modernity

Astonishing Form, Amazing Colours

Jagdish Swaminathan is an artist whose body of work and thoughts play an important role in taking us in the direction of real freedom – he attempted to re-establish the link between contemporary modern art and Indian tradition.

Given the kind of relationship I had with Jagdish Swaminathan, it seems strange to prefix his name with the word ‘late’. Perhaps this is so because in our lives, there are a few people who always stay alive within us.

Among these, there are one or two who spontaneously come to our mind as we wonder what they would have done if they had been in a situation that we find ourselves in and the answer to this question plays a very crucial role in our actions. Or, when an idea takes form in our minds, we compare it to the ideas of such a person who is in our minds, and only then do we give our ideas space in our lives.

Traditionally, such a person who is always present is called a Guru, and because the voice of such a person continues to resonate in our minds, it is not in practice to use the word ‘late’ before the name of a Guru. He is always, invisibly present near his pupil like the air we breathe, and the pupil spends his life listening to, debating and arguing with this invisible presence while fostering his own creativity.

This is why I find it strange to refer to the ‘late’ Jagdish Swaminathan. There is, however, another reason for it.

A great artist always leaves indicators of his absence in all his works, as though each creation of his is marked with his transience, or as though he signs each work of art with the signature of his mortality. He constantly creates new worlds and sees them being destroyed in front of his own eyes. In this sense his entire life is a progression from one death to another. So, one wonders after all, how many times can we use the term ‘late’ before the name of such a great artist!

In our times, Jagdish Swaminathan is an Indian artist and thinker of this stature.

All artists who are citizens of India are known as Indian artists and rightly so. But Jagdish Swaminathan is an Indian artist in an exceptional sense too. For him, it wasn’t enough to be a citizen of India; you became one merely by being born in this part of the world. He had earned his citizenship in the Indian tradition of art through his untiring effort in creatively reflecting on the elements of the tradition and also attempting to create in that tradition.

The distinguishing feature of this citizenship lies in the fact that here, each citizen is visible in every citizen and from the point of view of art, it is this citizenship that is far more valuable than the citizenship one gets by holding a voter’s ID.

It becomes even more significant for the artists who belong to countries that have been colonised. In colonised countries, artists have to struggle at various levels to try and recover their own artistic traditions. Almost as though they have been deceived into forgetting the pulse of their own civilisation. A colonial state does not merely rule over another country, it makes traditional institutions, rites, rituals and artistic traditions alien to the citizens of the colonised country.

In order to achieve this, it does away with indigenous systems of knowledge and replaces them with new institutions equipped with new knowledge systems that alienate the native citizens further. Gradually, as the sources of traditional knowledge dry up, citizens lose the ability to understand and relate to their own arts, literature, philosophical traditions and sciences. Everything that was meaningful till a while ago and that imparted significance to their lives now begins to appear meaningless and irrelevant.

All those signs, symbols and indicators which, across centuries were associated with their basic insights, gradually lose their relevance.

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In our case, by the end of the 19th century, for many Indians, many of the genres of creative arts that were part of the Indian tradition and everyday Indian lives began to seem embarrassing to Indians themselves. Under the influence of Western artistic traditions and the harsh and ridiculous criticism of Indian art by many Western art critics and even by Indian artists, instead of looking for new sources of inspiration within their own tradition, artists were forced, in a way, to accept Western art as the norm.

Colonialism does not merely impact the reality of a country, it even negates the established norms that were developed by a civilisation to engage with its own and other realities. Now it becomes difficult for colonised citizens to evaluate or find value in their own traditions without reference to colonial standards and parameters.

To put it another way, caught in the snare of the colonised mindset, a colonised society becomes dependent on gauging the value of everything in terms dictated by the colonial civilisation.

This is what happened with Indian art in a sense. Unless a painting passed through the standards set up by judgement by Western aesthetics, it was not to be considered real art.

Despite this statement, I have no animus against the revolutions in Western art, wherever those artistic movements may have reached today. They have their own relevance. But it was against the backdrop of colonial knowledge and governance that Indian artists had to make connections with those movements. You can call it love enforced on the subservient mindset if you like.

It was under the influence of such a mindset and in an effort to find his own freedom with its support, that towards the end of the 19th century, Raja Ravi Varma learnt painting under the tutelage of an English teacher of art while under the patronage of the Maharaja of Travancore.

Gradually, Raja Ravi Varma’s oleographs could be found in the house of every Indian. Traditional Indian artistic styles were overshadowed by Raja Ravi Varma’s gods and goddesses which were drawn using Western linear perspective, a technique debated even in the West. The placement of our gods and goddesses in these paintings in linear perspective was like the proselytisation of those gods and goddesses.

It became difficult in those years for Madhubani paintings, miniature paintings, Thanjavur art or Tantrik drawings etc. to achieve the status of an art form. Just because these did not follow the tradition of colonial art forms. Little by little, the practice of art became inextricably linked to following the different schools and movements in Western art.

Forgive me, this issue is far more complex and convoluted than what is apparent here. But there is no time to discuss these complications and confusions in depth here. Perhaps it is enough to say that in the twentieth century, Indian artistic traditions became gradually unavailable even to Indian artists. As though they had been thrown into a deep well of obscurity.

I have referred to all this because Jagdish Swaminathan’s artistic and intellectual achievements can only be understood within this context. After working as a political activist during the painful months of India’s partition and for some time after, Swaminathan engaged more seriously with painting. Perhaps some angst embedded deep in his heart was looking to express itself through the medium of form and colour. After learning drawing under Sailoz Mukherjee in Delhi and print making in Warsaw in Poland, he immersed himself completely in the very problematic world of Indian art.

Initially he was drawn towards Tantrik drawings, which is today referred to as Neo-Tantric art and of which he is almost the originator. He subsequently spent many years in the creative research and experience of traditional Indian art forms. As far as I can remember, he even travelled to Kinnaur on foot in search of these paintings.

His art took a new turn after he had immersed himself in the art of Pahari miniature paintings. This is known as the ‘colour geometry of space’. During this period, Swaminathan, inspired by Pahari miniature paintings, attempted to use the traditional interconnections between space, colour and geometry in a new way while also trying to resonate the echoes inherent within them.

Through these canvases, he gradually arrived at his magnificent paintings in which mountains, birds, staircases and trees can be seen swinging between the flat colours around them, which were transparent to themselves. As though the space painted on the canvas is transfixed within its own introspective meaningfulness, awaiting the occurrence of some deeply mysterious event to occur. As though the entire world has been charmed into momentary immobility by some mantra. As though this stasis is providing space for some cryptic enigma to manifest itself.

Apart from connecting his art with traditional art forms, Swaminathan is among those rare Indian painters who was brutally critical in his analysis of all modern Indian art that had been inspired by Western artistic movements and revolutions.

After the famous art critic and philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy, Swaminathan is among the few thinkers who questioned, at an intellectual level, the creative work of painters like Raja Ravi Varma. He was perhaps the only individual in the world of modern Indian art who had such insight and was willing to take this risk. This was also a means of escaping the colonial mindset: by examining sympathetically yet critically those works that had internalised an admiration of the colonial consciousness.

In this sense, Swaminathan is one such artist whose body of work and thoughts play an important role in taking us in the direction of real freedom. In this manner, he attempted to re-establish the link between contemporary modern art and Indian tradition. How successful or unsuccessful he was at his attempts may be a matter of debate, but one cannot deny the integrity of such an attempt.

For some writers and artists, existence itself is a riddle. Not a riddle whose solution awaits us at the horizons of history, but one that is doomed to remain a riddle forever. A never ending riddle. For some artists, perhaps the very first riddle of this kind. Swaminathan is also one of those who saw existence as an unsolvable riddle and art as a composition that allowed space for such a riddle to unfold itself.

Existence itself is extraordinary. Our being on Earth is amazing, The Guru Granth Sahib says:

Wondrous sound

Wondrous knowledge

Wondrous spirit

Wondrous mystery

Wondrous form

Wondrous colour

This is an unsayable tale, a riddle for which no one has the solution. There is a long tradition of texts, writers and artists who have looked at existence as an irresolvable riddle: texts like the Yoga Vashishtha; writers like Kabir, Meera, Ghalib and Borges; art works like Tantrik drawings and, at the fag end of this chain: Jagdish Swaminathan.

Also read: Ram Kumar’s Art Offered a Place of Refuge and Pause

Through their form, colour, shapes, their rhythm, their uniqueness, their expanse, his paintings provide space for this existential riddle, this tangled knot of life, to appear before us. Existence leaves signs of its insolvability, the same signs that Swaminathan glimpsed in tantric drawings and sometimes in the paintings of the Adivasis. Perhaps this is why he could imagine an amazing art gallery in which so called modern and so-called folk-tribal arts could be exhibited together.

He was instrumental in preventing Adivasi folk art from being seen merely as material for anthropological research. In this manner, he succeeded in carrying forward the work of Picasso, the famous Spanish artist, even further. While Picasso saw the future progress of Western art in tribal works of art like African masks and took inspiration from them in his paintings, Swaminathan, taking inspiration from Pahari miniatures and Adivasi art, didn’t only lay down a path for the resonance of the echoes of past tradition, but also became instrumental in introducing us to the magic of all these arts.

During this period, which we now call his last period, it is as though Swaminathan’s paintings jettison all ornamentation. Here he reveals the complex, unsolvable riddle of life as an unfathomable composition, as though at this point he wishes to confront the mystery of existence in its naked, pure, unadorned form. As though the hope that remains is also punctuated by God’s laughter. As though some passer-by has left splashes of colour on the bare walls of an abandoned house, scattered some random letters or etched some lines and has gone away. As though someone has been unable to decipher the mystery of life even at its extreme end and his dismay and despair have spread this unusual tracery of vines across the wall.

It is possible that I have been completely unsuccessful at understanding the mystery and meaning of Swaminathan’s art; this is absolutely possible because all significant art, just like life, is created in such a manner that its mystery can never be completely fathomed. Or if it is understood, it creates a new mystery at its core, which can never be fully revealed. Therefore, it is very possible that despite understanding the essence of Swaminathan’s art, I am still unfamiliar with it.

