This essay offers an analysis of a single text by a single individual in nineteenth-century Bengal, but it seeks to make a more general point about how concepts and practices travel through history and between societies. It is sometimes stated that all societies share certain common values and that distinctions between public and private (because they centre on the universal question of sexual life and how people should relate to their own and others’ sexuality) are correspondingly universal. All societies, in this view, have some idea of what is public and what is private. This point of view is well intentioned, but historically lazy and inaccurate.
My general point can be made by an analogy with the phenomena of marriage and kinship. Sexual relations are a biological universal, but kinship is a social construction and its universality is rather like that of human language. All societies have language, but each society has a language of its own. Kinship always centers on relations between the sexes, but
social relations are configured in startlingly different ways. I wish to argue, similarly, that a distinction between what is accessible—seen, heard, communicated—to others, and what is not, is common to most societies; but exactly where the lines of distinction fall, and where conceptual distinctions are inflected, differs widely between societies. Accordingly, although the sense that the individual has some properties or mental features which cannot be shared by others (and should therefore be socially protected) occurs in many cultures, especially through religious reflections on interiority, the idea of a ‘private life’ is a historical construction of Western modernity.
When this idea travels to other societies, and is accepted by certain social groups, it has to be translated into the different context of that society through two parallel processes. Firstly, the incorporation of these practices requires experimentation with their lives by adventurous individuals. But, secondly, these experiments cannot affect social practice without a discursive accompaniment. Additionally, as many pre-modern cultures possess pre-existing concepts and arguments about interiority, affability of emotions, and associated states of consciousness, the reception of modern Western concepts is inevitably mediated through these intellectual habits.
In the Bengali context, this discursive accompaniment, or a constant reflexive commentary on this mode of social being, is provided by new forms of writing, primarily novels, lyric poetry, and autobiography. Novels provide both description and evaluative commentary on the fictive lives of characters. But in the nineteenth century the literary canon of modernity is composed primarily of realistic novels. The central characters in these must be socially credible and act like ordinary individuals in society, which means that interior reflections and commentaries can apply to actual social life. Lyric poetry, in its characteristically universal, unindexed mode of enunciation of the abstract self, explores the emotional universe associated with a new kind of conjugal relationship. It is striking that, almost universally, the romantic novel is interested in the period in which a relationship is negotiated between two individuals, when their romantic encounter is in its formative stage, and requires a re-education of sentiments and its moral justification. The autobiography, the third distinctively modern literary form, holds a peculiarly significant place in this inauguration of new forms of social life. It describes and reflexively comments on real—not fictive—lives. Novels assert the possibility of modern lives in the abstract; autobiographies have the ineradicable advantage of describing the real. Every autobiography is thus a vindication that such a new kind of life for the individual is not merely desirable, but actually possible.
The text taken up here for analysis is an early Bengali autobiography (Sastri 1918), written by Sibnath Sastri, a major Brahmo intellectual in late-nineteenth-century Calcutta. Besides being a major religious reformer, Sastri was a literary writer of considerable repute who composed poetry and wrote social novels, though not of such stature as to be included in the highest canon of modern Bengali. Bengali school students are likely to learn about him in histories of literature as a second-level figure rather than to read his texts. However, much of modern intellectual history has stressed the importance of the ‘little texts’ which surround the great texts and constitute their language and fields of signification. Seeking to understand social history only through great literature can be misleading: individuals who are not leading writers often play a determining role in shaping social norms and in the creation of a modern consciousness. Sastri belonged to the latter type. His reputation rested on his fame as a man of ‘high character’ (unnata caritra), as a reformer, an eloquent preacher of the Brahmo religion, and as a person who lived a new kind of intensely moral life. For Bengalis cautiously intending to be modern, his life thus had a double, slightly contradictory, attraction: it was both ‘saintly’ and rationalistically modern. Its central theme was that it was possible to remain religious while acting in impeccably rationalistic ways.
In studying the ‘translation’ of ideas from the West, or just the historical inauguration of modernity, performances in the purely intellectual field are not the only relevant measure. Performances in the translation or transformations in practice are of equal, often greater, significance.
1 Sastri was, in many ways, a heroic figure—not merely in articulating intellectual ideas and arguments, but in his character (his
caritra), in ‘leading a life’ that was exemplary in a modern way. What people admired were not the texts he wrote, but the life he authored, the events that constituted it, the principles that structured it, gave it its peculiar form and direction, and its historic meaning. The
Atmacarit is his own chronicle of his life. It is called simply
Atmacarit (
Atmacharit in the more usual Bengali transliteration), a compound of two well-known words.
Atma means the self.
Carita contains the fertile ambiguity of reference to both the character displayed in the events of the life and a recounting of that story. Thus the title and its presentation are as simple and intentionally humble as possible, and there is an almost deliberate gesture of conspicuous humility in the plainness of the title and the invitation it offers to the reader.
This plainness is deceptive, however, not because the humility is insincere, as in many traditional saints who often turn such gestures into a conventionalized excess of inconspicuousness.
2 Nor is it a conventional hyperbole. Yet there is a peculiar irony in the emotion and the gesture itself. The traditional gesture of moral debasement worked through a simple technique. By asserting the extraordinary sinfulness of the devotee, it indirectly enhanced the glory of the redeemer: for the more fallen the sinner, the greater the glory of God who purified him. But Sastri’s autobiography follows a modern moral path, which considered such self-abasement unworthy of human dignity. In his ability to shape a moral life for himself, the modern individual moral subject took a much more upright stance. The entire life narrated in Sastri’s book continues this ironic relation to ordinariness: because, clearly, to be successful with its intended audience, it must appear as both ordinary and extraordinary. It is a kind of life that Sastri, through the story of his life, and its example, attempts to appear reasonable and socially possible to everybody. But, in his historical context, that required extraordinary effort, dramatic conflict, and social tension. The story of his life is a contest between two models of ordinariness, two contrasting, if not conflicting, forms of what an ordinary life should be. This conflict of two ‘common senses’ spread to every level—one’s self-identity, childhood, youth, conjugality, parenthood, friendship, religiosity, rationalism, cosmopolitanism. All these themes, ideas, and practices had their given, ordinary, meanings in customary Hindu life. For nearly all of them Sastri wanted a new definition to make them ‘ordinary.’ But that required the substitution of one discourse of ‘common sense’ by another. Thus the title is deceptive in its plainness. By trying hard not to embellish the title or the literary performance in the narrating, the author seeks to convey a sense of commonness. But it is not in any sense a common life. It is a life of great moral achievement, and it is lived with extraordinary deliberateness in a historical world, a language, and a changing sensibility.
The Awkwardness of the Autobiography
The autobiography is a highly specific literary form, and at Sastri’s time it was not commonplace, as it would become within fifty years. In Atmacarit, the two words which are compounded are both common; but their conjunction is not. Carita or caritra is a common religious biographical genre. It may appear, anachronistically, that writing an Atmacarit is simply transferring the skills from that convention to just another object—one’s self. Instead of another person of extraordinary merit, the object of narration is the person who happens to be the writer. But it is not that simple. In fact, some of the well-understood rules of this convention of biographical composition have to be abandoned, at times inverted, when a person starts to write a carita about himself. This involves not merely writing about a different subject; the subject forces the writer to engage in a very different kind of writing.
