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Epic Culture – Ashis Nandy It is no accident that Gandhi, knowing that he had to work within a tradition primarily built on orality, also believed history to be of secondary importance. cannot be that easily controlled or monitored through the state’s existing reward-punishment system and put to the service of the state. Indeed, the plurality of the spiritual and the cultural is even more difficult to ‘manage’ than the plurality of politics, for you cannot even hierarchise, reorder or retool revealed texts or strains of spirituality associated with them. Through the puranas, which have been at the centre of the popular culture that has kept the lifestyles and potentialities of our communities alive, that disorder paradoxically acts as the binding cement of an invisible confederation of our cultures. It is no accident that Gandhi, knowing that he had to work within a tradition primarily built on orality, also believed history to be of secondary importance. I am not inviting you to junk history. I am speaking of the modern love for history that often borders on the obsessive. In this love affair, it is obligatory not to recognise that there are other ways of constructing the past, even though many societies, including large parts of Indian society, have lived with pasts constructed outside history and observing other principles. Historiography depends heavily on archives and on empirical data that can be certified as reliable and verifiable. Once under their spell, one learns to live by them. That is the unacknowledged, tacit theory of memory in history; there is no place in that theory for memory work. The theory admits no cultivated forgetfulness or anti-memories— memories which are unforgettable but which one must struggle to forget on grounds of compassion, ethics, psychological health and ideas of a good life. I have been studying for the last fifteen years the violence that accompanied the partitioning of British India into India 53
54 ArtConnect: The IFA Magazine, Volume 6, Number 1 and Pakistan. The study has surprised me not only by the extent to which human beings can be cruel, bloodthirsty and greedy but also by the extent to which they can be magnanimous, brave, self-sacrificing and ethical. Two-fifth of the survivors we interviewed told us that someone from the opposition helped them to survive and/or knew of someone else who received such help. Unfortunately, almost all our interviews were done in India and the respondents were mostly Hindus and Sikhs. For Pakistan and Bangladesh, all we have are a few scattered cases and the highly suggestive work of Ahmed Saleem, the Pakistani writer and human rights activist. They show a similar trend. I doubt if any other genocide in the last 100 years can match this record. That is why I am not particularly surprised that, without the help of psychiatrists and psychotherapists, the survivors we interviewed had not done badly. And most of them have done so by locating their experiences outside normal life. A Pakistani friend told me about her grandmother who saw her family being butchered by Sikhs. The event had haunted her throughout life; she used to have nightmares and wake up screaming. Towards the end of her life she was once asked by my friend, “You must be very bitter about the Sikhs?” She said, “No. At that time they had gone mad and so had we.” She coped with her memories by locating them outside the sphere of the normal and the rational. In such extreme conditions, the epics come in handy as ethical frames, pegs of memory and, ultimately, as metaphors of life. If you have the means of constructing the past outside history, you have other manoeuvres that allow you to inject into the past, subjectivities exiled from history and from other neatly controlled disciplinary pockets such as psychoanalytic case histories and ethnographies. These manoeuvres allow for an expanded space for ethics and compassion. They do not deliver judgements the way a court or a tribunal does, but they do deliver them nonetheless. With one exception I have not found a single killer from our study of Partition who is at peace with himself in his old age. When some say that Partition memories constitute the greatest unwritten epic of India, they
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Contents EDITORIAL 3 READING VISUAL
Page 4 and 5: IFA has collaborated with Adishakti
Page 6 and 7: Reading Visuals: Timeless Voyages o
Page 10 and 11: The divine messenger (Agnipurusha)
Page 12 and 13: they sit in mournful contemplation
Page 14 and 15: upon a blue-gold sky. Or elsewhere
Page 16 and 17: his daughter in marriage. Dasharath
Page 18 and 19: Reading Visuals - Gulammohammed She
Page 20 and 21: It is difficult to summarise the na
Page 22 and 23: There are numerous other sights tha
Page 24 and 25: produces a rare form of intimate ye
Page 26 and 27: Reading Visuals - Gulammohammed She
Page 28: set upon a luminous red ground. In
Page 31 and 32: Myth Retold: Variants of the Story
Page 33 and 34: 32 ArtConnect: The IFA Magazine, Vo
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Page 69: Wayang Kulit: Where Ravana Dances i
Page 72 and 73: Wayang Kulit - Eddin Khoo the Javan
Page 74 and 75: I could explain what Malaysia is, c
Page 76 and 77: when a member of your family is suf
Page 78 and 79: Wayang Kulit - Eddin Khoo 77 Hanuma
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Page 82 and 83: Wayang Kulit - Eddin Khoo Ravana or
Page 84 and 85: closest to the audience is the most
Page 86 and 87: Wayang Kulit during the 1970s, 1980
Page 88 and 89: Wayang Kulit - Eddin Khoo Winged in
Page 90 and 91: the aim was to ‘museumise’ this
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104 About IFA India Foundation for
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