Loss and longing in Gujarat

Repentance requires capacity and possibility for reflection and recognition of a moral space within each one of us, howsoever fragile. Gujarat has been narrowing the very possibility of this inward gaze and recognition. University as an institution represents one such possibility. University, which seeks to bring the universe within a city, cannot be anything but a deeply dialogic space. The MS University was the only university in the state that aspired to and attained a national character. The sealing of the Faculty of Fine Arts closed this possibility. It closed the possibility of a debate about the self-regulating nature of contemporary cultural expression. More fundamentally, it restricted the very idea of a university as a space that is grounded in dialogue and conversation. It also signifies the unwillingness of Gujarat to look within. Simultaneously, we were confronted with images of D.G. Vanjara being showered with flower petals in the court compound. With it the hopes of repentance receded further in the dark recesses of our collective amnesia. We can no longer take solace that those who celebrate Vanjara and his associates represent a lunatic fringe of an otherwise sane and pragmatic society. That we are deeply divided and unable and unwilling to look at our own visage came out clearly in the sharply polarised responses that the literary and academic community of Gujarat gave to literary critic and cultural activist Ganesh Devy’s remark that the Gujarati mind harboured deep animus towards the Muslims.

Huzun is spiritual longing. Melancholy is both a literary and a cultural category despite its increasing absorption in the domain of psychoanalysis. What kind of a category is repentance? Despite the image at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial of a penitent Willy Brandt kneeling in prayer seeking forgiveness or admission of Gunter Grass of his Nazi association, repentance remains a personal moral category. It is a personal virtue. We have politics of hatred, of memories, of historic injustices but not of repentance. But is it necessary, we may ask, that repentance too becomes a political category? Should repentance like truth in our times also be cast as political?

Picture this. A lonely pilgrim. Age seventy-eight. Barefoot. He walked in penance through 49 villages of Noakhali and 7 in Tipperah. His was an act of repentance, of seeking forgiveness and awakening the humanity that lay latent in people. He prayed, recited the Al-Fateha and walked with bleeding feet; he ate one meal as repentance for the killing fields of Bihar. His bamboo stick was taller than him. Ramchandra Gandhi would tell us that it was a reminder to himself and all others that measures of Truth and human worth were higher than him, than all of us. His pilgrimage was an attempt to make penance and forgiveness central to the moral polity of India. So was Bibi Amtus Salam’s fast in Sirandi village. The malady was deep, but the method was strikingly beautiful in its simplicity. All that was required of him and us was to repent. He showed us that in a country divided and prone to frenzied violence repentance and forgiveness could not be merely personal virtue or a moral aspiration. Remorse, penance and seeking and granting forgiveness had to be brought to the very centre of the public and political domain. It was not surrender to the political. It was a plea to make the political a moral space. It is the loss of this desire we mourn. Despite our lamentations we have cast the political as an amoral, if not entirely immoral, space.

As political beings, however sceptical, we know that elections are round the corner. Democracy has a way of surprising the worst sceptics. We may or may not see a change of power in Gujarat. No matter what the outcome of the elections, the question of emptiness enveloping us would stay.

The writer is an Ahmedabad based social scientist