Empty vessels

Today India is facing gigantic problems. In Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and elsewhere farmers and weavers are committing suicide regularly. Prices of essential commodities are skyrocketing. Unemployment has become massive and chronic; the educated youth can see only darkness in their lives. Water and electricity shortage is widespread. Corruption and fraud are seen everywhere, even in the highest places. Medicines and medical treatment have become prohibitively expensive for the masses. Housing is scarce. The educational system has gone haywire. Law and order has collapsed in many parts of the country where criminals and mafias call the shots.

What, one may ask, has this to do with art and literature?

There are broadly two schools of thought in art and literature. The first is called ‘art for art’s sake’ and the second is called ‘art for social purpose’.

According to the first theory, art and literature are only meant to create beautiful or entertaining works to please and entertain people and the artists themselves; they are not meant to propagate social ideas. If art or literature is used to propagate social ideas it ceases to be art and becomes propaganda. Proponents of this view include John Keats, Alfred Tennyson, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot and Edgar Allan Poe in English and American literature, Agyeya and the Reetikal and Chayavadi poets in Hindi literature, Jigar Moradabadi in Urdu literature and Rabindranath Tagore in Bengali literature.

The other theory is that art and literature should serve the people and help them in their struggle for a better life by arousing people’s emotions against oppression and injustice and increasing their sensitivity regarding people’s suffering. Proponents of this school include Charles Dickens and George Bernard Shaw in English literature, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Upton Sinclair and John Steinbeck in American literature, Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, Gustave Flaubert and Victor Hugo in French, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller and Enrich Maria Remarque in German, Miguel de Cervantes in Spanish, Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Maxim Gorky in Russian, Munshi Premchand and Kabir in Hindi, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay and Kazi Nazrul Islam in Bengali and Nazeer, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Josh Malihabadi and Saadat Hasan Manto in Urdu.

Which of these two theories should be adopted and followed by artists and writers in India today?

Before attempting to answer this question it is necessary to clarify that there have been great artists and writers in both these schools. For instance, William Shakespeare and Kalidas can be broadly classified as playwrights belonging to the first school i.e. ‘art for art’s sake’. Their plays serve no social purpose beyond providing entertainment and understanding of human impulses and motivations. Though he was basically a realist, Shakespeare had no intention of reforming society or combating social evils. Yet undoubtedly Shakespeare is an artist of the highest rank. One is simply amazed by his insight and portrayal of human psychology and the springs of human action. Whether it is his tragedies, his histories or his comedies, one is wonderstruck by his depiction of human nature and human motivations. Be it Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Falstaff, Julius Caesar or Iago – these are all characters so full-blooded that we can recognise them from our own experience as actual human beings in real life.

Similarly, Meghdut by Kalidas is nature and love poetry at its highest. The poet’s depictions of the North Indian countryside are astonishing in their sheer beauty. Even William Wordsworth, the English nature poet, cannot come anywhere near it. Nevertheless, Kalidas has no social purpose in his works.

On the other hand, George Bernard Shaw writes his plays almost exclusively with a social purpose in mind – to combat social evils and reform society. Whether it is Major Barbara or The Doctor’s Dilemma, or Mrs Warren’s Profession or Misalliance or Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, his plays are a powerful denunciation of social injustices and evils. Similarly, Charles Dickens in his novels attacks the social evils in England in his time, the terrible conditions of schools, jails, orphanages, the judicial system and so on.

Shakespeare or Shaw? Who is the greater artist? The first represents ‘art for art’s sake’, the second ‘art for social purpose’. We shall attempt an answer but a little later.

Literature – the art of the word, the art that is closest to thought – is distinguished from other forms of art, such as painting and music, by the greater emphasis on thought content as compared to form. On the other hand, an art such as classical music may be almost entirely devoted to creating a mood rather than arousing any thought. For instance, the main form of serious North Indian classical music, which is called khayal, has hardly any thought content (since very few words are used in it) but it has an almost unbelievable power to create a mood and arouse aesthetic feelings.

