The liberal uses of providence

In the novel, instead of seeing the inevitability of dealing with the state and communitarian agents to continue his operations as regression, Gaitonde strains philosophically to integrate them into an overall realm of action dictated by his own self. He does not simply concede their primacy, just as the discourse of liberalization did not simply withdraw with the rise of Hindutva politics. He now seeks to negotiate his ascendance over them even as he accommodates their claims. To understand how he goes about it we need to identify more precisely the lesson that Gaitonde learns about his liberal subjectivity.

The incident with Dipika and the marriage with Subhadra, both of which precede Gaitonde’s participation in the riots, had already started to tap into Gaitonde’s need to commit to extra-personal notions of the self. Thus, even though he justifies his participation in the riots on business grounds, he finds that it has significant consequences for his self-identity. Gaitonde cannot consummate his marriage with Subhadra despite being able to have sex with prostitutes, signifying his as-yet-incomplete integration into the community. After the riots, he finds himself sexually restored when people identify him as a strong Hindu don. This suggests that the expansion of his range of self-identity cannot remain restricted to family narrowly conceived but needs to accommodate a larger communitarian-identitarian realm. After consummating his marriage to Subhadra following the riots, Gaitonde draws the following conclusion.

[Subhadra said,] “… Yesterday they were saying, now finally he’s showing his true strength. Now we know he’s a true Hindu leader.”

“Hindu?”

There were Hindus, and there were Muslims. Everything sits in pairs, in opposites, so brutal and so lovely.

Until then, all my life, I had felt like a ghost… I had come from nowhere and made a name for myself, but I had always felt that I was playing a part, many parts, and that I could switch from this name to another easily, that if I am Ganesh Gaitonde today, I could be Suleiman Isa tomorrow… I had held back from allowing the fragments inside me to settle into a shape, a form. I had led my men to believe in me, in Ganesh Gaitonde, and always secretly despised them for believing in me, because… I had believed in nothing. I had committed to nothing. And so I was a phantom of a man, capable of frenzied couplings with whores, in whose sopping chuts I turned to make myself real, but I was not fit for marriage. Marriage is belief, marriage is faith… I had been incapable of marriage, incomplete, imperfect and so impotent. But all the roads I had walked, thinking myself alone, all those broken paths had brought me inevitably to belonging, to the certainty of becoming something, one thing. I had burnt bastis, and so I had chosen… I stood ready now. I knew who I was. I was a Hindu bhai.” (395-96)

Here, Gaitonde encounters the limits of the plasticity of liberal subjectivity that are not reducible to some primordially communitarian Indian context as opposed to some properly liberal social contexts in the North Atlantic. The key ideas that Gaitonde starts out with are the plasticity of liberal subjectivity and its disembeddedness from the social contexts it traverses. Even as Gaitonde works in social contexts, he holds back from committing to them affectively, refusing to let them have a share in his subjectivity. He sees himself as the dis-embedded subject of the conventional understandings of capital. Such understandings see capital as an abstraction capable of mediating all exchange but, as many would argue, in the process reducing the object(ive)s of exchange themselves to abstractions. While capital has often been critiqued on these grounds for creating conditions of psychic atomization, Gaitonde sees its abstracting potential as liberating for the self. What he learns, though, as he is drawn into communitarian claims are lessons from more recent scholarship on money and capital forms. This scholarship emphasizes that the market economy is productive of, and is in turn shaped by, constantly evolving emotional and social relationships, and so its promises and its discontents lie elsewhere than its capacity for abstraction (Illouz; Konings; Zelizer; Giddens 109-114).

Viviana Zelizer speaks of the existence within capitalism of complex and varied “circuits of commerce, in an old sense of the word where commerce meant conversation, interchange, intercourse, and mutual shaping” (315). These circuits have complex features and rules of engagement, but the basic idea is that different realms of economic exchange make different locations of associational life possible for the same person without such associations acquiring the closedness implied by the idea of community. A circuit is therefore something that contradicts the idea of atomization, but also keeps the promise of a more fluid subjectivity open. People under capitalism learn to be aware of the complex rules of intercourse across the multiple circuits they traverse. This is compatible with the sense of having an autonomous subjectivity promised by capitalism, but such autonomy thrives on “the plastic nature of role-taking” that these circuits require, and which Gaitonde comes to think of as his “phantom” subjectivity. Atomism cannot automatically be the source of the discontents of capitalism since these circuits demand a subjectivity that is responsive to what is outside of itself. The conventional understanding of capital obscures the fact that the subject becomes affectively grafted into the shifting circuits which it navigates.[16] [open endnotes in new window] Gaitonde, who works with this understanding initially, imagines an endlessly plastic subjectivity without realizing that the circuits he navigates—such as his relationship with Paritosh Shah, his gang, his dealings with Shukla, the Intelligence Service and Jojo—are committing him more than superficially.

