Subaltern Urbanism I: Bringing Forth a Capacious Reading for Universal Justice
By Josué David Chávez
With a handful of stray dogs trailing behind him, Moré treaded down the streets of Bombay pretending to be reading the stars for his route home. This habit often made his walks feel like casual meanderings even when he was doing so because he couldn’t afford the fare.
The first time he lied to himself was when he journeyed for days from Dasgaon to Tale to take his high school examinations. Since then “following the stars” has helped him forget hunger and fatigue.
Moré was no stranger to a nomad’s life; he was also intimately familiar with Bombay. The streets were his actual map in this hour-long night walk from Lal Chawl in Delisle Road back to Family Lines. He was close, the building where his relatives lived was around the corner.
Although he liked living with them, he was ready to move out. Ten relatives were already living here and one of them had even gotten married that day. He could hear the couple laugh and whisper affectionately as he walked down the hall. This late at night, it was hard not to miss his own wife Sita who was still in Dasgaon with his mother.
As he got closer to their chawl Moré pondered on a peculiar problem. How it was that his cousin and wife, his relatives, his friends, himself were all forced to make a life within a room that could barely accommodate a stove and a couple of quilts spread out on the ground? Why did they have to come all the way to Bombay and live like this to escape caste, and improve themselves?
Moré slept right outside the room in the corridor. The summer breeze felt nice against his sweat-studded skin. He was hoping fatigue would soon beat hunger, but his mind kept going back to his students in Bldg. 14, in the BDD Chawls, where he and S. V. Deshpande gathered young Dalit workers who worked in the surrounding mills, labored as municipal workers, as railway cleaners and shed mechanics to discuss Marx, Lenin and raise their consciousness as outcaste workers. His students were picking up Marxism quickly even if they couldn’t read, let alone read Marx’s writings. He had faith that his students, and everyone else forced to cram their lives in a 10'x10’ room, would understand how their destitution was planned and imposed through the practice of caste and how caste limited their access to work.
Reading A Map of Many Worlds: An Offering
Imagining what a walk back home after leading a study circle on Marxism would have felt like to R.B. Moré in Bombay at the beginning of the 20th century would not be possible without the recent translation and upcoming publication of his memoir and biography, The Many Worlds of R.B. Moré.
Anupama Rao argues that the text is an entry point into for understanding the social experience of caste, class and Bombay city; these were the historical conditions of possibility that allowed Moré to imagine social justice through a joint commitment to caste and class struggles. The idea of a “Dalit Communist justice” is a feat of the imagination if we consider how the two ideologies reified into an agonistic relationship across much of our contemporary moment. Moré’s position as a “Dalit Communist” reminds us of a moment when a more capacious and specific Marxism could be imagined. Can we inhabit that moment again?
This collage-essay is an experiment that investigates how the recently-translated text makes possible acts of imagination which have the political potential to recognize injustices that need redress but might exist beyond the field of legibility for current models of identity-based justice. By focusing on how R.B. Moré’s memoir uses the technique of ekphrasis as a way of materializing, making sensate and sensual the experience of destitution, this essay appropriates that same form of ekphrasis to a different end. Here, I suggest that ekphrasis functions as as an imaginative act, as a figuration of claims the memoir form was not able to articulate as properly political due to the constraints of the narrative forms deployed. In other words, this is an offering, an attempt at salvaging the traces of R.B. Moré’s political experimentation for the sake of present futures yet to come.
