The Foreboding of Autumn: Aamir Bashir’s Harud
Akhil Katyal Director: Aamir Bashir Cast: Reza Naji, Shanawaz Bhat, Shamim Basharat, Salma Ashai If you work with silence as your frame, every sound gets registered. If you work with scarcity as your chosen form, every little detail is capable of a denotative surplus. Aamir Bashir takes this formal technique and builds from it his film Harud that matches, shot by shot, the gravitas of its subject, carefully ‘seeking dignity,’ as he puts it, ‘in a violent place’. Harud is set in Srinagar. It is about a Kashmiri Muslim family coming to terms with the disappearance of their son Tauqir. The film takes place in that breach which refuses to close when someone in the family is enforcedly disappeared by a power that is almost beyond redressal. In each shot, Tauqir’s younger brother Rafiq and his parents Fatima and Yusuf are seen attempting to adequately mourn a loss that they do not know the final shape of, that they necessarily cannot know the final shape of. When someone dies, you mourn their death. The certainty of their going away is the vehicle of the mourning. When someone disappears, even that certainty is withheld from you. You live a kind of daily life in which no hope remains uncontaminated with despair, where the object of your loss is both perpetually retrievable and permanently lost at the same time. In such an anchorless world, we see Rafiq and his family trying to find directions, but as if with a compass that is missing the lodestone. When he was asked to give a brief synopsis of the film to an interviewer in 2010, the year this film released, Bashir summarized thatHarud, or Autumn, ‘is about decay, it’s about psychological decay, and you see this…through the family, primarily through the protagonist…Rafiq’. The film could not have released in any other year. 2010 was its necessary place in time. It was in the summer of that year when this decay, so acutely shared among so many in the valley, transformed and erupted from the hands of thousands of Kashmiri boys on the streets of Srinagar, most as young as Rafiq, who picked up stones and hurled them at police and paramilitary forces on whose shoulders the Indian occupation in Kashmir rests. The film begins with this real time footage of stone-throwing. These young men on the streets provide the film its epigraph. 2010 was also when the actual story of the disappearance of the Nadihal men – a story more terrible because it mirrored many more like it – had broken out. A Special Police Officer had offered army jobs to three young men in the Nadihal village. Mohammad, 19, an apple farmer, Riyaz, 20, a herder and Shahzad, 27, a laborer were given a paltry sum of money and were taken to a remote army camp in Machil where nine soldiers shot them down. This was done to claim the reward money that the Indian state offers for the killing of ‘militants’. In the script that the army wrote for its press release shortly after the massacre, this herder, laborer and apple farmer were found in the possession of three AK-47s, one Pakistani pistol, ammunition, cigarettes, chocolates, dates, two water bottles, a Kenwood radio and 1,000 Pakistani rupees. In the last quarter of a century in Kashmir, if a young man goes missing, you shudder to imagine the possible consequences he or his body has met, what official script he or it has been instrumentalized towards. The endless speculation makes you fall apart, the cost of conflict comes home with every living second without him who has vanished. This is why Harud patiently bears out its each second. The film makes of allocating screen time to objects, scenes and characters an art, marking affiliation with how time looks like when in grief. The camera focuses long on the face, particularly the scorching eyes of Rafiq, played by Shanawaz Bhat. It rests gently and with an always uneasy calm on landscapes. It saddles together the unmatched beauty of the valley with its fragility, with the constant fear that attends the streets of downtown Srinagar and their inhabitants. This constancy of fear hangs like a fog which obscures the legendary beauty of the valley. In fact, the film, as Bashir claims, is about the exact opposite of beauty, it is ‘about decay’, that particular passage of time when beauty disappears slowly. Autumn for Bashir is both a season and a metaphor for this decay that takes its toll almost silently. No matter how beautiful that time of the year is, ‘in Kashmir,’ Bashir says, autumn ‘is also a precursor to dark winters’, one has to prepare for them, one has to be ready to cope with them. In one of the recurring sequences of the film wherein the camera follows Rafiq closely as he vends newspapers at dawn in Srinagar, he cycles past a shop of wrist-watches that has not yet opened. ‘Timex,’ the shop front reads, ‘Life is Ticking.’ Bashir keeps his screen time patiently ticking, every moment pregnant with apprehension, till it explodes in the last shot. But the opposite of fear also stalks the valley, that is, the real antonym of fear, not tranquility, but courage. In 1991, Parveena Ahangar’s son, like Tauqir, had also disappeared. He was at his uncle’s home where he had been studying when he was picked up by the Indian security forces during a search and cordon exercise and was taken away in a van. Javaid Ahangar was nineteen then and Parveena never heard of him again. Through these years the grief has remained as raw as the day she lost him. She went from every police station she could find, every interrogation centre, hospital and camp looking for him. During these searches, she met those who were her exact mirror images, scores of parents and relatives of men and boys who had been enforcedly disappeared in Kashmir. She invited them to make this search for their loved ones a collective one and in 1994 the
