Hubble-Bubble of Transcultural Encounters: A Study of the Social Life of the Hookah.

Abstract

This article traces the cultural history of the hookah in Indian culture from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century, focusing on its imbrication in cultural practices and cultural narratives. In proximity with thing theory’s idea of the agency of “chance interruption” to disclose the “physicality of things” (Brown 4), I argue that chance interruptions of monetisation turned hookahs as “objects” into hookahs as “things.” In the first part of the article, I trace the origin of the hookah culture and then examine one such interruption of monetisation – the patronage system of the Nawabs – that made the hookahs’s thing status evident and recognisable. Moreover, in the first section, I further elaborate Bill Brown’s use of the term “chance interruption” and how it links to the “physicality” of the hookah in the wake of the Nawabi system. Interacting with the posthuman idea of how the material environment forms and transforms human beings, I explore the thingness of the hookah in the context of a “bazaar of thingness” (Appadurai 18) present in India. To underline this metamorphosis, in the first part of the paper, I demonstrate two things: a) an object becomes a thing through “a sequence of encapsulations” (Connor 18); that is, the production of a “thing” is directly associated with the production of a chain of significations connected to the thing itself, and b) thingness is not inherent in things but it is the effect “of recognitions and uses performed within frames of understanding (which may be markets or ad hoc negotiations of action or desire or bodily skills as much as they may be intellectual formatting or sedimented codes)” (Frow 285). To put it differently, an object evolves into a thing if it is humanly recognised. Broadly, I argue in the first section that transcultural encounters are responsible for “thingifying” hookahs. In the second part of the paper, I analyse the second interruption of monetisation, the mercantile system of the British. Furthermore, I contend that by employing the thing status of the hookah in his play, The Play of the Hookah Smoker: A Farce in Four Acts, Thakur Jagmohan Singh (1857–1899), an Indian playwright writing on the cusp of modernity, has created one of the first myths of Hindi nationalism. This myth feminises and demonises Bengalis, speakers of the Bengali language, so that Hindi can be extolled as the national language of the country