The Materiality of Digital Mapping
I learned about Moré through Rao, who brought together a group of four students — myself, Poorvi Bellur, Sohini Chattopadhyay, and Anish Ganwande — at Columbia University to experiment with ways of “mapping” the memoir using data visualization technology. “Can we map the many worlds of R.B. Moré?,” we asked ourselves. The text easily lent itself to data-mining and mapping visualization because of the rich details about everyday life and its spatiality. Moré crafted the memoir around his multiple travels through Bombay and the surrounding areas in Maharashtra, a nomadic condition he was forced to adopt in order to pursue his educational goals and help his impoverished family. He goes from Ladawali to Dapoli, from Alibag to Bombay, from Pune to Mahad, back and forth and back and forth. It quickly became obvious that we needed to be selective with the locations we wanted to map even though it was precisely Moré’s mobility that linked his worlds of anti-casteism and Communism, or Ambedkar and Marx. This is what we ended up with:
It was not an ideal map. Anyone immersed in the technology with a critical eye can see that. However, it is not the map as an “outcome” that makes the exercise interesting. If we keep in mind that the premise for the mapping practice was not merely to experiment with different technologies for reading but rather, to work through modes of collaboration. What then makes the visualization particularly fruitful is that it functions as a “method” through which to read creatively and by so doing to touch the memoir. In other words, mapping the memoir facilitated a “bringing-forth” in the sense that Heidegger describes. It allowed us to think about our orientation to the technology we were using, posing the question: what can the map-memoir give to us, what can we bring forth through it?
Screenrecording of the various data points mined from the narrative. Notice that only for some of them were we able to get exact coordinates, suggesting a methodological problem: How do you map when the technology requires specific coordinates and the memoir only provides general locations?
Space and Significance
All four people in the R.B. More map visualization team came out of the experience with different projects and lines of intellectual inquiry that we developed through the stimulation of this collaborative exercise. This suggests that the act of using mapping technology revealed something to each person, that this has evolved, and it continues to do so.
The map’s zooming in and out effect, which occurs as one scrolls down the text made me especially aware of how the memoir narrates the experience of spatiality as essential to the account of the “becoming political” of R.B. Moré, the Dalit Communist. The diegetic narrator (somewhere between the empirical and a fictional Moré) has a pattern of identifying key locations at various scales, as general as Bombay city and as specific as the Alegaonkar high school in Pune. He “zooms in” when the pin, the location he’s discussing, is relevant to his own political awakening. In other words, spatiality is itself implicitly recognized in the very structure of the memoir as a subjectivizing experience.
The map marks the terrain of the Dalit Communist subject: in Ladawali, narrating the coincidence of his birth with the end of the Chhabina of Viroba procession (a time when “thousands of sturdy people of all castes [walked together]…forgetting all caste distinctions and untouchability”) allows Moré to symbolically align his life with the fate of becoming an anti-caste and communist activist; in Charai, meeting Chandrya Kaatkari, a thief who stole from anyone who “tormented the poor too much, [to] teach them a lesson” was the precursor for the later ability to indigenize Marxism and sympathize with a “bad person” who was also a Dalit Robin Hood; in Bombay’s Haji Bunder, meeting people with “vices” like smoking, gambling and prostitution was a way to determine “correct ways” for self-improvement. The phenomenological experience of existing in these various spaces and interacting with the contingent networks of actors who inhabited them is the condition of possibility for the diegetic Moré to be recognizable as a Dalit Communist subject with a respective “territory” he inhabits. The act of narrating gives the Dalit Communist subject a “reality”; in turn it is from this materialized location that claims for justice can be made and imagined.
If “zooming in” signals experiences of spatiality that were crucial for the process of becoming, one can argue that the memoir’s mode of condemning injustices is through the act of ekphrasis. Seeing and describing are condemnations of destitution, even when the description is not explicitly construed as the concerns of Dalit Communism. Such is the case with the “bad people” Moré meets. Even when the moral judgment takes place of calling people with vices “bad,” the very act/decision to include them as figures in the narrative suggests empathetic identification without explicit political elaboration. It’s an afterlife of an impulse to imagine universal justice for destitution, for dalitness-in-general.
Dark Spaces: Chawl Intimacy and the Refusal to Narrate
Missing from the memoir is a thick description of life in the chawls. Moré goes to the Family Lines chawls often, every time he’s in Bombay, in fact. And yet, readers never get a sense of how he felt staying there, even though he intimately describes other neighborhoods, cities and villages throughout the memoir. What does such an omission suggest?
Burnett-Hurst’s well-known study from 1925 on Labour and Housing in Bombay argued that the very dereliction of the chawls makes them impossible to describe: “Pestilential plague-spots…is by no means too strong an expression for them. No matter how graphic a pen-picture is drawn, how vivid a description is given of existing conditions, it is impossible to convey to the reader any true conception of the actual state of affairs.”
