|
|
|
 |
28th June, 2016
Between life
and ourselves
a great distance was put
and of that expanse
we were proclaimed citizens
~ Rococo and Other Worlds, Afzal Ahmed Syed. Snippet gleaned from the article "The Man Who Invented Poetry: The violence and passion of Afzal Ahmed Syed", Annie Zaidi, The Caravan, June 2016
The following is connected to this.
The writer was inadvertently led to the article above through trailing the online articles concerning the debate between Arundhati Roy and Ramchandra Guha, which commenced with publication of Arundhati's critique of India's nuclear tests in Outlook magazine in 1998, and followed by one on Sardar Sarovar Dam, both of which for irrational, but expected, reasons attracted disproportionate interest.
Guha was probably right when he stated that celebrity interest in a cause diverts attention from the cause to the celebrity. Generalising this, we can say that one has to be careful regarding what one associates with, and whether one's association is helping the issue at hand or complicating it.
Having said this, it is important to bear in mind that had it not been for Arundhati Roy, many in late 1990's (including the writer) would have been bereft of a strong momentary consciousness of existence of such issues, however simplistically they may have been portrayed as repeatedly emphasized by her critics. The writer ventures to add that while many may accuse Arundhati of hyperbole and rhetoric, at times, without the supposed hyperbole and rhetoric, those comfortable with the status quo, and indeed, fruitfully, lazily & unknowingly benefitting from it may never have been jolted out of their siesta and forced to react. He also asserts supposed because the writer personally does not find anything hyperbolic about her writings. A sudden impulsive jolt to one's consciousness is not a bad thing once in a while provided that, after waking up one knows what to do with the newly acquired shrill, stark and spartan consciousness of critical, and not frivolous, issues.
Guha also said Arundhati's article(s) was self-indulgent. The point is of specific personal interest because, if pressed, the writer too would say that his writing is anything but not self-indulgent. This was also the initial motivation to follow the back & forth between Guha and Arundhati to understand what ill does a self-indulgent writing possess.
The writer is yet to find an answer. As a reader one is gifted with a choice to not engage with a piece of writing. The counter-argument could be that people are, more often than not, unlikely to skip an article by a foreign award-winning writer in a national magazine. This raises a question: what is a public writer like Arundhati supposed to do when she comes across an issue which grips her in the particular (and, apparently, self-indulgent) manner in which it grips her? Keeping quiet will result in severely torturing her own psyche. Writing about it will surely help herself. Publishing it for wider circulation may or may not help her, and likewise, may or may not always help the potential reader.
As an example, what does one do as a writer (as well as an historian) upon hearing the following:
"A young lawyer who grew up in a village 30 miles from Srinagar told a story of two women, who after being raped by soldiers, spent the night shivering in separate bathing cabins, too ashamed to go home, hearing only each other's weeping."
~ Extracted from Arundhati Roy, the Not-So-Reluctant Renegade, Siddhartha Deb, The New York Times Magazine, 09th March, 2014, accessible here.
The first reaction would be chaotic anger or deep sadness. In either case, the heart of the writer, as well as the historian, will ache. Depending on their respective skills and experiences, both may develop different conscious responses. The writer will filter to a point and then express bringing to life the trauma of the victim, simply because at that point in time she too may be experiencing that trauma in a very personalised sense. The historian, on other hand, will be led to inquire into the antecedents, precedents and implications, and through a careful study of these arrive at a supposedly dispassioned and objective understanding of the real issue at hand.
Has Arundhati Roy maintained a consistent sense of balance? Probably not. Has she been guilty of framing the issues in terms of us against them? Probably. Has she been guilty of lending an overtone of shrillness and a texture of impending doom to her essays? Probably. Do her essays evoke a feeling of morbid helplessness in some, instinctive aversion in some others, and saturation amongst the rest? Probably. Does any of this diminish the potency of a call to action that her essays cry out for? No. Should we then spend time searching for a sense of balanced truth in her writings, or use her writings to arouse? The latter would certainly prove more fruitful.
