Home worlds ~ Malinda Words

I am not sure if Ghare Baire (The Home and the World) was the first Satyajit Ray movie I watched. It may have been Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder), based on the novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, where Ray graphically presents the political economy of famine and hunger, focusing on entitlements and lack thereof, as or more powerfully than the (later?) theoretical work of the economist Amartya Sen.

I believe it was a festival of Ray films screened on consecutive days at the Peradeniya Arts Theatre. I vaguely recollect watching Apu Sansar (World of Apu), also at the Arts Theatre, but I could be wrong.

The home. The world. Two words, dimensionally different, and yet so synonymous. There's the pithy Sinhala observation regarding the disjuncture between one’s persona as home and in public, ‘ලෝකෙට පරකාසේ ගෙදරට මරගාතේ,’ which translates as ‘a curse at home but acclaimed by the world.’ Ghare Baire embeds ‘worldish’ conflicts within a household. At the same time, we are struck by the commonality of themes: love, betrayal, the intersections of right and wrong, good and bad etc. The one throws light on the other not only in terms of impact but their mutually embeddedness, the broad strokes, nuances and the unwritten.

All that was absorbed uncritically. Things weren’t filtered too much back then. But years later I had the opportunity to consider more deeply and seriously the terms ‘world’ and ‘home,’ their intersection, their commonalities too often dismissed by the claim of proportionality, dimensions that don’t match and, interestingly, ‘economies of scale.' It happened when Susan Buck-Morss, teaching a class on how economies work, grow, collapse and are replaced by other political economic edifices different only in name, suggested that her students examine the etymology of the word ‘economy.’

We didn’t have smartphones. There was no dictionary in the classroom. She explained: “It comes from the Greek word ‘oikos’ which means ‘house.’” From oikos to ‘oikonomos,’ meaning manager or steward, to oikonomia ‘household management’ to the Latin ‘oeconomi’ which is the source of the French économie, Spanish economia and German Ökonomie.

Thenshe spoke about cities (not countries) that controlled trade and about those who really wielded economic power. She asked, ’What was common to them?’

‘They were all white,’ I said tentatively. The class erupted in laughter. She did too. Not in a bad way.

‘They were families!’

She mentioned the Rothschilds, ‘Mister Rothschild, Missis Rothschild, the Rothschild children…’ She may have mentioned other families, but I can’t remember. Households, all. Dynastic. Same as now.

But then again, there are worlds and worlds, households and households, things economic and things that can’t be broken down and sorted under economic categories, even though there’s an inevitable political economy informing what they are and how they work, even as these households in turn shape those structures that seem all-powerful and whose encroachment seems inexorable.

Amartya Sen, incidentally, titled his memoirs 'Home in the world,' and it is about, so the blurb on the dust cover tells us, 'a story of human empathy across distance and time, and above all, of being at home in the world.' That's a bit different from all that can be squeezed out of 'oikos,' but the Nobel Laureate I'm sure wouldn't disagree that the necessity for frugality, the complement of entitlement and politics related to access aren't too different in both spheres.

We have households that contain the world. Households that consciously are crafted in the image of a world that is preferred. Households of affirmation that, simply by the very fact of affirming, contest realities and political economies that seem intent on robbing or in other ways seek to erase meaning.

My sister’s house in Bala Cynwyd, Philadelphia. It’s a world. A world whose building blocks are words that come in the shape of novels, poetry, biographies, magazines, history, humour, children’s stories and other literature from all parts of the planet, all walks of life, all political preferences, ideological orientation and lifestyle choices.

There are wisdom-drops, carefully and consciously collected, that have been neatly and appropriately arranged so the walls seem to be in constant conversation with one another. It’s a world made of words, but also light and shade. It’s made of line, space and colour. It is fragrant. It has a pleasing voice.

It’s a magical household where fingertips can test the textures of landscapes yet unseen — all one has to do is to open a book, glance up or sideways or just let pieces of the world’s music graze the senses.

An incomplete world. An incomplete household. Yes. Just like the better known ‘world’ and the ideal ‘household’ that beckons, trips, tramples and laughs at the tragedy and the horror of those particular aspirational pathways that lead not to bliss but often enough despair. Incomplete. Still a home, still a world. A home that is a world. In and of itself.

It’s a home that is warm with love. As the world ought to be. And is, in so many ways, in so many places.

malindadocs@gmail.com

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is a new series. Links to previous articles in this new series are given below]

25 July 2023

Home worlds

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