The ‘Making’ of Silences and Unthinkable histories

While most scholars start with what they know, the information they have gathered and build their argument from what is available, Trouillot in Silencing the Past, starts with the notion of silence. This goes with the related assumption that where there is silence there must also be silencing. Between “what happened” and “what is said to have happened” is a third space comprising of what is never told. As such silences that refer to the gaps in history are not incidental- they are not just there but are ‘made to be’. This is important because not only does it shift perspective from the notion of history as comprising of what is remembered to that which is forgotten, it significantly adds a new way of thinking about the subaltern as not just an entity to be pinpointed (as we have done in the previous readings) but as a process to be identified and grappled with. Subalternity is a process that works through the creation of silences. This “creation” alludes to what I think of as a serious intentionality involved in the act of narrating history such that what we ultimately consume as history is actually a “human appropriation of the past as the past”. Trouillot identifies four processes through which silencing takes place: a) silencing in the making of sources. b) silencing in the creation of archives. c) the narrators themselves silence much d) not every narrative becomes a part of the "corpus,". I don’t know how far we can push this but I feel, these distinct modes of silencing that the author identifies suggest that we should also be thinking of subalternity as a practice.

Trouillot is concerned by the question of whether the forgotten, or more appropriately the ‘made to be forgotten’ can possibly be recovered. In other words, he thinks about ways of unsilencing, which to him is possible only through explaining those silences and engaging actively with their histories.  He does this himself in the narration of Haitian history by looking at two salient events. One is through recovering the buried story of Sans Souci. Not just the palace of Frederick the Great in Potsdam, or the palace of Henry Christophe in Haiti, but the man Sans Souci, the African-born slave and revolutionary who refused to surrender to the French, as Christophe and Jean-Jacques Dessalines had after the removal of Toussaint in 1802. This is the face lost to history: Colonel Sans Souci, was no ‘marginal rebel’, but “a high-ranking officer of Louverture’s army turned dissident.” The second incident involves uncovering the gaps in the history of Haitian revolution and thinking about why it was less talked about.

Obviously both examples are a departure from the South Asian context. However, there are parallels to be made between Trouillot’s examination of the Haitian Revolution and Sumit Sarkar’s The Kalki Avatar of Bikrampur.  In fact, my reading of Sarkar’s text is informed by Trouilot’s  concept of “unthinkable histories”.  For Trouillot the “unthinkable” is “that which one cannot conceive within the range of possible alternatives which perverts all answers because it defies the terms under which the questions are phrased” (82).  It is possible for some events to become unthinkable because they do not conform to a given conceptual framework. In a sense they are abberant.  When such happens, Trouillot argues, events are reduced to “non-events”. This, too my mind again has implications for thinking about subalternity in terms of that which cannot be comprehended or lacks a given frame of reference. It is limiting in and of itself.

Trouillot’s  conception of   the “non-event” was a good starting point to think about Sarkar’s piece  and how a ‘scandalous event’ of high import in the moment in which it occurred in Bikrampur was reduced to a non-event in historiography.  Trouillot and Sarkar’s work is separated by content, time and space. Trouillot exposes the paradox of Enlightenment thought which celebrated universal human rights and equality while oppressive institutions of slavery and racial oppression still persisted. He asserts that “colonization provided the most potent impetus for the transformation of European eurocentrism into scientific racism” where the enslavement of blacks was rationalized as a result of their inherent biological inferiority (77). It was believed that at the very bottom of this scale “enslaved Africans and their descendants could not envision freedom- let alone formulate strategies for gaining and securing such freedom” (73). Therefore, he argues that even as it happened, the Haitian Revolution was “unthinkable” as the story of the successful revolution of slaves was so disturbing to white assumptions about black inferiority and to cherished taxonomies of scientific racism that it could not be told without being recast or disfigured. Trouillot says that when the facts were undeniable much effort was expended to narrate the revolution in a manner that would neatly fit in with a European worldview and conform to its racial and cultural hierarchies.  And so he figures two “formulas of silence”: one that involves a complete erasure of the Haitian Revolution through archival omission and another that trivializes the event by ignoring its radicalism and looking at external factors outside of the role of the slaves themselves. (96). 

