must perform in the novel is to serve as a model of sexual freedom. Saratchandra’s enthusiastic reading of Herbert Spencer’s Descriptive Sociology is attested by his extensive citation of this work in his seminal essay Narir Mulya (‘A Woman’s Worth’, 1923), where, incidentally, he also cites John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women. His views on sexual morality, as evident in mature works like Charitrahin, Shrikanta Part II and Grihadaha, incorporate a liberal defence of the right to choose one’s partner and to reject a meaningless legal bond. In Spencer he found a form of evolutionary ethics linked to the development of the ‘higher sentiments’ which would accompany the union of the sexes in more modern, industrialized societies: ‘for sympathy, which is the root of altruism, is a chief element in these sentiments.’8 The relationships between men and women will inevitably develop from the crude notion of women as property to the ideal of a companionate marriage: ‘there will come a time when the union by affection will be held of primary moment and the union by law as of secondary moment; whence reprobation of marital relations in which the union by affection has dissolved.’9

  It is in the movement towards this state that, as Ashu Babu puts it, ‘the history of pure love is the history of civilization’ (p. 337). Kamal’s idea of love, a love that does not require validation through the legal bond of marriage, is a notion which even Ajit has to struggle to understand. But it is this notion which informs her assertion of an independent sexual choice, and the articulation of this choice links The Final Question with novels like Rabindranath’s Jogajog (Relationships) and Ghare-Baire, where the choice is shown to be constrained or corrupted. It also places Kamal in direct relation with the other women in the novel. Manorama, whose centrality in the novel decreases as Kamal’s increases, chooses to elope with Shibnath—a tragically mistaken course of action, but she cannot be abandoned for ‘following her heart’, as Kamal tells her father. Bela, Ashu Babu’s niece, has divorced her husband with her uncle’s support, but she is explicitly condemned for living on her husband’s money. Nilima, despite her admiration for Kamal, remains deeply committed to the Hindu ethic of fidelity and sacrifice. Yet she finds herself a drudge in Abinash’s household and an embarrassment in Ashu Babu’s: in the end she has no real choice at all. Despite her impoverished and marginal existence on the fringes of Agra society, Kamal’s critical, often mocking exposure of sexual hypocrisy and traditional morality touches every character in the novel—not least the brahmachari Harendra, whose willed celibacy is severely tested by Kamal’s invitation to him to spend the night in her room.

  Kamal’s rational choice of happiness over self-sacrifice or duty is hedonism of a sort, and it is clear that Saratchandra is uncomfortable with some of the implications of this philosophy. He solves this problem by making Kamal, quite irrationally, extremely ascetic, in the manner of a Hindu widow of the most rigorous kind. It is true that Kamal explains her practice of eating the simplest food only once a day by her poverty, which has habituated her to abstinence; but there is no real reason why she should make this self-denial a matter of the strictest observance. In fact, apart from the curious interlude about the soap in Manorama’s bathroom, Kamal is represented as avoiding even the meanest of self-indulgences. She goes on a long drive with Ajit, but she appears not to have sexual relations with anyone, she practically never eats or sleeps, and she works selflessly for the sick. Moreover, she demonstrates her womanhood in a tiresomely traditional way by insisting on cooking for Ajit or making him tea. It is impossible not to be conscious here of the symbolic value attached to the serving of food in Hindu society generally and Saratchandra’s novels in particular.

  If Kamal’s presence in the novel disrupts the comfortable middle-class assumptions about sex, morality, marriage, domestic peace and filial obedience to which the other characters have grown accustomed, it is also destructive of the nationalist ideology preached by Satish and Harendra. The time is one of crisis in any case. If we date the events by the influenza epidemic described in the second half of the book, we should assume a rough date around 1918, immediately after the war. The influenza epidemic of that year killed more people all over the world than any epidemic before or since; it ranks with the Black Death in Europe and Asian outbreaks of plague as the most destructive in history. In India roughly 12,500,000 persons, or 4 per cent of the total population, are said to have been killed by influenza in the autumn of 1918; there was a less severe recurrence in the spring of 1919. Historians in India have so far paid relatively little attention to the scale of this affliction, which far outweighed localized outbreaks of cholera or typhoid fever, and which combined with the economic distress of the post-war period to produce unparalleled misery. What is described at the beginning of Chapter 18 is almost certainly the autumn epidemic:

