Ramacharan Das

Ramcharan Das is a door-to-door cobbler in the city of Kolkata. Lungi-clad, white-haired, Ramcharan has practiced the craft of shoe repair for many years now. Trained by his father, shoe repair has become his livelihood. An amiable face and a distinctive blackness of teeth, Ramcharan’s voice has broken the monotony of many mornings. ‘Juto sharai…Juto sharai’¹, has reverberated through the alleys of Kalindi ² , leaving a sediment in my ears ever since my childhood. 

Ever since Paul Celan’s Corona³ has taken the form of a deadly virus and has disrupted all our lives, Ramcharan’s voice has faded out and has disappeared into thin air. Like all the muffled voices, his too, has been muted by the ongoing presence of the pandemic. The misery unleashed by the pandemic has silenced the ones unheard all the more. 

Ramcharan or Ramcharan kaku⁴ has been a familiar presence in my life since my childhood. While repairing my torn shoes, he often shared an anecdote or two. Mostly about his natal village in Murshidabad (a small town on the Eastern Bank of the Hooghly river in West Bengal) and his journeys from there to Kolkata for work. A gifted raconteur, Ramcharan’s stories often transported me to his homeland, his extended family, the fields and the streams there. He also spoke about his rental home here in the nearby slum, his wife Kamala and his pet bird Munia. 

I tried to contact Ramcharan once again after being assigned the term paper topic for my research method class. I wanted to know his life story in more intricate details. David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn (2004) write that “life stories far from being mere fabrications are imbued with an extra dose of truth”. Narratives are not just entertaining fictions but are meaningful explorations of life. Explorations that reveal complex emotional and social realities that are otherwise eluded by the scholarly gaze. Using the life history approach doesn’t necessarily mean imbuing the subaltern with a sense of agency that the ‘enlightenment rationality’ calls for. It simply means that as scholars and readers we should contextualize and understand that like all agents, the subaltern too, is an agent of the structure and therefore already within the matrix of power. Even though life histories are looked down upon as overly romanticized accounts, they do churn out deep insights not just about the concerned individuals but also about the wider society and the social segments of which they are a part. Going beyond the institutionalized silences, the discussed approach in this essay highlights those who do not have histories of their own, those whose voices have been throttled by ‘power’ for centuries now.

As the second wave (of the Coronavirus disease) wreaks havoc in the country, I call Ramcharan. After having a few telephonic conversations with him, I get to know that he belongs to the chamar or the muchi community. Proud of his musical ancestry, he told me that his forefathers were all instrument makers or the makers of Mridanga (a musical instrument made out of leather, played while singing kirtans). He says that the Muchis have a complex genealogical narrative.  After pestering him for a while, he finally WhatsApped me his first caste-ancestor, Muchiram Das’s picture. In a genealogical slip, the printed name (on the picture), however, is Ravidas, a leatherworker and famous devotional poet-singer in medieval North India. This demonstrates an extant Indian caste-network, with identities based on leather hand-labor and manual music-traditions.

Once he narrated the episode of Muchram Das’s birth to me. Muchir jonmo ba Jontrer Utpotti ⁵, the coeval birth-narrative of the caste and instrument being a significant factor here. Once, Shiva, after defeating many demons, began an ecstatic dance. But without any rhythm accompaniment, he lost his beats, and half his body. The deity, Vishnu, was very tense, and started sweating profusely. From his forehead-sweat, Muchiram Das was born. Earth then offered her clay, the divine cow Kapila, her skin, music offered her ragas, and Muchiram crafted the first mridanga to enable Shiva’s perfected dance. 

I have heard many such narratives from him. Narratives on and around the musical instrument and the instrument makers. He told me that he has moved to Kolkata and did not venture into instrument-making as the city often provides the comfort of anonymity. The anonymity that can often lessen the burden of caste. On several occasions, Ramcharan’s stories have reminded me of Sydney Mintz’s Taso, the sugarcane worker in Puerto Rico. Like Taso’s, Ramcharan’s is also the story of a man who learns that he must accept the finite environment, like a finite personal history, even while the boundaries of inner experience may approach infinity.