On the contrary,   Sarkar looks at the events at the turn of the 20^th century on a bizarre night in the life of a Bengali bhadralok family in Bikrampur where a Chandal claiming himself to be the Kalki avatar enters the household of Lalmohan and turns the domestic order upside down. . Sarkar says that “the incident became the kind of scandal that one knows but does not talk about” (3). It was silenced because it tarnished bhadralok reputation, It became an ‘unthinkable’ ‘non –event’, when filtered through Trouillot’s terminology, because it could not be articulated in the “patriotic memory of Bikrampur which was entering into an era of swadeshi upsurge”.  Sarkar and Trouillet’s works are united in their acknowledgement  of the power dynamics involved in the writing of history. In the Haitian Revolution and Kalki avatar affair, matters of prestige were equally important. “Erasure and trivialization” as Trouillout argues is not accidental. Sarkar too is conscious about limitations of the archive as he argues for textuality as a form of power: “no text is innocent”. Here the unthinkable concept is being used to question why scandalous histories never make their way into the official archive and whether they can be written about at all. Sarkar’s answer points to the power of the bhadralok discourse and its exclusivity.

Silencing the Past is a hopeful text: while it cautions us of the silences that allude to unthinkable facets of history, it never suggests that these histories are irretrievable. There is a movement towards making the unthinkable Sans Souci and Haitian revolution thinkable in Silencing the Past. Similarly, Sarkar and even Guha do the same where they analyse fragments of information about past events. If we question in what sense histories can be made thinkable then each author argues for the need to understand events in their own terms. One way of doing this is to think of the agency embodied by the characters. For example Prasanna’s actions involve a series of inversions: a chandal appropriates mythic traditions that exalt proper caste and gender hierarchies, and uses them to humiliate upper castes. This agency then turns into a caste based encounter.  But how does the subaltern perceive his own agency? To that end, Prasanna claims that the burning of the Lanka had been planned by the Thakur (Kalachand) and  Lalmohan (22). Again we fall back on the complexity of agency. A second way would be to place the event within the Kali yuga myth and the coming of the Kalki avatar at the end of the 20^th century which allows us to look at conceptions of mythical time in contrast to secular time and the advent of colonial modernity. The culture surrounding Kali Yuga and its popular reception is also central because in part the event is linked to a particular consumption and “re­-enactment” of certain stories and myths. In one way we are dealing with the afterlife of the Kali yuga theme that goes back to the Mahabharata and is later taken up by different puranic texts.  The essay talks about the evolution of the theme and how it was received in different historical contexts. As such, it was a significant part of the cultural imagination with certain recurrent motifs that had ossified by the turn of the century. 

But more so, the event can be understood in light of emerging definitions of family and household in colonial Bengal and the construction of the authority of the Karta or male head of the household vis a vis the women. The women’s narrative in the event signals another mode of comprehension. For the woman who kicked her husband, where does her agency derive itself from? How do we understand the act of stripping women and making them touch a fire. What were the women thinking? Did they believe that Prasanna was the Kalki Avatar? Why did Prasanna make them perform these acts? The article suggests  the inadequacy of colonial judicial discourse to interpret these actions in terms of a “madness” whereas Sarkar argues that we need to be conscious of the way the Doyhata affair was actually filtered through and legitimized by certain “belief structures” that were “transgressively imported” into the bhadralok household that night. By offering various means of explaining the event, Sarkar illuminates upon the multiple silences in the official narration in the Dacca Prakash and KM pamphlet as well as the realization that the Doyhata affair was not “unimportant”. By thinking of these possibilities of comprehension, we are actually not only looking into other realms of the unthinkable but at the same time trying to make such an event of a “carnivalesque” nature thinkable-trying to reclaim it from its hitherto position as a “non-event”.