Conventional biographies were written about persons of great religious merit or sometimes about military conquerors, both of whom were clearly claimants to extraordinary lives. Ordinary people do not live the excessively religious, or morally unimpeachable, lives of saints; nor do they have the power and authority to embark on military conquests and glory. It is precisely the extraordinariness of those other lives which made them deserving of the distinction of a narrative. But the connection between ordinary people and this kind of exemplary or extraordinary life is significant. Most people in traditional society would be expected to live their lives according to strict routines of occupation and conduct, which set out their social roles, the criteria for their exemplary performance, and the norms of moral behavior according to the station to which they belonged. Some individuals’ lives would be ‘extraordinary’ because they would conform to these standards to an extent not normally achieved by others. Exemplary lives would be exemplary in the literal sense, their devotion to their roles and their internal criteria of excellence would be of such a high degree of perfection as to serve as examples to others. By following these life-story models, ordinary lives would become firmer in their conception of their own roles and modes of meritorious conduct; ordinary lives would tend toward those high ideals without ever reaching their levels of perfection of moral performance. Thus these stories could contribute to the building of ‘character’. Interestingly, there is a necessary relation of non-identity in this narrative arrangement. The saint never recites his own life, his moral achievements: someone less capable of such excellence does. To put it another way, there is a necessary separation between the protagonist and the narrator. This is the concept of
caritrapuja (character-worship).
Why should there be an implicit rule of disjunction between the character and the narrator? First, the character has a perfection of personality that does not need models of this kind. He is also usually bound by rules of reticence,
3 so that it would become immodest on his part to narrate what he has achieved. His life is seen by a separate, different, lesser eye, which can, precisely because of this difference in the scale of achievement, grasp and admire its greatness. Saints, in any case, are heroes of moral action; they lack the leisure to be writers. Their lives are spent in creating bold acts, showing that such perfect acts are possible, not by preaching them, but by enacting them. In great acts, whether of kindness, compassion, sacrifice, or conquest, it is the doing that convinces, not mere saying. By definition, therefore, they do not have the time to narrate what they have accomplished. It requires a different role—that of the disciple, author, narrator, and litterateur. So every Caitanya has a Krishnadas, every Rama a Valmiki, every Krishna a Vyasa.
4 The author of acts and the author of stories must be different.
It is that combination—the undeniability of the ideal and its simultaneous unattainability—which induces ordinary individuals to a life of virtue. This ‘building’ has two connotations. It connotes the act of combining elements from different sources and giving them a crafted and fashioned coherence, and also of putting things together to make something strong. A true human character needs both: it needs to search for and select elements—dispositions, skills, and capacities—that can be culled from the most wide-ranging and diverse sources to make it rich, complex, and interesting; but it must also be a combination of some fundamental dispositions in which the person would have an immovable faith.
There are dangers in unifying the subject and the narrator. Human beings are naturally prone to self-indulgence; it is too easy and pleasant to be deluded about oneself, and fatally easy to be self-righteous about the course of one’s life. Stories told by the self cannot have completeness, because they are not told at the completion of a well-lived life, impartiality—because we tend to rationalize our acts, and because of the utter impossibility of achieving the detachment required in a moral tale. Thus, it is possible to make a strong case for the separation of the liver of the life and its narration, to devise a powerful pre-emptive argument against the autobiographic impulse. An autobiography written by an Indian in this cultural habitus must surmount some of these traditional concerns.
This set of concerns about narratives of the self, which barred their writing,
5 could, however, be dramatically undermined by a new kind of moral thinking framing the individual and his God. Following Weber, it is possible to sketch the most important ideas of this framework of moral life. Individuals always live in the unblinking gaze of God. There might be some escape from human criticism, but none from the ever-present scrutiny of God, particularly because he is not an external witness, but an internal one. He lives
inside the human heart, inside the Rousseauian moral sentiments instilled in human beings by nature (Taylor 1989). In the Brahmo literature, it is interesting to see how
isvara (God) is slowly turned into somebody who is
hrdayavasi, one who resides inside the heart. Thus there is a constant need to be honest and examine one’s own actions and the events constituting one’s life unceasingly, and to face the challenge, often the mortification, of making them public. This is also why there is such a constant need for penitence: the need to open oneself to God and to his rebukes. The self is thus divided into two parts: it is both the vehicle of the person’s experience and its judge. Moral judgment cannot be avoided because the agent of this judgement lives inside, not outside.
There is also another interesting transformation in the nature of God. It is his suspiciously Christian-looking pity and kindness for erring human souls that is constantly evoked in the Brahmo literature, rather than his more Hindu characteristics of infinite power or infinite knowledge. Sometimes, there is a sense of a deep intimacy with one’s God, but the quality of this intimacy is vastly different from the vatsalya intimacy of the Hindu devotee of Krishna. There is a strange ring to constantly repeated phrases like ‘God’s infinite kindness’. The traditional God was also infinitely kind, but not in quite this sense.
Schematically, Sastri’s text begins with a brief genealogy, indicating where his family came from—both in the sense of their physical origins in South India and the values it passed on. The original, unreconstructed answer to the question of who they were came in the splendidly rhetorical exaggeration of a verse his grandfather taught him in his childhood:
Yavay merau sthita deva
yavat ganga mahitale/
candrarkau gagane yavat/
tavat viprakule vayam
[‘as long as the Ganga flows on this earth, and the sun and the moon are in the heavens, have we been Brahmins.’]
Note here the intended ambiguity of the indescribable tense. There is no way of telling whether it is a reference to antiquity or to unendingness, to the past or the future. Sastri later decided that he was what he was not because of birth but by choice. He moves from the repetitiveness of the village community and its unchosen vocations to a city where lives are elected by a series of willed decisions. One of his main concerns is about domesticity and conjugality, which creates one of the greatest tensions in his life, and so also in the narrative. Marriage, which was the most passive event in the life of the Hindu adolescent, becomes a matter of the most wide-ranging experiments—of marriage among grown adults, marriage of widows, turning an arranged marriage into something utterly unlike itself, a companionate marriage of love. The autobiography is also tormented by his attempts to produce a defensible code for his two marriages, of doing right in a situation that is inherently wrong—having two wives. The movements and agitations of his life do not cease: he is forced into the upheavals and transformations of the Brahmo Samaj. The conflict between the two principles of kinship and friendship, between given and chosen relationships, is never resolved. The commonness of collective interest or intellectually shared enthusiasm never produces a thick enough sociality. It constantly, achingly, seeks something like a family; in being different from the ties of kinship it constantly mimics it, looks for the warmth, the comfort, the unthinking, assumed trustworthiness and availability of kin, parent, brother or sister. His physical movement into differently signified spaces also never ceases: he comes out of his village to Calcutta, to India, and literally to the world, to distant England. Everywhere his cultivated nature is put to the test—of being collected, civilized, never lost for words, or for acts of grace and kindness in a different milieu. That is the test of character. So, in a sense, what he is writing about is not a single person, but a type, the modern individual, of whom he is an example.
An Outline of Sastri’s Life
Sibnath Sastri was born in 1847 in a small village in the southern part of modern West Bengal, close to the Sundarban forests. But in this desolate region the kingdom of the Bengali ruler Pratapaditya had flourished a century earlier and Sastri’s ancestors, who came from an unspecified region of South India, were invited to settle there by the king. Sastri gave up the practice of caste as repugnant, but was not entirely above a certain sense of pride in his line of
daksinatya (southern) Brahmins. He was born into a family of renowned pandits. His grandfather enjoyed a great reputation for his erudition in the
sastras, which he passed on to Sastri’s father. The latter received a modern education, but could not acquire a sufficiently advanced English education to be able to enter the wholly modern teaching sector. He led a strangely mixed existence, teaching Sanskrit in the school system run by the government, a situation of some irony and considerable discomfort. Sastri’s maternal ancestors were also illustrious. His eldest maternal uncle, Dwarkanath Tarkabhushan, taught at the Calcutta Sanskrit College. He was the editor of
Somprakash, a leading journal in which Sastri had his writing apprenticeship. Dwarkanath was a close friend of the reformer Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, whom Sastri knew intimately from his childhood. He recounts how, as a child, he avoided meeting Vidyasagar: he had a pot belly, and Vidyasagar had a strange way of showing his affection by pinching his tummy.
