Beyond Recognition

One of the greatest sadnesses of married life for Mrs. A. was the loss of the lead role in a college production of the play Shakuntala. Mrs. A. identified closely with Shakuntala, a heroine whose story is typically told as an ethical narrative of recognition. Skanutala’s story is the most detailed and thoroughly explored myth in the case, and its moral lessons are part of a long history of establishing identities and ethics of reform in the midst of colonial rule, histories that shaped Mrs. A.’s own world and the social and political ideas available to her. But its dimensions also establish starkly gendered conditions for the ethical ideal of recognition. As Mrs. A. imagined life after marriage, she reimagined alternate versions of Shakuntala’s story, transforming a story of recognition into one containing the personal and political possibilities of non-recognition. She did so not through interpretation, but through a dancerly orientation that cast ethics as feeling, gesture, movement, play, and even artifice, reimagining not only the content of ethics, but the very form ethics might take.

Introduction: Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand

In the middle of World War II and at the end of colonial rule, a young woman in Punjab met with family friend Dev Satya Nand as a willing participant in his new method of dream analysis. This chapter introduces Mrs. A., Satya Nand, and the outlines of the case, which began with a discussion of bringing “Hindu Socialism” to Indian peasants and turned into an exploration of love, sexuality, ambition, and life after marriage. The case appeared early in the career of Satya Nand, a prolific but little remembered figure in twentieth-century Indian psychiatry, who theorized complex connections between the mind and the social world, casting the psyche as an organic vehicle for ethical imagination. This introduction also introduces Draupadi, Shakuntala, and Ahalya, central mythic figures who entered Mrs. A.’s musings and Satya Nand’s science. It asks what it means to begin a conversation about ethics from elsewhere than the usual sources in European myth and philosophy, and wonders at how we might consider this narrative in and beyond its place and time, Punjab on the eve of Partition, considering what it demands of us as readers of and alongside Mrs. A., an anonymous yet intimate voice.

Postscript: The Shape of the Counter-Ethic

This final chapter explores the implications of the concept of counter-ethics as it arises in Mrs. A.’s case, using the artwork of Shahzia Sikander to imagine ethics from a perspective of movement and shifting form. Beginning with Sikander’s large-scale installations and the motif of “singing spheres,” it follows a recurring shape, what Sikadner refers to as “gopi hair,” from abstract video installations to small, figurative paintings in the style of Rajput miniatures. From this, a sense of the potential of counter-ethics can be attached to shape, and to the diverse possibilities of derivative meanings and loose choreographies. Counter-ethics ask us to consider ethics as a gloss for repertoires of focused ways of being in and imagining the world, and to especially consider those that emerge from or bud off of the places at which ethical goals, ideals, or concepts find their limits. An invitation to expand our sense of those repertoires beyond certain familiar, though useful, ways we attach ethics to everydayness, critique, resistance, and power, this chapter ends by following Satya Nand toward an appreciation of imagination as both method and outcome of reflection.

Singularity and Uncertainty

Mrs. A.’s reflections on her daydream of “Hindu Socialism” continually returned to the conditions of marriage and her life as a privileged but unhappy Hindu wife. The eldest daughter in a progressive Gandhian family, though her marriage was a love match, she had been hurried into it and made to put aside her education when her family suffered a turn in financial fortune. As she reflected on thwarted ambitions, past loves, and current friendships, new concerns arose: perhaps her husband was having an affair, perhaps his parents were seeking another wife. Weaving these concerns with memories of childhood, she mapped connections between sexuality and the ethical foundations of marriage, those emphasizing emplacement, certainty, and belonging and casting dilemmas of female agency as matters of relationships. Describing the gendered double standards of those ideals, she imagined herself alongside Draupadi, heroine of the Mahabharata, and reflected on her erotically charged friendship with woman named Vidya. As a vision of life beyond marriage came into view, so did counter-ethical ideals for founding her future. Ideas about singularity and the pleasures of uncertainty helped her imagine not only her own future, but that of a just, independent society with an equal place for women.

Unconsciousness and Voice

There are blind spots in Mrs. A.’s musings. One of these concerns her maid, who endured traumas Mrs. A. witnessed as a child. Sexual treachery and violence are undercurrents in the case, rising to the surface as matters of judgment and dismissal. While there is little that can be known definitively about the maid’s experience, there is ample material from medicine and law to situate her story. This material connects sexual violation to ruptured consciousness in the form of symptoms—fainting, catatonia, and muteness. It connects with Hindu mythic resources that appear in Mrs. A.’s case as a different kind of testimony than memory, in which women speak righteously about violation and fall unconscious in its wake. These suggest a counter-ethic at the limits of the ways consciousness might be a ground for ethical practice, in the limitations of Mrs. A.’s class consciousness and in the figuring of consciousness in medical histories beyond the case. Ahalya, an ambiguous heroine from epic and folk narrative who was cursed for being violated, is a quiet presence in Mrs. A.’s case. But alongside the maid and contemporary cases, she adds the counter-ethical possibility of unconsciousness as a state of ethical repair.