http://indianexpress.

com/article/opinion/columns/a-return-to-reality-nationalism-
debate-hindu-muslims-5006390/

A return to reality
Written by Pratap Bhanu Mehta | Updated: January 1, 2018 8:41 am

Thinking about the new year in these smoggy, uncertain and angry times, is risky
business. Most new year writing is premised on the idea that the turning of the year
might bring new resolve and new hope. An element of self-overcoming might be
possible. At a personal level, there are the resolutions to overcome some past vice; at
a social and political level, to think of new possibilities. The idea that we have choices
to make that can make the world go one way or the other may not accurately describe
the world, but it certainly reaffirms our freedom.
This is all with the deep recognition that even in yearning for change, we will settle
into something familiar. This was the refrain of possibly the best-known new year
poem in English, by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, The Year: “What can be said in new year
rhymes/That’s not been said a thousand times.”
But the New Year is, very occasionally, welcomed in another register. Amrita
Pritam’s Saal Mubarak rarely fails to move. It is one of the rare examples of poetry
ushering in a new year with unflinching disappointment. It is hard to convey the
cumulative power of her language, “jaise aastha ki aankhon mein ek tinka chubh gaya/
naya saal kuch aisa aaya (the eyes of faith were pierced by straw/the new year came
thus).”
But then there are other sentiments about the new year that seem so apt, yet
unrecoverable. I am thinking of Tagore’s essay ‘Naba Barsha’, read in 1903 at Shanti
Niketan. The context was the Bengali new year, so the season itself was the renewal.
In too many ways, Tagore’s message is a dated message: Our efficient, rationalised
calendar no longer tracks rhythms of nature; the text is replete with now untenable
contrasts between east and west, references to a Bharatvarsha that can only be read as
aspirational, but sound delusional when treated as description.
But in these angry times, there is a radicalism to Tagore’s new year wishes. It is
precisely their strangeness that makes them apt.
If Indian society has, over the last few years, been characterised by a trend, it might be
described thus: Losing grip over reality. If there is a wish for 2018, it might be called
a return to reality. This might be a strange description for a time that is characterised
by so much action, practicality and desire for change. But what Tagore was hinting at
is precisely our practicality, our frenzied pursuit of enmities and ends was obscuring
reality. The most important one he had in mind was, of course, Nature itself, whose
plenitude and rhythms were themselves a solace for acquisitive and angry times.
Tagore can aestheticise nature like no one can. But what can be more a manifestation
of our losing grip on reality than that there is no idea of “Nature” left anymore?
Instead of being the source of plenitude, comfort and life, our air and water, our
ecosystems have become new self-inflicted hazards. If an age that prides itself on its
tough-minded realism cannot get a handle on this basic truth, it is a flight from reality.
The second theme in his message was his characteristic yearning for solitude. This
might seem, as it did to many of Tagore’s contemporaries, a self-indulgent wish,
particularly in an era where political mobilisation will be necessary to save the
republic. Solitary gestures will not be enough; the art of combining will be important
to create a new politics. But the spirit of Tagore’s yearning for solitude in the new
year was also to get a grip on reality. There is one large truth Tagore understood:
Often, collective identities lead us to lose a sense of reality in three ways. The more
we identify ourselves with and through a collective identity — “Hindu” “Muslim”,
“Indian” — to the exclusion of all else, the more abstract we become. Others also
become an abstraction, their human hopes and wishes, joys and sorrows, quirks and
interests, all get subsumed under the tyranny of a compulsory identity. Our public
relationships are mediated too much through collective nouns and pronouns, not
enough through individual human sympathies. Nationalism is not always realism; it
can also be a flight from the most human realities.
But another aspect of solitude seems necessary to get a grip on reality. Tagore knew
full well that a life which in every respect has to justify itself to others in a constant
gaze will be a life lived under a shadow of tyranny. We have lost a sense of reality
about ourselves in three ways. The erasure of the distinction between public and
private, a necessary condition for solitude, excessively exposes us to a public gaze. On
the other hand, the likelihood that we are shaped by the large echo chambers we are
plugged into also increases. Tagore knew that an authentic conversation would not be
possible if it was constantly plugged into a context of publicity and the need to justify
oneself. And finally, solitude was a kind of antidote to “post-truth”, a flight from
reality where the power to create false representations, or a simulacrum of reality,
took us away from our own self. The demand for solitude was a demand in the name
of realism: To rescue the self from the virtual worlds it inhabited, whether the
abstraction of collective nouns, or the imagined public gaze.
And finally, there is Tagore’s non-instrumentalism. A sentence like “the real end of
life is “to be”, and not “to do”, again might seem like a self-indulgent wish, in a
society whose material deprivation is still unconscionable. But Tagore knew that
excessive instrumentalism, where all aspects of life and society had to be justified on
some altar of material purpose or the need to dominate, was destructive of life itself. It
was that instrumentalism that unleashed the worst of what we were capable of, and
makes us forget real virtues of “contentment, restraint, tranquillity, forgiveness, all
these features of higher civilisation”.
“Jaise dharti ne aasman ka ek bada udass sa khat padha/ naya saal kuch aisa aaya (like
the earth read a sad letter from the sky/ the new year came thus)”. Tagore’s
impractical paean to nature, solitude and meaning, might not be the answer to the
personal disappointment Amrita Pritam expressed in these lines. But they are a call
that we will have to aim at a higher realism, about Nature and the self, that the
purveyors of collective narcissism, brutal instrumentalism and propaganda are making
us forget. Happy New Year.