Sastri’s father lacked the means to send him to the most progressive English-medium schools in Calcutta, and sent him, somewhat regretfully, to the Sanskrit College, which was going through its glorious phase with Vidyasagar as its principal. As was common among
daksinatya Brahmins, he was married at the age of sixteen to a girl, Prasannamayi, from a family of similarly high descent, though of distinctly less erudite reputation. This caused the most significant revolution in his life. His family, particularly his father, looked down on the background of the new daughter-in-law, and afterward, following a trifling incident, decided to send her back to her parental home. Sastri, as we shall see, ineffectually protested to his father about this, but was forced to marry a second time. He kept regretting his second marriage, apparently on two different grounds. Firstly, by this time he had joined the modern-educated progressive intelligentsia in Calcutta who rejected the polygamous ways of traditional Brahmins; and, secondly, he obviously felt keenly the injustice in the treatment of his first wife. This conflict, he asserts, made him increasingly critical of traditional religious customs and drew him toward the progressivism of Brahmo culture. After joining the Brahmo Samaj, he called his first wife back to live with him in Calcutta, but was irretrievably saddled with his second wife. He had wild and impractical ideas about practicing a form of monogamy within this compulsorily bigamous life, without eventually working out a wholly immaculate solution. Apparently he lived ever after in moderate happiness in this morally messy relationship with his two wives.
Sastri’s autobiography is a report on a religious life. He soon gained prominence in the Brahmo Samaj and came close to two of its major figures: Devendranath Tagore, the poet Rabindranath’s father, who led the Samaj for some time, and the mercurial Kesabchandra Sen. Sen constantly experimented with both the emotional and philosophical content of the Brahmo religion and its institutional form. This caused him to lead a life of exhausting religious enthusiasm and institutional turbulence. A substantial part of Sastri’s autobiography deals with these upheavals. It faithfully chronicles his initial attraction to Kesabchandra, joining him in his experiment with a modern ashram, and his gradual disillusionment with Sen’s arbitrary and tyrannical style. Eventually, he became one of the major pracaraks (itinerant preachers) of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj. He gave up his comfortable employment as a head teacher for the uncertainty of the itinerant life of a preacher and organizer, living primarily on charity. In the second part of his active life he traveled widely—first in the immediate Bengali sub-empire of the presidency, but later more widely in northern, western and southern India. A significant part of the autobiography is devoted to his six-month sojourn in England and his exchanges with British religious figures. He spent the rest of his life in the service of the Brahmo Samaj, which was by that time fast losing its radical and revolutionary character and turning into one unremarkable sect among the various strands of modern Hinduism.
Sastri was a writer of considerable range and versatility. His writing career began in his early student days, composing satirical verses on the foibles of anglicized Bengalis. In his maturity, much of his writing was devoted to internal disputes among the Brahmo sects. His sermons to Brahmo meetings were collected in a volume,
Dharmajivan (A Life in Religion), published by the Samaj. He also wrote
Mejobau, an early social novel, and volumes of poetry, often meant to be set as Brahmo hymns. However, his long-term reputation rests on his
Atmacarit and his masterful sociological account of Bengal in
Ramtanu Lahiri O Tatkalin Bangasamaj (Ramtanu Lahiri and the Bengali Society of His Times). As often happens, there is a certain inextricability between the two works: the concerns of one work spill over into the other, or themes abandoned in one are taken up and resumed for reflection in the other. One can see a simple division of principle between the two works:
Atmacarit is more the story of an individual life, and the tone is somewhat more personal, while
Ramtanu Lahiri is a more general account of society; but the two are also obviously connected. The assumption behind the telling of the life story was not that such a life was incredible, extraordinary, and unrepeatable, but that it was possible and ordinary. If the story was remarkable, it was because it was witness to a society which was equally noteworthy. Even fifty years earlier, a life of this kind would have been unthinkable.
As a result, the autobiography narrates the life of the person and also of the community of which he is a significant part: it tells the story of Sastri’s life by telling the story of the Brahmo Samaj, and beyond that of Bengali society. All these conceptions of sociability of different scale and qualities are contained in the altering semantics of the term samaj. In the early parts of the story, when Sastri decides to join the Brahmos and reject orthodox brahminical conduct, his father disowns him. This was for two reasons: his father was a sufficiently enlightened modern person to acknowledge the right of the individual to his religious conscience, a right recognized by Hindu polytheism. He disagreed with the Brahmos and disapproved of his son’s heterodoxy; but at least in part this was also because he had to lose face in his community, his samaj in the oldest, entirely traditional sense. ‘Samaj’ here invokes the idea of a circle of people joined by birth and kinship, and those to whom one should rightly feel the greatest obligations of sociability. However, the Brahmos also constitute a samaj. In so doing, however, they wish to obliterate the principle that birth and kinship impose the most significant obligations. They emphatically retain the idea of a community, or samaj, infused with obligations, but based, unlike the earlier brahminical community, on choice and intellectual fellowship. Finally, when Sastri wrote about the state of Bangasamaj at the time of Ramtanu Lahiri, his friend and contemporary, this signified society in the abstract modern sense.
Formal Aspects of Sastri’s Autobiography
Autobiographies clearly exhibit many different styles of writing. In the Western autobiography this is clearly reflected in various ways of presenting the self. Obviously, there is a strong connection between the tone or style of writing and the type of self the author wants to present to his audience. Take the most obvious examples: St Augustine and Rousseau. Taking these two is not entirely irrelevant, because Sastri’s Brahmo religious experiences were in deep contact with various strands of Christian thought. Evidently, the tone of personal relationship with God, divested of brahminical ritualism and priestcraft, had an equal measure of debt to Christian, particularly Protestant, examples and rationalist thinking. Though there are no explicit references to St Augustine in his work, the attitude of devotion to God is striking. Rousseau’s thought was widely known and deeply influential among his generation, though there are no significant direct references to him in the text. However, I am using these two examples as forms of writing, and wish to contrast Sastri’s writing with them because of its striking difference on some points.
European autobiographies are often personal in two radically different ways. Augustine’s confessions are deeply personal, written in a tone which is a mixture of introspective soliloquy and formal writing. Despite the perfection of its formal execution, the tone is of one speaking to himself, or in his case to the self of his self, someone sitting deep inside him. Although this image of God as seated in an inner self is not strictly part of traditional Hinduism (which commonly regarded God as
antaryami, one who can go inside persons, which is different from residing inside them), by the time Tagore was writing his deeply introspective poetry he could refer to his God as ‘
ke go antaratara se,’ that is, one more inside than the inside. Christian autobiographies often put the inner content of religious life—with its doctrines, emotions, doubts, and states of mind—into the act of writing. Thus, Augustine’s
Confessions turns the recounting of the events of his life into a long prayer. Accounts of even apparently insignificant incidents are turned into an invocation and celebration of God—from his first breaking into inarticulate sociability through a smile, to his being led astray through theft in his boyhood. Augustine’s confessions have an unrivaled intensity of introspective attention. It is almost as if, during the laborious composition of this highly literary masterpiece, he does not take his eyes off his inner self. The world exists and comes in only in reports of his unbroken continuous conversation with his self and God sitting inside this self. Augustine’s autobiography constantly reports the states of his mind, and of his religious emotion, and in the latter task, naturally, there is a detailed analysis of Christian religious doctrines and their adversaries.
There is a second kind of personal writing in Rousseau, whose Confessions is equally intent on his internal emotions: Rousseau is a painter of emotions for himself as much as for others. In addition, in this entirely secular recounting of emotional life, there is a subtle gratification of daring, to be able to talk about personal things and to bring them to public view. There is a combination of both confessional moral courage of a certain kind and the very different courage of causing outrage.
On the formal side, Sastri’s autobiography differs sharply from both Augustine and Rousseau. It is written artlessly, without any attempt to bring in literary skills or subtlety. Religious issues and crises are reported, but Sastri never adopts the tone of introspective intimacy, never reports the states of his consciousness psychologically. His text is strikingly unemotional and unpsychological. And, although he often touches on subjects which could be intimate or embarrassing, there is hardly any of the confessional daring of the personal autobiography. The personal is simply hinted at, intimacies are implied, but everything is reported in a tone of unemotional calm and matter-of-fact detachment, as if he is writing about someone else’s life. I feel this is because the embarrassment of the autobiography in the Indian context has been overwhelming. It is often the story of a person, but mostly of the public side of his life and of emotions which can be shared in public. Only Gandhi’s autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, is able to overcome this reticence about the private. Yet there is something remarkably accomplished in Sastri’s book. Without detail about his relations with his wives, or his dealings with his friends, or much psychological reporting of his thinking about God, Sastri records an astonishing phase of change in Bengali social life: the subject of this story, told so unemotionally, is precisely the invention of something called the private life of the individual, an essential part of the invention of a modern self.