Whether it is the monsoon raga called Malhar (there are many varieties of Malhar, the main one being Mian Ka Malhar though I am personally more fond of Megh Malhar) which can make one feel that it is raining, or the morning ragas like Jaunpuri, Todi and Bhairav which wake you gently, or night ragas like Darbari or Malkauns (called Hindola in Carnatic music) which gently put you to sleep, or a raga like Bhairavi which can be sung or played at any time and in any season and is astonishing for its sheer beauty, or a large variety of other ragas which create other moods.

There are other styles of North Indian classical music, like thumri, in which there is more thought content because they use more words than khayal. However, there is no style or raga in North Indian or Carnatic classical music which arouses the emotion of fighting against social injustices. It is pure art for art’s sake and yet it is undoubtedly great art.

Art critics often regard the two basic trends or tendencies in art and literature as realism and romanticism. The truthful, undistorted depiction of people and their social conditions is called realism while in romanticism the emphasis is on flights of imagination, passion and emotional intensity.

Both realism and romanticism can be either passive or active. Passive realism usually aims at a truthful depiction of reality without preaching anything as, for instance, in the novels of Jane Austen, George Eliot or the Brontë sisters. In this sense it can be called socially neutral. However, at times passive realism preaches fatalism, passivity, non-resistance to evil, suffering, humility, etc. An example of this is Tolstoy’s depiction of the meek peasant, Platon Karatayev, in War and Peace, who humbly and cheerfully accepts his fate, or in Thomas Hardy’s pessimistic novels like Tess of the d’Urbervilles or Far from the Madding Crowd.

Some writers were initially active but later became passive; Dostoevsky, for instance, who in Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot and elsewhere powerfully expressed the rebellion of the individual against the forces fettering him but ended up by calling ‘proud man’ to humility. On the other hand, a writer like Tolstoy was a fatalist in his earlier novel, War and Peace, but became a social reformer in his later work, Resurrection.

Dickens, Hugo, Gorky, Sarat Chandra and others belong to the school of active realists. They oppose fatalism, passivity and non-resistance to evil and instead inspire people to fight against social evils. For instance, in Mother, Gorky describes the transformation of the oppressed. In it men and women of the Russian common people straighten their backs, purge their souls of the traces left by centuries of oppression and of everything that suppressed or distorted the sterling potential in human beings, which was only waiting to be liberated. Pavel Vlasov and his mother are such people. Similarly, in the stories and novels of the great Bengali writer, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, we find a powerful attack on the oppression of women and against the caste system (see Shrikant, Brahman Ki Beti, Gramin Samaj, etc).

The strength of passive realism lay in its exposure of human motivations and social evils but its weakness lay in its lack of positive principles or ideals (as seen in the works of Émile Zola, Hippolyte Taine and others). This literature was valuable because of its truthful approach to reality, concentrating on meticulous description of the visible and real (e.g. Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, which is commonly regarded as the first realistic novel) but it showed the people no way out of their predicament. It criticised everything but asserted nothing. And it often viewed man from a fatalistic point of view, as a mere passive product of his surroundings, helpless and incapable of changing his social conditions.

Passive and active realism can both serve a social purpose. But whereas passive realism often preaches fatalism, pessimism and uselessness of endeavours to improve society, active realism is optimistic, characterised by its solicitude and concern for the people, inspiring them to strive against their plight and improve their social conditions.

In great writers like Shakespeare, Balzac, Tolstoy or Mirza Ghalib it is often difficult to define with sufficient accuracy whether they are romantics or realists. Both trends merge in their works and in fact the highest art is often a combination of the two.

Romanticism, like realism, can be either passive or active. Passive romanticism attempts to divert people from reality into a world of pure fantasy or illusions or to a fruitless preoccupation with one’s own inner world, with thoughts about the ‘fatal riddle of life’ or about dreams of love and death. Its characters may be knights, princes, demons, fairies and the like who exist in a world of make-believe (as in the novels of the Hindi writer, Devki Nandan Khatri, such as Chandrakanta Santati and Bhootnath, which were very popular at one time). Much of the Reetikal Hindi poetry, which was mainly written to please kings and princes and which deals with subjects like beauty (shringar) and love, belongs to this category. Passive romanticism thus hardly serves any social purpose.

