Humanities Underground

This Beautiful Parable of the May-Be Land

Prasanta Chakravarty     आँखों देखी—The film begins with flying and ends in flying. A man takes a leap off a cliff and piercing wind brushes against his face and lo, he is a bird! Elevated and detached, this man is soaring, gliding, winging his way to a liberating flight. By releasing his body. By unlocking his senses. We are invited to take that leap along with him, where the achingly lyrical and the sharply intellectual jostle and beckon us. A leap into a world of childlike whimsicality. But also into hardboiled and sensory matter of factness. That leap takes place at many levels. Most notably we are invited to partake in a sensual, romantic and amoral crossover. And if I may venture, this dare recovers a crucial, lost and esoteric world view, through a beautiful parable moored right in our present, right amidst ourselves in the by-lanes of old and crusty Delhi. Crucial because it brings to attention our own lyrical modernity at a time when this word, modern, has become turgid or is being constantly, sometimes viciously, being bombarded from various quarters—philosophically, socially, formally. Likewise, the term romantic seems to have lost its sheen and shine. The film goes to the root of the modern sensibility—revealing that rambling, travelling, whimsical, restless, obstinate spirit of freedom amidst what seems mundane and routine. This parable of the everyday also powerfully takes head on the tired metaphors of our banal certainties—surpassing ethics, varieties of political opportunism, and the bankruptcy and orthodoxy of those who dabble in social justice, ossified metaphysical and moral certitude, utilitarian celebrations of consumption. Naturally, every world-view has its own finitude and limitation and this one is no exception. But there are reasons to hold up this richly subtle film at a time when mediocrity and smartness are more or less the mainstays of ‘new’ cinema. लड़का गौ है —The Boy is a Simpleton This is Bauji’s fable, the story of his twin flock: one makes the home—his garrulous, loving, conservative wife, his two highly sensitive children—young adults really—and his younger brother’s family. The hearth is one— एक घर एक चूल्हा. Then there is Bauji’s workplace, a world peopled by small-time travel agents and customers. And also his neighbourly acquaintances—the masterji and the pandit, the kirana grocer and the mohalla loafer— a few of whom will eventually become part of his select sect of believers in the senses (eye is a metaphor) and in the maddening unbelief that such a position must spawn and uphold. This, at a more social level. But the narrative is about another subterranean story—the discovering of a sensory, sceptical and experiential germ within Bauji’s own self, and trying to live life and choose death by responding faithfully to such stimuli. The eye becomes the metaphor here. The family discovers that their daughter is in love and the father (Bauji) discovers, with his own eyes, that the lover boy is a lovely chap, a simpleton— लड़का गौ है, he confides to his wife—the young suitor is more of a lamb actually and not a threat to their daughter at all. That’s it. This is an extraordinary revelation. A joyous realization. And a decision is taken. Bauji will henceforth trust none: laws-dicta-dogma-statute-hearsay-news-science-debate-polemics-lecture-hectoring-bullying-suasion-emotional atyachar. Nothing. Save his senses and the experience that passes through such sense perception. And he will spread whimsical happiness, needlessly.  Thereafter the narrative is a ride through this singular commitment to verification; a paean to lived, sensuous experience. Leading to one’s यथार्थ through अनुभूति.  Truth, यथार्थ, is therefore piecemeal, infinite and subjective. But such a steadfast belief in experiential verification leads neither to systematic suspicion nor to any highlighting of the ego. Far from it. It leads rather to a quirky, endearing but contrarian world; a world that celebrates throbbing, giving relationships. Bauji declares that one has to first unlearn habits in order to enter this new world— सब कुछ सच्चा होगा, सब कुछ अच्छा होगा—henceforth, everything will be true and everything will be good. कलाकंद था—It was a Kalakand This is what one may call claritas— साफ़ नजरिया, as a song in the film puts it; there is new buoyancy in his gait, a new conviction in his dealings. The local panditji offers him some prashad and the sceptical Bauji comes to the conclusion that it is nothing but sweetmeat – कलाकंद था, it was kalakand a minute ago—but after he gobbles up the sweet, now it is plain matter. Matter is vibrant. As Leon Kass has said elsewhere: “…we do not become the something that we eat; rather the edible gets assimilated to what we are…the edible object is thoroughly transformed by and reformed into the eater.” 1 A journey in radical material romanticism begins by celebrating life as food—the kalakand inaugurates a new sunshine (आज लागि लागि नयी धूप) whose magic is matchless (जादू है अनूप). Bauji stops worshipping altogether. And as one bystander says, by taking this step: ‘पंडितजी को टेंशन दे दिया’ | This sense of unease in the priest arises from the latter’s realization that Bauji is actually hinting that all knowledge comes from our fallible senses. God, spiritual power and such things do not have much sway once you are in this zone. We can never penetrate the secrets of appearances—that is a realization. One must therefore revel in the senses, in our touched-and felt known environment. One must ingest and imbibe every bit of the sensual, fully. And through this immersion in the senses you drink life, deeply—to the lees. And it then follows that all judgement depends on sense perceptions—dynamic, active senses. Long ago Pierre Gassendi characterized such a sensual sceptic as a “…hunter who does not pursue wild animal sluggishly like an onlooker but hunts with keen senses and tracks it down zealously.”2. Bauji is a now a happy hunter. Such a realization is a direct challenge to the whole enterprise of phenomenology.  And it turns sensual consumption on its head and encourages dissipation. (No wonder this film is the complete and