To expect a sense of balance and a firm adherence to truth from a writer is to miss the point. Even though the writer may herself believe she is representing the truth, a writer's representation is anchored in the truth but it is not the truth. It is a call to search for the truth. As much as the Buddha's unyieldingly repetitive reminding of the suffering inherent in our very existence is a vigorous and direct call for attaining liberation in the here & the now.
(To caution the careless reader: we are not comparing Arundhati Roy with the Buddha. Neither are we saying that all the Buddha did was arouse people to contemplative action.)
As a reader, it is important to know and understand responses of both the writer and the historian. We are poorer if we are made to choose one over another. Through the writer we can viscerally experience the trauma of the two women which in turn forces us to look for the historian who can satisfy that burning question within us: WHY all of this? The historian, for all one knows, may lead us to the philosopher. The philosopher, unwittingly, to the sage who realized the Truth. Thus, how the reader responds to responses of a writer and an historian is his responsibility, and neither the writer's nor the historian's. The unavoidable fact is: both responses are needed, but they hardly form even half the complete narrative without the aid of the philosopher and the sage. If the writer and the historian believe otherwise, then both are clearly and certainly at fault with regard to 'conceits of representation'.
It is difficult to see how a writer should not write deploying a style that comes naturally to her. And whether being self-indulgent really is the issue at hand. Dispassioned objectivity is a noble ideal. However, if in the name of dispassioned objectivity we take the soul out of any piece of writing then that writing, inspite of being concise, brief, to the point and highly analytical will be devoid of the power to eventually move & tether one permanently to reasoned reflection.
For any writer, even of a mediocre calibre, this question is of immense importance: how to be true to one's unconscious convictions, impart meaning and soul to the activity of writing, while remaining as dispassionate and objective as possible?
By committing the sin of exercising the creative license, can the writer (and historian) lead the reader to some form of dispassionate reflection? In probing this question, it helps to remember that many a men have turned to reason after being ravaged & washed ashore by strong emotions stirred up by passionate, and probably polemical, writings. It could likewise be argued that many a men have turned to the battlefield after being ravaged & washed ashore by strong emotions. What separates the first course of action from the second, and what implication does it have for the responsibility that a writer and a historian carry on their able professional shoulders? It is the responsibility of which issues they choose to focus on, and what they make of those issues.
Any one who has tried to extricate, or separate, the faculty of reason from the faculty of feeling and emotions will realize that this operation is only possible on the firm and richter-scale defying foundation of morality. Morality is not a default state of affairs. It has to be cultivated. This is precisely where individuals like Arundhati Roy and Guha have a serious role to play as public intellectuals who shape the moral sensitivity of their readers.
Reason, of the kind disbursed from the calm confines of an ivory tower has merit. And there are those who would assert, justifiably, that it stands on a higher ground compared to personalised and anguished narratives that flow from the well of acute over (hyper) sensitivity. Yes. But if that same reason enables infusion of a subtle presumptuous haughtiness and arrogance then it loses its claim to premiership of the much sought after kingdom of Reason, which it (the ivory-tower variety) otherwise has every right to stake an uncontested claim to.
Do the supposed hyerbole, rhetoric, and sharp & polar contrasts which the essays of Arundhati Roy bring to surface, inch us a bit closer to the ideal of dispassioned objectivity, or most definitively away from it? It is possible to contend that they do inch us a bit closer. And how? These elements, while pitting the disenfranchised against the enfranchised, the progressives against the nationalists, the pacifist against the pragmatist vividly bring to fore an assumed, often ignored, taken for granted dimension of an issue.
An individual's sub-conscious is scared to confront black & white not because reality is not black & white. It is surprising how many times decisions that confront us really are of a binary sort. Rather, an individual is scared because if he becomes acutely conscious of this reality then the entire edifice of thoughts, and the world-view enmeshed within them which the individual's mind holds onto dearly, crumbles right there and then. As a result, our mind strains every possible neuron to escape this pincer grip of black & white by taking recourse to shameful speculations, reasoned-but-unreasonable rationalizations, pragmatism, opportunism, and when all recourses have run their due course, conspicuous unmindfulness. In some sense it is a tragedy with no parallel. However, if we use this tragedy wisely, it could turn into a tragedy that liberates.