If we refuse to believe that there’s something about the chawls themselves that makes them “impossible” to narrate, then it is equally possible that such impossibility is the result of the narrator’s subject position and a consequence of the paucity of models available for narration.
Rao points out that the memoir could be seen as a precursor to the modern Dalit Bildungsroman model, but it simultaneously “illuminates the difficulty of reducing the complexly ramified life of a Dalit activist through available models of activist memoir, Dalit autobiography, or communist history hagiography.” Could it be that the empirical Moré, as the head of a three-generation “red family” and as a writer who had to be persuaded to write this memoir in the first place, was not able to elaborate fully what he saw as an injustice that was inhabited, lived and reproduced through the problem of housing (and homelessness) because to do so would have rendered his account unintelligible for the Dalit (and/or) Communist readership surrounding him? Could it be that the form of the memoir, albeit already unstable, undermined the potential to capture experiences that didn’t neatly fit the recognizably political concerns of self writing in 1972, when the memoir was written? Can the occasion of its translation be a moment for salvaging what was believed to be “impossible to narrate”? Since Moré does include a few descriptions of his family house in Dasgaon and of his living arrangement with military family in Pune, how are we to make sense of his silence regarding the dark space of the chawl and its lifeworlds?
The apparent refusal to portray the intimate lifeworld of the chawl is of course incomplete. As readers, we find snippets of life in the chawls and more generally about R.B.’s family life in the biography written by his son, Satyendra. The latter adopts a tone of formality that fails to emulate the intimacy of R.B.’s language, because it is instead written in the recognizable style of Communist hagiography. This self-conscious stylization serves a specific purpose: to write R.B. Moré into the consciousness and public recognition of the worlds of anti-casteism and Communism.
Like the memoir the biography, too, relies on acts of ekphrasis to condemn the neglect the Morés suffered. This condemnation is construed as a betrayal from both movements given their “failure” to recognize R.B. as their own, precisely because he aimed to be a bridge between them, according to the diegetic Satyendra.
In an astoundingly mechanical tone, Satyendra narrates the conditions under which the family took shelter under Elphinstone Bridge multiple times after they were evicted from their chawl for failing to pay the rent. There are many other episodes of abject poverty, too. But they are all presented to us with little access to the inner life of any of the “characters,” except for a few letters R.B. wrote asking friends and relatives for money, such as this letter possibly addressed to Namdeo Vitthal Joshi:
I have worked up the courage to write this somewhat strange letter to you, when I have not written to you about our good health, and so i first express my apologies.
Since I am in debt, and since, not having any employment, I am not able to make repayment from time to time, I have to suffer all kinds of insults. Orders are ready to requisition my property for some one or two larger debts, and the smaller loans make the food taste bitter in my mouth. This indebtedness is affecting my bodily health, my mind and my intellect. I cannot think what to do, I am as if crazed. All kinds of thoughts come to my mind. So, instead of taking some rash step, i have decided to tell my friends of my situation and to ask you for two hundred rupees. I have exhausted all options. So, please forgive me for this untoward behaviour. To say yes or no is your prerogative. Do not be sorry if this is not possible, and do not hold back if it is possible. As it is, i cannot repay my earlier obligations to you; so if you hold out your hand to this drowning man you will be truly blessed. So be it. It is not the time to write anything more. If you can rescue me from a dozen moneylenders and take me into your bosom, you will be a true friend. I promise to repay the amount before i die, and if i do die, forgive one who was a sinner when he lived.
I meant to write just two lines but this unnecessary content has written itself. I have said enough to explain the situation; i will not show off my penmanship by writing more.
This “strange letter” that has “written itself” against Moré’s own desires to “write just two lines” suggests a sense of dignity that cannot be captured by Satyendra’s own narrative model. Satyendra cannot even describe their condition of destitution in his own words. Instead, he must cite it. In the letter, Moré seems to be aware he must describe the conditions of his poverty in order to receive help, but does so through a self-portrait that focuses on his own inner life, “This indebtedness is affecting my bodily health, my mind and my intellect. I cannot think what to do, I am as if crazed.” In refusing a description of the material conditions surrounding him, the description of his own sense of self becomes a proxy to describe abject poverty.
