There is a picture drawn by a German artist in the 15th century. The context is Alexander’s India attack and he is making a brave attempt to draw an animal unknown to him. The picture shows an elephant and an infantryman. The elephant is drawn having half the height of the infantryman, with a tusk shaped like a trumpet and legs with hooves like those of a bull . The courage of this painter should indeed be admired. He tried bravely to move beyond the boundaries of the corner of the world known and accessible to him.
Man’s imagination has always wanted to soar as further as it could – in his art, in his philosophy, in his worldview. He never wanted to stay still at someplace or be to be restricted to some state of being. In fact, man’s moralities, his art was always indifferent to boundaries. Of course, he had his limitations of his times imposed on him – limitations of geography, limitations of his medium, the customs and practices he may have had to adopt in particular circumstances and particular occasions.
But to celebrate these as nationalities and cultural and social ‘identities’ would be to forget the aspirations and imaginations of those forefathers and to celebrate their limitations and misfortunes. It is a double turning back. We are not even idealizing the limitations of our times but idealizing the limitations of our forefathers who did not have our possibilities.
Long time back and under some circumstances a people grew their hair long and always carried their swords with them. When their descendants today, generations later, ignoring the reality of the times they live in, still do the same, is it a move forward or back? What about those who begin movements announcing that those rituals and ceremonies and their symbols and practices which began when an old culture began to decay, are all the which brings us national identity in the modern world. Man’s urge is to spread beyond borders and move forward with the times. To retreat from that, to make small places, to try to stand still is retrogressive – whether it is in politics, culture or art.
Protest movements have always happened in history. But they can appear as a result of both progress and retrogression. Whether they support or oppose the natural and progressive movement of history should be the criteria of understanding them and indeed, judging them. All which come wearing new colors need not show growth, many in fact show decay.
3 responses so far ↓
pp // January 27, 2009 at 10:34 am
True, but one man’s definition and perspective of progress is different from anothers. Where one would define it as technology integrated, another would define it as living with the land. Both of them do embrace change- only in different directions- one looking into unexplored avenues,another looking to times of the past. Both are avenues of progress- is it not a prejudice to suppose that something new is a sign of progress and something already done is not? The long hair and swords are externals- what do they symbolise? What code of living to they stand for? Perhaps to these men ‘progress’ is the re-discovery, the embracing of a way of life that should not have been abandoned in the first place. So how do you ‘judge’ a protest movement? Personally, I believe progress is a personal individual thing and it stops being progress the moment one tries to force it on another individual.
Jayasankar // February 1, 2009 at 6:59 pm
PP,
Thanks. Your comments are as interesting as you are
.
I don’t think the author is contesting any individual’s right to choose. Indeed, there is a lot of stuff that can be learnt from more ‘primitive’ times. The judgement is on group identities revived from the past and identities which were indeed part of more restrictive times. And, the first victim in these revivals are always individual rights. One’s ability to choose being limited by one’s cirucumstaces of birth, nationality, race…
It is not easy to judge but it would be a turning back not to judge. To take another example, take the case of the Amish.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish
It can be politically incorrect to judge them to be wrong but to not do so would be incorrect. One has to say it though – the are retrogressive, their view of man and his nature is wrong.
An individual should have the right to judge that. But alas, another casualty of the imposed group think becomes his right to judge.
Jayasankar // February 8, 2009 at 5:35 am
On January 16, the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC), which runs all Sikh religious institutions in Punjab and is commonly referred to as the Sikh parliament, filed an affidavit in the Punjab and Haryana High Court defining who is a Sikh. Going by this definition, all those with shorn or even partially trimmed hair are ‘patit’ or apostate, even if they practise the faith in all other ways. Given that a lot of Sikhs today trim their hair, and many have done away with the turban too, the SGPC’s definition would render more than 70 per cent of Sikhs apostates.
moving forward or moving back?