ABSTRACT

Space is a fundamental, ineliminable dimension of existence, which manifests itself in every aspect of material, psychological and social life. The essence of space transcends material reality, thus when this space is encroached upon, is disrupted or even uprooted it results in altering the identity of self. Such was the effect of British colonialism in India. The space of every individual was altered to a permanent effect. The forced hybridization between the Indian and British ideals resulted in the creation of a man who was conflicted in every sense of the word. This conflict is depicted in Saratchandra’s Devdas in which the protagonist is at the crossroads of a cultural shift. The novel intends to depict that spatial conflict between tradition and modernity such that Talshonapur, Devdas’s home village, and Kolkata, the city he frequents, are representative of the two poles of conflict. Thus this paper aims to understand the Devdas’s struggle to understand his space and how this struggle severs his relationship with Parvati.

 

KEYWORDS- Devdas, colonialism, space, hybridization, self

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INTRODUCTION

When William Shakespeare in his play As You Like It wrote 'All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players' (Act 2, Scene 7), seldom did he know that his lines would be representative of the importance of the concept of space in literary theory. Yet he was also unaware that the very stage everyone was supposed to act on was not the same for everyone. Neither was everyone supposed to be a good actor and it was in fact the stage that determined the trajectory of everyone’s performance. Thus, far away both in time and distance, when Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay wrote his path defining novella Devdas, according to the author of this paper, that was when space met the concept of the tussle between tradition and modernity. The lack of clarity, as to who had the onus of the particular space and to which facet did it belong, faced intense opposition from both the sides. This confrontation resulted in the death of Devdas himself.

 

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 

This paper will attempt to understand the importance of conflict in space in the making of Devdas, the protagonist. It will contrast the two binaries, Devdas as a colonial subject and Devdas as a feudal being. It will also contrast Talshonapur and Calcutta as the two poles representing tradition and modernity respectively. Along with that it will also analyse the characters of Parvati and Chunilal who according to the author are the human representatives of tradition and modernity. It will then understand the role of alcohol as a suppressor and then finally understand the significance of Devdas’s tragic death.

 

UNDERSTANDING DEVDAS: SUBJECT OF THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE

When Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay wrote Devdas in 1917, he made an impression not only on Bengalis, but on the entire nation (Nair). This novella written in the Bengali language revolves around a wealthy young man who falls in love with his childhood sweetheart but is unable to marry her because of the difference in caste. Which forces him to be reduced as an alcoholic lovelorn social outcast. Corey Creekmur wrote about the novella that, “If only for the last century, no Indian ever sees Devdas for the first time (Creekmur 173)”. Such is Devdas because it has never gone out of vogue considering the fact that it has been adapted quite many times. 

But this work should not be taken for its face value as its intrinsic value is just as important. This work of Saratchandra has been hailed as a cult classic which has managed to tackle quite a few topics of relevance and presented a small scale reference of the then Indian society as a whole. The slow and gradual modernisation of the times, the prevalent caste issue, mental health, alcoholism and a love triangle are some of the many bold aspects that were covered in the plot. This novella was the first of many kinds. But what is of the utmost importance is the fact that it was the first tragedy in the Indian literary sphere to be adapted into a film. A literary history that is at par with the Greeks, why did tragedy find so long to find roots? Theorists present many reasons for this behaviour but the common understanding that comes out is that Indian literature was immune to the suffering of the common masses and always focussed on the greater good of the society.  

The character of Devdas himself was a first of its kind because he managed to display flaws that were essentially ‘not Indian’. No protagonist in the Indian literary sphere had ever shown insecurities that portrayed them as broken individuals. The eternal confused state of mind that Devdas was in, was a contrast to the clear headed stoic heroes of the past, who had a solution to every problem. Even though Devdas is as much an Indian as anybody else but he has been heavily influenced by the colonial way of life. This is evident all through the text and Poonam Arora writes, “One of the most enduring icons of the Indian film oeuvre is the aristocratic, lovelorn, sexually impotent, politically disengaged, and ultimately tragic hero named Devdas (Arora 253).” She has managed to prove that Devdas is a conditioned product of the colonial ideology of the imperial capitalist mode of production. He is a product of the mode which focuses only on making higher profits for the ‘mother country (Fanon 149)’. This mode of production does not care about the individuals of the land on which it has encroached upon. Furthermore this mode develops newer ways to further subjugate the masses so that there arises no rebellion whatsoever. People in this mode are left to fend for themselves. Thus the idea of competition and self-centeredness arises. Which inadvertently reduces the chances of formation of a “class consciousness” (Lukacs 46). 

