Reading an Autobiography

Of the startling variety of genres, autobiography is the most intimate. The first-person narration of one's life, it is like an opened-window, opened to the world by the person himself. Maybe it is an injustice to speak of autobiography as a window as if it affords the readers only a marvelled glimpse at the interior of a richly furnished drawing-room. Or, maybe it is like an invitation to a conversation. Just like a conversation reflects the taste and sensibility of the other person, every autobiography reflects, in a way, the life and mind of the writer. But, it is difficult to fix a single metaphor to describe every work of the genre. Whatever be the metaphor, it is a plea to be heard. Like every plea, it is a defence of the choices the author made in his life. Like every plea, it persuades us to identify with those choices. Sometimes, we do.

Source: Amazon

Mahatma and the Madness of Violence

The birth and death anniversaries of founding fathers are celebrated with paean and pageants. The sesquicentennial of Mahatma Gandhi's birth is no different. People from all walks of life including politicians, celebrities, sportsmen, journalists, scholars, and students pay homage to the memory of a man whose death prompted Albert Einstein to remark, "Generations to come, it may well be, will scarce believe that such a man as this one ever in flesh and blood walked upon this Earth."

Perhaps, it is impertinent to remind the nation and the world about the end he met, on his birth anniversary, but my insolence is in good company. Gopalkrishna Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma does the same, and he has a reason: "India and the world would have had little interest in the birth or the birth anniversary of this man if his life had not been what it was — a tussle between his passionate, self-consuming faith in ahimsa and his being stalked, unceasingly, by the fiercest violence until the very last step he took on the earth." (See The Pulse of a Legacy in an Age of Heroics)

M.K Gandhi, circa 1906
Source: NY Times

The life of Mahatma, on whose honour second of October was declared the International Day of Non-Violence by UN in 2007, was a continual battle against the violence around him, violence that pitted nations and peoples against each other, violence colonial and violence communal. The philosophy of ahimsa was his gift to the world, his solution to the problem of violence; a madness that propelled the world of the twentieth-century into two World Wars, Holocaust and brought it to the brink with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For Gandhi, non-violence was common-sense.

Since the end of the cold peace of post-war, the madness has returned with a vengeance. Alas, we don't have Mahatmas to lead us anymore. Ought we to lament the absence of a Mahatma in our age? We may either do that or we may ask ourselves: how ordinary men and women became Mahatmas? Mahatmas are born when men and women answer the call of history. An extraordinary personality, whose character is a rare synthesis of love and courage, will and vision. They thought through the problems of their times and devised ingenious solutions.

Mahatmas are a rarity that nobody really expects to see even once in their lifetime. However, that is not the lesson the history of Gandhiji teaches us. It is a story of resolutely-willed "naked fakir" who dared to do what he thought history demanded of him. In a nutshell, it is the story of love and courage, will and vision, qualities that are never too late to be redeemed by any generation.

The Meaningless Icons of Everyday Life

History has turned many an iconoclast into icons. Venerated and worshipped, the meaning of their life's work is relegated to the attic once they pass away. Their faces, sometimes smiling, sometimes brooding, would be all that remains. These decorate the drawing rooms of their friends and foes alike. Reduced into an icon, and frozen in time, they see the world, in silence.

Che Guevara's iconic visage is, arguably, the greatest example of the ‘indefinite icon'. Used by comrades and corporates alike, Che the Icon is a regular in the haunts of millennials, for whom it is (perhaps) a byword for ‘coolness'. Therefore, I wasn't surprised when I found a nail and string portrait of Che in a hair salon in Trivandrum. He sits there, with reciprocal defiance in his eyes to the indifference of the hairdressers and their clients around him. Neither he nor his hosts know what he does there; do you? 

A Proustian Soliloquy

For logophiles like me who are seized by the spirit of carpe diem, the oeuvre of Proust, Atget and Soofi serve as guiding lights. The act of capturing and metamorphosing our waking moments into literature, through words and images, is surreal. Nay, it is more than that. It is the ultra-real, the creative end to which human reality is hatched.

