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