The Idea of a Private Life
Family life, surprisingly, was the theatre of some of the greatest changes in early modern Bengal, and this was reflected in contests in the practice of family life and an intense intellectual disputation about the nature of the institution of the family and the role of the family in the structure of social life. To put it simply, there were two sides to the family debate or theoretical disputes about private life. Both thought that the family was at the center of the arrangement of various layers of sociability and their specific structuring in Hindu society. But the two sides’ conceptions of the family and its underlying principles were radically different.
Without going into the details of this complex literature, I shall discuss the arguments of two most remarkable participants in this contest over the hearts and minds of modern Bengalis, both exceptionally gifted in intellectual debate, exceptionally convinced of the justice of their views, and interestingly, both equally convinced that what they experienced in their own lives showed, unproblematically, the justifiability of much larger social forms. These two figures are Bhudev Mukhopadhyay and Sibnath Sastri. It is not entirely accidental that they wrote about very similar things, though from opposing (or at least very distinct) points of view. Both of them spent much of their lives searching for answers to some of the central moral questions of their age: what was dharma (an ethical life)? What was the place of the family in it? What was the form of a good society in the Indian context? And what was to be learnt from the modern West? Bhudev’s answers to these questions about the family are contained in his famous tract, Parivarik Prabandha. Sastri’s book, Grhadharma, was equally central to Brahmo domesticity and is a strikingly coherent and reasoned discourse on the ethics of domestic life.
Parivarik Prabandha is a text of astonishing complexity. What is most remarkable about the book is not what it says, but what is left unsaid. Bhudev’s conservatism is utterly different from the conservatism of other Hindu orthodox writers: it gives up an appeal to habitualism and replaces it with rationalist arguments. But in the end Bhudev’s treatise on the family was disappointing: it provides, on most matters, a total intellectual justification of conventional Hindu families. Sastri’s highly influential
Grhadharma argues the opposite case. There is no direct reference to Bhudev; but the subjects are common. Both Bhudev and Sastri write about marriage and the nature of conjugality, parents’ relation with children, the circle of friends (
bandhu), the maintenance of the household, cleanliness, and domestic order. What Sastri omits from his discussion of the family is also symptomatic: he does not discuss obligations to various types of kinship—
gnati and
kutumba—which loom very large in Bhudev’s picture of domesticity. This is a long and intricate argument in itself. Let me show an example of their differences by taking their views on child marriage. Bhudev writes:
The two who are united in their childhood by parents grow together like two creepers intertwining each other. The kind of permanent affection that is possible among them, how can that affection grow among adults? … [Among young people] the senses are irresistible, imagination is powerful, and affection/attraction is intense. The intelligence and patience that is required in testing each other’s character is usually entirely disabled at that stage. Just one arch look, one sweet smile, one peculiarity of movement captures the fortress of the heart at once. It does not allow time for examination of character, disposition or taste. (Mukhopadhyay 1884: 2–4)
And Bhudev concludes correctly that in all societies where marriage is based on individual choice there are arrangements for divorce.
Sastri’s arguments are entirely hostile to child marriage:
At the root of marriage is love, at the root of love is respect, and at the root of respect lies knowledge of each other. Therefore, the custom of arranging marriage through ghataks [marriage brokers] that exists in this country is not the correct path. Young men and women would mix with a lot of others, and from them would nominate one person—this should be the main principle of marriage. Where marriage is based on love it brings an amazing education to the hearts of men and women. First, it binds individuals to the community (janasamaj); second it binds them with religion (dharma), third it binds them to God (isvar). (Sastri 1963: 28)
What did Sastri see as being narratable in his life, so that he could overcome reticence about the self? I think it was his sense that his life showed the transformation of some of the most fundamental definitions of social conduct, the meanings of religion, leading a religious life, and of the everyday activities of living in a marriage, raising children and passing one’s life with friends. All these had changed historically, and he thought, correctly, that his life was an excellent example of how it had changed, and what people had to go through to make that change happen.
Before individuals can have and defend private lives, the concept of a private life has to become common in society, a matter of social decision which can give rise to intense public debate because these changes signify a fundamental reorientation of the most inescapable province of conduct and experience for all individuals. Sastri’s autobiography is fascinating precisely because it is a chronicle of the unremitting struggles of a man trying to live a private life in a society which still refuses to recognize such an idea, and to take, unmolested by others, what appear to us to be the most inoffensively ordinary decisions. His questions were about how to practice his religion, how to think of God and best to serve him, how to decide about his own career, how to marry, to bring up his children. I shall analyze his story now in terms of three forms of
intimacy—conjugality, the relation between parents and children, and friendship. But I shall follow the sequences of an ideal biography, starting with relations with parents, because they come first, followed by marriage and the setting up of his own
separate family, and developing relations of friendship with acquaintances through work and intellectual fellowship rather than kinship and family (Bhudev’s
gnati-kutumba).
The Relation of Parent and Child
One of the most significant strands of his autobiography concerns Sastri’s relations with his elders, in particular the very different inflections of intimacy with his father and mother. Sastri receives a classical and exacting traditional education in being a good child. His father is unable to stay with his family and has to teach in government schools, but his values and personality traits determine some of the outlines of their domestic life. He is obviously a man of learning and great honesty; but despite his straitened financial circumstances he defies the power of the local landlords in sending his daughters to the village girls’ school. There is, also, an interesting distinction at the heart of Hindu Brahmin domesticity: several incidents clearly demonstrate that inner religious life is considered both sacred and, in the traditional way, personal. A son wishing to follow the Shakta form of worship might cause a Vaishnava father some displeasure, but he would not normally interfere in these matters of belief. Turning Brahmo was, in one sense, simply changing religious conviction within the broad Hindu fold. Yet clearly becoming a Brahmo was treated as an act of a different kind. In traditional Hindu conduct, the liberty of inner attachment to God in any of his usual Hindu forms is counterbalanced by a strong emphasis on orthopraxy, the acceptance and performance of suitable conduct for a caste and associated occupation. If Brahmo doctrine had been associated with religious beliefs or doxa, it would not have been different from earlier Hindu sects; but its revolutionary heteropraxy was intolerable to traditional Brahmins.
In the traditional system of beliefs, childhood implied two things: only the first and evident part of it is the inability of the child to perform grown-up activities, his inability to feed or look after himself. Far more important, theoretically, was the principle of hierarchy, the son giving way to the father’s wishes, whatever their age. Children outgrew the first kind of dependence, but never the second. In extreme cases, when the father might become senile and wish something clearly unreasonable, the son might uphold the appearance of accepting his father’s wish while in fact doing what is socially reasonable. But this external appearance of obedience, even when it is utterly formal and unreasonable, was considered an act of great merit. Sastri’s conflict with his father centered on these principles of heteronomy and unreasonable hierarchy, the idea that whatever the case, and whatever their age, the son must always submit to the will of his father.