Polyphony or the Politics of Voices

Vincent Crapanzano (2013) states that life histories are written at the tussle between reality and desire. Unlike in case histories ⁶ wherein the subject’s views are presented from an outsider’s perspective, in the case of life histories just like in the autobiography, the subject is presented from his or her perspective or the perspective of the ‘self’. However, in a way it differs from autobiography as it is an immediate response to the demand posed by an ‘other’ and carries within it the demands posed by that ‘other’⁷.  One can say that life histories are doubly edited. Once during the conversational encounter and the second time, during the literary one while writing the piece. This genre exemplifies the ‘otherization of the self’. Like all forms of writing, life histories are also self-constitutive. They require the mediation of an ‘other’ and always already follow the dialectics of self-formation. I believe, in this process of patient listening and writing, the anthropologist/historian-author can also trace the presence of the ‘other’ in the ‘self’. It is only through writing that this ‘other’ can be traced. Tracing of this ‘other’ goes onto decenter the actual author of the narrative.

Life history is the product of the self’s desire for recognition by this essentially complex ‘other’. It is not just interpretive but also evocative. Its evaluation requires an understanding of the relation between the author and its ‘other’, the inevitable interlocutor whom he is addressing. In and through the conversations that we (Ramcharan and I) have shared, I am trying to bring out our joint authorship through this paper, trying to portray us as each other’s interlocutor. Instead of establishing any ‘self’ we have recognized each other as an ‘infinite other’. An ‘other’ that is already there even before the emergence of what we call personal identity or ‘selfhood’. I believe my conversational approach with Ramcharan would dissolve the traditional distinction between the historian as authority and the informant as subject. This would then go on to create what the sociologist Judith Stacy calls an egalitarian research process characterized by authenticity, reciprocity and inter-subjectivity between the researcher and her subjects (Perks and Thompson 2015). 

Ramcharan’s understanding of home and dwelling on the atrocious face of the pandemic have helped me to reevaluate mine in multifarious ways. Before the first set of lockdowns was announced, Ramcharan’s echoing voice used to mark my mornings. With the lockdowns, as our homes became full and our walls became sad, my mornings brought in an eerie sense of emptiness without Ramcharan’s voice in them. As the pandemic worsened and the shackles of captivity strengthened its fetters, my sense of dwelling started to change as well.

Therefore, while talking to Ramcharan and enquiring him about his ‘home’, I have naturally replaced the mode of a distanced, controlled and ostensibly neutral interview, with that of an engaged and sympathetic interaction between two human individuals. I have shared with him the unity of nearness and remoteness.  An amalgamation that Simmel found in the phenomenon of the ‘stranger’. This nearness and remoteness then go on to intertwine the ‘personal’ and the ‘political’ (Crapanzano 2013).  

Home and Work

As the pandemic has raged into our lives, Ramcharan and his shoe box have moved far away, taking recourse in the corners of his Muchipara home. Like many others his livelihood too, has taken a halt. His wife runs the household now. She works in the nearby tailoring shop as the tailor’s assistant.

“Kamala runs the family now. She leaves at 10 o’clock in the morning and returns at 8 o’clock in the evening. She cooks before leaving.  I prepare the evening chai. I spend the entire day watching TV soaps and feeding the birds. It has been a while now. Look! That is my favorite corner there!”, Ramcharan told me on my very first visit to his house.

I visited Ramcharan’s place the other day as partial lockdown measures have been rolled out in the state of West Bengal. “I am not allowed entry into people’s homes for repairing their shoes now. Earlier also I was treated like an untouchable but now nobody is willing to give me work. They think that people like us are unhygienic and wouldn’t follow the sanitization guidelines well. But this is not the case.”