Abstract, Abstraction
Swapan Chakravorty The primary problem with the adjective ‘abstract’ stems from its etymology. It derives from the Latin ab, meaning ‘from’, and trahere, ‘drawn away’. In other words, it carries a sense of being withdrawn, separated, extracted. When Locke spoke of ‘abstract general ideas’, he meant a process of detaching, or abstracting properties from something until one arrived at its concept. A more recent philosopher such as Frege would think of abstraction partly in Lockean terms: when characteristics are withdrawn, one arrives at ‘abstract concepts’: Suppose there are a black and a white cat sitting side by side before us. We stop attending to their colour, and they become colourless…We stop attending to position; they cease to have place, but still remain different. In this way, perhaps, we obtain from each of them a general concept of Cat. By continuous application of this procedure, we obtain a more and more bloodless phantom. (1) The phrase ‘bloodless phantom’ suggests a diminution of life, a loss of that sanguine vigour which supposedly characterizes art. It is in this way, for instance, that one uses the phrase ‘abstract thinking’ as one that is at odds with the aesthetic way of perception. Yet, extracting properties from an object may also be interpreted as leading toward an object that stands on its own, which is conferred being without the need for extraneous significance, likeness or expression. That is, ‘abstract art’ may be seen as non-figurative, ‘not a depiction, not having a significance outside itself.’(2) Andrew Harrison has drawn attention to the second sense in which one might use the word ‘abstract’ when discussing art. While the first idea of pure abstraction eliminates process and becoming, the second interprets abstraction as leading from one point to another: ‘this second concept has essentially to do with process, normally that marks a stage within, towards the end of, a mental, or interpretative, process.’ Abstraction in the latter sense is ‘bound up with the idea of meaning and with the matter of making meaning.’ (3) The usual sense in which the word ‘abstract’ is made to qualify art is seldom Lockean. Rather, it is most often used simply to mean non-representational, that ‘which is not a picture of anything at all’. (4). However, if we stick to the Lockean roots, the abstraction is not wholly separable from the object of which it is an abstract. This is the reason some painters object to the term as ambiguous, if not useless. The painter Paul Ziff writes: An abstract is a summary, an abstracted person is one which is withdrawn or separated, while an abstracted watch is one that has been purloined. An abstract of a document is supposed to convey the substance, the gist, of the document; in consequence, an abstract is not wholly independent of that which it is an abstract of: the character of the abstract is dependent on and determined by that of its original. But if I abstract myself from company, I turn from this company: it need no longer enter the purlieus of my concern. Ziff points to the Janus-like quality of the adjective when applied to art: it leads one to and away from something. In some ways, this is similar to (though not the same thing as) the ambivalence discussed by Harrison: abstraction as being, and abstraction as becoming. I am an abstract artist…Yet my works are not abstracted from anything; they are not derived from anything; they stand in no relation to anything that I have turned away from. The term is wrong, or if not wrong, it will not do…I find it implausible to suppose that an Alber’s ‘Square’ is abstracted from, or derived from, or related in any significant way to anything other than the work itself and its own creation. (5) Yet, this for major artists could be more ‘concrete’ or ‘real’ than depiction. The word ‘abstract’ applied to his art would irritate Constantin Brancusi. He considered his art ‘real’, for the real is not his likeness but in the idea: ce qui est réel n’est pas l’apparence mais l’idée, l’essence des choses. Brancusi was in some ways a Platonist, and influenced by the ideas of the Rumanian Orthodox Church and Tibetan Buddhism. (6) However, the co-incidence of the ‘real’ or ‘concrete’ with art that strikes one as non-representational (or ‘abstract’) needs no recourse to the ideal forms of Plato or the enlightenment of Brancusi’s other major source of inspiration, the eleventh-century Buddhist poet Milarepa. In 1930, Van Doesburg suggested the word ‘concrete’ for art that abjured figuration, and Hans Arp and Wassily Kandinsky backed the term later in the decade. (7) To ‘abstract’ may be seen to be a move from figuration to ‘pure’ object. Hence, Hilla Rebay’s misleading term ‘nonobjectivism’ caused some confusion in Europe and America in the 1930s.(8) The best instance of the focal co-incidence of the abstract and the concrete are the sparse writings of Piet Mondrian on his own work.9 In 1942, Mondrian wrote of his discovery that science has shown that ‘time and subjective vision veil the true reality’ (p. 15), and that the visual arts may redeem that truth through ‘pure plastics’ (p. 10). The previous year, he had written in essay ‘Abstract Art’: In the course of centuries, the culture of plastic art has taught us that this transformation is actually the beginning of the abstraction of natural vision, which in modern times manifests itself as Abstract art. Although Abstract art has developed through the abstraction of the natural aspect, nevertheless in its present evolution is more concrete because it makes use of pure form and pure colour. (p. 28) Mondrian moves close to Harrison’s sense of abstraction in art as involved in the process of making meaning, and at the same time tries to remove the stigma of the ‘bloodless phantom’ by arguing on behalf of the concrete vitality of pure plastics. In an astute move, he transports the word ‘objective’ to a different ontological plane. Abstract is objective in trying to capture the reality veiled by subjective vision, but is non-objective in Rebay’s loose sense of the non-figurative: We come to see that the principal problem in plastic art is not to avoid the representation of objects, but to be as objective as possible. The name ‘Non-Objective Art’ must have been created with a view to the object, [but] that is in another order of ideas. (p. 28) The antonym ‘objective-abstract’ is as misleading, wrote Mondrian in another 1941 essay, as the paired opposites ‘realistic-abstract’. In the essay titled ‘Liberation from Oppression in Art and Life’, he wrote that realistic art is taken to spring from aesthetic feelings aroused