His childhood and early youth did not see any conflict with his father: in many respects, Sibnath was an ideal child—obedient, gifted, highly successful in education. He also looked on his father’s character with considerable filial pride. But the first and vital clash concerned the question of family life. Sastri was married very early to Prasannamayi, and she came to stay in their household, although Sastri was still mainly in Calcutta at the Sanskrit College. Sastri’s own account of the critical incident gives us some significant pointers:
When I was immersed in the enjoyment of the pleasures of poetry, an unfortunate family incident took place. For some particular reason, my father became angry with my first wife, Prasannamayi, and her family, and sent her back to her father’s house. He said she would never be welcomed back. When it was decided to reject her finally, the question arose how, since I was an only son, the family line could be maintained. Thus it was decided that I was to be married again. By that time, I had grown up enough to know that polygamy was reprehensible. It was not that I had a particular affection for Prasannamayi. However, I felt that she and her family were being given a severe punishment entirely disproportional to their lapse. My mind became agitated thinking about how I could possibly assist in such a ruthless [heartless] act. However, from childhood I was in such fear of my father that it was impossible for me to oppose his resolve. Still, I let him know myself, and through my mother, that I did not consent to such a [second] marriage. (Sastri 1918: 67)
Sastri recalls that, on a journey to the village, he took courage in both hands and told his father, to his face, that he objected to these plans. His father, with characteristic vehemence, which he consistently confused with the legendary brahminical force of character (tejas), threatened to beat him with his slippers and told him to return to Calcutta. Sibnath persisted in accompanying him to the village, complained to his mother, but his mother pleaded inability to dissuade his father. Sibnath was duly married for the second time to Virajmohini; but he was so little involved he was unsure if it happened in 1865 or 1866. Sastri thought in retrospect that this was the most significant event of his life: and the two sections in the Atmacarit are tellingly entitled ‘consequences of the second marriage’ and ‘the beginnings of religious life.’ His own record is highly suggestive:
Immediately following this marriage, my mind was ravaged by a terrible sense of guilt [anutap: regret felt after a wrong act]. A punishment was wrongly inflicted on an innocent woman, and despite my unwillingness, I became the central figure in that wrongful act; at this thought I was overwhelmed by shame and sorrow. Before going out to marry at my father’s command, I had prepared my mind by thinking that Ramachandra had gone through fourteen years of exile in a forest to obey his father’s command; I might have to undergo suffering throughout my life. But at this moment of crisis, that thought failed to give me [moral] strength. I began to think, individuals are responsible for their own actions; even with a thousand parental commands, no one takes a share of one’s guilt [pap]. My mind was tormented by self-condemnation. When I think of that intense self-hatred, I tremble even today. I used to be a happy, humoros, friendly character; my sense of humor and happiness disappeared. I was drowned in deep gloom. While stepping forward, it seemed I was stepping into an abyss. When night arrived, it seemed better if morning never came. (Sastri 1918: 68)
‘In this state’, Sastri says, ‘I took refuge in, and sought succor, from God’ (1918: 68). His father, in an apparent attempt to help him solve his moral dilemmas, engaged him in discussions of atheistic doctrines from Hindu philosophy and sometimes indicated that Vidyasagar was an atheist. But Sastri had never liked atheism. Previously, he had never thought deeply about the relation between God and the individual soul; he did not have a habit of serious prayer. One of his friends sent him Theodore Parker’s
Ten Sermons and Prayers, and these prayers gave him ‘a new life.’ ‘While praying, I observed two changes in my mind. First I got strength in place of weakness: I decided ‘I shall fearlessly act on what I would see as my duty, even if it led to sacrifice of wealth, prestige or life.’ I prepared myself to follow the commands of dharma [moral truth], and of God who lives inside our heart’ (1918: 69). The external manifestation of this resolve was to attend the prayer congregations of the Bhawanipore Brahmo Samaj, in which he was initially somewhat shamefaced, but slowly acquired conviction.
His immediate worry, as he recalls decades afterwards, was his slow but decisive alienation from his father. Sastri explains: ‘I had said before that prayers gave me strength, which meant that my mind gradually became free of the fear of other human beings, and the inclination to act according to my own beliefs became stronger.’ His father heard of his visits to the Brahmo congregations and asked him to stop:
I said calmly, ‘Father, you know I have never disobeyed your commands. I am willing to obey all your wishes. But do not interfere with my religious life. I cannot give up joining the worship at the Brahmo Samaj.’ My father said nothing in the rented house I shared with others, but he found this answer so novel and terrible that I heard he wept inconsolably that day. (Sastri 1918: 70)
When his father returned to his village, as his mother asked for news of their son the cryptic answer came back ‘He is dead.’ It took his mother some time before she realized this ‘death’ was metaphorical. Sastri took recourse to prayers at this point of moral crisis, greatly aided by Parker’s humorous and optimistic devotion. He faced ‘severe struggles’ now. Earlier, when he returned home during his holidays, he used to perform the domestic worship,
puja, in place of his father. That summer, Sastri went home and told his mother of his resolve not to perform the household worship ceremony. His father was initially furious, and took up a wooden plank to beat him with. But when Sastri, once again ‘calmly’ refused, he did not insist and performed it himself. Even in his village, Sastri began to join a few Brahmo friends for daily prayers. His conversion to the Brahmo faith could not now remain an internal family secret and became a scandal for the joint family. When he returned to Calcutta he joined the Brahmo social reform movement with enthusiasm and played a leading role in negotiating one of the first widow remarriages in Calcutta. His father was eventually so enraged that he engaged a gang of thugs to beat his son. After many years he relented slightly and simply left home when his son came back to meet his mother; still later he contented himself with being around but not speaking to him. Sastri’s father apparently kept his vow of never speaking to his son until the very end. There were only two exceptions: once when Sastri was seriously ill in Calcutta, he took his mother to nurse him back to health—but as a man of honor, accomplishing this rather complex task without exchanging words. At the time of his death, when Sastri went to Benaras to see his father, there was a brief final reconciliation.
Sastri’s account shows with great clarity that it was possible to respond to the new ideas of the Brahmo faith in two radically different ways. His parents responded to his conversion very differently. His father’s sense of brahminical piety was strongly intellectual, with a deep pride in devotion to knowledge and acceptance of a life of high-minded poverty; but it was, in consequence, utterly inflexible. When Sastri gave up idolatry, abandoned his sacred thread, and joined Brahmoism (entailing non-observance of caste practices), his father resolved never to speak to him again, i.e. never to take up a rational dialogical stance. Throughout his life he stuck to this high-minded, peculiarly principled inflexibility as a mark of his brahminical ‘character’. From his point of view, it would have been cheating if he disapproved of his son’s conduct and carried on as usual in their father–son relationship. Sastri himself expresses admiration for this devotion to principles and claims he learnt his sense of moral rectitude from his father, though he used it in the service of different religious principles.
Yet, inside the family, his mother’s response to his conversion was radically different. She did not express consternation when he joined the Brahmos, and her only concern on his announcement that he would not do the household worship was that her advice would have no weight with his father. She did not respond in this way because her religious conviction was less intense. When his father debated
nastika darsana (atheistic schools) with his son, she strongly disapproved and feared this would lead to his moral ruin. She regarded her relationship as a mother as morally more important than her duties as a Hindu, and worked out a rational trade-off between the two. She often also performed the role of a highly sensitive and skilled intermediary between childishly and insensitively inflexible intellectual men—a common theme in Bengali novels.
Sastri’s autobiography moves on at a fast, hurried pace, without pausing to reflect on the principles involved in the social changes he was enacting in his personal life. He gives us little information about his relations with his children, and whether in his own life he worked out fundamentally different moral relations with the next generation. But the conflict with his father can be analyzed to yield some points on which his sense of correct relationships was ‘new and terrible.’ His father, despite a modern education and proximity to people like Vidyasagar and Dwarkanath Vidyabhusan, clung to the traditional principles of hierarchy and an unreasoning continuity of religious conduct. In all such cases, continuity of conduct involves the added Hindu principle of submission to authority. In these moral systems, acting on one’s own views, however considered, is regarded as willfullness and a kind of ethical egotism. Ability to submit to the will of ‘elders’ is similar to selflessness. In that moral world, too, there was a difference between ‘being a Brahmin’ well or badly; but ‘being a Brahmin’ was not itself subject to rational choice. More importantly, Sastri thought it right to give children a right to choose their own religious orientation. Given that freedom of choice, the relation between parents and children could continue to be intense and intimate. But the most important principle, to which others were subordinate, was the one of individuality and autonomy. For Sastri, religion was nothing without autonomy; it was a dull, repetitious routine, without the thrill of acting well. For his father religion was nothing if autonomy was brought into it. Yet, in the way Sastri paints his mother’s reactions to his religious crisis, it is clear he believed that there was a possible solution of this problem from within the traditional repertoire of moral conduct. His mother’s response was not due to a weaker sense of religious conviction, but a different kind.