When the time comes for Gaitonde to acknowledge that his self-remaking embeds him into circuits that develop claims on him, he needs some way of thinking that they will allow him to retain the autonomy of his own self. He does this by invoking a grand, cosmic design, in which “everything sits in pairs, in opposites, so brutal and so lovely,” and within which he has a privileged position of “belonging.” What finally authorizes his acquiescence to the identity of a Hindu bhai is not any specific theology of Hinduism, or even an imagined history of a persecuted Hindu identity that feeds Hindutva discourse, but an alternate, quasi-theological conception of a cosmic design centered on himself that may crudely be designated as a sense of destiny: “But all the roads I had walked… had brought me inevitably to belonging.”

Gaitonde’s dilemma in the Indian context is similar to several historical attempts to philosophically reconcile the primacy of self-interest with the necessarily social mode in which all selves exist. Albert Hirschman’s history of the philosophy of self-interest demonstrates that arguments for self-interest in the eighteenth century were made on an assumption of its capacity to contain social conflict (“the passions”), and therefore had to contend with a collective horizon for the individual self. Further, Hirschman points out that every argument in favor of material self-interest as capable of containing social conflict, or of ultimately capable of working in the collective material interest, had to resort to some idea of an impersonal force that makes it possible. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is the most famous.[17] This resort to a quasi-theological force that is neither personal nor collective but transcendental gave these arguments a providential character.[18] This resort to a providential framework is also at work at the level of individuals’ perception of their own fortunes.

Max Weber argues that one of the key psychological roles played by major religions in the articulation of an “economic ethic” has been to provide a “theodicy of good fortune for those who are fortunate” (271), that is, an argument for why the fortunate deserve to be fortunate. In modernity, and under a capitalistic ethic, such a theodicy may seem redundant, as it does to Gaitonde in his initial phase when he attributes his fortune to his own efforts rather than to communitarian patronage. But at the moment that he needs to decide whether to take part in the riots, what holds his fortunes hostage is precisely the need to align himself with the Hindutva political community. An earlier Gaitonde who had not recognized the limits of his capacity for autonomy should not have had any hesitations aligning himself with it since it would simply be good business sense to accept the alignment. But the incident with Dipika has primed him to notice the affective commitment that business alignments also require. The terms on which he would now deserve his fortune are about to shift in a way that would demote the primacy of the autonomous self. This is a moment of crisis internal to the liberal self that is resolved by the invocation of a theodicy of fortune articulated by Shukla, a discourse that begins the transition of Shukla’s status with Gaitonde from a client to a spiritual mentor.

Weber elaborates that theodicies of fortune focused on individuals had given rise to new cults of “redemption” in which certain penances, prescriptions and abstinences administered by a “spiritual adviser” justify the acquisition and maintenance of good fortune. Shukla is such a spiritual adviser, someone who is unironically referred to in current public discourse as a “spiritual entrepreneur.” But, as a representative of a modern cult of redemption, Shukla speaks not of abstinence, penances and prescriptions but of methodical self-gratification. As Nandini Gooptu writes about the “New Spiritualist” (NS) discourses in contemporary India,

“The current concern with the self is… devoid of connotations of personal asceticism, self- abnegation, and world- renunciation. Instead, the primary concern now is with self- development, self- fulfilment, and self- empowerment” (74).

She argues that NS produces “an active, authorial self” for the neoliberal subject (76). Thus, the providential frameworks identified by Hirschman, Weber, and Giddens have an intensified contemporary historical resonance that the novel taps into.[19]

In keeping with the logic of contemporary theodicies of fortune, Shukla does not moralize in any conventional sense but merely trains Gaitonde to see his self-gratification as part of a “cosmic design.”[20] His role in smuggling arms to “protect” the Hindus is a part of that design, but he does not understand the design as an end in itself. Rather, he believes that the design relies on his agential or starring role to realize itself so that its existence confirms the primacy of his own self. The larger nuclear conspiracy remains hidden from Gaitonde, so that Shukla’s philosophy is not, unlike in the series, a vehicle for revenge against absolute failure, but a pre-emption of the failure by a promise of psychic integration. The self may no longer be absolutely autonomous or plastic, but retains its primacy. If, as in the series, the identitarian discourse in the novel preys on a crisis in which the liberal subject finds itself, the contours of the crisis the novel reveals are, unlike in the series, specific to liberal aspirations and liberal failures.