Organ Grinder by Eugene Atget (1898)
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Blind Spots of Liberal Thought: Thomas Paine, USA and the Unsaid History of Racism

Thomas Paine's Rights of Man is filled with exuberance and joy at the founding of two republics: the USA and Revolutionary France. Among the two, the USA was already a decade old when Paine published his treatise. Paine considered the founding of the American Republic as an epoch-making event, one that signaled the arrival of a new age in history, politics, and society. That migrants and settlers from all over Europe transcended their religious, linguistic and national identities and built a nationality around common interests, and fought against Britain, one of the mightiest imperial powers, was an inspiring testimony to the people's love of liberty. It was also evidence of people's capacity to avoid anarchy and establish society even in the absence of a government and live together in peace and security. For Paine, it proved the natural principle of human society: cooperation based on common interest. Therefore, democracy, or, the rule of the people, was the best way to exercise the peace of natural society.

Howard Zinn (1922-2010)
Source: howardzinn.org

For many European thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries America invoked the image of the Garden of Eden, an abundantly rich and virgin land, where men and women flocked to begin anew. Except that it was not. Although sparsely populated compared to the European nations, America was already home to the Native ‘Indian' tribes. The democratic peace and progress that settlers achieved were on the back of the expropriation of native lands. The founding of the American republic only exacerbated the process and the tragedy was compounded when the new nation started ‘importing' African men and women as slaves into the continent, to work their farms and plantations. Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States evocatively narrates this neglected side of history; so does Charles Mills' criticism (based on the the history of racism in America) of John Rawls' definition of society.

The biggest criticism leveled against liberal thinkers is that their analysis and philosophy tend to be ‘blind' towards the innate asymmetry of power and the injustices it spawns in the society. These blind spots of liberal theories include gender, class, race, caste, etc. By either ignoring or building upon these asymmetrical relationships, liberal theories and liberal politics have perpetuated these injustices and and helped institutionalize these in the daily life of our polities.

Paine included, the liberal impulse for human freedom and human rights is worthy of respect but the complexities of the real world are such that it demands scrutiny into the asymmetries of power and dismantling of it even as we build a world of human rights.

Thomas Paine and the Right of Democratic Consent

I am currently reading Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. A spirited rebuttal of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, Paine's work wades through both political theory and the history of French Revolution to establish its propositions viz. that people have natural rights, and that they are within their rights to overthrow a government that fails to respect their natural rights. For Paine, the French Revolution was an exercise of this basic political right.

Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
Source: Wikipedia

Of the many problems Paine dealt with, one that captured my attention the most was the 'problem of consent'. In Burke's Reflections, he argued that the English people had renounced their right to change their 'governors' in 1688 when the Parliament submitted the nation and its future generations to the new King. For Paine, the parliament of 1688 didn't have the right to bind the future generations, as it did itself. Therefore, even though the Parliament had pronounced such a declaration, it was null and void, and without effect on future generations of England. This was because, for Paine, politics is the realm of the living, and the deeds of the dead men couldn't hold a veto over the aspirations of the living. The line of defense adopted by Burke is preposterous in a country like England, where the individual liberty of a person is legally recognised once he/she reached majority at the age of twenty-one. If the Church and the parents didn't have the right of command over the free persons, then it followed, for Paine, that the dead didn't have it either.

Thomas Paine's criticism of Burke's formulation of the problem of consent goes deeper. For both Burke and Paine, the question whether or not people had the right of consent against their rulers boils down to whether or not people had rights, and how did they obtain them. Burke traced the origin of rights to historical precedents whereas for Paine it was a matter of innate natural rights. Paine argued that to ground the rights of people on accidents of history was arbitrary. If one went far enough in time, one would find counterexamples to the one on which the rights are grounded. To choose one over the other is based on personal preferences, and thus arbitrary. Therefore, to argue the case of rights based on precedents would 'prove' anything and 'establish' nothing. Paine 'established' his case, the origin of Rights of Man, based on natural rights that he gained by the virtue of 'unity of creation'. Firstly, men belonged to the 'unity' and 'equality' of Man (as a single species). Thus, no other man had innate rights over other men, and pretensions to the contrary are just that, pretensions. Secondly, he derived these natural rights from his Maker, God. The Man was imbued with natural rights by his Maker, who created him after Himself. Thus, imbued with equal, natural rights from his Creator, the Rights of Man was a fact to reckon with, and not the product of contingencies of history.