Relationships of Conjugality
Sociologically, parent–child relationships are intrinsically related to alterations in the central notions about conjugal life. Modern occupational life disrupts the structural form of the joint family based on common agricultural labor, and the replication of occupation across generations which gives individuals a fund of skills they absorb easily through their close family context. Training for an occupation was internal to the traditional caste-based family system, rather than externally arranged through schools or academies. In early modern Bengal conjugality changed fundamentally through a combination of intellectual and social influences. Sibnath Sastri’s family was typical of the first wave of social groups who benefited from, and were deeply affected by, institutional changes brought in by early modernity. His grandfather had lived a life of the traditional pandit in the local context of the village; but his father received an education that was modern in spirit, though his specific qualification was in the traditional discipline of Sanskrit. Harananda Bhattacharyya, Sibnath’s father, was placed in a strangely mixed position: his learning was traditional but his occupational position was drastically different from his ancestors’. He did his teaching in government-funded schools, for a regular salary, independent of the earlier system of village support, usually supplemented by some ownership of land. Sastri does not tell us very much about his family’s finances, but it is clear that his father’s family survived mainly on his small salary, and the smooth running of the household depended on his mother’s intelligent ability to manage on such meager means.
Despite the insufficiency of the pay, the
structural difference was enormous. In a single generation, Sastri’s family had exchanged the older, village-bound, caste-based, localized occupational system for the life of the salaried professional. Since salaried people often had to move from place to place on government jobs, this had an immediate impact on the way the family ran. Harananda arranged his family in the traditional manner: he did not leave his ancestral seat in the village, the spatial center of his existence. He kept his wife and young children in the ancestral home, and moved himself to his places of work. The distances were manageable, and he was able to spend time with his family over weekends or holidays. But this made life difficult for his wife. She had to run the household entirely on her own, as well as fending off unwelcome attention from amorous males, like her son’s primary schoolteacher. For his entire life, Harananda maintained this dual existence—of the family seat as the principal home (
badi) and an insubstantial, rented residence at the place of work for the single male (
basa). In fact, both in everyday thinking and in high literary discourse, there was much play on these two forms of residence. For Harananda, Calcutta was the place of learning, with occasional visits to family members or valued friends, but nothing more.
In Sastri’s generation successful people commonly took up government employment, which immediately altered all the circumstances of intimacy in their lives and the kinds of people with whom they spent most of their time, in the closest emotional relationships. Usually, these jobs came with high salaries and associated perks. These salaried individuals had to leave their ancestral homes, take up residence in often large, luxurious government accommodation; but the most significant change in their lives was sociological. They had to live permanently away from their circles of intimate relatives in the village or towns; thus a traditional existence surrounded by close kin—siblings, cousins, in-laws, etc.—was impossible. Increasingly, however, both their salaries and their mental orientation allowed them to take their wives to live with them—a structure of conjugal life radically different from the village-centered world of Sibnath’s father. In many of these cases, particularly for the financially fortunate ones, this left a couple of relatively young people of comfortable income in the unaccustomed intimacy of each other’s unobstructed company. They lived in large, spacious, fashionable homes, which invited decoration as their intimate living space. Decoration accorded to this space a special individuality and marks of intimacy. It marked the space off as ‘their space’, separated from others’. The private character of this space was marked by objects of personal taste, conjugal photographs, even the double bed. Till fairly recently, traditional people regarded these as a vulgar display of sexuality: as a shameless display of selfish indulgence.
6 The private space could be filled with furniture and household things which not merely declared their relative level of opulence, but also a space for the display of taste and a material culture of owning things of sophistication and delicacy. Material objects came to have a role that was different from, and beyond, the dry functionality of objects in the rural household.
Traditional conjugality had to develop in the context of the joint family, and from both novelistic and biographic evidence it can be clearly seen that those circumstances produced a peculiar ethic of good conjugal behaviour. Young couples felt shame at being together in the presence of others: for both males and females there was a peculiar ethic of demonstrative attention toward others, to show to members of the joint family that they were not given to a selfish, and probably carnal, attentiveness to their spouses. For women, especially, this ethic of inattentiveness encompassed a demonstration of love for children other than one’s own. The internal ethic of the joint family enjoined a rule of equality with respect to children, and a good mother was the woman who treated all the other children as her own.
Spatial relocation away from the ancestral seat of the joint family altered this sociological context radically. There were no relatives, particularly elders, to enforce the ethic of conjugal shame. More substantially, since elders and other close kin were not around for constant influence and consultation, the husband’s main ally and adviser became his wife. This resulted in a tendency toward greater equality in their relationship, not in terms of power, but because they were subjected to the same experiences and had to find their joint way through problems, opportunities, and decisions. Excessively unequal relationships became unhelpful for men. It was a seriously inconvenient situation if the wife did not have the education to share the husband’s tastes and concerns. Evidently, this did not lead to a sudden era of women’s empowerment; but husbands found it in their own interest to give education to their wives and make them culturally more their equals. As couples went through their lives in situations of mutual dependence, and as no one in their joint family could share this joint memory and experience of life, this tended to cement the bond between the spouses and mark them off from others. Thus a new form of intimacy developed between married men and women living a modern life, driven by material circumstances of sharing occupational experience and ideological power of rationalistic doctrines of autonomy, assisted by the moral imagination of romantic novels. Many marriages did not start as romantic, but were made so retrospectively.
Sibnath initially regarded his village home as the spatial center of his existence, the central point from which all spatial relations radiated outward toward his increasingly expanding universe of experience; and whenever he had the chance, on short or long holidays, he went back to the village. His life with Prasannamayi began in highly fraught circumstances. He was married very young, and when his father decided to send her away he confesses he did not feel great attachment to her. He began to think seriously about her out of a sense of moral responsibility rather than emotional attachment, and only when he was driven into his second marriage. He requested his uncle to call Prasannamayi to his house and went there to meet her and apologize to her. She stayed in his uncle’s house, and he went there every Saturday—to set up a new, partially autonomous relationship with her. His father was initially furious at this disobedient action but subsequently accepted it and even relented, accepting her back into his own family. Eventually, when his father threw him out for becoming a Brahmo, Sastri had to set up home in Calcutta. He brought Prasannamayi to Calcutta to set up his own nuclear family. This, however, left the question of his second wife very unsatisfactorily unresolved. When he set up a base in Calcutta with a friend whom he supported in marrying a widow, he had some ‘wild designs’ (Sastri 1918: 79). ‘At this time, all kinds of absurd projects entered my mind, all kind of projects for the deliverance of India’, among which, he retrospectively recognized, were his designs about his second wife.
He was sharing a house in Calcutta with his friend Yogendra, who had lost his wife and married a widow. Sastri used to teach her English and Bengali, while ‘at this time, reading John Stuart Mill’s works, Yogendra temporarily turned into an atheist’ (1918: 79).
We three people had become such great ‘reformers’ that we decided that we would bring my second wife Virajmohini and marry her off a second time. I had not yet taken Virajmohini as a wife. In the year 1868 I once went to bring her. She was a girl of 11 or 12 years. Probably, they [Virajmohini’s family] refused to send her down with me because I had gone without my parents’ permission. I did not treat her as my wife because it would have been wrong to live with someone I was intending to marry off a second time (1918: 79).
