Independence day is a time for reflection. The discussion has to go beyond the gossip of personalities and the pull of charisma. It has to focus on institutions and the value systems they maintain. It has to identify us a society that has become a hybrid social construct between democracy and the nation-state. How have these institutions fared? Such questions should immediately summon the storyteller. Tragically, the storyteller is missing—another creature rendered obsolescent by so-called modernity.
The storyteller provides the poetry, the meaning, the creation myths of democracy. He creates the weave of memory that makes democracy possible. Democracy is not the litany of one man, one vote, but also a litany of stories, fables and anecdotes that make it meaningful. Every parent, every senior member of the house has a story of partition, about Gandhi, or a song—none of which gets told today as television eats up these pieces of narratives. With the storyteller missing, independence day—with its official, civil-service-like textbook speeches—is arid and empty. Each person is a labyrinth of memories, but this pilgrimage of memories through the memory lane is precisely what is lost. The silence is all-consuming.
What consolidates the aridity of speech is the emptiness of numbers. Democracy, rather than being a normative system, has become a numbers game. Majoritarianism stands for electoralism and even democracy has become a zero-sum game. Numbers help only to mechanically create a social contract, showing little consideration for meaning, nuance, pluralism or dialogue. The valences of dialogue elude the logic of numbers.
There is another property that is missing—the poetics of memory. One of the fascinating characteristics of Indian democracy was the logic of collective memory. The myth of three other institutions sustained democracy. Three institutions created a surrogate theory of democracy—films, cricket and science, as each became part of the folklore of democracy.
In a land replete with myths, films have been a companion anchor to democracy, digesting its contradictions, yet providing for the heroism of the aspiring individual. Films can integrate family life with the contending ways of law and order, urban life and ritual logic. Films create the myths of compatibility that make modern democracy possible.
Sadaat Hasan Manto argued that Bombay Talkies, as a way of a craft’s life, was an embodiment of our pluralism. The songs of Bollywood were the anthem of democracy. Yet, in the last decade, Bollywood has stopped being a myth factory for democracy. It is silently arguing that centres that cannot hold Bollywood’s myths are incompatible with it.
Accompanying films as addendums to democracy are science and cricket. Cricket is a moral fable, not just a genre that captures the play of Indian democracy. Cricketing fables about legends like Lala Amarnath and Eknath Solkar are anecdotes about democracy, arguing as if cricket is a superior version of electoralism. Yet of late, cricket appears loaded with corporate logic rather than upward morality stories.
Science in India was heralded as an annex to the Constitution. The scientific temper was part of the democratic temper, a tacit version of constitutionalism. Yet today, Big Science has destroyed the logic of play. The elementary simplicity of science as a rule game anyone can access is no longer visible. One can no longer claim, as one did in the 1970s, that every man is a scientist, every village a science academy. Information technology, too, appears more technocratic than accessible.
Finally, democracy is caught in its own contradictions. The logic of majoritarianism has cued in the beginning of a genocide. The 1984 and 2002 riots made democracy in its electoral form look genocidal. Violence as a spectacle became an act of consumption to be savoured again. The video replay became a genocidal spectacle.
Movements across the world show democracy has to be rethought and revived. The direct-action movement has shown that a new semiotics of the body—the everyday body, the dialogue body—has to be revived. One needs the equivalent of the satyagrahi explained to revitalise the language and rituals of democracy. This independence day is the right time for it.
One has to realise that democracy today is a variegated spectacle. It is no longer only a textual fact. The printed word as a medium no longer explains the text of democracy. One needs the oral, textual and digital bodies to recreate democracy, to create a face-to-face society, to create an immediacy of conversation. Democracy becomes a richer sensorium with orality in play. Orality, the practice of speaking face-to-face and recollecting without a text, is a crucial part of it. Democracy needs a revitalised sense of memory, a revitalised body, a new sense of numeracy to relaunch it. The pedagogy and the drama implicit in it are obvious.
Democracy today traverses different kinds of time—the new modes of communication are one aspect of it. Only a linear model of development straightjackets time. The time of alternatives, the time of the future is pluralistic and cannot be regimented within a textbook. History has to always allow for variety of interpretations. Pluralism is therefore inherent in democracy. Democracy is thus an adjudication of differences, rather than numbers alone. Its theories of representation are richer, emphasising difference and inclusiveness. They are yet to be built into the current frame; the allocation of quota alone won’t do. One has to explore the epistemic and cosmic roots of democracy.
(Views are personal)
Shiv Visvanathan
Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations
