The day arrives, and we go through the rites of remembrance and renewal. The right dress, the right words. What do those gestures mean? I write this on August 15, a date hard-wired in us to evoke a reflex of joy. Its arrival on the calendar, like that of any festival, forces us out of the dreary flow of everyday life and rejoins us with a moment that has travelled through history. It’s difficult to say we have always done justice to those annual encounters.
For years, when TV was the sofa-bound Indian’s only link to public life, they used to run patriotic films from Bollywood. The tawdry potboiler Tirangaa was a favourite. Today, I see macho war films being advertised. I can’t remember any time they played an introspective Garam Hawa—which deals far more directly with the day. As if that somehow wouldn’t be right. The festival licence applies. Anything goes, as long as it makes no crease on the forehead. Thought is to be suspended for a day.
An anthropologist studying the Indian middle class through material analysis may conclude that the past here is intimately connected with pop-corn! Mercifully, by memetic transmission or through family stories, we have also been handed down a richer, more complex consignment of memories. This was not served especially well by popular culture. Decades of Bollywood treated Partition with studied avoidance. This may be changing, though. Imtiaz Ali’s Main Vaapas Aaunga may not be a perfect film, but we see signs of a new openness and curiosity there. The Bengali consciousness worked differently—loss and displacement always cast its shadows on the public square.
A cultural homeland had been severed, and refugees overwhelmed Calcutta. Yet, Bengal erupted in scenes of wild happiness on August 15, 1947. Streets that had been fiercely divided by deadly communal riots just days earlier saw Hindus and Muslims embracing and celebrating together. Why? Because this was the land that had given flesh and blood to the idea of swadheenata—the state of being self-ruled. Like freedom, it’s a word that is free to be applied across contexts. It can be taken from the nation to the things that make it up. People, for instance.
And indeed, it has often been asked by this group or that: are we really free? It also did not take too long for the personal liberty-minded to observe that the individual was not yet fully sovereign. That national sovereignty only made us free to enter into a kind of complex negotiation with a new form of power.
Multiple generations born after independence have received August 15 as cultural and political inheritance. For most among them, it has been possible for freedom to be taken for granted. They are the blissful lot who consume patriotism along with samosas by watching Sunny Deol bash up an evil foreign force—just a different idea of ‘foreign’ that has come to rule over us. But the world of ideas too has lived in their midst.
Multiple waves of citizenry have engaged with it, not just an heirloom to be taken out of a closet, dusted and polished, and taken around on a chariot on the big day. They negotiated their freedoms in their own ways. They strove for it, in homes, in stifling social niches, in public arenas, at university, in offices, in contrarian personal choices, and most of all in thought. Even in thinking free, they have performed freedom.
Something strange and poignant resonates as one takes this brief walk along the edges of history two days after the historian Sumit Sarkar left us. In 1939, a year before he was born, the Haripura Congress had brought the everyday life of ordinary, rural Indians to the visual vocabulary of the national movement. In that setting, Nandalal Bose’s hand-painted motifs of village life filled the pandals—art as politics, not as decoration.
The people were installed as participants. Decades later, Sarkar’s ‘history from below’ came almost like its academic analogue. The story of India’s passage to selfhood, for him, was not written by a roll-call of great men. It was collectively authored, by many many actors who wrote their own scripts. Sarkar is usually spoken of as belonging to a certain school, but his deepest arguments were with the dogma of that school—of any school, for that matter. In his later works, he even argues with his own early works.
‘Argumentative Indians’, luckily, have survived decades of idiotisation through mass culture! That title, one could say, is an example of redundancy in phrasing. Like saying ‘past history’ or ‘advance warning’. By definition, there is no India without its history of argumentation. It is an essence composed of debate.
The UN defines a generation as spanning about 15 years. That makes for two generations who don’t have a living memory of 1997, let alone 1947! But they are the ones now invoking their right to speech in the town square—as well as their right to be heard. Periodic disruption of order is how everything evolves, from science and technology, to business cycles, to knowledge, to our genes. If a certain Indian gene is alive and well, that too is not a cause for mourning. August 15, 1947, was a night-bitten dawn, as Faiz called it, yet India celebrated. Stained though the glass was, what streamed through it was light.
Read all columns by Santwana Bhattacharya
Santwana Bhattacharya
Editor, The New Indian Express
