“There is a plenitude of decline in every overripe civilization.”
— E M Cioran, A Short History of Decay
The controversy around the Hindi film Adipurush exposes a deep hole in the heart of cultural revivalism. The Allahabad High Court in its observations on June 27 admonished the filmmakers for putting the tolerance of Hindus to test. This is an interesting observation where the imaginary line of tolerance is seen to have been violated. Under what circumstances are we able to make a judgement on the concrete overcoming of an imaginary line? How do we interpret and ascertain the limits to a community’s level of tolerance? What makes it sacrosanct?
Interesting times raise interesting questions. They remind us of the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”
The dialogue writer of the film at the centre of this controversy appears to have made an epic mistake by fiddling with the language codes of India’s grand epic. To be informal and contemporary is one thing. To introduce street-slang is another. He crossed a certain line of permissibility. The act has been denounced not just as an error but a sin of judgement, and a fall from artistic grace. It is ironic that the condemnation was loudest from the same revivalist industry the writer has been pandering to of late with his sentimentalist language.
What came between them? The dialogue writer failed to distinguish between myth and history, sacred and profane, the grand old epic and the modern, political epic of nationalism. You have to mind the gap.
The power and longevity of mythic stories come from their polysemic quality. Characters in an epic portray a certain character of language and its relation to its time. What is the relation of an epic to our time? In an interview, G N Devy said the use of mythology in our times “can provide a peek into the political history of a nation.” One important aspect of the controversy regarding Adipurush is that you cannot morph characters of an epic that are bound within a sacred economy into everyday characters uttering profanities. The revivalist culture of nationalism cannot appropriate ancient texts by caricaturing them. This unbridgeable divide between what is modern and what is ancient is the limit situation of modern culture. The desire to both overcome and glorify this limit is a sign of modern decadence. When mythologies are dragged into the arena of history and politics, they no longer remain what they essentially are: A celebrated reminder of collective memory. Modernity betrays itself as a lack (it lacks the past). Progressivist ideologies that want to demolish the past contribute to the past’s iron grip on the present as much as revivalist ideologies that glorify it.
This inescapable and unbearable dialectic in relation to the past is the first sign of modern political decadence. Revivalist politics tries to make use of this lack by intensifying it. It creates what Bertolt Brecht called “the interregnum of morbid symptoms”, where a Ravana is reimagined as a bearded devil. The political intent behind the projection of evil blurs the lines between an ancient epic and history, destabilising the very divide that feeds the cultural self-projection of nationalism. The epics belong to a pure time, while the time of history is tainted. You cannot confuse and mix the two even in the service of nationalism. The nation that cannot distinguish between a time of eternal glory and a time of grievous loss is not a nation.
Cioran writes, “A nation dies when it no longer has the strength to invent new gods, new myths, new absurdities; its idols blur and vanish; it seeks them elsewhere, and feels alone before unknown monsters. This too is decadence.”
This Nietzchean perspective explains how in the failure to reimagine holy icons, artists in the service of revivalist politics end up inventing monsters. When history is reimagined as a story of good versus evil, it resembles myth. This perversion of history as a reusable trope of myth is a sign of cultural decadence. The mobile army that issues threats to erring artists in the name of culture defines the political excess of this decadence. If people who claim to belong to an undying cultural heritage feel threatened by a badly conceived film, it’s a terrible show of confidence. The intolerance towards a lousy act of transgression is a sure sign of decadence.
The writer is the author of Nehru and the Spirit of India