But if what I have said inspires you to think about the art of great painters like Swaminathan and helps you to engage more knowledgeably with this subject, then even if your understanding of it differs from mine, it will be of great solace to me.

Translated from Hindi by Ranjana Kaul in March 2024.

Udayan Vajpeyi is a noted Hindi poet, short story writer and essayist, known for his writings on art, cinema and theatre.

Today, June 21, is Jagdish Swaminathan’s birth anniversary.

What Makes India an Idea?

For Perry Anderson, “religious affiliation” and “uniformity” are missing between the Maurya, Gupta and Mughal regimes. If those are a European necessity to be called an ‘idea’, keep it for Europe. Indian history is a history of many religions and one of its key aspects is religious, ethnic and cultural variability.

In the original introduction to his popular book The Idea of India (1997), Sunil Khilnani writes:

“Nehru’s idea of India sought to coordinate within the form of a modern state a variety of values: democracy, religious tolerance, economic development and cultural pluralism. The unexpected historical trajectories of these various components since 1947 have changed the conditions of political competition in India… it has become much more difficult to sustain a vision of a single political community.”

Khilnani assumes, or claims, Nehru has an idea of India fitted into a range of values that can be named and laid out so there is nothing further to speculate on. By naming these four values meant for our polity and society, Khilnani also makes the idea of India pragmatic. There is nothing more to think about the ‘idea’ itself, now that we know what it is. The idea of India becomes definable and attainable.

Does the coming of a “single political community” establish a programmatic grid around the ‘idea’ of India? Does Nehru use the word ‘idea’ the way Khilnani lays it out? Khilnani makes an ontological and epistemological jump establishing the ‘idea’ of India in reverse by connecting it to other ideas. What makes India an ‘idea’ in the first place? Is there anything specific, or unique, to India?

Writing The Discovery of India from Ahmednagar jail between 1942 and 1945, Nehru writes in the epilogue:

“The discovery of India—what have I discovered? … About her there is the elusive quality of a legend of long ago; some enchantment seems to have held her mind. She is a myth and an idea, a dream and a vision, and yet very real and present and pervasive… Rabindranath Tagore, in line with that great succession, was full of the temper and urges of the modern age and yet was rooted in India’s past, and in his own self built up a synthesis of the old and the new.” [Emphasis mine]

Nehru’s use of the word ‘idea’ does not seem to resonate with the element of fixity and closure that Khilnani associates with it. In this passage, Nehru is contrasting the Indian mind against what Max Weber in his 1819 lecture called the “disenchantment of the world” that was produced from the “loss of a sense of shared meaning”.

The idea of India, in Nehru’s thinking, did not lose its ties with the idea of enchantment. The demystification and rationalisation of life and thinking that Protestantism introduced into the western world since the 16th century did not become so dominant it could prevent a rationalist like Nehru from imagining India as a myth, a dream and a vision.

To be sure, Nehru very much believes in the principles of democracy, religious tolerance, economic development and cultural pluralism. In fact, in a section in The Discovery titled ‘The Importance of the National Idea. Changes Necessary in India’, Nehru reiterates a “synthetic” approach to knowledge, a “turn to science”, the abandoning of caste, and political, social and economic equality.

But the ‘idea’ of India has an “elusive quality” to itself that does not fit – rather exceeds – the basket of attainable values.

Also read | Debate: History, Historians and a Desire Named India

In fact, Khilnani’s pragmatic endeavour begins with 1947 and fits Nehru’s ideas as part of the nationalist project. It bypasses one of Nehru’s most significant preoccupations in The Discovery: his grappling with Indian history.

Apart from disturbing the colonial periodisation of history as ancient and medieval, Nehru offers what Partha Chatterjee calls (in Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse, 1986) “a direct rebuttal” of the Orientalist dichotomy posed between East and West. The ‘idea’ of India, speculatively and politically, has to do with the contest over history, and ways to imagine that history.

Nehru in the mentioned passage from the epilogue imagines Tagore as a historical figure who upholds the paradox of the modern self that represents a certain idea of the past in the present. In a letter to C.F. Andrews from New York on March 13, 1921, Tagore evokes India as an ‘idea’:

“India has ever nourished faith in the truth of the Spiritual Man, for whose realisation she has made in the past innumerable experiments, sacrifices and penances, some verging on the grotesque and the abnormal. But the fact is she has never ceased in her attempt to find it, even though at the tremendous cost of losing material success. Therefore I feel that the true India is an idea, and not a mere geographical fact. I have come into touch with this idea in far-away places of Europe, and my loyalty was drawn to it in persons who belonged to countries different from mine.”

A few things converge in this passage. India is more, or less, than a “fact”. It is an idea. India, Tagore seems to think, is not its geography. He found the idea resonating in people who were not Indians. Clearly, Tagore’s idea of India is not an idea understood by Indians alone, or necessarily by them. It is a ubiquitous idea, one without an ethno-cultural centre.

This is way more inclusive than what Stuart Hall tells us of the West in his essay “The West and the Rest” (1992). The West is “an idea, a concept” but an idea within itself, differentiating it from the rest of the world in ethnocentric terms. The Rest is understood in relative terms as a lack, and that lack is fundamentally a lack of reason, beginning with a reason to exist on its own terms.

Remember what Perry Anderson says in his three-part essay “Indian Ideology” (2012): “The ‘idea of India’ was essentially a European, not a local invention. … Europeans could define Indians simply as ‘all natives of an unknown country’”.

Reason often makes fools of racist rationalists. Anderson’s European arrogance finds it necessary for his ancestors to have known the ‘idea of India’ if it existed, and since they didn’t find it, it didn’t exist.

Only in modernity it was necessary to discover and invent – historical discoveries are partly inventions – this ‘idea’. For it is the first time in history that the past becomes a political issue.

Modernity invents the past to separate itself and name itself in contradistinction to the past. The necessity to distinguish itself from the past comes from the announcement of reason as the superior tool of reflection, understanding and knowledge, spearheaded by the birth of science.

The past is unscientific, irrational, and the major blame for it is put on religion. Even though the past is unscientific, it is possible to study the past scientifically, rationally.

This pedagogic responsibility is also a mark of superiority. The past has to bend to the diktats of reason.

Perry Anderson finds no reason to believe it is possible to construct an ‘idea of India’ before the British arrived. Of course, the construction is modern. That doesn’t mean it is fiction. Anderson finds no connection of cultural memory between the Maurya, Gupta and Mughal empires.

A significant detail refutes Anderson’s claim: Romila Thapar points out that one of the seven Ashokan pillars that carry the inscription of the seven “major edicts of his policy” has an inscription by Samudragupta, the Gupta king, boasting of his military campaigns, and on the same pillar there is an inscription of Jahangir from the third millennium tracing his genealogy: “three inscriptions in three different languages, over three millenniums”.

The Ashoka pillar stands as the symbol of a centrifugal force around which Indian history circulated. Photo: Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden/garystockbridge617.getarchive.net. Public domain.

It raises a poetic question: what led, or inspired, three kings at three vastly separated moments in historical time to inscribe their presence on the pillar? If we treat the pillar as an imaginary centre, then Ashoka, Samudragupta and Jahangir appear as figures on horseback whose concentric circles passed through that centre at a point in time. The Ashoka pillar stands as the symbol of a centrifugal force around which Indian history circulated.

If a history of our past can be woven around that centre, who is Anderson to object? In fact, the pillar is also a metaphor of the paradox of Indian history: it testifies continuity and rupture, culture and conquest.

For Anderson, “religious affiliation” and “uniformity” are missing between the Maurya, Gupta and Mughal regimes. If those are a European necessity to be called an ‘idea’, keep it for Europe. Indian history is a history of many religions and one of its key aspects is religious, ethnic and cultural variability.

When Anderson writes Europeans defined Indians as “natives of an unknown country”, questions arise that are not devoid of reason: Does Anderson mean Europeans discovered a country unknown to itself? Or does it mean a country not comprehensible to his English ancestors or Europeans in general? Is incomprehensibility, by rational standards, something devoid of meaning, or something that demands more attention?

This question leads me to Sanjay Seth’s essay, “Reason or Reasoning? Clio or Siva?” (2004), where he argues that instead of a singular idea of universal reason with a capital ‘R’, we need to pay attention to “traditions of reasoning”, particularly in how the Rest outside the West can also argue its history without having to cater to the conceptual demands of modern European traditions of thinking.

Reading Michel de Certeau, Sanjay Seth discovers the French scholar’s idea of history implies “the past of non-Western countries is not history’s past”. It does not occur to de Certeau that if the non-West can’t be fitted into a Western idea of history, the West and not the Rest needs to question and broaden its perception of history where the relationship between modernity and its past is not understood through binaries alone.

Nehru certainly sees the past more complicatedly. He writes in The Discovery: “National progress can, therefore, neither lie in a repetition of the past nor in its denial.” To deny the past is a psychological form of defence mechanism that does not want to confront the past. In order not to repeat the past, to overcome what is undesirable, one must acknowledge it as part of our unconscious.

In fact, in the letter to C.F Andrews quoted above, Tagore brings the past and the present in sharp contrast, colliding against each other, to sharply produce his idea of the political:

“India will be victorious when this idea wins the victory – the idea of ‘Purusham mahantam adityavarnam tamasah parastat” – “The Infinite Personality, whose Light reveals itself through the obstruction of Darkness.” Our fight is against this Darkness, Our object is the revealment of the Light of this Infinite Personality of Man… The darkness of egoism which will have to be destroyed is the egoism of the Nation. The idea of India is against the intense consciousness of the separateness of one’s own people from others, which inevitably leads to ceaseless conflicts.” [Emphasis mine]

Tagore’s translation of ‘Purusham’ rids the gendered nature of the word. The idea of India is imagined at the level of the individual as a flowering of personality that allows all forms of light to fall on itself. Darkness is imagined as a property of the mind that prevents light. Tagore concretises it by associating it with egoism, a psychological term that explains, among other things, human acts motivated by self-interest.