The biography’s descriptions are meant to condemn an act of “betrayal” by the two movements. But can these acts of ekphrasis also condemn dalit-ness in general? They can. To do so, we as readers must imagine the power of those descriptions for ourselves, as there is nothing else to do.
The rattling of the tracks as the train passed by above them made Sita anxious every time. What if the bridge fell over them and they ended up trapped under the rubble, their bodies strewn around like litter among the wild weeds surrounding them?
Sita inhaled. The smell of shit emanating from close by shook her back to reality. She laid down the bag carrying her pots, which she had made by tying the corners of her quilt together. She needed to free her hand to put down the old folding cot under her arm. She was tired and her wrists were in pain. She could also feel her stomach starting to eat itself.
She was still red from the shame of having the bailiff laugh at her while evicting them. Just like the last time, he hadn’t found anything in their belongings worth confiscating this time either. As Kamal and Satyendra sat down and gathered around her on the cot, she pointed up to the sky, teaching her children how to “read” the stars like a map.
It was hard not having Moré for moments like this but she knew how to get by. A sudden knot in the back of her throat stopped Sita’s lesson short. The abrupt gulp brought out tears that had pooled in the back of her eyes. Satyendra held her as the tears streaked down his mother’s cheeks. It was a busy street, he hoped no one passing by would recognize them.
Moré was also letting hot tears streak down his cheeks. Once again, he was forced to hide, away from his family. He was back on the road just like he had been most of his life. He hadn’t even said goodbye. Earlier, on the day he went underground, he had taken Pavali to the hospital. As she was seeing the doctor, a comrade found him and told him to hide immediately. That was four weeks ago. His family was probably getting kicked out by now since he had not been able to send them any money.
He looked around the room where he was hiding with five others. It reeked of sweat. They had piles of books and newspapers in one corner, a radio and a pipe in the other and next to him his passport, locked in a tin box together with some letters from Sita.
The room was slightly larger than his relative’s chawl at Family Lines. He stepped outside to look at the stars. But he was surrounded by concrete, by windows leading into rooms teeming with people just like this one.
R.B.’s memoir is explicit that claims to education and access to public space (the water well satyagraha), matters that are easily recognizable to Dalits’ sense of their stigma and exclusion, are political claims. But if space is a subjectivizing experience as well, as this memoir suggests, the figuration of the chawls as a space for political theorizing and organizing could have been articulated despite their presence as a dark space in the memoir if narrative models for making them legible and visible had existed. Did the empirical Moré ever imagine leading a chawl satyagraha? What about a satyagraha at the big house of his relatives who were stealing from him and his mother? What about a satyagraha of the homeless right under Elphinstone bridge?
Was Moré able to read before he died Prakash Jadhav’s “Under Dadar Bridge” poem, also written in the early 70s? Would he have written his letters asking for help differently, inspired by the realism, the acts of ekphrasis, of this poem?
Under Dadar bridge, my questions echo,
the hostile stars eat like maggots
into my future,
my buried dreams.
The umbilical cord I myself
had hung up to dry
there in the crevices of stone walls.
One day, ma died…
When the rudder of her raft broke
in the cruel seas under the bridge,
I was asking these Himalayan people, whose
heads drift proudly in cultured skies
to allow me to continue living.
Now I sit beside unrecorded memories,
and those scattered sculptures, in an empty hour,
and cry.
The small details of abject poverty in the memoir and biography suggest that the act of ekphrasis has the potential to implicitly recognize them as injustices that require redress. Let me be clear. I’m not saying Moré’s politics are weakened by not organizing with homeless people; my concern is not that he “failed” to do these things. My concern is the over-determination of claims for justice based on reified identity categories. My concern is to salvage those intimate, imaginative moments that were impossible to narrate in the form of either memoir, or Communist hagiography.