The pandemic has reinforced the double bind of caste all the more. Earlier, even though the upper castes were willing to repair and polish their shoes by a lower caste Dalit man, they didn’t want to touch him directly or allow his presence inside their homes. Ramcharan’s narrative unmasks the hidden presence of caste even in a state like West Bengal wherein the upper caste leftist babus have denied its existence for the longest time. This is the aporia of untouchability that Gopal Guru (2016) talks about in his essay on the aesthetics of touch. There he shows that the skin of the Dalit leather worker is more defiling than the cricket ball that he produces. Given the claims on reciprocity and exchange, the ball would be as untouchable as the Dalit, however it is not so. The untouchable’s skin has to be alive and vibrant for the casteist discourse to continue. If the skin becomes dead the person would no longer be sensitive to touch.  Thus, the skin becomes a standard for limiting the basis of reciprocity that is the very essence of touch. 

The only area wherein this uniform exchange is still maintained is the arena of the slaughterhouse. It is here that they cut off the hide of the animal and in the process they themselves are cut off from the Brahmanical social order thereby being converted to Buddhists. It is the untouchability issue that further proves that the ‘thickness’ or the dimensionality of the body is the sole means by which one goes into the heart of the things, by making oneself the world and by making others the ‘flesh’ or ‘chiasm’ (Merleau-Ponty). As one touches the other, the other touches oneself thereby making the self, touch its own self. This makes the inside the intra corporeal reverse of the outside. The outside that the body shows to the ‘things’ and ‘people’ or to the ‘others’. Thus, there is a constant dialectic between separation and union. If the Dalit body wouldn’t have had the potential to penetrate the upper caste bodies, then the discourse of caste would have failed in itself. 

In the ‘Phenomenology of Untouchability’, Sundar Sarukkai (2018) mentions that the pure untouchability of the Brahmins has to be maintained or supplemented by the impure untouchability of the Dalits. In a Derridean sense, the Brahmins become speech and the untouchables become writing. In Ramcharan’s case, the upper caste people who refuse his entry (to their homes) and thereby his work, actually exist as the well-sanitized pure people or the ‘us’, as people like Ramcharan or ‘them’ permanently supplement them. It is this tactful touch or the touch without touching that then goes onto fixate the discourse on and around caste and today’s discourses around sanitization and face masks.

Home Within Home

“I spend a lot of time alone, locked in my home, with these walls. As my wife goes out for work I try to clean the house before and after she returns.” Ramcharan says as I sit in his backyard with my notebook. In a certain way, his narrative disrupts the hegemonic structures of normative masculinity. “I don’t really know how to pass my time. I think about my village house a lot these days. Our little red brick house. The huge mango tree, my childhood days, my parents, the swings and my friends. I think Bhola has died, he came to me in my dreams…He used to come to my house a lot. We played a lot… I think he is dead now, I don’t know. We are not in touch… All these memories keep coming to me. Look! That is the corner where I sit.” He shows me the corner of his silent contemplation. In ‘Poetics of Space’, Gaston Bachelard (2014) writes that the house furnishes dispersed images and a body of other images at the same time. It is in the house that life begins. It begins enclosed, protected, though not always warm. However, it is our childhood house that transcends every other memory and keeps returning to us, adding to our store of dreams. Thus, Bachelard eloquently says that we are never real historians but always near-poets. Our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of poetry that was lost. And the poet knows well that the house holds childhood in its arms.   

“The second wave has killed so many people and it is getting harder to find work now. It is a lot of pressure on my wife…But I can’t help it…These images keep coming back to me…Feels like I am living in those times again but within these walls…” Ramcharan’s blue-white walls (The TMC government has painted many houses blue-white) play out the dialectics between the ‘I’ and the ‘non-I’ in today’s times of preposterous doom. It is this dialectic that then goes on to create the ‘I’. This is the most interminable of dialectics. Through this, a sheltered being ascribes perceptible and imperceptible limits to his shelter. He experiences the house in its reality and virtuality, by the means of thoughts and dreams. Similarly, Kazi Khaleed Ashraf (2016) writes that the hut or the dwelling place indicates an enclosure, a place to stay, a place for maintaining possessions and a place for self-making.

