Romancing the Retrospect
      an inquiry into India's political nostalgia

When history is rubbed against the grain, to use the words of Walter Benjamin, ripe peels of nostalgia lie convulsing in the sands of time, throbbing with life, often in pools of blood. However, for all texts of culture and civilization that get lost in history, there are some that remain. They linger around, floating in the collective consciousness of cultures, of nations, of people. These strands of history thrive, representing a continuity with the past; a past that is too perfect, too poetic to be forgotten and so it is preserved. Often at the cost of misprizing the present. Nostalgia then becomes a precious sentiment; a defence mechanism to counter the uncertainties of the present with the certainty of a glorious past. 

The political texture of Indian democracy still finds these strands intertwined with contemporary trends. And therefore, it is easy to feel nostalgia hanging heavy on the mindset of the Indian voter. How else does one explain the dominance of the Indian National Congress in Indian politics till at least as long as 1977; riding unbridled on the legacy of the Nehru-Gandhi family. According to the Prof. Dipankar Gupta at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, JNU, such has been the Indian voter’s fascination with the Nehru-Gandhi family that the leadership vacuum created at the centre after the exit of Mrs. Indira Gandhi is yet to be filled. Even with the ideological transition in Indian polity since 1991, Indian intelligentsia’s romantic reminiscence of the Nehruvian era continues. “In a way we are all Nehru’s children. The Indian middle class, with its modernist orientation and its faith in scientific rationality, has had a long standing intellectual engagement with Nehru. Nehru’s conflicting experience with Indian tradition due to his modernist education is shared to various degrees by every Indian growing up along the same educational trajectory, “says Avijit Pathak, professor of Sociology at JNU. Nehru assumes significance not just as a political leader but also as a political thinker. Moreover, with Gandhi dead, he was the only one of a comparable stature who ushered India into independence. To that extent, he provided a continuity between pre and post independence India. Being the first Prime Minister of independent India, he shaped India’s destiny with his policies based on Non-alignment and democratic socialism that still find relevance in the policy discourse of the Indian welfare state. 

As in National politics, so also in the regional domain; J.N.Vyas in Rajasthan, J.P.Narayan in Bihar, Biju Patnaik in Orissa, Periyar and to some extent MGR in Tamil Nadu etc are all examples of charismatic leaders who continue to haunt popular imagination. According to Uma Maheshwari, a professor at the Political Science department of Madras University, the political climate of Tamil Nadu, especially dalit politics, has always been defined with E.V.R. Periyar as a reference point. K. Kamaraj and MGR are the other major reference points. Periyar’s face peeping behind the shoulders of giant cutouts of MGR, Karunanaidhi and Jayalalitha and even local level politicians like Vijaykaanth is testimony to this phenomenon. 

The student movement of the 1970s led by Jai Prakash Narayan is another chapter in the study of Indian political nostalgia. The most interesting aspect of this kind of nostalgia is that it is not just confined to the generation that witnessed these leaders. It transcends generational boundaries and assimilates members of subsequent generations as well. Memory is a pre-condition for nostalgia but this transcending aspect of nostalgia is explained by what Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, Senior Advisor, Global Initiatives at The New School in New York City, calls nostalgia without memory, citing examples of teenagers of the current generations reminiscing about Vietnam and the Beatles. It is almost as if the present has been unable to provide any reference point to those who live in it; the current generation has nothing to identify with and so it keeps revisiting the past to make sense of its present.

Mahim Singh

In Cold Blood
an inquiry into law, literature and violence

Law serves justice by means of violence. It “cures” the perpetrators of violence by inflicting violence upon them; violence that is dark, secret, silent and often disturbingly dignified. It is this violence orchestrated by the juridical apparatus that Michel Foucault talks about in Madness and Civilization: A history of insanity in the age of reason and also in Discipline and Punish. While ancient and medieval periods served justice by explicitly severing bodies, the modern juridical apparatus, powered by modernist rationality, does the same by denying freedom to the accused. The accused thus retains life but at the cost of freedom. And even when the law condemns someone to death, it makes sure it is a quiet, bloodless, painless death; an act performed through scientific, objective means in absolute secrecy. Justice served to perfection by absolutely rational means. Robert Cover echoes these very articulations of a disturbingly dignified violence in his article Violence of the Word. The notions of pain and suffering are strictly tabooed in the juridical vocabulary. The idea is just to deny freedom, or life for that matter, but without pain and suffering. Consequently, the “word” as Cover would say, inflicts violence without pain and suffering. Inferentially, pain and suffering get lost in legal narratives when crime translates into justice. Notions of pain and suffering being lost in legal narratives are often re-invoked and relived in art; in literature, paintings, music, films etc. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood documents this rediscovery of pain and suffering exceptionally. A story about the murder of a prosperous Kansas family by two criminals Dick and Perry, In Cold Blood celebrates pain and suffering with disarming gruesomeness. Capote weaves a complicated psychological story of two parolees who together commit a mass murder. A large part of the story involves the intense psychological relationship of the two felons that culminated in this cold-blooded crime. What stands out in Capote’s account of the murders is the fact that he succeeds in bringing out aspects of pain and suffering that got lost in juridical interpretation. Capote began researching for the book even before the murderers were captured and a lot of it was conducted while they were still under trial. He covered every single detail of the act, interviewing local residents and investigators assigned to the case and took down thousands of pages of notes. The fact that he could actually live the reality that he was about to document made In Cold Blood a seminal work on true crime and the first non-fiction novel ever written. Walter Benjamin’s famous statement, “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” brings out the loss of pain and suffering at the hands of the juridical apparatus. In Cold Blood, pregnant with details of the murders, with graphic descriptions of the methods employed in committing the crimes, successfully brings out this pain. Capote manages to document the violence inflicted upon the family and betters it by capturing the violence implicit in the psyche of the perpetrators. This is where Benjamin’s thesis on the parallelism of civilization and barbarism applies to In Cold Blood, with violence inflicted upon the family representing the former and the psychic violence of the perpetrators representing the latter. It is precisely this barbarism that gets lost in the juridical narrative and that Capote brings out so vividly. The book spawned two movies, In Cold Blood (1967) and Capote (2006). While both were cinematic articulations of the same event, Capote, fueled by Philip Seymour Hoffman’ sublime impersonation of Truman Capote, succeeds in


terms of representation of reality. As a visual narrative, Capote, is dark, subtle and disturbing in its representation of the events as well as the psyche of the perpetrators. The film, as a text that is textured of violence and the ensuing pain, can be analyzed through both Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality and McLuhan’s idea of “the medium is the massage/message.” In terms of representing the infliction of violence by the perpetrators and the pain thereby produced, first on the screen in the narratives of the criminals, and then reproduced and externalized onto the viewer, Capote conforms to both of the aforementioned concepts. These interpretations of the film as well as the text, however delineate essentially from Benjamin’s storyteller. So while Truman Capote assumes the role of the storyteller as the author of In Cold Blood, Bennett Miller does it as the director of Capote. And as narratives documenting crime, violence and pain, the book as well as the film transcend limitations of media and emerge as “storytellers” themselves. Law, in this sense, betrays experience by denying it pain and suffering in legal narratives. Benjamin probably realized this when he commented, “for never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly…..” To this extent, these media succeed in documenting experience where law, as providing the expressionless with expression according to Benjamin’s “tradition of the oppressed” thesis, fails. 

Mahim Singh