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OUR LITERATURE AND TIME-TRUTH
�In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms.�
The words of one of the greatest literary interpreters of the real thing, lived through in personal experience of the 20th century�s physical displacements and upheavals of perception-Thomas Mann-give me leave to reflect on writers� intuitions of the destiny. Salman Rushdie, one of the later interpreters of the real thing, while living through the most recent of its traumas, has defined a credo for us: �One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsyllable, to speak the unspeakable, to ask difficult questions.�
Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Ibsen, Tagore, Sharat, Premchand the century with questions we expected Marx and Freud to answer. Proust, Joyce, Kafka, followed by Lawrence, Genet, Mishima, spoke the unspeakable ( the names in all categories are representative, not inclusive). Kafka was the one who went furthest, presaging in his story-telling genius what grim history had in store-fascism, Nazism, dictatorship. (Did he miss the return of the religious inquisition in a 20th century avtar? I have to reread him yet again�). With politics as the meaning of destiny, literature�s position as both a deeper and higher understanding of human striving than that in which politics operates, changes: literature becomes inexorably a medium through which that political operation is expressed at a deeper and higher level. If destiny is political, politics and literature cannot be kept hierarchically apart. Would Berlot Brecht have known that �to speak of trees is almost a crime/for it is a kind of silence about injustice� if he had not formed his creative consciousness in the years of Hitler�s other creation, Nazism, and in the imperative of resistance to this fate? Would 1916 have the resonance, in the history of our era, without Yeat�s poem of that name whose line �A terrible beauty is born, rings on down our years, tolling the awesome pain and exaltation of desperate struggles for freedom. We heard it in India, we heard it, on and on, in Cuba, in Vietnam, in south Africa.
I can speak of literature and politics, pass from one to the other in one breath, so to say, because the former-literature-creates inescapably within the destined context of politics. Even literary style, which Proust defines as �the moment of identification between the author and his subject� is also the identification between the author and this destined context.
We are not only children of our time but of our place. My own consciousness and subconscious, from which I write, come even in most personal aspects of mind and spirit from destiny shaped by the historico-political matrix into which I was born. My personal sense of the defining events of our time is dominated by two: the fall of communism, and the end of cold war. And the two extraordinary developments are linked subjectively, even contradictorily, for me, since I was born after independence of a country from colonial racist society and as I grew up I looked to the Left as the solution to the oppression of the poor and powerless all around me, in my home country and the world.
Satyajit Ray has said, �It is in the presence of the essential thing in a very small detail which one must catch in order to expose larger things. This is in Indian art, this is in the caves of Ajanta and Ellora, this is in the classics, in Kalidasa, in Shakuntala�this is the essence.�
This principle I believe applies beyond art, to the general level of awareness of your world with which you were presented when you opened your eyes. The essential detail that exposes the larger things in my life begins very early. I was taken as a toddler to wave a flag at the District Head Quarter of my village on arrival of Prime Minister of Independent India .As I grew, I was told again and again of this momentous occasion, with a sense of values to be indicated: loyalty in homage to political power , presented for the formation of my sense of values the fact that Mohandas Gandhi had lived in, and developed his philosophy in and through the country where I was born and was to live my life, the man who was to leave behind in that country principles of liberation that were to be fundamental to the struggle for freedom by the black people. The great revolutionary martyrs Shahid Bhagat singh, Chandra shekhar Azad, Asafaq ullah and others also supplemented the values of human liberation in feudal and imperial India.
The sum of past century may be looked at in a number of ways. The wars those were fought, the military defeats that turned into economic victories, the ideologies that rose and fell, the technology that telescoped time and distance. Women�s rights have at last been recognized as full human rights entrenched in many contemporary constitutions, an emancipation from gender oppression that went back beyond the male dominance enshrined in holy texts of many religions, all the way to club-wielding caveman.
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