Editor’s note: This article was first posted by vqueer on her Facebook in 2016 shortly after Rohith’s death.
Rohith Vemula has become an icon. Like all icons he is both singular – the dalit student from HCU – and popular – the symbol and face for resistance against oppressive structures of brahminism, fascism, and nationalism. I want to add to the list. More than that, I wish to render Rohith an icon without iconicity.
Umar Khalid, in his speech at JNU yesterday, mentioned how what Rohith had written – to be reduced to the nearest number, an identity – had come home to Umar.[1] In the last few days, Umar has been targeted just because his name sounds a certain way. This refusal of attachments to proximate objects – a name, an identity – is vital to Rohith’s last letter. He did study stars after all! He also argued we are all stardust. It is intimacy, critical of the proximate, which Rohith offers to us as love. One of the laments in the note that survived Rohith is that love has become half-hearted and painful. One must remember that Rohith wrote this not in the context of some person but a love for science, nature, stars and friends. What Rohit offers is love unlike any we call love.
Let us first understand love. Someone called Marx wrote about the commodity in capitalism that the commodity creates its own desire – that even as the desire seems to come from within, it is produced by the commodity. Think of walking in a mall and seeing a pair of McQueen heels. They are black, studded, stunning and everything you wanted. Wait. How did they become everything you wanted when you just saw them a few minutes ago? They produced that desire. The object creates that desire that we feel came from within. If desire is so sticky, can and does attach itself to so many objects (including people), how do we not constantly fall apart given that it’s not possible to have everything we desire? Let aside not getting all we want, imagine getting all we want! We couldn’t bear it. We’d fall apart, break down, crumble under the weight of those very heels. In the face of overwhelming desire, what holds us together is love. Love, afterall, is the fantasy of being held.
Love holds us by offering a plot where desire’s disturbances can be narratively readjusted. But love’s plots are social. There may be infinite stories but very few plots. No wonder even as lean and naturally hairy bodies are back to being sexy, so few of the women and men around me would ever turn to give another glance to the construction workers around us. Isn't it amazing that so many of us just happen to fall in love with people of similar castes, class and religion! Or consider, no matter how authentic and singular the love, it needs those clichéd three words to express it. Anyone who has said them and not heard them back knows how material, how real, how potent this cliché is. I don't want to condemn anyone to conformity with this depressing, fatal tale of love. These limited and constraining social plots also guarantee the optimism (thank you, Lauren Berlant!) necessary to thrive, survive, live. Think of my favourite formula of love, and this is copyleft, the intensity of the truth of our desires is directly proportional to the intensity of the conflict they generate. If you have fought caste patriarchy, family or an arch-nemesis for a lover, you have been held together by this plot. Think about the relief things like “distance makes the heart go fonder” bring to the longing of a lover far away.
The intensity of the truth of our desires is directly proportional to the intensity of the conflict they generate.
Like all plots, insofar as it is social, it is also exclusionary. There are some plots that are not recognised as legitimate. This is why gay boys want marriage. You couldn’t possibly be promiscuous, without a house and a dog together, spending multiple evenings apart hanging with separate friends, and still be said to be madly in love with someone! It’s the same when people around us frame doing politics and getting an education in binary ways. My friends in Pinjra Tod often relay how their parents and well-wishers ask them to focus on studying rather than activism. Speaking of Pinjra Tod, can we ask, does Rohith have a gender? To be given an appropriate name must need a gendered subject. This question cannot not be asked since in the wake of Rohith’s suicide we heard of the suicide of Monisha, Priyanka and Suranya; three dalit women studying at a medical institute in Villupuram, Tamil Nadu. It is the gendered nature of our public spheres that they have disappeared from view. Heck, even private spheres. While Rohith “used” a friend's room, these women were found in a well. Their suicide notes, we are told, mentioned the oppressive fee structures and insensitive authorities of their college. In the public, their voice must stick to the immediate, the proximate. The absence of love from their letters begs the question of who gets to love in our economies. Anyway, women are easier beloveds than they are lovers. They can be Bharat Mata not Shurpanakha. And we know what happened to Shurpanakha. The mutilation of women's faces belongs to this history of patriarchal control over desires. The recent attack on Soni Sori is an attempt to throw her out of circuits of desire, in this way misrecognising her.[2] Unfortunately for them, Soni Sori far exceeds this violent characterisation. Soni Sori is a lover, just like Rohith, of her school, adivasis and a radical political vision.
Let me make one last point before I return to the question I began with. Someone called Fraud or Freud (thank you, Ismat Chughtai!) offers a thesis that we all first wanted Mummy. Taboos and Daddy, sometimes the same thing, make it hard (all puns intended) to have Mummy. All lovers, in this theory, are therefore replacements. Girls want husbands like their fathers and boys complain that their wives don't cook like their mothers. As replacements these objects/persons will disappoint. They will never live up to what we (don’t know but actually) want. The lover, as Berlant tells us, stands in the way of love. You can love your partner, your kin, your nation all you want but you will be heartbroken. It is this that ought to mark any progressive politics, a recognition that the objects to which we would attach our desire and optimism will disappoint. This opens us and our politics to critique.
So, here we have it. Via Marx and Berlant, we understand love is a way we bear the unbearable, survive our lovers, and stay in the flux of desire. We also learn that some objects are easier loved than others. Some people are impossible (as) lovers. And, finally, no matter the object, its promise, it will not satisfy. This critical distance between what we want to want and what we have is not sad or deflating but what opens us up, what throws us into the social, what could make us ask the world to match love’s abundance.
Rohith loved science, nature, politics and friends. This love was curious, interrogative and critical. Rohith didn’t just offer us an array of objects to attach to but a democratic plot of love. You couldn’t love stars without attending to the muck of caste that separates us. A love unlike love. I may not have known Rohith, the person with the proper name, but I share his critique and his fantasy. And true to him, I refuse to name this love or attach it to him alone.