If R.B. Moré’s text refuses to fit available models of narration and instead relies on the act of ekphrasis as a genre for condemning injustice and as a vehicle for political experimentation, we as readers must ask ourselves the following question: Can we read this text while maintaining, emulating and pushing forward political experimentation for the sake of universal justice? Can we as readers avoid limiting our imagination within the constraints of what we assumed is the identity of a Dalit Communist? Can we cling to those traces of claims to justice that were not or could not be fully elaborated? Can we use them as launching pads to read capaciously, and to keep expanding and specifying radicalisms for present futures yet to come? Posing these questions on the occasion of the memoir’s translation (into English and into a map) suggests the necessity of doing so.
Moré was excited to go to Paris, but his usual anxieties where inundating his thoughts again. He had to briefly pause packing and take some deep breaths. The memories of the verdicts of betrayal hurled at him by fellow anti-caste activists when he joined the Party were making his skin crawl, condensing into cold sweat. Babasaheb’s words still rang clearly in his ears, “I wonder whether the Communist party in India, which belongs to Brahmins, will appreciate your dedication and honesty?”
The Party hadn’t even nominated him to be a delegate for the International Labor Conference, Babasaheb had smuggled his name onto the list. Moré took another deep breath while remembering this and smiled. Going to Paris was the right step to continue the work he believed needed to be done, a belief that went beyond what the Party or sometimes even what Babasaheb seemed able to recognize. And yet, he could only do it with both of their support.
The sound of rustling paper snapped him out of his reverie. Satyendra was playing around with the letter of invitation Moré needed to show at customs. Moments ago, he was holding onto it but it must’ve slipped from his hands while meditating. Satyendra had picked it up as his new toy. Gently, he took it from his son, who was playing with a gusto that reminded Moré of himself. Sita was still looking for his passport among the piles of clothes and kitchen vessels on the floor. He found that document intriguing. So much power arbitrarily conferred to folded pieces of paper. His friend Jadhav made it very clear he could not lose it under any circumstances. It was neither easy nor cheap to get.
As they were looking for his passport, their neighbor and old friend Pavali, a flamboyant tamasha dancer with a penchant for toddy, came in carrying a brand new travel bag and a 28oz bottle of spirit. They had first met each other when Sita and Moré first moved to Calcuttawalla Estate. At that time, the Morés had to go through her room to get to theirs, and so they saw Pavali quite often as she entertained her patrons or practiced.
Sita found Moré’s passport under the stove, as Pavali served them each a drink.
Moré threw it into his new bag along with his other documents, shoved his clothes on top and zipped up the bag as his comrades knocked on the door to take him to the airport. It was already 3a.m. He hugged Pavali, picked his bag and went out.
Pavali felt protective over them. She admired Moré’s hard work and selflessness; in his own words, his activism was for everyone’s improvement. As he, Sita and their boy Satyendra got into the jeep to get to the airport, Pavali smiled. She pictured Moré entranced by the awe-inspiring landscape of Paris, a distant and dim image from where she stood yet distinct enough to outline…She had read a Marathi book about the Paris Commune that her friend lent to her once. Imagining herself on the streets of the city, making shoes for anyone who might want and need one, was easy. Some dal and rice would be nice for Sita and the boy when they get back, she thought to herself as she stepped back inside.
As Moré boarded the plane, he looked back at his wife and son. He was still thinking of Babasaheb’s offer to pay his Paris expenses so he could stay longer. Remembering his own refusal still made him shiver. He had to fight off the usual, irrational guilt. As he looked out the plane’s window, Moré hoped Babasaheb understood why he couldn’t agree to that. So many joined the Party and made money out of it, an excuse to look down on the anti-caste movement. He didn’t want others to think he was like them. He could not profit off this work if he wanted to help Dalits, workers, farmers and all the others he knew who suffered from destitution, like Pavali, Sita, and his own son.
He also wanted to come back quickly—he needed to help his family pay rent. As the plane soared into the night sky on its way to the International Labour Conference, Moré leaned back on his chair and closed his eyes. He was nervous.
- Prepared with the editorial assistance of Layla Varkey