Hence Devdas, who according to Arora is, “The babu of colonial India sought to self-organize his masculinity by acquiring a western education, by distancing himself from the values and practices of rural, "indigenous" India; and by adopting the western values of "manly self-control (Arora 273)”. Similarly Veena Hariharan writes, “Devdas challenges the idea of arranged marriage (at least in thought); he smokes cigarettes (in the novel, the hookah), drinks alcohol, visits the city brothels, and has cosmopolitan friends like Chunilal (Hariharan 201)”. This clearly implies that Devdas is a complete subject of the colonial experience and is thus a modern being. 

But there is where the author of this paper differs. He believes that Devdas is at the crossroads of tradition and modernity and stays conflicted till the very end when he finally returns home signifying the strength of his association with tradition. In order to understand this statement one needs to understand the concept of space.

 

UNDERSTANDING SPACE AND YURI LOTMAN’S CONCEPT OF SEMIOSPHERE

“Generally speaking, space and spatiality, like time and temporality, have always been part of literature and literary studies (Junior 1)” or “Did it start with Bergson, or before? Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, and the immobile. Time, on the contrary, was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic (Foucault 70).” Such is space which in recent times has managed to receive the literary recognition it truly deserves. Space not only provides the stage to the plot but everything in the plot is because of the stage. Isabel Hoving states that, “For space is never ‘just there’ – is never neutral and mappable. It is here that we find the critical potential of spatial theory (Hoving 112)”. This further implies that the geographic significance of the plot is what determines the trajectory of the plot. For example if a novel about racism is to be written, the geographic setting will be of the region in which people have experienced some form of racism. In concurrence with the author’s views, Philip Wegner elucidates that, “Space is thus once again treated as the ‘stage’ upon which the drama of character development unfolds, and setting in such a tradition is viewed as distinctly secondary in importance to character (Wegner 180)”. Therefore space becomes an entire entity in itself. Space manages to create its own metaphorical biosphere and this study was given by Yuri Lotman, who gave the concept of Semiosphere (Lotman 121). Which he theorised in his book Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. He wrote that, “The semiosphere is marked by its heterogeneity. The languages which fill up the semiotic space are various, and they relate to each other along the spectrum which runs from complete mutual translatability to just as complete mutual untranslatability (Lotman 125).” Lotman had interests in spatial semiotics and believed it to be a special scientific discipline. He associated it with the development of mathematical and scientific knowledge pertaining to nature, with the ideas of the relativity of space, the multiplicity of space where in one space was bound to affect the other, their asymmetry and mutual complementarity. For Lotman, who considered the artistic space as the most significant model of the world of an author, as a sign-symbolic model of cultural, historical, religious, ethical ideas and choices of a cultural community and semiosphere, the extrapolation of the abstract concept of space to the humanitarian sphere was convinced. In the works of Lotman there are daily, religious, irreverent spaces, spaces of life, death, nature, spaces pertaining to meaning, etc. Lotman believed that the term “space” is extrapolated from the mathematical understanding of space as a set of objects between which there is a relationship – continuity. Winfrid Noth in his understanding of Lotman’s space wrote that, “Although Lotman ascribes different topographies to the spheres of real space, which is continuous and homogeneous, and to the semiosphere, which is discontinuous and heterogeneous, he nevertheless believes in the impossibility of conceiving real space independently of representations moulded by culture, language and hence the semiosphere (Noth 13).” This clearly demonstrates that any space does not exist in singularity and it is also not just the geographical location that one may associate it with. Instead space is a profound amalgamation of every aspect of human and non-human existence which collate together in order to create the setting of any plot. In synchronisation with the author's beliefs, Gabriel Zoran states that, “…space is not a neutral material just existing in the world; it has various functions relating to other planes of the text (Zoran 333).” Lotman further elaborated that, “Literary space represents an author's model of the world, expressed in the language of spatial representation. In a literary work, space models different relations of the world-picture: temporary, social, ethical and others. […] in the literary models of the world―space sometimes metaphorically adopts meanings of relations in the modelled world-structure, that are themselves not spatial at all (Lotman 218).”

Literary space is thus a model of the real space and not its copy. Hence even though it has associations with the outward reality but that in no way means that it cannot have its own environment which could be inspired but not be an outright copy. Thus Devdas in Devdas would act the way he does not simply because he’s a subject of the colonial mind-set. He would do so because he is a representative of every Indian who was in a conflicted state of mind over their lack of belongingness to either the Indian tradition or the Western modernity. He does so because his space compels him to do so. 

