In Search Of Lost Time

Baudelaire called Paris a whore. But this whore--with her murky underbellyand seamy backalleys--was a woman the poet was madly in love with. He celebratedher squalor and stench, setting sail on a voyage of verse that made him dig intolanguage to extract that quintessential experience in which commonplace urbandecadence is transformed into sublime poetics of concrete, steel and blacksmoke-spewing chimneys.

Baudelaire was an insane butterfly, hovering over flowers of evil, desperatefor a sip of their bitter nectar. For him, modernity was an ongoing dialoguebetween the banal and the profound. And this profundity lay beyond theboundaries of good and evil.

More than a century has gone by after Baudelaire's last sigh, but hisunfinished quest for all that our modern and virtuous metropolitan soulcontinually represses is crying out to be begun afresh. And our times--steepedin the sin of the neon-lit global supermarket and haunted by spectres ofauthoritarian pogroms--await their redemption in the poet's 130-year-oldphilosophy of evil.

The self-righteous grimace with which history has fixed us--its godforsakenfellow-travellers--is the seed from which sprouts the herb of uneasy cynicism,manifest in the affected laughter of the homogeneous metropolis with its globalsoul. That, then, is what fascism is today. No more thumping of jackboots, thenoise of menacing laughter of the metropolis--concealed in platitudes emanatingfrom the Hindutva- free-market alliance--rises above the diffident whispers ofvariegated provinciality, rendering them inaudible.

The only resistance, in such circumstances, can begin by resurrectingBaudelaire's undead vision of evil and dredging out the tabooed province, theanathematised small town, from the silent crypts of evil where they lie ascaptives--policed by the cherubs and seraphims of metropolis's angelichierarchy.

But where is this small town with its rejuvenating vigour? Is it one of themany small north Indian  kasbas with their huge, shady trees? Or isit the green countryside-like setting of Calcutta suburbs? Is it the Keralabackwaters by any chance? Surprisingly, it's none of these, though it could beconstructed by borrowing a few elements from all. This small town, in fact, isnot a geographical entity at all. It is, to begin with, a new politics. It's theimpulse of resistance against the unstoppable, rolling Juggernaut ofmetropolitan uniformity. It's also a new poetics that subverts and opens up theclosed universe of metropolitan discourse and pits the irrational joy of flux,chance and festival against the 'rational' and oppressive ordering of the bigcity.

This Bacchanalia, in other words, is what small-town politics is all about.It dissolves individual egos, not into a totalitarian superego known as themetropolis, but into a sea of collective experience and thus releases humanity,in an almost orgasmic ecstasy, from the fascist grip of self-containedmonologues, sanitised expressions and constructed desires. Henry Miller wrote inSexus: "We must die as egos and be born again in the swarm, notseparate and self-hypnotized, but individual and related." The recovery ofthe small town then is also about putting an end to such sad deaths and patheticbirths.

The revolutionary power of the small town, therefore, lies in tearing asunderthe well-crafted, monotheistic ideology of the metropolis with the global freemarket as its only god and the World Wide Web its only guarantor of collectiveexperience.

But how does this quest begin--the quest for the exile's lost home? For, thislost home is nowhere and everywhere. Undoubtedly, it's an exile's mission. Anddon't we all suffer this banishment, carrying it like a cross? It's an exile intime and even the 80-year-old granddad, who hasn't budged an inch from his homeever in his life, is its victim.

The exploration of the small town is, thus, aProustian endeavour in that it is a search for lost time. For, small towns,thanks to the concerted bulldozing carried out by the spin doctors of ourmodern-day knowledge societies, have ceased to be physical spaces. A provincialtown like Allahabad, for instance, has sacrificed its greenery, its broadstreets and its collective quietude to the razzmatazz of hoardings, fast foodrestaurants and 100cc Japanese motorbikes, where the only celebration is that ofthe fragmented individual. A being alienated from the collectivities (addas to be precise) nurtured in parks and coffee houses and the odd roadsiderestaurant.

