Independence Day 2022 | As India turns 75, a look-back at the defining cultural moments that shaped it
The arts had been a domain of freedom and disruption in the run-up to Independence. How did they catalyse India's journey after 1947?
What have been the most compelling works in the arts and in literature in India in the last 75 years? The anniversary gives us a chance to consider the question anew, but the answer is more difficult to arrive at than we assume. After all, we love our cultural icons much more than we do their work.
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Anyway, the question is too general and, as a result, unwieldy. Let me narrow it down. Before doing so, let me also say that I think the idea of ‘Independence’ as a break and catalyst in our modernity is of limited use. Many of the greatest shifts and innovations in culture took place well before Independence, in the 19th century: it was then that the sphere of culture – of poetry, dance, fiction, art, the classical genres, cinema – began to be formulated as a domain of freedom and unpredictability. It was then – and not after Independence – that we became either citizens or daydreamers, or both. I would roughly, perhaps tendentiously, date the moment of citizenship, at least in Bengal, to 1828, to the formation of the Brahmo Samaj, and daydreaming to 1860, to the composition of the Meghnadabadhakabya by Michael Madhusudan Dutt and Hutom Pyachar Naksha by Kaliprasanna Sinha. Since then a hundred and sixty years have passed. Others will date these moments differently; but, whatever their dates might be, they will predate Independence. I see the legacy of those traditions of citizenship on the one hand and daydreaming on the other carried forward well after Independence to, at least, the late 1970s. In the ’80s, another break or fissure, more significant than Independence, begins to appear, to do with the onset of globalisation and the free market, the ascendancy of English, the creation of a neoliberal elite, and the gradual rise of the Right. All of these were formalised in India in 1991 by both economic deregulation and the assault on the Babri Masjid. Whether, since 1991, we have been ‘free’ – in our dreams, our imagination, and our thoughts and actions – is moot.
I’d like to dwell briefly, first, on just a few of the developments that extend, post-Independence, the legacy of daydreaming – a form of freedom that not only overrides the coloniser, but our own citizenly proprieties as ‘Indians’. In that legacy’s line, I’d put Ustad Amir Khan’s post-Independence innovations in the vilambit or ‘slow’ khayal, which made it ‘ati vilambit’, or ‘most slow’/‘radically slow’. Amir Khan had taken a cue from the pre-Independence singer Ustad Abdul Waheed Khan, whose secretive experiments had already been moving the khayal in the direction of slowness, consolidating the legacies of enchantment, trance, and daydream, severing khayal from overt intelligibility, and pushing it towards seeming purposelessness. This lineage has had a great spiritual impact, after Independence, on the Indian notion of music as a form whose limits – and whose very musicality – are to be tested. The emergence of Amir Khan’s idea of the khayal is not unrelated to a mode of thinking that makes a film like Pather Panchali possible in 1955. These projects and artworks extend an already-existing domain of possibility and enchantment, of freedom, that had been put in place by 19th and early 20th-century forebears like (Rabindranath) Tagore, Bibhutibhushan Banerjee, and Abdul Waheed Khan.
Perhaps, the most intelligent and uncompromising theorist-practitioner in the last 50 years in this domain of freedom, who never underestimated the power of the nation-state, whether it’s ‘independent’ or otherwise, to curtail or delegitimise the imagination, was Mani Kaul. His scepticism and concerns about the deep, probably inescapable, legacies for Indians of the Enlightenment and the European Renaissance (with their privileging of the instrumental and of knowledge as a form of mastery) informs the poetic resistance of his filmmaking, turning it into a form of knowledge that can’t be assimilated to a clear purpose. The great value of this type of resistance – of its seeming irresponsibility and obfuscation – in Nehruvian India shouldn’t be ignored. It created an important option for us. Kaul’s theoretical positions in relation to his belligerent poetics are to be found scattered across his interviews and snippets of lectures uploaded on YouTube. They point to an idea of the arts as a kind of dissent which we have now lost sight of, just as the challenge posed by Kaul’s work has slipped from our sights.
Rating: 5