What does this mean? Imagine a spool of thread. Tightly knotted, twisted, inter-connected in ways making it very difficult to disentagle. What if someone finds a particular knot, which, if loosened will someow simply straighten up the thread? Those who delight in a sense of the complex, the sense of a delicate balance, the sense of dependency and inter-connectedness which shape our day to day experiences will be hard-pinched to discover that the thread they thought knotted is actually quite simply straight, plain and bare.
As an example, the Buddha's most profound insight of 'this/that conditionality' completely straightens up all the pretensions of the mind in one go because the mind sees what it perceives to be complex as nothing but a compound of parts. There is no joy, after a point, in preserving this compound, delighting in it and becoming champions of it.
However, not every knot which can be disentangled will produce a straightened thread. The rhetoric of a monolithic Hindu past is the wrong knot to disentangle. But the knot of the pain of the disenfranchised is a more important, and probably effective, knot to diligently work upon.
You can fault Arundhati Roy for not covering all dimensions of an issue. But you cannot fault her for the fact that the knot she identified was indeed a thorny one, and needed to be untangled with all one's might. The real anger and irritation of people with her is that they realize, at some level, she actually may be onto something.
Jack Nicholson's dialogue in As Good As It Gets is apt: you are not pissed because you are left behind. You are pissed because others got ahead of you. One reason people are pissed with the likes of Roy is not only because they puncture the comfortable (and balanced) status quo, but also that they happen to be famous, well-heeled, educated people with a following who are performing the not-so-delicate surgery, and possibly relishing performing it. And more importantly, they continue with it year after year.
And when those irritated with her rhetoric characterize her as 'the Arun Shourie of the Left' they are committing precisely the error they accuse Arundhati of committing. That of hyperbolic rhetoric. Reason, even of the ivory tower variety, would distance itself from such a characterization. That variety of reason would prefer to take a balanced and objectively dispassioned approach to dissecting why Arundhati writes the way she writes. The understanding critic would have found an initial hint in her past and come to realize that she is self-indulgent because in the entire world she has only one best friend: herself. If one does not communicate with one's best friend in moments of anguish, then with whom shall one talk to? For any writer of any seriousness, this test of friendship holds true.
So how should one really approach Arundhati Roy?
A writer, scholar, artist or anyone else who has the power to analyze and express with integrity can play the role of a marg-darshak, of a teacher who genuinely, sincerely and with integrity expresses his or her thoughts. The elements of chief importance are intention & integrity. Whether the style is brief or verbose, self-indulgent or 'objective' is a matter of secondary or even lesser importance. Some of these thoughts may pinch, some may heal. Ultimately, those who express cannot assume they are responsible for a certain reformation, transformation, or even a movement. That indeed is a conceited position. Reformations are led by fools (who might be deemed intelligent by conventional standards) who misinterpret the expressions. They really do literally make 'God out of Small Things' because it suits their own latent and selfish desires.
There can be certain basic standards of decorum in communication. It is advisable that they indeed are kept to a minimal set of universal tenets. Beyond this it is unfair to shackle and judge a writer, scholar or an artist. Charlie Hebdo certainly falls outside of these rules of decorum. But it is difficult to believe Arundhati Roy, in being, as Guha describe her 'a vigorous and one-sided polemicist', has trespassed those rules. It is a different question altogether whether she indeed is a one-sided polemicist, and whether being a polemicist is such an unproductive, unconstructive, or evil design as compared to being an intellectual as implied somewhat (perhaps not consciously) by that characterization.
In general, what Umberto Eco articulated for philosophy also holds true for artistic expression of any substantive kind:
'Philosophy has great explanatory power, since it provides a way to consider as a whole many otherwise disconnected data -- so that, when a scientific approach starts with defining an observable datum and a correct (or true) observation, it starts by positing philosophical categories. A philosophy, however, cannot be true in the sense in which a scientific description (even though depending on previous philosophical assumptions) is said to be true. A philosophy is true insofar as it satisfies a need to provide a coherent form to the world, so as to allow its followers to deal coherently with it.
