A friend of mine, a great scholar and teacher, reminisced sadly. One sensed his loneliness when he said he did not feel like a scholar anymore. He felt he sounded old-fashioned in a world full of policy documents and public intellectuals. What he missed the most, he said, was storytelling. He believed that policy documents left out storytelling and that statistical trends made for an amputated story. Statistics, he claimed, was not pregnant with folklore or wisdom. My friend insisted that democracy needed not just numbers but the everydayness of proverbs and fables. He claimed that we are pruned on a lot that was necessary in the Constitution.
It was late in the evening and we were talking about the fate of democracy. He underscored not just the dullness of democracy as a majoritarian system but its failure as a pedagogy. He told me that at his institute, lunchtime was storytelling time. He added that democracy lacked the power of eccentrics in the present day. The unavailability of eccentricity is a cultural deficit that democracy must confront. When the storyteller, eccentrics and richness of memory disappear, little is left of democracy.
My friend continued, “We have to remember what the soft side of democracy is. Democracy is a collection of epics and anecdotes. Without storytelling, there is no character building. And without character building, there are no exemplars and archetypes. The moral force and creativity of democracy disappear.”
I listened to him carefully. He was all of eighty. A great sociologist. He believed what democracy lacked was the power of fables. The strength of tacit assumptions. A constitution, he claimed, was a lifeless skeleton without memory and storytelling.
He suddenly smiled and asked me how many kinds of time a constitution needed. “It cannot be a linear document. How can we draft rights for the future, cyclical time and obsolescence in a constitution? How do you give rights to childhood and old age without a sense of biography and cyclicality?” Language and time, he claimed, were taken for granted. Law demands hermeneutics, a continuous re-interpretation of texts. A constitution, he said, must be read metaphorically and through interdisciplinary lenses.
He suggested one needed a special dictionary of terms. Take words. They must fit changing worlds. Think of nature. It is not a commodity or mere resource. It is so much more, and has a touch of the mystical. My friend spoke about leaders of the Indigenista movement in Brazil. To them, a forest was a myth or an epic. They felt that treating a forest merely as lumber or paper destroyed that myth and desiccated the forest.
A constitution, my friend claimed, was a collection of myths connected by a contract. But these myths required a different understanding. He said the dualism of thought destroys the fragile world of rights. He believed a formal constitution had little to say about the informal world. While the Constitution deals with the concept of citizenship in a formal manner, the everyday interactions of citizens are informal. Yet our governance and law have little sense of it.
We face the irony where Covid as a performance was virtually enacted in the informal economy, yet the history of Covid is presented as antiseptic formal policy. The other opposition to understand is the dualism between state and civil society. Civil society dreams of communities beyond the State. How do we weave them together?
Our regime has no sense of the civil society and the differences and eccentricity within it. Our democracy cannot work without the civil society providing a playfulness to constitutionalism.
Our democracy cannot work without civil society providing a playfulness to the Constitution. Oppositions create the tension of difference, but trigger new possibilities in the encounter within the difference. Many constitutions emerge from disasters which often serve as creation myths for a new constitution. As Susan Sontag put it, the imagination of disasters provides the imaginaries for the constitution. Disasters tell you about State relief. But they need to acknowledge the power of civil society, of Sikh langars and the Ramakrishna mission. This goes beyond formal contracts and captures the subcultures of caring in a society.
The tragedy is we read the Constitution as an accounting sheet when we should really read it as an enactment of communitas. Legal language sounds impoverished in the act of interpretation. Law needs a sense of play to provide for alternatives and justice. We need a new cycle of interpretation to enrich law periodically.
The old scholar stopped. He said a constitution is also myth and fiction sustained as orality. The written text is often an act of amnesia and genocide. A constitution needs to be sustained in a manner where the fecundity of oral languages, the unstated part of law, is such a rich world that only memory and orality can capture the epic possibilities of a constitution. A formal Constitution without its tacit accompaniments loses its tone, texture and music.
The old man sat quietly for a while. He said we must think of the fate of the world. We need a Roget’s Thesaurus to spell out the various meanings of words as they traverse through history. For example, where do words like exile, refugee and migrant stand within the definition of citizenship? It is not just a contract or certificate that separates them from freedom. Citizenship has become a waiting game for people. It is a promissory note that is rarely honoured in places like Kashmir and the Northeast.
He then emphasised that violence is the one word we need to understand. It has all the creativity of evil. Violence cannot be looked at as a face-to-face act of brutality. It has become more subtle and abstract—genocide, obsolescence, displacement and indifference. Law needs to understand the subtlety of violence and capture through literary imagination. He said one must understand interdisciplinarity. One has to do to the Constitution what historians did to science. A constitution needs an act of reflection to unravel the tacit, the uncertain, and the unconscious. We need to reword its silences. A constitution is not just an invitation to interpret but a challenge to tell a story. I wish he had talked more about tacit Constitutions. I wish he had underlined the silence of words and concepts. But that might be too demanding for a democracy. He stopped and said that we need to keep re-reading both the Constitution and life. Only such an experiment makes law and democracy a source of life and sustainability.