Active romanticism, on the other hand, attempts to arouse man against the evils in society, for example, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Prometheus Unbound’, Heinrich Heine’s ‘Enfant Perdu’, Gorky’s ‘Song of the Stormy Petrel’ and the poems of the great Urdu writer, Faiz. It thus clearly serves a social purpose. Active romanticism rises above reality not by ignoring it but by seeking to transform it. It regards literature as having a greater purpose than merely to reflect reality and depict existing things. Jean Jacques Rousseau’s novels Émile and Julie, or the New Héloïse are good examples of this school.

It may also be mentioned that ‘art for social purpose’ may be expressed not always in a direct way but also sometimes in an indirect, roundabout or obscure manner, by satire, for example. In this connection, reference can be made to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels or A Tale of a Tub, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Voltaire’s Candide and Zadig among others. Much of Urdu poetry, which mostly serves a social purpose (as it attacks oppressive customs and practices the way Kabir’s poetry did), is expressed not in a direct but in an indirect way, as seen in the works of Mir Taqi Mir, Ghalib, Faiz and several others.

Similarly, ‘art for social purpose’ can also be clothed in religious garb, like much of the Bhakti poetry in Hindi.

We now come back to the question posed earlier. Should artists and writers in India follow the school of ‘art for art’s sake’ or ‘art for social purpose’? As mentioned earlier, both schools have produced great artists and writers. What we have to think of however is which school would be more beneficial to our country in today’s historical situation. Thus the question of who is greater as an artist, Shakespeare or Shaw (I personally think Shakespeare is greater) is not very relevant in India today.

In a poor country like India, I believe the second theory (‘art for social purpose’) is the only one acceptable today. Our country is facing the tremendous challenge of abolishing poverty, unemployment, inflation, ignorance, casteism, communalism, a myriad social evils, and hence artists and writers must join the ranks of those who are struggling for a better India. They must inspire the people by their works and use their crafts against oppression and injustice.

What however is the scenario before us today? The truth is that there is little or no quality art or literature to be found in today’s India. Where is the Sarat Chandra, the Premchand, the Faiz of today? Where is the Kabir or Dickens of today? Contemporary Indian society seems to exist in an artistic and literary vacuum. Every skill seems to have become commercialised. Writers write not to highlight the plight of the masses but only to earn some money, for television or cinema.

Some Hindi writers complain that Hindi magazines are closing down. Have they ever wondered why? Evidently, no one is interested in reading what they write because they do not depict the people’s suffering and do not inspire people to struggle for a better life. When Maxim Gorky, the great Russian writer, stepped out onto the streets of Russia he was mobbed by the masses, people who idolised him because he wrote about their lives and championed their cause. Can a Hindi writer today make a similar claim? When writers are out of touch with the people and live in a world of their own it is no wonder that no one wants to read what they write.

People in India today are thirsty for good literature. If someone wrote about the people’s real problems it would spread like wildfire. But are our writers doing this? If not, why do they complain that Hindi magazines are closing down?

Art and literature must serve the people. Writers must have genuine sympathy for the people and depict their suffering. And moreover, like Dickens and Shaw in England, Rousseau and Voltaire in France, Thomas Paine and Walt Whitman in America, Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Gorky in Russia and Sarat Chandra and Nazrul Islam in Bengal they must inspire people to struggle for a better life, a life that can really be called a human existence, and to create a better world, free of injustices, social and economic. Only then will the people respect them.

The concept of ‘art for social purpose’ in its active sense, the use of art and literature to reform society, is largely of recent origin. It could hardly arise prior to the industrial revolution, during the feudal age when the very thought that men could themselves improve or change their social conditions was rare. The belief in feudal times was that whatever has existed or will exist in future was ordained by god or destiny and man had no role in this connection. It was the advent of the industrial revolution that introduced the thought that man could indeed change his social conditions with the help of science and scientific thinking. Hence almost all art up to and during the feudal age (e.g. Sanskrit verse and drama) was art for art’s sake or else art for social purpose only in the passive sense, to preach that man should accept his lot ordained by god or destiny.

Now that the scientific age has genuinely dawned, and man can change his social conditions by his own efforts, art too should help in this great endeavour. Art for arts’ sake in poor countries like India, where the vast masses live in poverty and other terrible social conditions, amounts in fact to escapism.

Writers in Hindi, Urdu and other Indian languages should use simple language. Hindi and Urdu should both come closer to Khari Boli (or Hindustani) which is the people’s language. Some Hindi books are difficult to understand because they are written in difficult (klisht) language. The same is true of some Urdu writings. If what is being said or written is not even comprehensible, what purpose does such literature serve? Great literature uses the simplest language, like the wartime speeches of Winston Churchill or in the stories of Premchand and Sarat Chandra.

Having dealt with the role of art and literature we may now consider the role of the media.

What do we see on television these days? TV channels that concentrate on film stars, pop music, discos and fashion parades, astrology or cricket. Is it not a cruel irony and an affront to our poor that so much time (and money) is spent on broadcasting something far removed from their reality? How do the Indian masses, who face severe economic crises on a daily basis, connect with cricket, film stars, fashion parades, disco and pop?

I am constrained to say that the Indian media today is largely guilty of irresponsible conduct; it is not serving the Indian people in their struggle against poverty, unemployment and other social evils as it should.

Historically, the media was born as an organ of the people against feudal oppression. In Europe, the media played a major role in the transformation of a feudal society into a modern one. The print media’s invaluable role in preparations for and events during the great British, American and French revolutions is well known. The print media, the only mass media in existence at the time, was used to good effect by writers like Rousseau, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Junius, John Wilkes and others in the people’s fight against feudalism and despotism. The stirs created by Paine’s pamphlet, Common Sense, during the American revolution or by the Letters of Junius during the despotic reign of Britain’s George III are also well known.

The media became a powerful tool in the hands of the people at that time because the people could not express themselves through the established organs of power which were controlled by feudal and despotic rulers. Thus the people had to create new organs that would serve them. It is for this reason that the print media became known as the fourth estate. In Europe and America, it represented the voice of the future as contrasted with the feudal or despotic organs that wanted to preserve the status quo in society.

In the 20th century other types of media have emerged: radio and television, the electronic media.

What should the role of the media be? This is a matter of great importance to our country today as it faces immense problems of poverty, unemployment, corruption and more.

To my mind, in underdeveloped countries like India the media has a great responsibility to fight backward ideas like casteism and communalism and to help the people in their struggle against poverty and other social evils. Since a large section of the people is backward and ignorant it is all the more necessary that modern ideas must be brought to them and their backwardness removed so that they become part of an enlightened India. The media has a great responsibility in this respect.

Underdeveloped countries like India are passing through a transitional age between a feudal society and a modern industrial society. This is a very painful, very distressful period. A study of the history of England during the 17th and 18th centuries and of France during the 18th and 19th centuries shows that the transitional period was full of turbulence and turmoil, revolutions and intellectual ferment. It was only after going through the fire that modern society emerged in Europe. India is going through this fire today. The barbaric ‘honour killings’ of young men and women in districts of western Uttar Pradesh like Meerut and Muzaffarnagar to prevent inter-caste marriages is but one of several instances that illustrate how backward we still are, a society plagued by casteism and communalism.

Our national aim must therefore be to get over this transitional period as quickly as possible, reducing the agony that is inevitable during this time. Our aim must be to create an India that is a modern, powerful industrial state, for only then will we be able to provide for the welfare of our people and gain respect from the global community.

Today the real world is cruel and harsh. It respects power, not poverty or weakness. When China and Japan were poor nations they were derisively called the ‘yellow’ races by the western nations. Today nobody dares to call them that because they are strong industrial states. Similarly, if we wish our country to gain respect among the comity of nations we must make it highly industrialised and prosperous. For this purpose a powerful cultural struggle, a struggle in the realm of ideas, must be waged by our patriotic, modern-minded intelligentsia. This cultural struggle must be waged by combating feudal and backward ideas like casteism and communalism and replacing them with modern, scientific ideas among the masses.

Art, literature and the media all have a vital role to play in this cultural struggle, as already mentioned above. But are they really performing this role?

The sad truth in India today is that of a total disconnect between the mass media and mass reality. I reproduce below a few facts from a speech delivered by P. Sainath, rural affairs editor of The Hindu and Magsaysay award winner, as part of the Speaker’s Lecture Series held at Parliament House on September 6, 2007.