But the matter takes a radical turn when Tagore further identifies the psychological property of the mind’s darkness in “the egoism of the nation” which is, simply, nationalism. Tagore believes nationalism is dangerous because it divides “one’s own people” from others. But it isn’t just that.

For Tagore, nationalism is lucifugous: what shuns light, or is anti-light. Photo: Cherishsantosh/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Nationalism can create doubts, suspicions and claims against the idea of who “one’s own people” are. In other words, nationalism can turn one’s own people into other people. Tagore makes the radical political point that the ‘idea’ of India is not served by nationalism. He said it, mind you, in 1921, in the thick of the anticolonial struggle.

This was a radical departure from all European thinkers writing on the nation during that time. It is also a departure from Tagore’s own reading of Ernest Renan’s 1882 essay, ‘What is a Nation?’ that he discusses in a Bengal essay in 1901-1902 (mentioned by Partha Chatterjee, Lineages of Political Society, 2011).

For Tagore, nationalism is lucifugous: what shuns light, or is anti-light. It is not the black hole, but the hypothetical white hole of space that can imaginarily envelop the mind, and prevent light from entering.

Take the nationalist phrase, ‘unity in diversity’. Whether you privilege ‘unity’ or ‘diversity’ in the phrase, the mind obsessed with establishing unity without allowing diversity, or difference, to sink in is bound to use the force of egoism, or the egoism of force, to create a darkness of unity. Difference alone throws light on unity.

Despite the limitations in Khilnani’s evocation of the ‘idea’ of India, he however extends the point into the political realm when he writes:

“And yet the idea of India retains a remarkable tenacity… The old arguments and battles are replayed today with the current generation’s new meanings and desires: Ambedkar is once again ranged against Gandhi, Patel is brought into battle against Nehru. Even as they divide, these struggles themselves testify to the presence of a common history, a shared Indian past. The struggle for that past is of course a struggle to determine the future ideas of India… These struggles constitute the identity of India’s history since 1947. And, in its ability constantly to encompass diverse ideas of what India is, this history is itself expressive of the Indian idea.” [Emphasis mine]

What is the political in the ‘idea’ of India? To draw from the above statement, it is a battleground of ideas. No idea is safe from the battles of history. Hence, it is always prone to contestation.

As Romila Thapar puts it in her conversation with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (The Idea of India: A Dialogue, 2023), “One of the problems… in the notion of the idea of India, or the idea of any place for that matter, is of course that the idea changes – it’s not the same all the time.”

To keep any ‘idea’ alive however, to be able to think it without doing violence to its imaginative possibilities, ideological fixities need to be avoided. The political does not necessarily have to be ideological.

For instance, refutations by European thinkers and scholars of the cultural continuities in Indian history and the persistence of the ‘idea of India’ have been ideologically framed. Some of the challenges against those refutations have been political. Ideology seeks closure. The political, in the purest sense of radical, will pursue the question, allow thinking.

The idea of India, for that matter, will always exceed all that is said about it, or against it.

Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is the author of Nehru and the Spirit of India. He is working on a book on Gandhi.

Jean-Luc Godard and the Incoherence of Modern Life

In this tribute to the master of modern French cinema, Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee focuses on two films – ‘Breathless’ and ‘My Life to Live’ – to capture a defining preoccupation.

When the pandemic-lockdown descended like an invisible iron curtain on our lives in late March 2020, I took to three things simultaneously, in earnest: writing, cooking and cinema. I started by watching Jean-Luc Godard’s films: Breathless, My Life to Live, Masculin Féminin, A Married Woman, Weekend, and Alphaville. I wanted to end the embarrassment of not having watched Godard’s famous films earlier, after I got put off by the abstract style in his 2001 film, In Praise of Love.

In this tribute to the master of modern French cinema, I would focus on two of his films, Breathless and My Life to Live, to capture a defining preoccupation that I discovered in his films.

Breathless: Capturing dilemmas

In the 1960 classic, Breathless, where Godard announced himself in world cinema, the American actress, Jean Seberg, also makes her flamboyant and memorable debut as Patricia, an aspiring journalist who lives alone and sells the New York Herald Tribune in the streets of Paris. Her short-lived romance with the young criminal, Michel, who fashions himself like the Americana actor, Humphrey Bogart, is a metaphor of the times they lived in. The postwar uncertainties of de Gaulle’s France were evident in the economic sphere that reflected on people’s lives. There was nervous energy and excitement in the air. The lures of capitalism and the risky charms of individual life fed off each other. It was a time of craze and creativity, a time to realise the frisky sources of the self, and the fleeting music of love. Godard’s camera captures the dilemmas and dreams of those times through the two characters with infectious energy. There is a moment in the conversation between Patricia and Michel in her small apartment room, which is illuminating:

Patricia: “You know, you said I’m scared. It’s true, I am scared. Because I want you to love me. But at the same time I want you to stop loving me. I’m very independent you know.”
Michel (smoking): “I love you. But not that way you think.”
P: “How then?”
M: “Not the way you think.”
P: “But you don’t know what I think. You don’t know.”
M: “Yes, I do.”
P: “No, it’s impossible. I want to know what’s behind your face. I’ve looked at it for 10 minutes, and I still know nothing. I’m not sad, I’m scared.”
M: “Sweet, gentle, Patricia [Patricia brushes that description off] OK, then, cruel, stupid, heartless, pathetic…cowardly, despicable.”
P (smiles, lights up a cigarette): “Yes.”
M: “You don’t even know how to apply your lipstick. Now, you’re hideous.”
P: “Say what you like. I don’t care. I’ll put all this in my book.”
M: “What book?”
P: “I’m writing a novel.”
M: “You?”
P: “Why not me? … Have you heard of William Faulkner?”
M: “Who’s he? Someone you slept with?”

As Michel tries to undress Patricia, she quotes the last sentence from Faulkner’s The Wild Palms: “Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.”

The conversation is riddled with deception, as Patricia looks for meaning, but not Michel. Patricia rebuffs his claim to understand her mind. Modernity is obsessed with the mind. The mystery of character is sought to be uncovered by knowing the mind. The claim to know the mind is propelled by the desire to control. Patricia understands love as a terrifying condition because she knows it is impossible to control someone. She suggests that one must resist the temptation to love if one has to remain independent. Lack of certainty, or even momentary clarity, is a fundamental condition of modernity. Desire has to live by a radical uncertainty, and a possible lack of meaning. Love is dangerous because it seeks certainty and a semblance of clarity. It is a profound predicament that ails modern life.

Patricia’s sudden confession about her desire to be a writer, and the quote from Faulkner, changes the tone of the conversation. It introduces a mysterious quality to Patricia’s character. She lives two worlds. One is the world of her independent life and its reckless choices, where she befriends a man about whom she knows next to nothing. The other is her life of reading where she finds clues to herself. Faulkner knows her more than her lover.

There is a suggestion of depth in Patricia which is missing in Michel. But the conditions of life have thrown Patricia into the mercy of chance encounters where it is difficult to find what she may be looking for. She may not even know what she is looking for. The world of capitalist modernity is such that the absence of meaning is crowded with meanings. Between grief and nothing, between meaning and non-meaning, Patricia will choose the former. Grief here is not an existential fact of life, something that is inevitable. Grief is the only source that offers meaning to the world where everything disappears before you know it. Meaning takes time to appear, in other words, meaning is time.

A still from ‘Breathless’. Photo: Screengrab

Modernity, as the French poet of the 19th century, Charles Baudelaire told us in his 1863 essay, ‘On the Painter of Modern Life’, is “the transient, the fleeting”. It is a description of time and life, where speed is the norm. Modernity is the time of breathlessness. Time is out of breath, and so is meaning.

Breathless announces Godard’s desire to probe the nature and language of love in postwar Europe. It prefigures the sexual revolution of the late 60s. This probe is part of a cinematic preoccupation that is political and includes Godard’s lifelong engagement with the cultural ills of capitalism. The element of speed however is not merely a problem with capitalism alone. It is part of the scientific and technological innovations of modern life. Godard grapples with a new aesthetics to capture the speedy nature of the world. It makes him introduce the famous jump cut in cinema. Jump cuts are an artificial device to create an unsteady connection between space and time. The creation of jerky visuals disturbs the frame of vision which is disorienting. It comes close to the way surrealists imagined the nature of time through a play of the unconscious, and which corresponds to the uncanny nature of our subjective experience. If cinema is an art of disbelief (or, the suspension of belief) that paradoxically offers us a glimpse of reality, this paradox must reflect in the craft.

Vivre sa vie: Meaning what you say

Godard’s 1962 film, Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live, or It’s My Life), has had a lasting impact on my mind for a number of reasons. The actress, Anna Karina’s performance in the film is breathtaking, a word that loses its depth in commercial cinema. She plays Nana, a woman forced by circumstances to choose the life of a sex worker after leaving a marriage in the hope of becoming an actress.

Nana’s assertion of her independence and individuality does not get jeopardised by accident. The gateways to freedom that modernity promises are ridden with dangers that are structural in nature. There is a nexus between social, or civil, morality and the law that creates circumstances where Nana finds herself selling her body for money. Godard’s matter-of-factly voice in the background (like reading from a newspaper report) informs us about the legal issues and aesthetic grid pertaining to a sex worker’s job. There are laws in sex work that are not just legal but gestural. The sex worker is expected to obey the rules without her individuality coming in the way of her professional identity. The body becomes a conduit through which money changes hands in a brutally instrumental economy of exchange.

Nana’s predicament is way more constricting than Patricia’s. She is trapped in a world due to her economic condition that conditions her choices. In an unforgettable scene, Nana breaks into a dance with bewitching abandon around a billiard table, trying to catch a man’s attention, while her pimp, Raoul, sitting in the background is secretly selling her off to another pimp.

Later, in a memorable conversation with a philosopher in a café, Nana tells him,

“I know what I want to say. I think first about whether they’re the right words. But when the moment comes to speak, I can’t say it.”

