Page:Relocating Bakhtin.pdf/28

24 to be bubbles in the ocean of namelessness under the pretext of achieving global citizenship, their cessation from communal existence means they are answerable to nothing. They forfeit all claims whatsoever either to historicity or to articulation of values in deeds. Bakhtin has taught us that we have answerability for our unique place in existence and at the same time we are endowed with the means by dint of which we are able to relate our uniqueness to the expansive space of others.

The cessationists refuse to be responsive towards their community and remain confined within monological and nonconvergent presumptions. They can never recognize that as participant residents in a historically evolved society, we must ourselves be responsible or answerable to ourselves and be always prepared for interactivity and collective performance. Each individual occupies a unique time and space in the dramatics of life and though it is dependent on the recipient others, nevertheless, its role and place is unchangeable and non-negotiable. In any given historical epoch, the position of individual self engrossed in society is always shifting and hence dialogics with the others also cannot remain static. In fact, the dynamics of relationship and sharing of existence with other human beings as well as the world around is essentially dynamic. This dynamism is spontaneously evaluative of the deeds and eventfulness articulated by the individual self in the context of a participant society. Concomitantly this process is deeply ethical as well because, in the performance of such deeds in the life-world, there is a constant affirmation and renewal of the faculties of addressivity to other selves and the world. Their ideas are indeed put to test in the Indian subcontinent whose variegated cultural history as well as multilinear social history offer us rare opportunity to interpret Bakhtin's cardinal concept of the architectonics of answerability. If it is negated, there is calamity and cataclysm in Indian history. It is our responsibility to situate Bakhtin properly so that we can