...
On the contrary, it was the philosophical position of the modern notion of thinking subject that led Western culture to think and to behave in terms of subjectivity. It was the position of notions such as class struggle and revolution that led people to behave in terms of class, and not only to make revolutions but also to decide, on the grounds of this philosophical concept, which social turmoils or riots of the past were or were not a revolution. Since a philosophy has this practical power, it cannot have predictive power. It cannot predict what would happen if the world were as it described it. Its power is not the direct result of an act of engineering performed on the basis of a more or less neutral description of independent data. A philosophy can know what it has produced only apres coup. Marxism as a philosophy displays a reasonable practical power: it contributed to the transformation in the long run, of many ideas and some states of the world. It failed when, assuming to be a science, it claimed to have a predictive power: it transformed ideas and states of the world in a direction it could not exactly forsee. Applying to globality, a philosophy does not play its role as an actor during a recital; it interacts with other philosophies and with other facts, and it cannot know the results of the interaction between itself and other world visions. World visions can conceive of everything, except alternative world visions, if not in order to criticize them and to show their inconsistency. Affected as they are by a constitutive solipsism, philosophies can say everything about the world they design and very little about the world they help to construct."
~ Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, Umberto Eco, Indiana University Press, 1986, pg. 11 & 12
If we engage with Arundhati Roy as we would with a sensitive artist we would gain a lot from her. If we engage with her as an activist to fight against, the loss will be ours. Asking artists (and even activists) to behave as scholars with erudition and command of a certain technique will be most certainly a vain exercise. Sensitivity is no one individual's preserve. A scholar may feel equally pained as an artist (assumed to be an activist). However, let us grant each of them freedom to express in a way they deem fit because, frankly, their expression does not change the world to the extent we (or they) would like to believe, and neither does it change the lot of those on behalf of whom they vocalize beyond a certain point. But if they stopped expressing and vocalizing, the loss will be of those who would like to be jolted out of the monotony of their daily existence and shown facets of the world they were ignorant about.
Artists, scholars and writers certainly possess the power to change individuals. Let us give enough room to individuals who are listening to them to make their own, hopefully thoughtful, choices. If we do so, we would have helped those individuals realize 'God in and from the Small Things' which life has to offer every little day, which could lead to many offering many bits of empathy and concern along with a silent prayer to those who are dispossessed, disowned, disregarded, disrobed, famished, ravished, ravaged, degraded, depraved, and who, in the process have forgotten to respect and love their own selves. And we too, in the process of unknowingly disrobing them, have forgotten to love our own selves. This lack of self-assured compassion for one's own self is what causes sparring between two people: including public intellectuals who enjoy celebrity status.
By no measure are the above set of paragraphs analytical, intellectual and imbued with dispassioned objectivity. The writer wrote them because he wanted to write them. If for nothing else then as a reminder to his own self what he thought at a given point in time and that, these thoughts may be worth going through at a later point of time, to keep the writer's own possible unmindful transgressions in check. Self-indulgent they may be, but if it helps the writer be a little more mindful about himself and clarify his own thoughts, does it really matter?
The reader can of course quit at this point. But given that the writer is a bit of a charlatan, he reserved this liberty for the end. Or did he really? It is always possible that this paragraph simply emerged in his mind at the very end. No point reading conceited designs of the self-indulgent kind when it is just a mere flow of the mind, especially when the reader is under no obligation to trek uptil this point in his, hopefully mindful, exertions.
P.S.: Note that we are specific in giving the liberty of expression to writers, scholars and artists and not to politicians and twitterati; though of late sensible individuals would argue that twitterati is so politicised that this distinction between politicians and twitterati is self-defeating.
Initial draft proof-read and corrected with help from Bibhas Mondal. The errors, if any, may be on account of subsequent modifications and are all attributable to the writer.
| |
|