In response, the philosopher narrates a story by the French writer, Alexandre Dumas, where a man, Porthos, faces a moment of indecision while planting a bomb and is crushed to death. Nana shows her irritation at being told such an agonising story. Then she tells the philosopher,

“Why must one always talk? I think one should often just keep quiet, live in silence. The more one talks, the less the words mean.” She says further, “Words should express just what one wants to say. Do they betray us? … Why do we have to… understand each other?” The philosopher argues that it takes time (in abstinence) to learn to speak well. He says,

“So to live speaking, one must pass through the death of life without speaking.”

Nana asks, “What do you think about love?” As the philosopher tries to explain through Leibniz and German philosophy, Nana interrupts him, “Shouldn’t love be the only truth?”

Nana is lost in an incomprehensible world of meanings. She is no longer sure of what words mean if they don’t mean what they are supposed to, in other words, if they don’t mean the truth. The gap between language and truth bothers and bewilders her. What is missing for her in this false transaction between words and truth, is love. Nana suspects it is the absence of love that divorces language from truth. Nana’s quest for truth is not some philosophical, abstract truth that the philosopher seems to explain to her, but rather, truthfulness, the act of meaning what you say. Godard is intrigued by the nature of language in modernity. He is keen on how people speak, and wants to probe the nature of speech. Cinema is about speech, not writing. Nana understands the philosopher more than he understands her because she lives the everyday, structural deceptions of speech. The philosopher is caught in abstractions. But life, Godard seems to tell us, is the best yardstick to measure language (and ideas).

A still from Vivre sa vie. Photo: Screengrab

In a hotel room sometime later, Nana spends time with a young man who reads her out from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Oval Portrait. She falls in love with him, and wants to quit her profession. It is perhaps not so much the exact nature of the text he reads out to her that arouses her emotions, but the fact that he found her worthy of reading out from the book. He shares his ideal world with her that came from reading and literature. It is this gesture that establishes a sense of romance in her heart. The haunting background score of the film by Michel Legrand brilliantly accompanies the intensely quiet grief that chases Nana throughout the story.

In both these films, Godard paints memorable women characters who brave the odds to uphold what they hold precious: their vulnerability. In a world where time and language are in a hurry and meaning is difficult to decipher from the anarchy of modern experience, Patricia and Nana make difficult choices and live up to them. There are no guarantees in life except living it. Godard’s films, with their technical innovations and aesthetic idiosyncrasies, are a testament to our difficult lives.

Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is the author of Nehru and the Spirit of India (Penguin Viking, 2022), The Town Slowly Empties: On Life and Culture during Lockdown(Copper Coin, 2021), and Looking for the Nation: Towards Another Idea of India (Speaking Tiger, 2018).

Faith or Reason: Are the Judicial Victories of Hindutva Accidental?

The double standards employed by Hindutva organisations is not new to Indian politics. But what is newer and more disturbing is the internalisation of this double standard by the higher judiciary.

Even though Hindutva organisations in India no longer need any institutional or constitutional endorsement of their actions or claims over history and the future, they use a combination of scientific rationality and majoritarianism to subdue and subjugate contesting claims.

They use scientific rationality to paint some of the customs and traditions of Muslims – like triple talaq and the practice of wearing hijab – as barbaric or backward. They also employ arguments of modernity and democracy, gender justice and liberating women from the clutches of the clergy and a conservative community.

They unhesitatingly make use of figures like B.R. Ambedkar, modern science and even the constitution to further their arguments – showing no sense of ambiguity. The counter questions on why the same principles are not applied to Hindu practices are either evaded or deemed to be ‘partisan’.

To protect Hindu or Brahmanical practises that are considered patriarchal, conservative, casteist or discriminatory from the gaze of secular law and other modern values, Hindutva groups advance the argument of faith over reason. Or they take shelter in the interpretation of the constitutional safeguard of innate religious freedom against external intervention, including the state and constitutional values.

The double standard of the Hindutva organisations is not new to Indian politics. They have been there since independence and have gained currency over the years. But what is newer and more disturbing is the internalisation of this double standard by the higher judiciary – especially over the past decade.

Take, for example, the recent judgment by the three-judge bench of the Karnataka high court banning the hijab in classrooms. The fundamental legal premises under which the bench pursued its reasoning was twofold.

One, wearing a hijab is not an essential religious practice of Islam and the right to conscience is not established by the averments made by the petitioners.

The second line of reasoning was a blatant endorsement of prejudices about the practice of wearing a hijab – that it constrains freedom and that the state is furthering the cause of secularism by imposing a uniform dress code in educational institutions. So much so that the court privileged the promotion of uniformity in these institutions over the continuation of education itself.

While the court showed its reluctance to apply the same principle to the turban, kumkum and other markers of different religions, it refused to consider the parallel in a judgment of a South African court which allowed the sporting of a nose stud along with the prescribed uniform. The strange logic offered by the court not to consider the example was that the nose stud was ocularly insignificant compared to the hijab.

Thus in the hijab case, the court accepted and improved on the principles of secularism and uniformity as advanced by the BJP government and the Hindutva forces – which in essence denied Muslim girls the right to wear hijab either as an essential practice of Islam or as the right to conscience of the individual.

A hijab-wearing student walks past a worker painting a wall to conceal a pro-hijab slogan written on the wall, outside a college, in Hospet, March 16, 2022. Photo: PTI

Consider the irony in the Sabarimala case. When the top court used principles like secularism, gender justice and modernity to rule that the temple’s practice of denying entry to menstruating women was discriminatory, the Hindutva organisations defied the judgment and called for open rebellion by devotees. Subsequently, the Supreme Court readily agreed to reconsider its judgment and constituted a seven-judge bench to look into the judicial boundaries in defining essential religious practices and other matters related to religion.

Let us also compare how the higher judiciary considered the case for the right to conscience in the hijab case and the Ayodhya title case.

In the hijab case, the three-judge bench of the Karnataka HC declared:

“…Conscience is by its very nature subjective. Whether the petitioners had the conscience of the kind and how they developed it are not averred in the petition with material particulars. Merely stating that wearing hijab is an overt act of conscience and therefore, asking them to remove hijab would offend conscience, would not be sufficient for treating it as a ground for granting relief… No material is placed before us for evaluation and determination of pleaded conscience of the petitioners. They have not averred anything as to how they associate wearing hijab with their conscience, as an overt act. There is no evidence that the petitioners chose to wear their headscarf as a means of conveying any thought or belief on their part or as a means of symbolic expression.

Pleadings at least for urging the ground of conscience are perfunctory, to say the least.”

Thus, in the case of the hijab, the Muslim girls’ averments were not enough to uphold their right to conscience. The principle followed was that the petitioners should satisfy judges’ “evaluation and determination”. The judge is not the believer. But the court.

Also Read: Hijab Ban: The Marriage of Convenience Between Zealotry and Judicial Illogic

On the other hand, in the Ayodhya judgement, the five-judge bench of the Supreme Court suggested:

“…Matters of faith and belief lie in the personal realm of the believer. That which sustains solace to the soul is inscrutable. Whether a belief is justified lies beyond ken of judicial inquiry. This is not a case where the witness statements indicate that the belief or faith is a veneer or that it is being put- forth merely as a strategy in a litigation. Once the witnesses have deposed to the basis of the belief and there is nothing to doubt its genuineness, it is not open to the court to question the basis of the belief. Scriptural interpretations are susceptible to a multitude of inferences. The court would do well not to step into the pulpit by adjudging which, if any, of competing interpretations should be accepted. Faith is a matter for the individual believer.” [Emphasis supplied]

Here, the court is so liberal that it imposes boundaries and prohibits itself from transgressing into the domain of individual faith! Further, unlike in the hijab case, it does not demand any additional evidence to “evaluate and determine” the conscience or faith of the believer. It says:

“… Once the court has intrinsic material to accept that the faith or the belief is genuine and not a pretence, it must defer to the belief of the worshipper. This, we must do well to recognise, applies across the spectrum of religions and their texts, Hinduism and Islam being among them. The value of a secular constitution lies in a tradition of equal deference.”

How is it that in the Ayodhya case, where the petitioner is a Hindu devotee, the court only examines the genuineness of the faith and defers to the belief of the worshipper, whereas in the hijab case, the same principle is not extended?

How is it that in the Ayodhya case, even after considering ample archaeological evidence and proof which suggested otherwise, the court upheld the claims of the Hindus by privileging faith over reason, whereas in the hijab case, faith was dismissed as backward, non-secular and against the progress of the country?

A lawyer reacts as he displays a religious flag during celebrations after Supreme Court’s verdict on the Ayodhya land dispute, outside the court in New Delhi on November 9, 2019. Photo: Reuters/Adnan Abidi

How is it that the verdicts in both cases advanced the agenda of the Hindu right and denied the constitutional rights of minorities? This does not seem to be an aberration.

The privileging of faith over reason in the Ayodhya judgment by the SC has helped the Hindutva forces make new claims by openly subverting the spirit of the Places of Worship Act in many states.

In a separate case, a single-judge bench of the Karnataka high court applied the same principles in upholding the claims of a Hindu organisation to observe Hindu rituals in the Bababudan Swamy Dargah on the basis of the “genuineness of the faith” of petitioners. Thus, the judgment declared:

“… Article 25 of the Constitution guarantees Freedom of Conscience and free profession, practice and propagation of religion. By the impugned order, firstly, the State have infringed upon the right of Hindu Community to have the pooja and archana done in the manner as per their faith..”

Not only this, the judgment quoted a full paragraph of the Ayodhya judgment in justifying the Hindu claims, which was not backed by any evidence. Thus it said:

“..The Constitution Bench of the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India, in M.Siddique Vs. Mahanth Suresh Das, the Ram Janma Bhumi Temple case has held that faith is a matter for the individual believer. Once the Court has intrinsic material to accept that the faith or belief is genuine, it must defer to the belief of the worshipper.”

After the SCs decision to admit a number of petitions challenging the very Places Of Worship Act and its dilution in the Gyanvapi mosque case – where the SC declared that the law does not prohibit ascertaining the religious nature of the disputed shrines, the Hindutva forces are celebrating these developments as judicial endorsement of their agenda.