 

DEVDAS AND HIS CONFLICTED SPACE

As previously discussed, literary space is a model of real space and is thus bound to have the turmoil that a real space would. The representation and the portrayal could vary but the closeness or the resemblance with the real world would be uncanny. Therefore the literary space will represent the volatility of the real world. Along with that it will also showcase the ever shifting boundaries and limits. The lack of belongingness to a particular place, not knowing where home is, manages to underline the sense of uncertainty and the conflict. This severe uncertainty is destined to cause conflict of one form or the other. The many trajectories that collide in order to create the conflict in space is what makes this concept of space interesting. Similarly De Leo states that, “It is a labyrinthic path through space and time, the coming together of multiple trajectories on the borderlines of the ‘present’; it is the space where belonging, however problematic, is actually possible (Leo 12).”

 

In Devdas, two places act as the two focal points where the entire story unfolds. Those two places are namely Talshonapur and Calcutta (Kolkata). While the former is Devdas’s native village and is thus his connection with tradition. The latter is the cosmopolitan city where Devdas frequents quite often and it represents his association with modernity. It should also be noted that the number of round trips that Devdas makes between these two places, should not be taken at face value for it has an intrinsic meaning that will be understood using Raymond William’s concept of Dominant (Williams 121) and Residual (Williams 121).

 

The conflict within the space of Devdas is a result of the protagonist’s struggle with balancing dominant and residual culture. This concept was given in the essay Dominant, Residual and Emergent which was written by Raymond Williams in his book Marxism and Literature. Dominant, as the name indicates, is the most powerful shaping force, but it does get its own section in the essay. Williams expected his readers to have enough understanding of what the dominant culture was in their respective societies. To explain it in brief, the dominant culture refers to the established language and ideals held as the norms for a society, usually imposed by the majority. Since Devdas was written in the year 1917, when the entire nation was being ruled by the British therefore the dominant culture was that of the imperial-capitalist mode of economic production. This is where one understands as to why Devdas has been termed as a subject born out of the colonial experience. Interestingly the dominant in the novella acts as the background over which the Residual overlaps and thus results in the said conflict. 

 

According to Williams, “The residual, by definition, has been effectively formed in the past, but it is still active in the cultural process, -not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present (Williams 122).” Within the novella this aspect is represented by Devdas’s village Talshonapur. The choice of a village as the residual is nothing new because even Williams stated that, “Again, the idea of rural community is predominantly residual… (Williams 122).” This essentially feudal mode of economic system is generally regarded as tradition and Williams stated that, “…but also because 'tradition' has been commonly understood as a relatively inert, historicized segment of a social structure: tradition as the surviving past (Williams 115).” 

 

Devdas is thus at the fringes of both the dominant and the residual. Which is evident because he is unable to rest in any of them. To avoid being drowned in the fight between tradition and modernity and to avoid the realization that he will one day have to choose between the two, he uses alcohol as an escape. Alcohol plays an integral part which works counter-productively and instead ends up numbing the sense out of Devdas. Alcohol is the suppressor that Devdas does not need but still ends up using it. It ends up becoming one of the causes for his tragic end. Parvati, his lover, is a call by the residual, which requests him to return to his traditional values. But his dominant, represented by his city friend, Chunilal who is completely transformed as a subject of the colonial mind-set is a call by the modern. Thus, “…Devdas, the scion of Bengali gentry trapped between his feudal inheritance and colonial modernity, in the story of the same name (Elison et al. 77).”

 

The death of Devdas in the end is of utmost significance because it manages to portray the conflict that Devdas was in. He travelled the entire nation which became a symbol of modernity but in his fleeting moments he chose to return to Hatipota village, where his childhood love Parvati now lived. It needs to be understood that Devdas had promised Parvati that he would return to her in his last moment. Thus this tryst between the two finds its ingrained meaning that Devdas at the very end chose to let go of his colonial subjectivity. But at the same time, he dies without even meeting Parvati which further means that he could not stay true to tradition as well.  

 

CONCLUSION

A history of emotions should thus not only provide historical contexts but also account for the politics of the transformation of emotions in contemporary South Asia (Khan 628). Devdas is thus not just a product of the previously mentioned colonial experience but is an amalgamated confluence of the past tradition and present modernity which his space brings upon him. He should not be taken as an isolated character far off from reality but as a representative of the man of those times. Hence his decisions, his whims, his fancies, his entire thought process are in alliance with space of the said time period. The various characters in his life are also representatives of all sorts and thus act as various choices given by the writer to the protagonist. As a result of the fallacy of choice he acts not on his own accord but on the terms of his time and the space in which he belonged, which was essentially conflicted. Hence Devdas, for the modern Indian reader, becomes almost an object of bewilderment because he shows traits of being the conflicted neoliberal subject that any average Indian would later become.

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