The Self, Existence and Identity in "Woh jo kho gaye"

I wrote in my paper on Season of Migration to the North, about how the identity of Mustafa Saeed is a failed one, because it is always formed in relation to the ‘Other’, and because his own identity and existence cannot sustain itself because he is in a state of exile, with no roots to look to in Africa, and that he inherently cannot form an identity in the present because he has no past. I feel that this resonates with what we read in “Woh jo kho gaye”.

This comes up when each of the men finally realize that the man that they thought that they might have lost, could have been their own Self: “woh jo kam ho gaya hai, who mai hun”.

The displacement of identity is one of the characteristics of the figure of the exile, which can be found in Mustafa Saeed in Season of Migration to the North and Aziz in A Passage to India. Another characteristic of the exile is that they have no place of origin, or the place that they feel they can identify with only exists idealistically. This is found for example in Men in the Sun, but becomes more intense within “Who jo kho gaye”, where the characters do not remember where they came from, have no past that they can identify with, just some remnants of memories of some cities. 

Yet there is the wish to have this root and this identity as well: “phir bhi acha hota agar hum yaad kar sakte ke hum niklay thay aur kahan se niklay thay”.

Coming back to the original point then, even though there is the wish to have this rootedness, even if the wish is only momentary, for just after that one of the men says that it doesn’t matter where they came from or whether they have any memory of it, because it is of no use. However the fact that they cannot have an identity at the present even, is not just because they have no past, it is also because they are not individuals and cannot sustain themselves for even the fact of their existence can only be proven by the testimony of the Other: “Afsos ke mai ab doosron ki gawahi per zinda hoon”.

Nevertheless the question is posed then, that whether this kind of diminished existence is better than being annihilated, like those who had no Others to testify to their existence. Despite that, the fact remains that this identity that they have gained is temporary and flimsy, because their entire existence depends upon a single testimony which cannot be relied on: “Sou tum apni gawahi se agar phir jao tou mai nahin rahun ga”. Unlike the notions of individuality and perhaps as opposed to the Cartesian dictum “I think, therefore I am”, this narrative postulates that ‘I exist because this Other person testifies that I exist’, which is arguably inconcrete since the former is dependent on the conscious of the Self, and the latter on the word of the Other.