Thus, even though, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat promises that his organisation will not participate in any temple movements, he has reiterated, “Muslim invaders destroyed thousands of temples and constructed mosques over it.”

RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat. Photo: PTI/Atul Yadav

Taking a cue from that statement, senior BJP leader and ex-Karnataka minister K.S. Eshwarappa has declared that there are more than 36,000 mosques in the country built over temples. And that the Muslims of today should not take the side of the invaders of the 15th century and hand over all of them to Hindus and only then peace and harmony would prevail.

Even as the hijab hearings were going on in the courts, the interim order which banned the hijab and saffron shawls – but not other religious markers like kumkum – in classrooms was blatantly misused by the government and private institutions by misinterpreting the order as universal and applicable to even teaching staff.

When this was brought to the notice of the court, the judges were reluctant to even hear the plea or specify their order and seemed satisfied by the oral promise made by the advocate general representing the government. Now, when the hijab ban is justified as an act of upholding secularism, even universities in Karnataka – which did not have any dress code hitherto – have started to ban the hijab on campus. Just a few days ago, girls wearing the hijab were denied entry to Mangalore University.

The double standards have also become evident in the bail hearings of Umar Khalid. While the court resorted to surgical anatomy of the word “jumla” and “Inquilab Zindabad” used by Khalid to find if there was a hidden anti-national agenda, it said slogans like “Goli Maro..” – used by prominent BJP leaders – cannot be considered hate speech if they were uttered with a “smiling face”.

Thus, whether it is a case of faith or a claim based on “evidence”, the Hindutva narrative emerges victorious. It is neither accidental nor coincidental. It is part of the structural changes that the Indian state is undergoing. The culpability of the liberal judiciary in the rise of fascism is documented in contemporary history. But when history repeats, it’s not only tragic but also a testament to the collective failure to learn from history.

Shivasundar is a senior columnist and activist in Karnataka.

Rethinking Education in the Age of the Coronavirus

Our ‘modern’ universities have burdened us with the packages of specialised knowledge. Yet, we are almost incapable of engaging with the inherent uncertainty of existence.

It is unfortunate that even as educationists and teachers, we refuse to learn any meaningful lesson from the crisis confronting the entire humankind. As the coronavirus pandemic shatters the modernist notion of ‘order’, we ought to contemplate and reexamine what we have taken for granted till now—our ‘academic’ and ‘technical’ skills, or our pride in the ‘intelligence’ that universities cultivate.

However, what is ironic is that even at this puzzling moment, we fail to see beyond techno-managerial solutions; seldom do we go beyond what is popularly known as ‘online’ learning. The assumption is that the lockdown period should not be wasted; and students and teachers must keep their ‘normal’ activities alive, complete the ‘syllabus’ through ‘online’ learning, and get their degrees in due time. Hence, nothing, it is thought, is more important than reading the same texts, completing the same kind of assignments, and listening to the same monologue of the teachers. Use technology, work from home, and continue the ‘academic production’!

I see its absurdity. I feel this is the time for an honest and a rigorous self- reflection; this is the time to understand the deeper layers of our consciousness; and this is the time to examine where we have gone wrong. Yes, this is the time to rethink education. It doesn’t matter even if we do not complete the official syllabus; it makes no difference even if, for instance, sociology students do not write yet another standardised term paper on Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, or philosophy students miss a couple of routinised lectures on Spinoza and Descartes. What, I feel, is really important is to unlearn the old baggage of knowledge, and derive a meaning of existence in the period of existential and ontological uncertainty.

From arrogant conquerors to humble wanderers

I know modernity has given us many things. It has activated our physical and vital energy; it has sharpened the power of the intellect; and it has given us ‘comforts’. Yet, modernity with its triumphant agenda has destroyed the possibility of an organic relationship between the human species and the universe. Instead, its Baconian science has asked us to manipulate and conquer nature; its Cartesian dualism has separated reason from emotion; technocrats and economists have made us believe that we can go on with the gospel of unlimited growth, and reckless exploitation of natural resources; and the spectacular success in bio-medicine makes us think that it is not far away when we can even conquer death.

Also read: Teaching in the Time of Isolation

In a way, we have become arrogant conquerors. The self-perception of being ‘modern’ is to be a conqueror filled with the power of instrumental reason and techno-science, and capable of keeping everything under his or her commands.

But then, the coronavirus has shattered this confidence. No, we are not the masters of the world. And not everything can be fitted into our notion of mathematical precision and engineered order. Not everything can be predicted—the way we predict whether it will rain this afternoon in South Delhi. In other words, the coronavirus has brought us to the domain of uncertainty and perplexity. And herein lies the importance of what the enthusiastic champions of modernity wanted us to forget: the inherent mystery of existence. To acknowledge this mystery is to redefine ourselves. This is to transform us from arrogant conquerors to humble wanderers.

It is in this context that we have to rethink education. Our ‘modern’ universities have burdened us with the packages of specialised knowledge; we have learned to acquire all sorts of ‘technical skills’; we have cultivated the prosaic intellect. Yet, we are almost incapable of engaging with the inherent uncertainty of existence—or, say the possibility of death knocking our doors at this very moment. Hence, when a crisis of this kind confronts us, we are terribly shaken, we fail to see beyond masks and sanitisers, and yesterday’s conquerors become today’s fearful mortals.

A view of deserted BMC headquarters due to the coronavirus pandemic during a nationwide lockdown, at CSMT in Mumbai, Saturday, March 28, 2020. Photo: PTI/Kunal Patil

And hence at this crucial juncture, as educationists we must ask ourselves whether we should redefine education as a new quest of a wanderer. Should education give us the psychic, spiritual or aesthetic strength to understand our location in this vast universe, cherish a sense of gratitude and humility, and live gracefully even amidst the fragile character of the phenomenal world—the way a tiny blue flower blooms for a couple of days, and then withers away with absolute grace?

And if we do not ask this question, and continue to do what we have been doing for years—say, working in our science labs and publishing papers in journals with high ‘impact factor’, or like a parrot quoting from Derrida and Lacan, or fetching an M.Tech or MBA from ‘top ranking’ universities, we would prove to be utterly callous and insensitive.

From ‘social distancing’ to engaged responsibility

Think of it. The term ‘social distancing’ can emerge only from the kind of society we moderns have created. Yes, we are used to the pathos of the lonely crowd; anonymity or heartless indifference characterises our urban spaces; new gadgets further take us to our solitary cells, even though we might have thousands of ‘followers’ and ‘subscribers’; and above all, the normalisation of surveillance in our times has erected huge walls of separation and exclusion. Furthermore, the prevalent practice of education has already transformed us into reckless competitors or warriors. We have almost lost the ecstasy of the communion. Is it the reason that even at this moment of crisis we can only think of ‘distancing’?

Also read: We Will Survive the Coronavirus. We Need to Make Sure We Survive Ourselves.

I admit that there is a danger of community transmission, and the spread of the coronavirus can be combated reasonably through physical distancing. However, physical distancing is not social distancing. In fact, through a new mode of education, we can generate an ethos of socially enriched engaged responsibility and ethics of care, despite the temporality of physical distance.

This is like realizing that while obsessive fear makes us selfish and insulated, it is love that heals the wound. To love is to connect. And hence, all these meaningful gestures—say, talking to a friend who lives alone in the distant suburb over the telephone, or not hoarding extra grocery material for one’s own family, or, for that matter, persuading the neighbours in the gated community not to be solely preoccupied with the new apps for the undisturbed supply of fish and meat in their 1500 sq.ft apartments, or with their own ‘safety’ (which, anyway, is a myth – in a ‘risk society’ there is no winner, and even Prince Charles can get it) and start a fundraising drive for migrant workers suffering severely because of the lockdown – would matter a great deal.

This is the time for realising the need for sharing and togetherness, and love and therapeutic healing. However, if we do not change ourselves, and, instead, continue to cherish the mantra of ‘distancing’, we would eventually find ourselves in a world where the victims would be more and more stigmatised, a new form of untouchability would emerge (it has already begun as we see the way the doctors dealing with the coronavirus victims have been asked to vacate their houses), and in the name of ‘safety’ the authoritarian state would further dehumanise us through the chains of surveillance. We would enter a frightening dystopian age.

Hence, as educationists and teachers, we are required to make a choice. Should we continue with the kind of education that only makes us ‘logical’, yet ethically and spiritually impoverished self-centric careerists? Or should we learn some deep lessons from the present crisis, and redefine education to undertake a new journey: from the narcissism of modernity to the poetry of connectedness with the rhythm of life and death; from certainty to mystery; or from weapons of destruction to prayers of redemption.

Avijit Pathak is a professor of Sociology at JNU.

Why Victorians Feared Modern Technology Would Make Everyone Blind

In the 1800s, the rise of mass print was both blamed for an increase in eye problems and was responsible for dramatising the fallibility of vision too.

From concerns over blue light to digital strain and dryness, headlines today often worry how smartphones and computer screens might be affecting the health of our eyes. But while the technology may be new, this concern certainly isn’t. Since Victorian times people have been concerned about how new innovations might damage eyesight.

In the 1800s, the rise of mass print was both blamed for an increase in eye problems and was responsible for dramatising the fallibility of vision too. As the amount of known eye problems increased, the Victorians predicted that without appropriate care and attention Britain’s population would become blind. In 1884, an article in The Morning Post newspaper proposed that:

The culture of the eyes and efforts to improve the faculty of seeing must become matters of attentive consideration and practice, unless the deterioration is to continue and future generations are to grope about the world purblind.

The 19th century was the time when ophthalmology became a more prominent field of healthcare. New diagnostic technologies, such as test charts were introduced and spectacles became a more viable treatment method for a range of vision errors. But though more sight problems were being treated effectively, this very increase created alarm, and a subsequent perceived need to curtail any growth.

In 1889, the Illustrated London News questioned:

To what are we coming? … Now we are informed by men of science that the eyes used so effectively by our forefathers will not suffice for us, and that there is a prospect of England becoming purblind.