The mass reality in India (which has over 70 per cent of its people living in rural areas) is that rural India is in the midst of the worst agrarian crisis in four decades. Millions of livelihoods in the rural areas have been damaged or destroyed in the last 15 years as a result of this crisis caused by the predatory commercialisation of the countryside and the reduction of all human values to exchange value. As a result, lakhs of farmers have committed suicide and millions of people have migrated, and are migrating, from the rural areas to cities and towns in search of jobs that are not there.

They have moved towards a status which is neither ‘worker’ nor ‘farmer’ but many of them end up as domestic labourers or even criminals. We have been pushed towards corporate farming, a process by which farming is taken out of the hands of the farmers and positioned in corporate hands. This process is not being achieved with guns, tanks, bulldozers and lathis. It is done by making farming unviable for the millions of small family farm holders due to the high cost of inputs (seed, fertiliser, power, etc) and uneconomic prices.

India ranked fourth in the list of dollar billionaires but 126th in human development. This means that it is better to be a poor person in Bolivia (the poorest nation in South America) or Guatemala or Gabon rather than in India. Of a total population of between 110 and 120 crore people, 83.6 crore people in India subsist on less than Rs 20 a day. Life expectancy in our nation is lower than it is in Bolivia, Kazakhstan and Mongolia. According to the National Sample Survey, the average monthly per capita expenditure of the Indian farm household is Rs 503. Out of that Rs 503, 55 per cent is spent on food and 18 per cent on fuel, clothing and footwear, leaving precious little to spend on education or health.

The world report of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations shows that from 1995-97 to 1999-2001 India added more newly hungry millions than the rest of the world taken together. The average rural family is consuming 100 kg less than what they were consuming earlier. Indebtedness has doubled in the past decade. Cultivation cost has increased exorbitantly and farming incomes have collapsed, leading to wide-scale suicides by farmers.

While there were 512 accredited journalists covering the Lakme India Fashion Week, there were only six journalists to cover the suicides in Vidarbha. At the fashion show models displayed cotton garments while the men and women who grew the cotton were killing themselves in the Vidarbha region, an hour’s flight away from Nagpur. No one told that story but for one or two local journalists.

Is this a responsible way for the Indian media to function? Should the media turn a Nelson eye to the harsh realities in which over 75 per cent of our people live and concentrate instead on a few ‘Potemkin villages’ where all is glamour and showbiz? Is the Indian media not behaving like Marie Antoinette who when told that the people did not have bread said that they should eat cake?

Although the media does occasionally report on the farmers’ suicides in Maharashtra, the rise in prices of essential commodities and other issues of grave concern, this constitutes only a very small part, five to 10 per cent perhaps, of its reportage. The bulk of its coverage is dedicated to cricket, the lives of film stars, pop music, fashion parades, astrology and so on. Is this not really an attempt to divert the attention of the Indian people from the real issues, which are basically economic, to non-issues of a frivolous nature?

Some TV channels show cricket round the clock throughout the year. In India, cricket really is the opium of the masses. The Roman emperors said "If you cannot give the people bread, give them circuses". This is precisely the approach of the Indian establishment. Keep the people involved in cricket so that they forget their economic and social plight. What is important is not price rise or unemployment or poverty or lack of housing or medicines, what is important is whether India has beaten New Zealand (or better still, Pakistan) in a cricket match or whether Tendulkar or Ganguly have scored a century. Is this not sheer escapism?

Art, literature and the media in our country today must do their part to help the people in their struggle against the prevalent social evils and to make India a progressive, influential, industrial nation.

For this purpose, scientific thinking must be promoted because, in my opinion, science alone is the means for solving our country’s problems. And I would clarify here that by science I do not mean physics, chemistry and biology alone. I mean an overall scientific outlook that must be spread widely among our people. Our people must develop rational, logical and questioning minds and must abandon superstitions and escapism and for this purpose the media can and must play a powerful role.

Many TV channels today show programmes on astrology day in and day out. In my view, astrology is nothing but superstition and utter humbug. Even elementary common sense tells us that the movement of the stars and planets can have no rational connection with our lives and cannot determine whether one will become a lawyer or a doctor or an engineer or will die at the age of 40, 50 or 60. And yet, although astrology is totally unscientific, several TV channels actively propagate it, which, I believe, is against the national interest.