The Banal Sublime of Postcolonial Bombay and Calcutta: The Embodied Ghosts, Falling Bodies, and Tangled Webs in Chandra's "Dharma" and Chaudhuri's A Strange and Sublime Address

Remarking on the point of contact between the violence of symbolic representation and the real historical violence for postcolonial nations, French cultural theorist Michel de Certeau writes: "[w]hat the map cuts up, the story cuts across."¹ Narrative, he notes, "plays a double game," "organiz[ing] spaces" wherein the "boundaries" created by the narrative "mark out limits only by moving themselves."² The boundaries created by narrative "put emphasis on the curves and movements of space," rather than "divisions established by" the physical marker of a fence or wall, which "cut up and compose an order of places."³ Hence "the story," unlike a "map," preserves the mobility of space and its limits. Stephen Hartnett explains that de Certeau's "concern with the indeterminacy of 'reading' is the preliminary move that enables him to suggest that history itself is a 'text' that is equally indeterminate. Hence, history (much like reading) does not proceed in a linear, grand, overarching march of discernible totalities, but, rather, in aphoristic, incommensurable layers of … microstories."⁴ In this way, history can be rewritten, or at least the boundaries of its maps can be redrawn by stories whose narratives resist the rhetoric of maps and other "historical" objects—written or otherwise—whose "aspirations to 'Truth' frequently manipulate a rhetoric of presumed 'objectivity' while pursuing a politics of imperialism."⁵ For the purposes of this article, I drawn attention this "double-cutting" as it points to the importance literature holds for understanding historical traumas in the wake of the British empire—however distant its official collapse may seem. The "cuts" or divisions that proliferate in both the land and the psyche of a nation touched by empire can be found registered in their national literature.

Here, I assert that Vikram Chandra's Love and Longing in Bombay (1997), and in particular the story "Dharma," is a testimony to the continued complications and struggles of postcolonial India.⁶ Despite its generic instabilities, or possibly because of them (part fantasy, part realist in style—but still far from the magical realism of Salman Rushdie or José Saramago), the working through of a national trauma whose narrative begins with Partition (and the period of colonialism that preceded it) manifests in Chandra's stories as a constitutive part of independent Indian national identity. Chandra's narrative represents a series of repetitions of the protagonist—Jago's—personal trauma, as entangled in the national landscape.

Sigmund Freud explains that traumatic neurosis "repeatedly bring[s]" the victim "back into the situation of his accident, a situation from which" he experiences "another fright."⁷ In a sense, he states, the traumatized individual "suffer[s] mainly from reminiscences."⁸ These repetitions and recollections characterize Jago's story. As the narrative depicts the progress of the character's working-through, moreover, representations of the "original" trauma take on an increasingly material embodiment; this resembles the process of "the patient" who for Freud "reproduces instead of remembering," "lives it through as something real and actual" during which the analyst helps them in "translating it back again into terms of the past."⁹

I read the generic polarity in which "Dharma"'s nested trauma narrative presents itself together with the extraordinary everyday images of Amit Chaudhuri's A Strange and Sublime Address (1991).¹⁰ Representations of historical trauma—such as colonialism—are subject, explains Michael Rothberg, to a complex set of demands: "documentation" and "reflection on the formal limits of [said] representation," as well as an attention to the production and consumption practices inherent to such narratives' "circulation."¹¹ This tension between the urgency of documentation and the limitations of representation comes to the fore in Chaudhuri's narrative—whose aesthetics is marked simultaneously by the uncanny and the banal. Both stories struggle with the problem of a "traumatic realism," each presenting a "form of documentation and historical cognition attuned to the demands of extremity."¹² Taking literary representations of national trauma as its lens, this article demonstrates that...