The article continued, considering potential causes for this acceleration, and concluded that it could be partly explained by evolution and inheritance.

The 19th century was the time when ophthalmology became a more prominent field of healthcare. Credit: Pixabay

Urban myopia

Other commentators looked to “modern life” for an explanation, and attributed the so-called “deterioration of vision” to the built environment, the rise of print, compulsory education, and a range of new innovations such as steam power. In 1892, an article, published in The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review, reflected that the changing space of Victorian towns and lighting conditions were an “inestimable benefit” that needed to be set against a “decidedly lower sight average”. Similarly, a number of other newspapers reported on this phenomenon, headlining it as “urban myopia”.

Also Read: The Victorians Had the Same Concerns About Technology as We Do

In 1898, a feature published in The Scottish Review – ironically entitled “The Vaunts of Modern Progress” – proposed that defective eyesight was “exclusively the consequence of the present conditions of civilised life”. It highlighted that many advances being discussed in the context of “progress” – including material prosperity, expansion of industry and the rise of commerce – had a detrimental effect on the body’s nervous system and visual health.

Another concern of the time – sedentariness – was also linked to the rise in eye problems. Better transport links and new leisure activities that required the person to be seated meant people had more time to read. Work changed as well, with lower-class jobs moving away from manual labour and the written word thought to have superseded the spoken one. While we now focus on “screen time”, newspapers and periodicals emphasised the negative effects of a “reading age” (the spread of the book and popular print).

Education to blame

In a similar manner to today, schools were blamed for the problem too. Reading materials, lighting conditions, desk space, and the advent of compulsory education were all linked to the rise in diagnosed conditions.

English ophthalmologist Robert Brudenell Carter, in his government-led study, Eyesight in Schools, reached the balanced conclusion that while schooling conditions may be a problem, more statistics were required to fully assess the situation. Though Carter did not wish to “play the part of an alarmist”, a number of periodicals dramatised their coverage with phrases such as “The Evils of Our School System”.

The problem with all of these new environmental conditions was that they were considered “artificial”. To emphasise this point, medical men frequently compared their findings of poor eye health against the superior vision of “savages” and the effect of captivity on the vision of animals.

While we now focus on “screen time”, newspapers and periodicals emphasised the negative effects of a “reading age”. Credit: Pixabay

This, in turn, gave a more negative interpretation of the relationship between civilisation and “progress”, and conclusions were used to support the idea that deteriorating vision was an accompaniment of the urban environment and modern leisure pursuits – specific characteristics of the Western world.

Also Read: Alice in the Asylum: Wonderland and the Real Mad Tea Parties of the Victorians

And yet the Victorians were undeterred and continued with the very modern progress that they blamed for eyesight problems. Instead, new protective eyewear was developed that sought to protect the eye from dust and flying particles, as well as from the bright lights at seaside resorts, and artificial lighting in the home.

Despite their fears, the country did not become “purblind”. Neither is Britain now an “island full of round-backed, blear-eyed bookworms” as predicted. While stories reported today tend to rely on more rigorous research when it comes to screen time and eye health, it just goes to show that “modernity” has long been a cause for concern.

Gemma Almond is a PhD Researcher at the Swansea University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Tagore’s Critique of the Modern Condition

Tagore believed that modernity ought to be embraced in a manner that “minimise[s] the immense sacrifice of man’s life and freedom that it claims in its every movement.”

In Rabindranath Tagore’s dance drama Tasher Desh (translated into English as The Land of Cards), the subjects of the House of Cards follow seemingly absurd rules because “[i]t’s the law.” Laughter, among other things, is forbidden on this land. The Card Race have learnt to “go by the book”, “follow the beaten track”, be “[e]ver-docile”, and simply “follow the leader.” It takes two foreigners in the form of a prince and a merchant to bring about the winds of change in the land of cards that ultimately lead to the breakdown of the political order and free the Card Race from the fetters of tyranny. This work of Tagore’s, written in the year Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, was dedicated to Subhas Chandra Bose, the Indian nationalist who would later ally with German fascists in his failed attempt to free India from British rule.

Perhaps more than anybody else, Tagore understood and acknowledged the significance of the foreigner in his home country. It was his belief that the single “most significant fact” of his day was that “the West ha[d] met the East.” A meeting of the West and the East, as Tagore would have it, implied a spiritual union between men who had come together on an equal footing. For Tagore, had India not come into contact with Europe, “She would have lacked an element essential for her attainment of perfection.” What disturbed him, however, was that the West had come to India not with its “humanity” but its “machine.”

Herein lies his critique of the modern condition. The ‘machine’ that Tagore refers to is the nation-state model (and its accompanying paraphernalia) imposed on India by the coloniser. As noted by, for instance, Sudipta Kaviraj, modernity imposed by way of colonialism cannot and does not fulfil its historical purpose of liberating humankind.

Tagore as well as other greats of the Bengal Renaissance like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Swami Vivekananda, Jagadish Chandra Bose, among others, were products of colonial modernity. All these men negotiated with this modern condition on their own terms in their own very different ways, and it is not my intention to categorise them together without being mindful of the differences in their approaches. There were, quite naturally, some parallels, too, in how they made sense of this modernity as it unfolded in Bengal.

Kaviraj, for example, points out that both Bankim Chandra and Rabindranath in their writings tried to convey that “modern and English speaking were not necessary equivalents.” Tagore, in fact, made a distinction between ‘modern’ and ‘European.’ He articulated to his Japanese audience thus:

Modernism is not in the dress of the Europeans, or in the hideous structures where their children are interned when they take their lessons…. These are not modern, but merely European. True modernism is freedom of mind, not slavery of taste. It is independence of thought and action, not tutelage under European schoolmasters.

Tagore believed that modernity ought to be embraced in a manner that “minimise[s] the immense sacrifice of man’s life and freedom that it claims in its every movement.” He was attentive to the toll that the supposed by-product of modernity called nationalism was claiming, lecturing as he was in the midst of the Great War. Again, Tagore’s disapproval of this one aspect of Western modernity, namely nationalism, does not lead him to reject its other aspects that comprised “[a]bove all things” the “banner of liberty” – “liberty of conscience, liberty of thought and action, liberty in the ideals of art and literature”, which is curiously why, for him, the way for Europe to redeem itself is through European ideals itself (such as liberty) after Europe has been judged “before her own tribunal and put…to shame.”

For, Tagore, materialism can never be the basis for any enduring union of peoples. Credit: Cherishsantosh/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

It is all too well known that Europe historically has had a proclivity for monochromatism. This was dreadfully witnessed in the many projects of nation- and state-building undertaken as part of a modernising Europe which attempted to homogenise populations within respective sovereign boundaries. This was done with the objective of stamping out any potential attempt at sectarian (or other) opposition in future. Thus, in post-revolutionary France, Napoléon considered it his foremost duty to create nationalist Frenchmen. This was echoed by Massimo d’Azeglio who, following the Italian Risorgimento, famously remarked, “We have made Italy; now we must make Italians.” Tagore was attentive to this when he wrote: “When differences are too jarring, man cannot accept them as final; so, either he wipes them out with blood, or coerces them in some kind of superficial homogeneity, or he finds out a deeper unity which he knows is the highest truth.” That ‘truth’ (another Tagorean motif) was what had led India to choose the last alternative in its attempt to address its “immense mass of heterogeneity” by “successive…expansion and contraction of her ideals.”

Tagore believed that, unlike India, Europe had fewer differences to begin with. Here, he was thinking not just in racial terms but also with regard to “their ideals of life” where “western peoples are so near each other that practically they are acting as one in building up their civilisation.” Ultimately, for him, “civilisations are mixed products. Only barbarism is simple, monadic and unalloyed.”

Tagore’s critique of modernity also includes a critique of scientism and the perils of placing too much faith in science. He was well aware of how the “pursuit of science” had been closely tied to the evolution of political liberty in Europe. Science had liberated Europeans from “nameless fears” and informed them to value its laws over arbitrary ones set by despotic rulers and to desist from an excessive dependence on providence. Modern science had greatly benefited the human race and allayed its “sufferings”, but it was also being used instrumentally for enhancing “selfish power” which had ended up making “war and preparation for war the normal condition of all nations.” An overemphasis on science that ignored nature and its laws had only served to “violently [divert] Europe’s attention to gaining things in place of inner perfection.”

Marshall Berman has written about the tendency of modernity to crush not just what is seemingly “traditional” and “pre-modern” but that which is modern itself. In All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, he talks about the figure of Robert Moses – architect and planner of modern New York City – who affected the lives of so many New Yorkers, especially the most vulnerable who were already experiencing life on the margins of the metropolis, through his construction of “bridges, tunnels, expressways, housing developments, power dams, stadia, cultural centres.” Berman grew up in the Bronx and he recollects Moses’ plans for the Cross-Bronx Expressway, a structure whose construction demanded that entire neighbourhoods be rammed through. The project went ahead without a care for the occupants of the affected neighbourhoods, for the modern narrative held that to oppose such acts was equivalent “to oppose history, progress, modernity itself.” Some of the buildings in the neighbouring Grand Concourse boulevard which, for Berman’s family, “represented a pinnacle of modernity” fell victim to Moses’ expressway.

For Tagore, cities everywhere from “San Francisco to London, from London to Tokyo” seemed to convey a routine physiognomy. His favourable disposition towards rural Bengal and lack of affection for Calcutta – an “upstart town” with pitiable “manners” – is well known; he once recoiled with horror upon noticing factories erected on either side of the Ganges. For all his critique of urbanism, Tagore was quite clear what the role of cities ought to be which, for him, was to “enrich the entire society.” ‘Greed’ on the part of modern towns and cities was anti-democratic. Tagore sadly reminisced about “sky-scrapers frown[ing]” on him during one of his stays in “the giant’s Castle of Wealth…America.” Following his experience, one can almost imagine the following words of his as being addressed to Robert Moses:

[It should be] realise[d] that the mere process of addition [does] not create fulfilment; that mere size of acquisition [does] not produce happiness; that greater velocity of movement [does] not necessarily constitute progress and that change [can] only have meaning in relation, to some clear ideal of completeness.

