The stories we make up

Day 36: "It was a 'flat' view of the street: in what I had written, I went right up close to it, as close as I had been as a child shutting out what lay outside. I knew, even then, that there were other ways of looking; that if, so to speak, I took a step or two or three back and saw more of the setting, it would require another kind of writing. And, in a greater complication, I wished to explore who I was and who the people in the street were…, that would require yet another kind of writing. It was to that complication that my writing, in fact, took me. I had lived all my writing life in England; that had to be acknowledged, had to be part of my world view. I had been a serious traveller; that had to be acknowledged as well. I couldn’t pretend as a writer I knew only one place. There were pressures to do that, but for me, such a world view would have been false.

All my life I have had to think about ways of looking and how they alter the configuration of the world.” – VS Naipaul, prologue to A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling, 2007.

He didn’t get it quite right many times – this desire to be objective – for people were still offended by his words. Despite this, the Naipaulean vision persisted in acknowledging his own shortcomings in the larger scheme of things even while writing of others in a contemptuous manner. He tries as best as he could to understand the world which he inhabited. This is a writer and a person aware of his positions and the possibility of bias. I think of Naipaul this week because this week I think of integrity and responsibility. Lest this appears to be an advice column, I note that these are all important to the way in which we think of history and politics.

Some years back, while writing an essay that I had titled Why I am Hindu (still incomplete), I was ruminating on a photograph of a Ramleela play in which there seemed to be the photographer’s subconscious acknowledgement of a heritage and the story of that heritage of which she herself had not been conscious. It struck me that stories waft by through generations. In many instances, these stories are just fragments of a larger picture. Yet, they remain many times embedded in our subconscious and arise in the image of the world that we create and the creative works that we produce.

The recent PNM sari skit that caused uproar among religious groups and many members of the Hindu community was a useful example of the fragmented story, a story taken out of its original context and loosely used in a metaphor that went awry when it hit the public domain. Drawn seemingly from the disrobing of Draupadi, a scene in the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, that would eventually contribute to the great war, the sari skit began to assume a life of its own in the hands of those who could use it for political mileage. Even if the writers were unaware of its original context, it was nevertheless a foolish decision in these volatile times to use the sari, a typically East Indian and Hindu symbol of a woman’s honour, to convey a political message. No doubt that it would have had repercussions. (Sat Maharaj’s non-issue with it perhaps had to do with his own highly disrespectful lambasting of the Opposition Leader earlier this year). However, one needs to point out that the skit, although attempting to be metaphorical in nature, hit nerves and this has to do primarily with current views on domestic violence, women’s rights, religious sensitivity and race.

Art should be allowed its creative space. We all agree on this. Yet, the artist also has a responsibility. As much as we devalue the arts in our society, it does have the power to incite conflicts. And we also know that those with agendas to push, will use it to their own advantage, many times to create further rifts, as was evident.

And so, it is only responsible to point out, that we think carefully of our metaphors before taking them public. While we do agree that sometimes there is a tendency to overthink, we also acknowledge that perhaps this tendency to overthink and take offence easily, has an already developed past. Isn’t it about time that we begin to stop the culture of retaliation and consider confronting and investigating the way in which we have constructed stories about ourselves that now need to be revisited? Or is it that we are waiting for the mental breakdown before we begin to feel the need for change?