On this occasion the problem passed, as her parents did not allow her to accompany him, and he could not put his reforming ideas of marrying his wife to a second husband into practice. By 1872, however, her parents and siblings had died in a cholera epidemic. Her uncles accepted her unwillingly and asked Sibnath to take responsibility for her. He accepted his responsibility to look after her, but his Brahmo friends pointed out: ‘A Brahmo living with two wives is a detestable idea. One of our major principles is to protest against the practice of polygamy. If you live with two wives, how would you protest against polygamy?’ (1918: 112). Sastri replied: ‘But I am not going to fetch her with the intention of living with two wives. What is her guilt that I shall not offer her refuge after her parents passed away? The guilt of this bigamy rests with me, not her. I am going to bring her here because I will educate her; if she agrees, I will give her in marriage a second time’ (1918: 112). Sastri and his friends had obviously overlooked some problems in their state of moral enthusiasm: it would mean bigamy for his second wife, a far more problematic status for Hindu women, and also the small matter—for ideological supporters of moral autonomy—of the choice of the woman herself. Faced with this moral conflict, Sastri sought advice from Kesabchandra Sen, his religious leader at the time. Sen gave him the practical advice of bringing in his second wife, saying to Sastri: ‘In a society that practices child marriage, how can women be held guilty in cases of bigamy? If a man marries ten women and then becomes a Brahmo, it is his moral duty to give shelter to these ten women. In fact, if he refuses to take care of them, and any of these women goes astray, he is responsible for that’ (1918: 112).
Sastri reports that he had some difficulty persuading Prasannamayi to accept this high-minded scheme of bringing in the second wife, and giving her an education until she could be remarried. But the greater oversight in this was that no one considered the possible views of the woman herself. When she was brought to Calcutta, Sastri explained to her two possible courses of action: the first was for her to grow up and marry someone else when she came of age; the second was for her to get an education, so that she could take care of herself. To both these high-minded proposals she responded, not surprisingly, with horror. ‘She was startled by the first proposal [of remarriage], and exclaimed, ‘My God, how many times can a woman marry?’ On seeing her reaction, and her deep repugnance for the idea of a second marriage, the genie I had kept in my head for so long left at once. I realized that it was the second proposal that I had to turn to practice’ (1918: 112).
Understandably, this led to a serious domestic crisis:
From another angle, I faced a further severe test. When Prasannamayi and Virajmohini began to live under the same roof, I did not treat Virajmohini as my wife and I began to feel that it was morally right for that period to live apart, away from Prasannamayi. By then we had a long conjugal relationship, and Hemlata, Tarangini and Priyanath had been born. But inside the ashram there were no outside rooms except for the schoolroom and Kesabchandra’s office. Where do I sleep at night, if not in Prasannamayi’s room? To live apart became a great struggle for me. It was also very distressing for Prasannamayi. Eventually, I managed to convince Prasannamayi, and took her leave, and started sleeping wherever I could. By chance, an expedient came to light. On the verandah of the Hindu College, there was an empty table [that] … lay empty at night. After dinner at night I took a book with me, and placing my head on that book, I slept soundly on that table.
He added, somewhat incongruously, ‘I spent my time wonderfully’ (1918: 112–13).
However, both his wives got to know of this unorthodox arrangement and became disconsolate. Soon afterwards, Sastri was called by his uncle to take charge of his highly respected journal, Somprakash, and went to live in a small town, Harinabhi, leaving his two distressed wives in Kesabchandra’s ashram in Calcutta. Again, not surprisingly, Kesabchandra expressed concern about the untenability of the arrangements, and said he feared Virajmohini might commit suicide. Eventually, Sastri decided on an ingenious plan which combined domestic peace with moral rectitude: ‘When I found that Virajmohini did not want to be separated from me, I decided to take the following course: when she would be with Prasannamayi, I would live apart from both of them. When they would live in different houses, I would unite with them as their husband. We started acting accordingly. For a long time, as long as Prasannamayi lived, this is how it went on’ (1918: 113).
By this strange device, Sastri saved his conscience and turned his bigamous life into discrete monogamies with two wives. Strange times need strangely imperfect moral solutions.
Apart from the peculiarity of this marital story, what is interesting is the unfolding of the principles of conjugality in Sastri’s autobiography. Several types of conjugality figure in the social universe around him. Conventional orthodox relationships, of course, abounded: many Brahmos or progressive Hindus practiced their progressivism in strictly segmented spheres. They lived a life of friendship and work with male friends who shared their world, but retained a totally orthodox relation with their wives. But most of Sastri’s intimate circle experimented with a different flavor of conjugal relationship. A few who married widows were fortunate to have as wives women who were comparatively older, more mature, usually educated, from cultivated, liberal families. These women shared the interests of their husbands’ lives more fully, and apparently controlled the domestic sphere, which included considerable freedom of financial expenditure. Others married wives who were too young, and usually less educated than themselves, but they quite often spent considerable effort in getting such wives educated, and often succeeded.
In most cases the huge moral ideal of the romantic novel, of a companionate relationship with one’s wife, based on love, could not be translated into reality easily or entirely. The women were rarely independent, nor free to choose their partners at the time of their marriage; nor did the circumstances favor pre-marital courtship. But after marriage, when the wives came to maturity, progressive men often tried very hard to graft a quasi-romantic relation on that heteronomous arrangement. And although women never enjoyed complete equality within those relationships, they often earned a great deal of autonomy of action and respect. Sastri’s own short sketch of Prasannamayi is a wonderful example of such respect, expressed with great dignity and restraint. But the moral imaginary of the novel is of great significance: it was always one step ahead of social practice, drawing social conduct toward that ideal by the most intangible and powerful enticement. Novelistic plots painted, as it were, a picture of a completely ideal conjugal relationship, and although reality usually fell far short of such exhilarating and ennobling emotion, they constantly stretched the margins of possibility, legitimizing in the sacred language of literature a mode of conduct which real life could not sustain.
Relationships with Friends
Another significant new development was the emergence of a new sociability of friendship. This should not be taken to mean that before the arrival of modern influences Indians did not know what friendship was. But with the advent of modernity, the recasting of social norms leads to two kinds of changes in patterns of friendship. First, the range of people from whom friends can be selected is vastly widened, though we should be careful in recognizing its limits as well. Second, the place of friendship among other types of sociability changed fundamentally in a general reorganization of relationships of intimacy. It would be grotesque not to observe the existence of mythological and literary models of friendship in the traditional literature, not least because, even after the new form of friendship flourished, traditional literary examples remained powerful models. Friends were made traditionally either in the pursuit of a common caste profession or within the circle of kinship. Caste made friendship outside of common professions improbable and difficult to sustain, and it was usually disapproved of by society. The functional interdependence so central to the operation of the caste system disallowed intimacy and friendships across the boundaries of caste and kin, which were related in any case.
This order was decisively broken with the arrival of the forms of modern sociability. Some economic and structural changes played a central role in this transformation. Evidently, these changes affected only the more upper-class elements in Bengali society, residing in urban centers, and living their lives on the plane of a new kind of professional space spanning the whole of the British imperial domain. Bengalis monopolized administrative posts, and a doctor or an inspector of schools—such as Bhudev Mukhopadhyay—could be posted to distant reaches of the empire. This process of constant relocation affected the structure of sociability of such people deeply. As it loosened the ties with the paternal family and kin, it compelled people to seek out others who could provide them with a social life in unfamiliar areas. Modern professionals therefore developed strong friendships with people from similar stations and professions in life, and who had similar ideas about social norms. Groups like the Brahmos provided a much-needed structure of social sustenance in this sense, apart from their more explicit doctrinal norms. Among the Brahmos, precisely because they rejected conventional Hindu customs, there was a strong urge to codify the rules of a new domesticity, and Sastri’s
Grhadharma played an important role in the standardization of domestic conduct. In his own life the importance of friendships of the new kind was inestimable. As his family refused to give him sustenance, he depended increasingly on his friends.