Paine's defence of the people's legitimate right to change their governors and the government is important even in a democracy because it provides the theoretical basis for periodic elections, where people's consent is sought at regular intervals. Unlike Burke's stance (that the people are bound by the decisions of the past generations), people's will isn't considered either absolute or their consent irrevocable. People and their representatives are allowed to reevaluate their older decisions, on the light of reason and experience. Although it isn't a foolproof system, as the state of contemporary democracies show, nations are yet to devise a system that is fairer and more practical.

On Perumbadavam's Narayanam

The parallels between life and journey are many. Often, we are encouraged to view life as a journey, not towards a particular destination but as an act in itself. The reason for this analogy is obvious. Like in a journey, in life we will encounter many things that we may or may not appreciate. Again, as in a journey, we will find the going sometimes smooth and at other times rough. The point is to keep walking, to continue the journey while absorbing the colorful and colorless experiences. The good and the bad, like the smooth sailing and bumpy ride, are part of life. Like a traveler, one should learn from them and take them in stride.

Narayanam by Perumbadavam Sridharan
Source: Mathrubhumi Books

Perumbadavam Sridharan's Narayanam dwells on the theme of the journey to interpret the life of Sri Narayana Guru. In his thematic and episodic review of Guru's life (through fictional psychology) the novelist delineates four layers of meanings to Guru's life/journey from a precocious young boy Nanu to become Sri Narayana Guru, a multifaceted personality whose influence, on the intellectual and social history of modern Kerala, has been unparalleled.

For Sridharan, the life-journey of Guru starts when he leaves his home to become a wandering ascetic. Here, the meaning of the journey is tapas. Often translated as 'meditation', it is more accurate to render it as solitude, and the etymology of the word in Sanskrit points to the verb 'to burn'. Tapas is a state of solitude where the ascetic 'burns' his ties to the worldly life, by renouncing social ties and by mortifying his body through various meditative practices. The novelist is right in equating the first stage of the journey with tapas because, the young Nanu decides to 'burn' the bridges that tied him to the world, both social and carnal.

The second meaning of the journey is athmapida, or the torture of the self. This is different from self-torture where a person actively inflicts pain on himself. The novelist, Sridharan, draws parallels with the experiences of Semitic prophets such as Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, who went through the phase of self-mortification through fasting and other ascetic practices in which their resolve was sorely tested by the lures of the Devil. The young novice Narayanan accepts that this phase of athmapida is an essential one on the road to enlightenment and like those seekers of Truth who preceded him, he too faces the devils inside him with resolve and determination.

The third meaning of the journey, as the novelist renders it, is mochanam or emancipation. Even as a child, Nanu witnessed and experienced the injustices of the caste-system. Born into an Ezhava family, Nanu's caste was sandwiched between the higher castes such as Brahmins and Nairs and lower-castes such as Pulayas. Owing to their position between the highest and the lowest, Ezhavas suffered the ill-effects of ayitham (a form of untouchability) from Brahmins while simultaneously practicing it against the lowest castes such as Pulayas (please refer to Ambedkar's idea of caste-system as graded inequality). Ezhavas were both the victims and perpetrators of the injustices of the caste system. For people like Nanu's father, caste discrimination and untouchability was the order of life and felt nothing unjust about it. Even if they did, they didn't dare raise their voices. However, for Nanu, the whole system was patently unjust and absurd and his life as an Advaitin only reaffirmed his conviction that the caste system and untouchability had no divine or scriptural sanctions. For an Advaitin (non-Dualist or monist) like Sri Narayana Guru, the theory of Advaita propounded that 'being' is the manifestation of the Being, the One. Whereas the ideology of caste-system ranked and graded the people based on their caste which it asserted was awarded to each individual as a result of their putative deeds in the past-birth.

The final phase of the journey is moksham or liberation, one in which the Guru dies after a protracted illness. In this phase of his life-journey, Guru relived the solitude, pain and the thirst for social justice before finally departing from this world. However, in Sridharan's narrative, death is neither the cessation of life nor of the journey. Like destinations on a journey, death is also something that you reached but only to leave again. The transience of life is repeated and death is the final transient that is soon transcended. In the end, Guru comes face to face with the Truth he has been searching for his entire life.

In the scheme of the eternal journey of the Being through its various manifestations through beings, the journey doesn't end here, although the story does.