A beginning can be made by reclaiming moments that slipped throughour fingers as we inhaled the opiating smoke of free market. These are momentswe hid in the dark recesses of our bodies and consciousness as we, inebriated bythe ideology of globalism, sought and pursued the homogeneous and rationalmetropolis--held out before us like a paradise.

The small town, therefore, is above all else a dynamic, a motion, an urbanbecoming as opposed to the defined and fixed being called the metropolis. And byvirtue of being a ceaseless movement the small town is a democratising impulse.Like the discursive and leisurely tale of a kothok or  kissa-goiwhich constantly militates against the rational language of the fast-paced, racyand linear narrative of television images.

These small-town moments are,however, at present layers buried under other preponderant layers whichconstitute the palimpsest called the human body. The small town is actuallythe invisible body. Each one of us carries this invisible and untamed body withus. To search for these collective, almost genetic, experiences inscribed in ourbodies, and also concealed by them, is the beginning of the new politics andpoetics we have been talking about.

This poetics is crucial. For, only this can open the political domain wherethe suspended dialogue between the provincial and the metropolitan can onceagain resume. Sans this dialectic, the metropolis will remain an expression ofone-dimensional modernity--where our vision, palate, hearing and touch are notjust sites of the fascist danse-macabre but also willing agencies of thisself-destructive tango. Only when this new political domain is opened up, in theway we eat, live, love and sleep, would we have begun rescuing the small townfrom the bottomless vortex of history.

But this rescue mission is to be mounted with great circumspection. One wrongstep and it's easily confused with nostalgia. The recovery of the small town isno romantic sojourn into the past. Neither is it about obtaining to a pristinestate of noble-savagery. Nostalgia, in fact, is inimical to the politics ofsmall town. It is a confounding smokescreen created by the metropolis.To beprecise, it's metropolitan modernity's neurosis.

Nostalgia is what drives the Hindutva brigade's project of reviving the RamRajya. Its politics is premised on the idea of vertical mobility so integral tonotions of metropolitan modernity.

In the metropolis' scheme of things all otherconceptions of mobility, in space as well as in time--horizontal, cyclical or nomobility at all--are primitive myths. Only vertical mobility-- progress,evolution etc--is 'rational' and 'scientific'. In this kind of motion one has toconstantly outgrow (read reject) one's past to keep moving into the future. Thisprecluding of all other notions of mobility as also the idea of rejection (or isit repression?) inherent in the 'rational' conception of progress makes it aclosed and negative experience.

Closing the world, however, doesn't eliminatethe other experiences and yearnings. The forced, almost repressive, rupture ofthe cultural self brought about by the metropolitan imagining of the modern, ofcourse under the tutelage of the free market, gives rise to the politicscharacteristic of the RSS. So, the only way the fragmented and alienatedmegalopolis can bridge this cultural breach with its Other (actually a part ofits own self) is by creating agencies like the BJP and the Sangh which delvedeep into the past to recover the Ram Rajya by demolishing mosques and killingminorities (their supposed Other).

It's not without reason that the entire Babri Masjid movement, including L.K.Advani's rath yatra, became a television spectacle and the leaders of themovement stars who towered heads and shoulders above the 'hoi-polloi'.

The starprinciple, as philosopher Theodor Adorno has rightly observed, is totalitarian.Therefore, in an age when TV is the principal delivery vehicle, disseminatingthe ideological glue that will stick diverse experiences and cultures togetherinto a homogeneous collage called modernity, individual charisma is hot propertyand becomes the dominant mode of conducting and understanding politics.

Thedialogic and heterogeneous mode is pushed aside into the dank side-alleys ofdisfavour. The politician-star, the charisma-exuding demagogue hitting out atthe Other, become the torchbearers of metropolitan politics.

Our politics of small-town, on the other hand, is a positive and inclusivistenterprise. Our small town is not a long-lost historical impulse alien to ourexperience which we need conquer. It's actually a mish-mash of experiencescarried in our bodies which the global metropolis has forced them to forget.It's a collective and an almost biological search, unlike the politics ofnostalgia which gropes around for lost homes in the alien and abstract wastes ofhistory and the Other.