At an early stage, his friends come primarily from college mates, or students studying in Calcutta and forced to mess together in rented houses with common living space and servants. There are also touching examples of Sastri providing support to others in need, such as his attempt to support a friend who married a widow at his instigation. As they advance in life, these examples of youthful frenzies of idealistic enthusiasm abate somewhat, but the close relations with friends continue. Friends made in early life, at college or through common enthusiasm for Brahmo reform, mostly grow into successful professional men, because, in the colonial dispensation, once a person became part of the modern education system, he could hardly fail. This imparts a certain homogeneity to the social group—financially and ideologically—among whom this was practised. But evidently, prosperous friends tended to support less fortunate ones, as evident from the life of the poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt, who led a peculiarly difficult life. In Sastri’s case, the relationship with friends was slightly different: although prosperous friends sometimes paid for his needs, he was in the morally superior station of the religious preacher.
What is remarkable in his autobiography is the total absence of intimacy with his kin, and the complete dominance of relationships with friends. This demonstrates the social possibility of a new kind of life for the reformed Hindu of intense sociability without the kinship circle. There is always an underlying theoretical argument. Influenced by some contemporary Western theories, the new individuals in effect assert that traditional friendship and sociability limited to kin becomes morally unjustifiable if they accept a process of individual differentiation. Even close kin, like brothers or sisters, might not share an individual’s temperament or intellectual enthusiasms and, as economic modernity unfolded, his occupational culture. Relations with friends are based, by contrast, on similarity of temperament and intellectual inclination: these are, therefore, more intense and reliable. In any case, it seems clear that, in the life of socially mobile upper-class Bengalis, relationships of friendships became more important over time than kin-based intimacies. In literary writing, particularly in the novels of Tagore and Saratchandra Chattopadhyay, there is a constant and searching reflection of the nature of friendship—its various possible forms and intricate structures. Instances of strong friendship are very central to novelistic narratives, and, in some striking cases, intellectual bonds survive serious misunderstandings. In some instances there is also a suggestion of complementarity, as in the case of Binoy and Gora, both in terms of character and intellectual arguments in Tagore’s novel,
Gora. Literary narratives also speculate about the possibility of a ‘friendship’ between men and women which is distinct from (and does not constitute simply) the early stages of romance.
The Self and Intimacy with God
The autobiography is, after all, the story of a self. What kind of sense of self is portrayed in Sastri’s work? Is this sense of self different from more traditional ones? Is there a connection between these redefined intimacies and the exact nature of religious life Sastri valued? I think there is a strong connection between the redefinition of intimacies and the particular conception of the moral self that was central to Brahmo doctrine. Although these doctrinal arguments are oddly absent from the Atmacarit, Sastri presented them with great theoretical clarity in some of his regular Brahmo sermons. In a sermon entitled ‘God resides in the heart’, he first rejects several conventional Hindu conceptions—of a God declaring moral rules through the infallible verbality of the Vedas, a God available to men as avatara, and a God of idolaters.
The common fault with all these conceptions of religious life is that it makes moral rules into something to be laid down from outside, and therefore experienced as constraining, rather than discovered from inside, and thus experienced as fulfilling. In all these pictures of moral life, God appears intermittently and suddenly to light up the true path. True religiosity yearns for an intimate and incessant contact with God. Unlike the Hindu belief in God’s externality, God resides inside the human heart, and his commands are not written in external tablets of religious instruction but are whispered by the utterings of our conscience. In the deeper self, human beings are in contact with the divine. In accordance with this view, Brahmo temples have to reject the noisy chaos of Hindu worship, and, most important of all, every Bengali home must replicate the peace and domestic order Sastri had found in the homes of the English middle class. What he admired most in English homes was the designation of a private space, however small, for each individual, where every person could enjoy undisturbed solitude, where he could develop an intimacy with himself, and listen to God speaking through his heart. In the usual distractions and clatter of everyday life, these whispers are stilled (Sastri 1933, 2: 73–84). It requires peace and silence to listen to the God sitting inside us and speaking through the untrammeled language of conscience. Sastri develops a theory of a particular relationship with one’s self which is also couched, in a sense, in a language of intimacy.
In the intense debates about the nature of religious life, and the two crucial concepts at its very center—God and the self—essential social practices were being redefined. But it is characteristic that these social themes figure in a religious debate. Sastri’s religion is radically different from Bhudev’s. It rejects and disconnects itself from the Hinduism which values external manifestations and ritualism. It is radically critical of caste and its dual commitment to predestination and hierarchy. And it reorders the picture of the universe by placing God inside men rather than in an inaccessible part of the world—creating a deep moral impulse toward an intellectual and religious individualism. Intense religious and intellectual individualism was a precondition for individualist social practices. Precisely because these reorientations of practical conduct touched some of the fundamental moral values of Hindu society, they needed not just the force of economic change to secure them but a language of moral legitimation to impart to them something close to sacrality. The creation of privacy was not just an arrangement of convenience, but part of a moral order.
Just as Weber saw in Protestant loneliness in the world the sanctifying language for capitalist conduct, Sastri produces through his religious ideas the essential moral arguments for the new institution of the Bengali individual’s privacy. The Bengali individual could from now on become different from his father in his profession, keep his deepest thoughts from his family, value his friends more than his kin, seek from his wife companionship rather than subjection, use his affection for children to let them develop as individuals—all unthinkable infringements of traditional Hindu conduct. This is the historical invention of a private sphere, of a private life for individuals, a conceptual space in which they are sovereign, subject to some rules of sociability. Sastri’s religious teaching seeks to make this private sphere more than just intellectually acceptable. He wants to make it sacred. The modern individual, he believes, needs this space, literal and metaphorical, not just to escape from everyday aggravation, but to meet himself, and his ‘more than inner’ (
antaratara) God.
References
Arnold, David, and Stuart Blackburn. Eds. 2005. Telling Lives in India. Delhi: Permanent Black
Eisenstadt, S.N. Ed. 2000. Multiple Modernities. Daedalus, Winter.
Mukhopadhyay, Bhudev. 1884. Parivarik Prabandha. Calcutta.
Sastri, Sibnath. 1918. Atmacarit. Calcutta: Prabasi Karyalaya.
———. 1933. Dharmajivan. 3 vols. Calcutta: Sadharan Brahmo Samaj.
———. 1963. Grhadharma. Calcutta: Sadharan Brahmo Samaj.
Tagore, Rabindranath. 1970. Gitabitan. Calcutta: Visvabharati.
Taylor, Charles. 1989. The Sources of the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wagner, Peter. 1994. A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline. London: Routledge.
First published in David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn, eds, Telling Lives in India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005).
1 A similar change, or shift of emphasis, can be seen in recent Western studies of modernity. See Wagner 1994; but this tendency toward a revisionist understanding of modernity can be seen in several essays in the collection ‘Multiple Modernities’, in
Daedalus, February 2000, which is not confined to the West.
2 In the Bengali tradition of religious thought the most famous enunciation of the practice of humility comes from Caitanya in his famous
sloka:
trnadapi sunicena taroriva sahisnuna/ amanina manadena kirtaniya sada harih/. But there is a highly conventionalized form of moral abjection which makes the saint-devotee describe himself as a sinner ineligible even for God’s redemptive grace.
3 One can compare Sibnath Sastri’s unwillingness to talk about the sexual side of his conjugality with a similar kind of reticence in the poet Mahadevi Varma: see Francesca Orsini’s essay in Arnold and Blackburn 2005, and compare Jawaharlal Nehru’s silence about his private life in his celebrated
Autobiography (1936).
4 Though it would be wrong to believe that the relationship between the great figure, such as Rama or Krishna, and the great narrator, such as Valmiki or Vyasa, is a straightforward one of recording, it is a far more complex relationship.
5 There are some well-known autobiographical narratives from medieval India: the best known of these, precisely because it tells the life of an ordinary individual, is
Ardhakathanaka (‘Half a Tale’) by the merchant Banarasi Das, written in Hindi during the reign of Jahangir in the seventeenth century.
6 Compare how, in Jonathan Parry’s essay in Arnold and Blackburn 2005, a man who had led a fairly adventurous sexual life regarded the double bed in his daughter’s house as an almost pornographic object.