  Within a few days, the appearance of this densely populated, prosperous town changed completely. Schools and colleges were closed, the shops in the markets shut down, and the river bank was almost desolate. The main roads were silent and deserted except for the timorous footsteps of Hindu and Muslim corpse bearers. Looking around, it seemed that not only the people but even the trees, houses and buildings had turned pale with fear.

  As the town lay sunk in this state, many of the inhabitants, burning with anxiety, sorrow and bereavement, made up their differences. It did not require the effort of discussion or mediation—it just happened. Those who had still survived, those who had not yet been obliterated from the face of the earth, seemed by virtue of that to be close kin to each other. People who had not spoken for a long time now met on the street with moist eyes: one’s brother, another’s child or wife had died meanwhile. They no longer had the strength of mind to turn away their faces in hatred. Sometimes they exchanged words; sometimes not, only taking their leave silently, wishing each other well. (pp. 185—86)

  Kamal’s experience of death in the leather workers’ slums affects her permanently; it teaches her to forgive Shibnath’s conduct, and it shows her also the limits of her own endurance, which cannot compare with that of Rajen. She is more vulnerable at this time than at any other moment in the novel, more open to the access of sympathy, less censorious of others’ mistakes. Her friendship with Rajen has also been educative in a quite new way; sparing of speech and argument, he shows himself to be stronger and more independent than she is. It is in this spiritually chastened mood, when the whole novel bears the horrific weight of the present calamity, that Kamal has her first extended conversation with Harendra (pp 187 ff.).

  This conversation needs to be considered together with a later effort by Satish to persuade Kamal of the validity of his beliefs (pp 295 ff.). Given the dialogic mode generally adopted in The Final Question and specifically characterizing these encounters, it would be wrong to assume that Kamal’s opinions are uncontestedly the author’s. In the second conversation at least, the argument seems to be genuinely unresolved; despite the force and rationality of Kamal’s position, her interlocutors can give only a qualified assent, and in much they are forced to disagree. The exchanges mark out an area of reasoned difference which more or less coincides with that traced in c
ontemporary debates on nationalism and modernity in India. The struggle of the modern that we mark in Kamal’s efforts to extend what Habermas might call the domain of public reason remains incomplete; in a sense it is overshadowed, at the very end of the novel, by the image of sacrifice provided through Rajen’s death. As in so much contemporary discourse, the polarization of opposing arguments, the split between tradition and modernity, East and West, asceticism and materialism, produces a curiously schematic view of the conflict. This schematization is further reinforced by the divisions of race and gender which are allowed, in this fictional enactment, to structure the argument. For Saratchandra, the only means of reconciliation lies in sympathy: the sympathy of which Harendra is most intuitively capable, the love which Ashu Babu is readiest in offering. Whether this is enough is an open question.

  Kamal’s first conversation with Harendra is not in fact about the ideals of his brahmacharya ashram, but about her own relationship with Shibnath. It is important, in the total context of the novel, that Harendra who is ‘immeasurably devoted to India’s religious ideas and customs, her unique and distinguished civilization’ (p. 195) should be so disgusted by what he sees as Kamal’s immorality: ‘He was repelled by the thought that Kamal’s father was a European and her mother a harlot.’ Unassimilable within ideologies of nationalism which equate the nation with the mother and idealize womanhood as the repository of the truest spiritual values, Kamal represents to Harendra the fallen, racially impure woman; the woman whose life embodies the other history of the nation, as prostitute and bastard. This revulsion is converted to respect in the course of this first exchange, but there is still, in the later conversation, the irreducible sense of Kamal’s difference and otherness.