But what exactly is this collectivity of experience? This politics of thesmall town which is waiting to be rediscovered? First and foremost, it'sthe fantastic and leisurely yarns of daastan and kissas with thehearth at its centre. Lazy afternoon knitting and sewing of mothers and auntssurrounded by a gaggle of children listening with rapt attention to tales thatnever end and go on from one to the other. It's also about the experience oflistening to similar stories flowing out of the radio at dinner-time incollective silence. Or the polyphony and chaotic flow of words inside coffeehouses.

These discourses, because of their discursive character, could never bedoomed to closure and were thus always open, ongoing and poetic. They had thepotential of transforming the empirical and the quotidian into experiences whichmade the 'rational' discourse only one of the many ways in which life could beinterpreted and spoken about. All that has been forgotten in the purposive andsensible chatter of the metropolis.

Very much like the flaneur. The individual who would melt into the crowd andamble or slowly cycle down streets and lanes, through markets and bazaars, andperceive everything in that state of leisurely motion. There was no yearning forimmediate positive knowledge that our metropolis, floating on an ocean ofinformation, pretends to provide. In the by-lanes of its supposedly anonymousInternet.

Recovering the small town, therefore, would mean ending the reign of themetropolis peopled by individuals. It would imply a new connectivity. Not theconnectivity exemplified by the individual and his fragmented gaze captured bythe image of the television star. But the connectivity of listening to storiesand also telling them at the same time. The point essentially is to persuade thepurposive, rational and closed metropolis to enter into a dialogue with thediscursive, 'aimless' and always-open small town.

But it's not just the television. Long before the cable TV arrivedand emptied leisure of all its collective potential, the headmaster with hiscane always awaited the dreamy and unruly flaneur. His mission: to disciplinethe idle day-dreamer into (some)body with a reasonable purpose in life.

The metropolis is only the absolute perfection that this disciplining hasachieved. Today, discipline is no longer the cane looming large outside leisure,it has wormed its way into the very heart of play and enjoyment.

Instead of picnics, in one of the innumerable wildernesses or gardens whichdot north Indian cities, recreation and holidaying today is about resorts whereeverything is planned and pre-determined with no room for collectiveimprovisation and chance. And this mathematical precision of metropolitanleisure can often assume disturbing proportions. Seats in the PVR cinema halls havegrooves which can fit in cola glasses and popcorn packets available only withinthe auditorium complex.

So play and leisure, the last flanks of small town's resistance against thehomogeneous and homogenising metropolis, have, it seems, also been outflankedand made to cede ground.

The small town has become a metaphor for subalternness. It's a sign that hasbeen repressed by the metropolitan discourse and the only proof of itsexistence today is in its absence. Recovery of the small town,therefore, means making this hidden and muted metaphor visible and heard, sothat it impacts the given totalitarian order of the metropolis with fullsubversive force.

Only then, surprisingly enough, will modernity and its metropolis survive.Civilisation, one believes, is suffering from karoshi--a disease amongJapanese workaholics overworking themselves to death. The provincial impulse hasto be liberated if modernity--as the bearer of the post-Enlightenmenttradition--is to really live.

To do so now is to lie still and try and feel the twitching of those sinewswhich have the irrepressible flaneur, the truant-playing schoolboy, theirreverent and rebellious college student, and the reluctant office-goer writtenall over them. But even that will not be enough. One will also have to look forways by which one can plug one's ears to the metropolitan siren-songs ofproductiveness and 'rationality' in order to begin a dialogue with thousands ofstragglers who lie without a care in the world, on patches of green whichsurround the hundreds of forgotten and decrepit monuments in our cities.

A short poem by Hiranand Sacchidanand Vatsayan Agayey reads:

jo pul banaayeNge,
itihaas meiN vo baNdar kahlaayeNge
senayeN ho jaayeNgi paar,
maare jaayeNge raavan, vijayii hoNge ram.
jo pul banaayeNge,
itihaas meiN vo baNdar kahalaayeNge

(History will always remember those who build bridges as monkeys. Even thougharmies cross over, Ravans are killed and Rams are victorious).

Modernity's history is fast approaching a dark abyss and thesebridge-builders are its only hope. It should stop calling them monkeys andrecognise them for what they are.