Laziness & Work: An Interview with Pierre Saint-Amand
Sina Najafi and Pierre Saint-Amand Jean-Siméon Chardin, Auguste-Gabriel Godefroy Watching a Top Spin, 1738. The roots of our contemporary obsession with work and productivity are usually traced to the eighteenth century, when the new social and philosophical project of the Enlightenment, founded on rationality, dovetailed with the emergence of a capitalist economic system based on maximizing efficiency and productivity. This is the century in which the secular gospel of work in its modern form was written. In its most radical articulation, this gospel proposes that freedom and work are in fact equivalent. In his book, Paresse des Lumiéres (Editions du Seuil, 2008; The Pursuit of Laziness: Idle Philosophy and the Enlightenment), Pierre Saint-Amand, professor in the departments of French studies and comparative literature at Brown University, looks to the eighteenth century paradoxically not for a critique of laziness but instead for a counter-tradition that champions it. In figures as diverse as Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean-Siméon Chardin, and Pierre Marivaux, he finds the beginnings of a refusal to participate in a social project governed by the work ethic and of a skepticism toward the notion that productivity and industry should be our ultimate goals. Sina Najafi spoke with Saint-Amand by phone. Why did you choose the eighteenth century as the focus of a book on laziness?The discourse against laziness really starts in a coherent way in the eighteenth century, as we reach the cusp of industrial capitalism, and as the discourses on labor and economy emerge in their rationality. That is when we see the previously marginal discourse on laziness becoming more and more pointed. In many of the philosophers of the eighteenth century, one finds an equivalence between work and life itself. In Discourse on the Political Economy, for example, Rousseau acknowledges the inevitability of work; when he considers the responsibilities of the State and the well-being of its citizens, he argues that it’s imperative that work always be necessary and never useless. Voltaire champions the spirit of industry that pervades his century when he writes, “To work is to live.” And in his famous essay What Is Enlightenment?, Kant defines the project of the Enlightenment as having “the courage to use your own reason.” For him, laziness is associated with cowardice, which is the condition for remaining in what he calls a state of “tutelage.” For Kant, laziness is the primary obstacle to an autonomous life. I was interested, however, in examining a counter-discourse that valorizes laziness. This counter-discourse rejects functionality, resists the ideology of utility, and affirms forms of marginality that radically unsettle the Enlightenment project. What is especially interesting is that some of the same figures in my book who promote laziness are also the ones writing apologies for work and labor. Diderot would be one example, as would Rousseau, who begins to associate laziness with freedom in his later work, especially Reveries of the Solitary Walker. This is also the case with the painter Chardin. Many of his canvases celebrate domestic activity, but then you have the other paintings where work is suspended, and the subjects are distracted—they indulge in relaxation and even indolence. That’s basically the contradiction, the moment of dialectic, that I wanted to explore in the book. But I wanted to leave aside the question of aristocratic idleness, which is of course a given in the eighteenth century. I wanted to confront instead the particular area where laziness and idleness become figures of resistance within bourgeois economy. Is the aristocracy exempted from critiques of laziness?Not exactly. In religious treatises and in a lot of satire, you do see aristocrats being portrayed as lazy, as unproductive. And, of course, during the French Revolution the aristocrat will become the iconic figure of laziness. In 1789, for example, Emmanuel Sieyès formulated, in his influential What Is the Third Estate?, the revolutionary ideas of the nation, which he saw as bound by a common obligation to work. And aristocrats became “strangers” to this common project because they did not produce anything. But the aristocracy is not really affected by the context of the rising bourgeois economy and its values, which is what I’m concerned with. After all, the aristocracy is a class that is exempted from all forms of work. Leisure is an inherent privilege. Are people like Diderot in fact reading the emerging bourgeois theories of economics and labor?We have traces of these theories in the work of someone like Diderot, of the way the discourse of liberal economy is infiltrating the discourse of the philosopher and the encyclopedist. The historian Annie Jacob has written on the alignment between the physiocrats, who were the early economists of the eighteenth century, and the encyclopedists like Diderot. We even find in Diderot allusions to Benjamin Franklin’s writings on economy—the proto-Weberian apology for work. Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack was translated very early on into French as La Science du Bonhomme Richard. When in Rameau’s Nephew —Diderot’s imaginary dialogue between a philosopher and an idler—he portrays the nephew as a parasite, as someone who lives on the margins of the market economy, he knows exactly what he’s doing. But there is a contradiction in Diderot’s work. He certainly belongs to the category of philosophers who promote labor, who want to valorize work. But in Rameau’s Nephew, Diderot creates this unique character who is a hero of non-production—a bohemian musician who does not produce anything that lasts. Diderot shows his admiration for the genius of an artist of unfinished works, for an idler who resists economic finality and is consumed by the present, who refuses employment and subjugation. And it’s interesting that Rameau’s Nephew was written while Diderot was involved in the great busy work of his life, the Encyclopedia, for which he wrote around five thousand entries. There are also entries in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedia that deal with laziness.There are several of them, and they establish a hierarchy; I focus on three. The articles were written by the Chevalier de Jaucourt, who contributed many entries to the encyclopedia. At the lowest level, there is fainéantise, literally “doing nothing,” which is described as the most physical negation of activity,
Books on the Footpath
Kala-Pyacha Though I am yet to witness writers begging on the footpath, their books have long made their way there and have thus been silently facilitating their own journey there at some future point. It is sheer luck that the books have arrived but the authors have not yet. Once born, humans must die; once written, books must arrive on the footpath. This observation is quite scientific, in fact. I know of some eminent and insane people who heartily believe in this theorem. They are also avid footpath book ‘collectors.’ In a few select cities, and such cities are now rare in India, you may often bump into such lost and insane souls. They do not frequent cinema halls or other adda sessions. They do not have time for all that—their heads are filled up with books on the footpath. And most of their fallow time is spent on rummaging through books on the footpath. Often you will find them lost and vigorously trying to spy some pearl within the piles of books that lie strewn on the footpath. Having gone to buy wives’ sarees in the market, they will return with old books instead. I know of a man who is hardly able to run his family but the lure to collect first editions is simply irresistible for him. Nothing much at home, but the one full almirah is stashed with first editions. I have known quite a few people who are dead certain about the scientific thesis that I have just advanced: that books must come to the footpath once written. These collectors keep track of every new book that arrives in the market. But if you happen to ask one of them, “Have you seen that new book, written by so and so?” The inevitable reply will be, “Yes I have been following. The book hit the stands a couple of months ago, right? I sure will buy it; just hoping that it will reach the footpath in 3-4 months’ time.” Even a vegetable vendor will be horrified to hear this, and a writer, hah! What immense faith the soothsayer has in his own conclusion. As if he is the grand astrologer, the raj-jyotishi of each and every book and can easily predict their destiny. I have been fortunate to have known a few of the astrologers of this class. By merely glancing at the book or at the very mention of the author’s name these jolly souls can predict at what point the book will arrive on the footpath at half the original price. It is thus that I have been able to work out some sort of a horoscope of various classes of books from these folks. The half-price dateline looks somewhat like this: Poetry 2 weeks History, Philosophy, Politics, Science, Criticism 3 months Good Novel 6 months Film Gossip & Fiction 1 year Detective & Crime 2 years Pornography 5 years Religious books 5 days I have consulted some rather experienced hands about this distribution, and there has not been too much of a variation in the past 50 odd years. If you have a sense about this particular horoscope, you will naturally be enlightened about the selling power of new books too. They are intricately linked. Look at the last two entry—the number 5 is common; but the rest? Thereby hangs a tale, does it not? I have already proffered this quite scientific thesis about books—that if you venture to write, tablets and pamphlets and books must appear on the footpath. An obvious corollary to this thesis may come from the table above: the quicker a book arrives at the footpath, the less it gets sold in its first hand version and vice versa. The other corollary can be drawn from the first one: that the reader’s relationship with particular genres of books may reflect the nature of a social condition. It is pretty clear that poetry or religion are not visceral genres any more, difficult and serious subjects perhaps bore lay people and there is not even much time to read a good novel. These are no new observations. But that robust imaginative or analytical literature has taken a backseat is not even good news for popular literature, forget the classic. Those who have read the likes of Marquis de Sade or old vernacular fiction/poetry/lyric know well the art and romance of serious pornography, its lazy ruses, and its capacity to complicate relationships. Boisterous, messy, heartbreaking. They take it headlong. So also with religion or