An unwritten life, one lived only to the extent it is imposed like a death sentence, lived out to its inevitable conclusion, this is insufficient to ward off disaster. There is a deficiency about it, an incapability. It can only be lived as a life of privation. The same life, lived as though one is merely acting out a script, this is said to take on a protective function. How so?

The palliative effect of a good story is evident throughout the classic tale of Durga and Opu. Translator T.W. Clark refers to the varied incidents, anecdotes, and digressions weaved into the fabric of Pather Panchali as ‘ornamental discontinuities,’ isolated gems each with its own set of tensions, without which things could end prematurely.

Much of the stuff of Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay’s 1968 novel is non-empirical matter which, rather than being exposed as false in the interest of ‘uplift’, is reclaimed and repurposed as qualitative limitations, those devilish difficulties deployed in the creation of conditions of impossibility (and an accompanying permissibility) whose conveyance is said to allow for meaningful exchange.

Thus when Clark introduces the work with the question of whether a curse was not at bottom the cause for Horihor’s congenital inability to provide for his family, he is not being indulgent. The question is posed within a space in which empirical questions do not apply and credulity is encouraged. The unanswerable question functions to redeem Banerjii’s past losses in their retelling, and to preserve his literary memory.

Notable, however, is that within this space of unreason, a space that is never ‘complete’ in that further building activity always is possible, redemption and/or retribution is unevenly permitted on the basis of virtue with respect to the young siblings, while attributes attaching to what is considered virtuous are closely aligned with conventionalized wisdom or, worse, justificatory rhetoric used in the regulation of possibilities.

The literacy narrative organized around Opu is not too far afield of Europeanized early modern scientific notions of virtue as that which attends the relinquishment of self-interested beliefs in certain phenomena. True, fair, the only son, Opu is permitted to become the idealized embodiment of learned virtue. His sister Durga, on the other hand, is a born thief, a figure of the counterfeit (and not only because the author had no sister). Durga is the very embodiment of un-virtue – girl, dark, wild, which further makes of her a figure of contradiction, for which no intermediaries are permitted. Therefore, even though she seeks out and steals fallen fruit, or knowledge as it presents itself, erroneous beliefs attaching to that knowledge that normally would have fallen off on the way to becoming something else stick to her, whereas Opu is permitted an intermediary that would allow him to be disabused of outmoded supports as he moves through stages of becoming, rapidly outdistancing in mind the boundaries of his village and the abandoned indigo factory demarcating it. Meanwhile, the impossibility of assimilating Durga as readily to similar standards of education is what slows and even resets time periodically.  

Further, to say that Durga is undisciplined, disobedient, ‘unprincipled’ is also to say that she is not recognized as being covered by the same governing principle which allows for virtue to attach to Opu. That is, her case is in complete difference or contrariety, a kind of opposition to that of Opu’s, such that exchange or sharing between them is not possible in terms of said virtues. Even where one seeks to apply said qualities of virtue to her case, it would yield a privation of meaning rather than an absence of virtue. Such privation, classified here as contrariety (even though it is a kind of opposition) cannot on this basis speak to whether or why one is full, while the other is in lack, nor can it be said one’s gain is because of the other’s lack.

However, this absence of correlated meaning is also the freedom or leverage allowing for another governing principle to cover Durga. This ‘something else’ is the motherly principle that bypasses rather than impacts or calls for the undoing or in any way complicates Opu’s meaning or the virtues that attach to his case. The move is consistent with the restrictions placed on contrariety, which admits of one intermediate, but it doesn’t rely either on the systematic removal of ‘illusory matter’ said to enable modern sciences their predictive ability, or the ‘re-arrangement of an oppressive order to allow infinite possibilities a chance’ (Hulme).

Rather, here you have an activity, a labor, a building up of a work from those very materials “affirmed and posited” by those who inhabited the village square and its outskirts. These materials now in narrative form are the fallen fruit of “error, fantasy, non-knowledge” that readers eagerly awaited and “guiltily” consumed in serialized form. The reader is thus made to follow after Durga, after the Old Aunt, Menaka Devi, after the principle that extends universally to cover dry-haired wildness, the principle worded in Clark as “a motherly kindness and capacity for happiness” (xvi).

Yet the above is not to be confused with the twin appeal to an ancient mystic femininity that some men make use of in order to bring themselves out of an undifferentiated state. The latter idealization of women, conceived by men for the restoration of tensions between men, is closer to demands of fidelity between what is ‘above’ and ‘below’, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, resulting in a whole host of disastrous attempts to search out the ‘cause’ of dissatisfaction, not to mention a history of preoccupations to expose as false and lacking in virtue that which presents itself as true. 

That said, this drawing out of a distinction between the motherly principle that Clark points up and the Virgo-Venus dichotomy does not diminish the latter in the same sense that it is not necessary for Durga’s recognition and redemption to come at the expense of Opu. As mentioned high up, professing faith in that which you know to not be is a permissible irony in certain kinds of space.

Yet still, there is clearly something being demanded of the character of Durga, and only her (insofar as intermediaries are not permitted). This has to do with the role of contradiction as an oppositional force in the service of Being or, if not that, some entity that calls itself Being. Here, the Law of Contradiction is said to facilitate ease of comprehension at a remove, without which conditions would devolve to incoherence. “The possibility of analytical propositions was easily comprehended, being entirely founded on the Law of Contradiction” (Kant 26). If a contradiction is what arrives after form has lost its meaning to give coherence to some at the expense of designated others, a conventional fiction used to designate cannot be dipped into again for explanation (Nietzsche). Thus, while explanation is denied to Durga as to why she is considered to be in error, neither is she able to ‘unhand’ herself as error, while on the other hand relinquishment is permitted Opu, who is sheepishly relieved of his fondness for this or that sense object on his way to virtue.   

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