Heidegger (1971), in his essay, ‘Building, Thinking, Dwelling’ writes that the basic character of dwelling is to spare and preserve. Differential spaces open up new meanings, as they are let into the dwelling of the man. In this piece, Heidegger establishes that man’s relation to location and through locations to spaces, inherits in his dwelling.  This relationship between man and space is none other than his dwelling. It is through Ramcharan’s current dwelling that the multitude of spaces he has inhabited have been opened up. 

Svetlana Boym (2008), in ‘Future of Nostalgia’ writes that nostalgia is about the relationship between individual biography and the biographies of groups or nations. It is the bridge between personal and collective memory. Nostalgia speaks in riddles and puzzles. It charts space on time and time on space. It hinders the distinction between the subject and the object. Nostalgia being a historical emotion is janus-faced, like a double-edged sword, a sword that breaks binaries and crosses barriers. Just like Boym, Heidegger and Ashraf also try to break the stringent barriers in and through their understanding of dwelling.

Ramcharan’s nostalgia for his homeland, his house, his lost times during the ongoing COVID crisis further proves Boym’s point. Ramcharan’s longing for the past in the present stands as a testimony to the fact that nostalgia indeed stems from the outside (and therefore, is a historical emotion) and not from within. In and through his musings and dreams, Ramcharan dwells in an eternal present. It is in this present that the past is forever being renewed and the future is forever being born. In other words, this can also be read as Bergson’s duration or duree. The preservation or the prolongation of the past, entailing the coexistence of the past and the present. This makes ‘Time’ the place or the carrier of memory. This is the time of embodiment or the embodied time.

Beginning of an End

It was my last day at Ramcharan’s place. I was quickly going through my field notes to see if I have missed out on anything. “You keep asking me about my home, my dwelling and how I understand them now, but you never tell me about yours.” Ramcharan told me while entering the room. I told him, just like him, I too have a corner in my room where I sit and try to make my life bearable during these difficult times. Images of the hills, the images of my boarding school, the trees and the songbirds there come to me as I try to dwell in my locked house. The images of Delhi, imagined and lived online, frequent my room as well. These images have made me realize that nostalgic time is the time out of time. It is the time of day dreaming and longing that jeopardizes one’s timetable, even when one is actually working on nostalgia.

There is a tradition in the anthropology of place that shows how a particular place can have a pervasive or enveloping relationship with people, with the capacity to affect both – that is how people negotiate with their external physical topography and how they experience scenes of places as their interiors (Sarbadhikary 2015). This understanding of place is borrowed from Edward Casey (2001). Casey understands ‘space’ as the volumetric void in which things are positioned and ‘place’ or ‘placiality’ as the immediate environment of the lived body. In his parlance, this is the arena of action that is at once, historical, physical, cultural and social. 

Ramcharan’s Murshidabad and my Darjeeling and Delhi exemplify this point quite well. We see these images in our ‘heart-minds’ or in our embodied minds. This heart-mind is objectively subjective and globally local. This is the realm of inward looking bodily consciousness or the realm that keeps all of us in ‘place’. This makes the ‘body’ in ‘place’, in turn making the ‘body as place’. This is the body where we all dwell. This is where we keep coming back to, as our last refuge in dismayed times. This our corporeal archive or the bearer of affect. This is why my writing on Ramcharan and his sense of dwelling has been both discursive as well as affective.

“Good luck with your paper. These images will keep coming back to me whenever I close my eyes and sit down there at that corner. They live in me and I live with them… I will tell you more the next time when you come back…” Bidding goodbye to Ramcharan I left.