Signs of Madness The fundamental secret of the power of humour was wonderfully revealed in two lines in Sukumar Ra/s khicuri, the poem which reports that the duck and the porcupine carried on a traditional existence until a time when, by the miracle of humour, the grammar of reality fell away, and they formed a mixed animal.2 It allows us to break the grammar of reality and history. Kamalakanta, the protagonist of his humourous essays, is an ungrammatical being, half conformist, half rebel. There is a peculiar openness of form in Kamalakanta: because it is a mixture of in several things. It is in part serious ironical prose, in part essay, story, drama mixed together. It takes the most unpredictable of turns. As it is nonserious, it is free from obligations of consistency, it can play between its own possible meanings. It can be any of them, it can be all; it can, precisely because it is laughter, be this play of astonishment. Signs of Madness The text we are going to read is a text of madness. Its putative author, Banmkim says, was regarded by ordinary people, as mad.3 But the madness that produces this text is a text in itself, a sign. It can be read, made to yield its meaning. We must first understand who says this text, before we can grasp what it says. In a manner of speaking this essay is about the almost unknown author of one of the most celebrated texts of Bengali prose. These are written allegedly by Kamalakanta Chakrabarty, a brahmin, homeless, occupationless, classless,4 a drug addict, a parasite, a sayer of the unsayable. Curiously, very little is usually said about this remarkably odd figure. He is wholly merged into the authorial personality of Bankimchandra. But he is not so negligible; because he exemplifies, to my understanding, not only an important segment of Bankim's art, but also his strategy of intellectual existence. Still, it is hardly ever asked in the literature why did the author create another author who is such an interesting negation of himself? What does the author's alienation of his own text signify? On his own part Bankim clearly took great pains to put the text at a distance from himself, alienating Kamalakanta's utterances from his own by a series of symbolic disjunctions.5 Bankim is sane, Kamalakanta is suspected of insanity; Bankim is staidly respectable, Kamalakanta is marginal, of doubtful (unspecified) occupation; the author is normal, Kamalakanta an opium-eater; Bankim is a solid civil servant, a salaried man of a decidedly upper bracket, he is dependent on something of a mixture between respect and pity; Bankim is a realist, he is a dreamer. To state the argument in more serious form, Kamalakanta is a bundle of negative attributes, indescribable in terms of the available categories of social description.6 Whatever he might be, he is, quintessentially, not a babu. Bankimchandra was a model of the successful Bengali gentleman (bhadralok, the English term is a common but strictly inappropriate translation) under the colonial social dispensation—successful, contented, reconciled. Kamalakanta is his exact opposite—idle, disorderly, unmarried, unkempt, socially indescribable, an irrationalist, or perhaps, a rationalist dedicated to the cause of what his contemporaries would have seen as 'irrationalist'. Yet, Journal of Arts & Ideas