Song for Pushkin

Sitting among wild young men
I am lost in my thoughts.

–Aleksandr Pushkin

An imagined Russia–Soviet or otherwise–along with an imagined America have at times over the past century served as vehicles of hope in India as elsewhere. The American writer Jhumpa Lahiri tells the story of Gogol, the resentful son of Bengali migrants to Boston named by a father whose copy of the Russian’s works had once saved him from a train wreck. The story I recount here centers not on an Indian-origin Gogol but on an ‘America-returned’ Pushkin. But it, too, is an account of hope and the limit to hope, set in the aftermath of a time when India, America, and Russia stood as parallel dreamworlds offering a receptive humanity the future. If it is an account of homosexuality, it is because homosexuality has come to serve as a privileged marker both of hope and its limit in the aftermath of the three worlds. If it is an account told as a song, it is a song in the sense of the Sanskrit gita and how I would render it, as the recognition of an ethical universe one is asked to call into being. I sing in the face of Pushkin’s death. Ethics as a performative practice is offered here as a kind of mourning.

The account: two men, Pushkin Chandra and Kuldeep, were found murdered on August 14, 2004, in New Delhi, at Chandra’s barsati, a small apartment adjoining his parents’ residence. The Chandras lived in a gated enclave known as Anand Lok, the Bliss World, in the south of the giant city. Within days, residents of Delhi, as well as a globally dispersed public stitched together through the consumption of Delhi-based media, were being offered frequent and lurid reporting on what quickly became known as the Pushkin Affair.

The attention was based in part on Chandra’s social position; accounts referred to his father’s career in the prestigious Indian Administrative Service and to the posh surroundings of Anand Lok. But the extensive coverage emerged primarily because Chandra and presumably Kuldeep were assumed to have enjoyed homosexual (or in newspaper Hindi, samalaingik) relations, and because they were from distinct social classes. Kuldeep was understood to be a Hindi or Punjabi speaker of a ‘laboring class’ background, and, like at least one of the alleged killers, was noted to be from the uncivil peasant culture of towns dominated by the Jat caste in the state of Haryana, just to the south of New Delhi. Chandra, scion of the Bliss World, had done his graduate training in management in the United States.

.  .  .