In his lectures on nationalism, Tagore critiques, among other things, rampant commercialism which follows the spread of modern capital. Another related aspect of Tagore’s understanding of modernity is that he is, most crucially, critical towards a utilitarian treatment of humankind and human relations. The modern project promotes the utilisation of man as material. When socialist Russia valorised the ‘Stakhanovite’ or capitalist America romanticised the ‘working class hero’, they were but only overindulging in this very embedded feature of modernity. Tagore believed that humans could only be perfectly revealed spiritually and not materially. This is why he blamed the unhappiness that the modern age had left in its wake not so much on material poverty but a loss of people’s humanity. In other words, an estrangement of humans from their spiritual bonds – which, for Tagore, was the only real universal – had caused humankind’s depressing state of existence in the last century. Just as science had released man from the shackles of ignorance and absolutism, so too had commerce served as a powerful thrust for his progress but it had to be kept in mind that the domain of both science and commerce was the ‘material world.’

Peace, according to Tagore, could only come about once men realised their ‘spiritual unity’ with other men. It was futile for a warring Europe to build peace on a foundation of science and trade. Tagore, therefore, can be read as a critic of functionalism (particularly when it overplays the role of commerce) which, as David Mitrany states, “emphasises the common index of need.” Functionalists expect inter-state cooperation in the fulfilment of such needs (whether of a material or technical nature) to lead to stronger ties among states. For, Tagore, though, materialism can never be the basis for any enduring union of peoples.

Arko Dasgupta is with the Centre for Political Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

What Did Max Weber Mean by the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism?

In reality, the true ‘spirit’ of capitalism moves beyond making more and more money out of greed, and encapsulates a holistic understanding of Western ideas and priorities.

Max Weber’s famous text The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) is surely one of the most misunderstood of all the canonical works regularly taught, mangled and revered in universities across the globe. This is not to say that teachers and students are stupid, but that this is an exceptionally compact text that ranges across a very broad subject area, written by an out-and-out intellectual at the top of his game. He would have been dumbfounded to find that it was being used as an elementary introduction to sociology for undergraduate students, or even school children.

We use the word ‘capitalism’ today as if its meaning were self-evident, or else as if it came from Marx, but this casualness must be set aside. ‘Capitalism’ was Weber’s own word and he defined it as he saw fit. Its most general meaning was quite simply modernity itself: capitalism was ‘the most fateful power in our modern life’. More specifically, it controlled and generated ‘modern Kultur’, the code of values by which people lived in the 20th-century West, and now live, we may add, in much of the 21st-century globe. So the ‘spirit’ of capitalism is also an ‘ethic’, though no doubt the title would have sounded a bit flat if it had been called The Protestant Ethic and the Ethic of Capitalism.

Max Webber (1864-1920) was a German sociologist known for his work on protestantism and capitalism. Credit: Wikipedia

This modern ‘ethic’ or code of values was unlike any other that had gone before. Weber supposed that all previous ethics – that is, socially accepted codes of behaviour rather than the more abstract propositions made by theologians and philosophers – were religious. Religions supplied clear messages about how to behave in society in straightforward human terms, messages that were taken to be moral absolutes binding on all people. In the West, this meant Christianity, and its most important social and ethical prescription came out of the Bible: ‘Love thy neighbour.’ Weber was not against love, but his idea of love was a private one – a realm of intimacy and sexuality. As a guide to social behaviour in public places ‘love thy neighbour’ was obviously nonsense, and this was a principal reason why the claims of churches to speak to modern society in authentically religious terms were marginal. He would not have been surprised at the long innings enjoyed by the slogan ‘God is love’ in the 20th-century West – its career was already launched in his own day – nor that its social consequences should have been so limited.

The ethic or code that dominated public life in the modern world was very different. Above all it was impersonal rather than personal: by Weber’s day, agreement on what was right and wrong for the individual was breaking down. The truths of religion – the basis of ethics – were now contested, and other time-honoured norms – such as those pertaining to sexuality, marriage and beauty – were also breaking down. (Here is a blast from the past: who today would think to uphold a binding idea of beauty?) Values were increasingly the property of the individual, not society.

So instead of humanly warm contact, based on a shared, intuitively obvious understanding of right and wrong, public behaviour was cool, reserved, hard and sober, governed by strict personal self-control. Correct behaviour lay in the observance of correct procedures. Most obviously, it obeyed the letter of the law (for who could say what its spirit was?) and it was rational. It was logical, consistent, and coherent; or else it obeyed unquestioned modern realities such as the power of numbers, market forces and technology.

There was another kind of disintegration besides that of traditional ethics. The proliferation of knowledge and reflection on knowledge had made it impossible for any one person to know and survey it all. In a world which could not be grasped as a whole, and where there were no universally shared values, most people clung to the particular niche to which they were most committed: their job or profession. They treated their work as a post-religious calling, ‘an absolute end in itself’, and if the modern ‘ethic’ or ‘spirit’ had an ultimate foundation, this was it.

One of the most widespread clichés about Weber’s thought is to say that he preached a work ethic. This is a mistake. He personally saw no particular virtue in sweat – he thought his best ideas came to him when relaxing on a sofa with a cigar – and had he known he would be misunderstood in this way, he would have pointed out that a capacity for hard work was something that did not distinguish the modern West from previous societies and their value systems. However, the idea that people were being ever more defined by the blinkered focus of their employment was one he regarded as profoundly modern and characteristic.

The blinkered professional ethic was common to entrepreneurs and an increasingly high-wage, skilled labour force, and it was this combination that produced a situation where the ‘highest good’ was the making of money and ever more money, without any limit. This is what is most readily recognisable as the ‘spirit’ of capitalism, but it should be stressed that it was not a simple ethic of greed which, as Weber recognised, was age-old and eternal. In fact there are two sets of ideas here, though they overlap. There is one about potentially universal rational procedures – specialisation, logic, and formally consistent behaviour – and another that is closer to the modern economy, of which the central part is the professional ethic. The modern situation was the product of narrow-minded adhesion to one’s particular function under a set of conditions where the attempt to understand modernity as a whole had been abandoned by most people. As a result they were not in control of their own destiny, but were governed by the set of rational and impersonal procedures which he likened to an iron cage, or ‘steel housing’.

Given its rational and impersonal foundations, the housing fell far short of any human ideal of warmth, spontaneity or breadth of outlook; yet rationality, technology and legality also produced material goods for mass consumption in unprecedented amounts. For this reason, though they could always do so if they chose to, people were unlikely to leave the housing ‘until the last hundredweight of fossil fuel is burned up’.

It is an extremely powerful analysis, which tells us a great deal about the 20th-century West and a set of Western ideas and priorities that the rest of the world has been increasingly happy to take up since 1945. It derives its power not simply from what it says, but because Weber sought to place understanding before judgment, and to see the world as a whole. If we wish to go beyond him, we must do the same.

This article was originally published at A eon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

A History of Loneliness

Although loneliness, a major cause of health problems, may seem timeless and universal, the word seems to have originated in the 16th century.

Is loneliness our modern malaise?

Former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy says the most common pathology he saw during his years of service “was not heart disease or diabetes; it was loneliness”.

Chronic loneliness, some say, is like “smoking 15 cigarettes a day.” It “kills more people than obesity.”

Because loneliness is now considered a public health issue – and even an epidemic – people are exploring its causes and trying to find solutions.

While writing a book on the history of how poets wrote about loneliness in the Romantic Period, I discovered that loneliness is a relatively new concept and once had an easy cure. However, as the concept’s meaning has transformed, finding solutions has become harder.

Returning to the origins of the word – and understanding how its meaning has changed through time – gives us a new way to think about modern loneliness, and the ways in which we might address it.

The dangers of venturing into ‘lonelinesses’

Although loneliness may seem like a timeless, universal experience, it seems to have originated in the late 16th century, when it signalled the danger created by being too far from other people.

In early modern Britain, to stray too far from society was to surrender the protections it provided. Distant forests and mountains inspired fear, and a lonely space was a place in which you might meet someone who could do you harm, with no one else around to help.

In order to frighten their congregations out of sin, sermon writers asked people to imagine themselves in “lonelinesses” – places like hell, the grave or the desert.

Yet well into the 17th century, the words “loneliness” and “lonely” rarely appeared in writing. In 1674, the naturalist John Ray compiled a glossary of infrequently used words. He included “loneliness” in his list, defining it as a term used to describe places and people “far from neighbours.”

A Gustave Doré engraving for an 1866 edition of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

John Milton’s 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost features one of the first lonely characters in all of British literature: Satan. On his journey to the garden of Eden to tempt Eve, Satan treads “lonely steps” out of hell. But Milton isn’t writing about Satan’s feelings; instead, he’s emphasising that he’s crossing into the ultimate wilderness, a space between hell and Eden where no angel has previously ventured.

Satan describes his loneliness in terms of vulnerability: “From them I go / This uncouth errand sole, and one for all / Myself expose, with lonely steps to tread / Th’ unfounded deep.”

The dilemma of modern loneliness

Even if we now enjoy the wilderness as a place of adventure and pleasure, the fear of loneliness persists. The problem has simply moved into our cities.

Many are trying to solve it by bringing people physically closer to their neighbors. Studies point to a spike in the number of people who live alone and the breakdown of family and community structures.

British Prime Minister Theresa May has set her sights on “combating” loneliness and appointed a minister of loneliness to do just that in January. There is even a philanthropy called the “Campaign to End Loneliness.”

But the drive to cure loneliness oversimplifies its modern meaning.

In the 17th century, when loneliness was usually relegated to the space outside the city, solving it was easy. It merely required a return to society.

However, loneliness has since moved inward – and has become much harder to cure. Because it’s taken up residence inside minds, even the minds of people living in bustling cities, it can’t always be solved by company.

Modern loneliness isn’t just about being physically removed from other people. Instead, it’s an emotional state of feeling apart from others – without necessarily being so.

Someone surrounded by people, or even accompanied by friends or a lover, can complain of feelings of loneliness. The wilderness is now inside of us.

