Remembering Said
AP
IF there is one memento I am proud of having collected in the happening city of Kolkata during the long course of my career as a collector of memorabilia, it is the autograph of Edward Said, the incomparable professor of comparative literature, who died in September. It is a thing I value. And it is none the worse for being preserved in my much-thumbed, pocket-sized blue notebook of action points, snippets and memoranda, all rolled in one.
Admittedly, the memento in question is nothing compared to the other one made famous a few years ago by a wily Indian clerk who reportedly struck gold with it. I am referring to the long and carefully hoarded hand-written letter by John Lennon, which the person traded for dollars beyond his dream. But, as the adage has it, to each his own, according to his swadharma. For me then, this faintest of the textual traces, represented by the signature, recaptures the eventful presence of Edward Said in Kolkata, and, by a strange and sweet coincidence, in my life.
Said's visit to India in December 1997, which was his first and last Indian trip, had started off on a slightly sour note. Media persons felt that an anti-establishment figure like him should have had no truck with the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation which was behind his all-expense-paid trip. Said made up for it,though, by the redemptive gesture of agreeing to deliver the prestigious Netaji Subhash annual oration in the ancestral Kolkata home of the great nationalist leader. And, of course, he more than made up for his initial act of supposed prevarication by what he said on that night and on the previous night of informal discussion held at 10, Lake Terrace under the auspices of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences. These two nights of December 18 and 19, being also the nights of my fortuitous encounter with the great mind, were the high points of my halcyon days in Kolkata.
Said's Kolkata lectures were indeed summations of the humanist project which had inspired him all his life. Deriving from his commitment to the cause of the Palestinian people's struggle to recover their lost homeland in the face of opposition from the Anglophone empire, this was the project of forging solidarities among the washed-out of all hues across cultures. The discourse shaped by him through a sustained series of interventions starting from Orientalism (1978), the quarter century of whose publication is being celebrated this year in intellectual circles the world over, through Culture and Imperialism (1993) to the latest Guardian article "A Window on the World" (August 2, 2003), made itself manifest in regular invocation of the Saidean trinity: "worldliness of texts", "the credo of exile" and the "secular and oppositional character of criticism".
In his grand oration, presided over by the nephew of the great Indian leader, Said declared his preference for multipolarity as a cure for a world, which, thanks to the American hegemony, was becoming threateningly unipolar. Reminding everyone of us that identities, over which so much of blood was being spilt in the world today, were not fixed and unchanging essences, he spoke passionately in favour of a world of "mixtures, migrations and crossings over", but without meaning to empty it, in postmodernist fashion, of all historical content.
If there was one theme which I took home for closer reflection, it was Said's advocacy of the notion of the intellectual as someone who consciously refused any affiliations with power. Intellectual work, he said, was sustained by "openness to occasions and surprises", by keeping alive in us that childlike capacity for wonder. The little anecdote I give below is ample proof of the point he made.
I approached Said cautiously and asked him for his autograph at the end of his talk, apprehensive that I would be ticked off for my propensity towards discipleship which he had excoriated during the course of his talk. He surprised me by promptly signing the held-out page of my notebook. Nothing was at stake by that act, because, as he put it in his carefree, no holds barred way, "it doesn't commit either you or me to anything."
Edward Said, whom the world will miss as long as it slides on in its uneven, unjust ways, had the true intellectual's passion and pluck for self-effacement.
HIMANSU S. MOHAPATRA
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