Gaitonde’s adoption of the providential view is an effect of his longing to integrate the various circuits (in Zelizer’s sense) of his existence into a cosmic vision, circuits that he would have earlier been content to keep discrete as a marker of his plastic subjectivity. As these circuits press their claims upon him, he feels that he needs to integrate them around himself in order to retain the primacy of his own self. We can understand the intensity of this need from the intensity of the frustration at his failure to obtain it. Gaitonde wishes to but cannot discuss Dipika’s claim on him with his men. He cannot bring himself to tell his wife that he murdered Salim Kaka for purely mercenary reasons, because that kind of murder is beyond the pale of the communitarian imagination she represents. He learns English because he understands it as cultural capital, but he is too embarrassed about it to let his men know. He has a similarly secret telephonic relationship with Jojo, a hard-headed television producer who sends him escorts. He cannot tell his intelligence handlers about his dealings with Shukla. And most of all, he cannot communicate his spiritual “discoveries” for fear of being mocked for seeking a validation by design:

“I had to keep all these segments of my world apart, Jojo from Guru-ji, Guru-ji from Mr. Kumar [his Intelligence handler], and some of myself from everything” (559).

Until the end, Shukla’s theodicy remains for Gaitonde a promise of the revelation of a pre-ordained integration of the circuits centered around himself.

This, then, is the crisis of this liberalization subject’s navigation of its circuits of commerce. This subject can accept the discrete character of the various circuits it negotiates so long as it does so successfully, since that character also assures its ability to enter and leave them at will. However, a moment of crisis in the successful navigation of the circuits can make the subject aware that their distribution and design is, inevitably, part of a much more complex network that exceeds its own subjectivity. In such circumstances, the discrete character of the circuits begins to appear like an aggravation because the circuits’ autonomy from the liberal subject appears to stand for limits to the priority of the self.

The way to repair the sense of disorientation could become, as it does in the novel, a desire for the perfect integration of the various circuits into each other through some impersonal force, as if this manner of securing them accords with a transcendental design or at least mitigates the threat by concentrating it along a single frontier (here, of communitarian identity) as opposed to multiple, scattered ones. Religion, understood here as the impersonal force sidelined by the empowerment of the human subject, could here step back in to contain the potential of the circuits to spin away from the liberal subject. Its reconstructed, providential discourse makes its identitarian-communitarian character palatable for such a subject. It offers the frontier along which real and imagined threats to one’s identity may be concentrated. It is, thus, that Gaitonde comes to sentimentally identify with the communitarian gangster Varadrajan of Nayakan, while his rival Isa does the same with The Godfather (559). However, as Jojo’s mockery of this reminds us, such an identification is simply the wishful conceit of a Gaitonde uncertain of his moorings rather than an actual parallel between him and Varadarajan (725-26).

The failure to achieve a compensatory integration of his various circuits is the primary failure of Gaitonde’s liberal subjectivity in the novel, not Shukla’s deception of him as in the series. When Gaitonde discovers that Shukla had been using him to smuggle nuclear weapons meant to destroy Mumbai, he is horrified not merely at the scale of destruction planned but more so by the loss of the consolation of the grand design. The grand design turns out to have not been centered on him. His last conversation with Shukla on the phone ends in Ganesh’s realization that Shukla’s plans are irrevocable and that the latter’s cosmic design never had more than an instrumental role for him. The following lines sum up the impact of this realization on him:

“And then there was a click, and he was gone.

The cars sped by me, bleeding their trails of light in the dusk. I felt as if I was falling. Then, in that moment, I didn’t think of my boys or millions of people of the country or the world. I thought only of me. That faint metallic snap in my ear sliced through my neck and into my stomach, and left me alone. I knew he wouldn’t come back. I wouldn’t find him, and he would not call me again. I was alone. Once again, I was Ganesh Gaitonde setting out into an unknown world, a knife hidden under my shirt.” (839)

This particular loss of the orientation first provided and then withdrawn by Shukla, rather than his deceit, is what Gaitonde cannot accept, and is the latter’s decisive failure in the novel. The novel and the series both see the susceptibility of the Indian liberalized subject to Hindutva’s political project in terms of an impasse in self-assertion. But where in the series the identitarian discourse creates and accentuates the impasse in order to co-opt the liberal subject, the novel relies on the questionable psychic resources that the liberal subject deploys to deal with the crisis. As such, the novel paints a picture of liberal self-deception and restores the liberal subject’s agency in its own failure.