ABSTRACT
How to forget This chapter tries to imagine what it means to intercept a mode of thinking at the cusp.1 Implicit here is the need to stay with the thought of the ‘limit’, which is when cultures facing collective doom or annihilation seek to invoke the memory of their ancestors in rites of mourning. This is how they learn to survive, to strategise about how to live on. The Ghost Dance among Native American tribes in the late nineteenth century is one well documented instance of such a rite. In what follows I will attempt to detect something like this understanding of death in the idea of punishment at the origin of Hindu myth or law, which is also the origin of caste and religion. Decidedly, I invoke this rite of mourning in a different historical moment, another cusp, which is the present; the earlier moment in antiquity and our present moment both occur at something like a yugant, which is the transition typical of the ‘end of an era’.2 The present understood in this sense is a temporal limit, a contemporaneity in which we look to the future but also seek to be ‘haunted’ by the past. Here is one sketch of such a tumultuous present, our very own: let us understand the present in general terms as a time of the insertion of postcolonial societies into global capital through the workings of the free market; more crucially, it is an era when more and more hitherto subaltern communities are making the transition into lines of mobility, as is evident from the growing mobilisations among dalits and tribals (untouchables and indigenes) in the electoral scene in India. They are now laying claim to the individuality needed to affirm the ceaseless negotiation between community and state that Partha Chatterjee has described as the realm of ‘political society’.3 The key emphasis in this chapter is that the current insertion of low-caste and tribal communities into empowerment has not effaced their experience of centuries of caste oppression. By analogy with the predicament of the tragic hero, we might say that these communities work between silence (the horror of caste discrimination) and speech (empowerment as caste communities in electoral stakes).4 In other words, we can point to the persistence in contemporary low-caste politics, of older forms of community and other-directedness that can now be invoked cannily in the new political scene. And we can think of this momentous transition from silence to speech as one that ‘stamps’ the singular being locked into primordial moral traditions (steeped in desire, need and care for another), with
the empowered (agential) ‘I’ that will propel itself as an individual-in-community into politics.