Populating the wilderness of the mind

The lack of an obvious cure to loneliness is part of the reason why it is considered to be so dangerous today: The abstraction is frightening.

Counterintuitively, however, the secret to dealing with modern loneliness might lie not in trying to make it disappear but in finding ways to dwell within its abstractions, talk through its contradictions and seek out others who feel the same way.

While it’s certainly important to pay attention to the structures that have led people (especially elderly, disabled and other vulnerable people) to be physically isolated and therefore unwell, finding ways to destigmatize loneliness is also crucial.

Acknowledging that loneliness is a profoundly human and sometimes uncurable experience rather than a mere pathology might allow people – especially lonely people – to find commonality.

In order to look at the “epidemic of loneliness” as more than just an “epidemic of isolation,” it’s important to consider why the spaces of different people’s minds might feel like wildernesses in the first place.

Everyone experiences loneliness differently, and many find it difficult to describe. As the novelist Joseph Conrad wrote, “Who knows what true loneliness is – not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask.” Learning about the range of ways others experience loneliness could help mitigate the kind of disorientation Conrad describes.

Reading literature can also make the mind feel like less of a wilderness. The books we read need not themselves be about loneliness, though there are lots of examples of these, from Frankenstein to Invisible Man. Reading allows readers to connect with characters who might also be lonely; but more importantly, it offers a way to make the mind feel as though it is populated.

Literature also offers examples of how to be lonely together. British Romantic poets often copied each other’s loneliness and found it productive and fulfilling.

There are opportunities for community in loneliness when we share it, whether in face-to-face interactions or through text. Though loneliness can be debilitating, it has come a long way from its origins as a synonym for isolation.

As the poet Ocean Vuong wrote, “Loneliness is still time spent with the world.”

Amelia S. Worsley, Assistant Professor of English, Amherst College

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

‘Dear Zindagi’: A Smart Film That Shines a Spotlight on Mental Health

The movie, at its core, asks several uncomfortable questions about living with people who make you feel unsafe and insecure.

Dear Zindagi, at its core, asks several uncomfortable questions about living with people who make you feel unsafe and insecure.

A still from Dear Zindagi featuring actors Alia Bhatt and Shah Rukh Khan. Credit: YouTube

“You know, I haven’t really cared for breakfast in a long, long time, because I stopped taking tiffin to school after eight grade.”

It was a regular March afternoon this year, and I was sitting opposite my therapist, whom I had started seeing recently, because I was tired of my own emotional vacuum, one I had been carrying and hiding for years. But, more importantly, I was tired of being tired.

“You didn’t take tiffin to school after eight grade?” She asked, as a matter of fact. It was an innocuous question, really, which just sat there, not asked with an intention to elicit a reaction.

“Yeah, I did not,” I said, and started crying—first slowly, and then in spurts. Those tears were hard and uncontrollable, as if they had lives of their own—some formed a film over my eyes, some fell on my shirt, some hung on my cheeks, some trailed down. I was very embarrassed, and very surprised, because I was talking about something that had happened one and a half decade ago, but the pain, even after such a long time, felt real and new and physical, stinging deep and not stopping. But when that moment receded, I felt relieved and calm, as if a part of me had just been set free, had just been accepted. And that was it.

I didn’t expect to revisit that feeling at all, much less while watching a film. But I did, while watching Dear Zindagi. At one point in the movie, Kaira (Alia Bhatt), an up-and-coming cinematographer, is sitting opposite her therapist, Dr. Jehangir Khan (Shahrukh Khan), and talking about her own childhood, opening the cellar in her heart no one else’s been privy to: the shame and guilt of abandonment, of rejection, of not feeling loved. Directed by Gauri Shinde, Dear Zindagi is about these small moments, the ones we usually don’t share with others, which shame and guilt-trip us, which make us less perfect, make us less… normal. Earlier in the film, Kaira asks her friend about his DD (“Dil ka Doctor”), therapist: “Why do you see one? So that you can tell others that you’re gay?” Kaira and her friend are at a shooting location, and she’s taking a break. There’s no judgment in her tone or demenaour. “I don’t go to a therapist so that I can tell others that I’m gay,” her friend says. “I do so to tell myself.”

There’s a reason we don’t talk about mental health, because we don’t like to talk about ourselves, our inner fears and desires, for we like to be accepted and liked and loved. Modern Indian society—with its propensity for drunken conversations, superficial humour, smart repartee, a sense of irony and detachment—prizes perfection, emotional numbness, and looks down upon vulnerability. So even though you’re with people, you’re alone—and despite having a good time, you don’t feel safe, feel left out, as if something’s missing.

So it’s heartening and refreshing to know that a mainstream film like Dear Zindagi, starring two Bollywood stars, Khan and Bhatt, chooses to talk about mental health, and does so in a manner that doesn’t trivialise its finer details. Kaira isn’t perfect, and the film doesn’t justify her behaviour or actions. She acts on her impulses. She hurts others. She doesn’t know why she does what she does. At one moment in the film, Kaira’s friend, Jackie (Yashaswini Dayama, who is as fantastic in Dear Zindagi as she was in her debut, Phobia), tries convincing her why a guy she just rejected is perfect for her. And we believe Jackie, because we saw the previous scene, where Kaira, in the midst of a fairly normal conversation, suddenly turned indifferent. Jackie is drunk, so she keeps going on and on about the guy’s merits, and how he’d make her happy. But Kaira is not interested or listening. Because some people aren’t looking for perfection. They aren’t looking for a way in, but a way out. They don’t want to lower their defenses, bring down the fortress surrounding them, whose walls keep getting thicker—not because they like to live alone but because loneliness is so much better than the fear of abandonment. Some people just want to watch themselves burn.

Dear Zindagi is a smart film, because it understands Kaira, its protagonist. And it does so, in mundane moments, without making anything obvious. Kaira is reluctant to pick her mother’s phone calls; she’s always looking to cut short their conversations, to the point of being rude. Her mother, on the other hand, keeps asking her whether she ate on time. It makes for quasi-comical conversations, because here are two people who are always using one excuse or the other to evade talking about something they should. Kaira’s generous towards others—she asks her boyfriend to allow a bunch of strangers to enter his restaurant, even though they haven’t followed the dress code; she offers her plate of noodles to a street urchin—but hard on herself. And it makes sense. Compassion towards others is still easy; compassion towards one’s own self is very tough. Kaira’s also addicted to online shopping, which gives her temporary solace in moments of stress and confusion. This makes sense, too, for when daily life becomes overwhelming and dark, coping mechanisms are taillights that guide you home. A lesser film would have explained these asides, made the obvious tedious, but, thankfully, Dear Zindagi doesn’t.

More importantly, besides dealing with mental health, Dear Zindagi also talks about something else that’s usually either brushed under the carpet, or dressed in terms of perfection: the family. And, if you look at it, these two aren’t dissimilar: Because if you can’t discuss the former, you can’t speak against the latter. For decades now, films and advertisements have placed the idea of a family, and its most important members, mothers and fathers, on a pedestal, showing its countless perfect portrayals, telling and retelling us its importance. But then there is, no matter in how small a number, always an alternate narrative, wanting to scream its lungs out, come out in the mainstream, in the hope of recognition and acceptance.

Dear Zindagi, at its core, asks several uncomfortable questions about living with people who make you feel unsafe and insecure. But here, too, Shinde is trying to understand and engage with the other. There are no demons here. Kaira’s parents are fairly normal: They drink with their daughter, exaggerate her achievements in front of acquaintances, and are, more or less, fine with her choices. Sure, like most Indian parents, they desperately want her to get married, but nothing about them signals ‘evil’. Which is how people usually are, and it’s to Shinde’s credit that she makes this story more relevant by barely dealing with characters, or their situations, in broad strokes.

On modern Indians

And it’s important that Dear Zindagi is the way it is, because we barely do justice to films on modern Indians. Of course, numerous films have been made on them, and will keep getting made, but not many that truly attempt to understand them, and their stories: of young men and women lost in urban jungles, struggling to find a way out, failing to figure out what’s wrong with them, constantly losing, constantly living with shame. These are our stories, too; they also exist; they also need a vent, if not necessarily a closure.

American film critic Roger Ebert once memorably said, “The movies are like a machine that generates empathy.” We go to the movies to not just hang out, or have a good time, but to also feel human: to understand ourselves and others better. Dear Zindagi, I hope, will introduce people to something that’s slowly going out of fashion: empathy. Because we are, at the end of the day, a star struck nation. So, one hopes that, if Bhatt and Khan are in a film—which is funny, smart and engaging—talking about mental health, then maybe a regular audience member, who used to hitherto equate therapy with madness, would probably take notice and, in the future, be less judgmental.

It also helps that Dear Zindagi is credible and restrained that benefits from two wonderful performances: by Khan and Bhatt. By now, we’ve almost come to expect nothing but perfection from Bhatt who performs remarkable roles (Highway, Udta Punjab) with as much ease, aplomb, and humour as the regular ones (2 States, Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania, Kapoor & Sons). But it was Khan who, much like Kaira in Dear Zindagi, seemed to have lost his way and running away from himself. Chak De! India, which released nearly a decade ago, was the last film where he looked completely convincing and in control. Since then, barring sporadic moments of good acting in films such as Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi, My Name is Khan and Fan, he’s appeared in one forgettable film after another. In Dear Zindagi, though, Khan doesn’t seem to be putting on an act. He appears and sounds like how he does in his interviews: smart, funny, snarky, quick-witted, charming. Playing the role of a therapist, Khan’s character, Dr Jehangir, isn’t dispensing sermons to Kaira, either. He is, at most of the times, sharing his insights about life, and its various confusions, as therapists usually do.

For a film that gets so many things right, so much so that you start feeling protective of it, I wish Dear Zindagi could have avoided a formulaic song, Love You Zindagi, in its closing segment, which forcibly tries to smoothen over the rough edges in a story that doesn’t lend itself to an easy, crowd-pleasing climax. But I’m glad that this film exists, because it brings out many stories and truths behind texts not sent, calls not returned, confessions not made.