Nirmal Verma
(Translated from Hindi by Alok Bhalla)
W
hy does man feel that he is a stranger in the universe? This has been an obsessive theme of much of modern literature. In recent years, the question seems to have acquired an additional significance as a result of the dominant feeling of rootlessness caused by successive waves of migrations of people from their native lands either in search of livelihood, or because of political persecutions and racial terror. Uprooted from his own natural habitat, man becomes increasingly uncertain about his own identity. If man’s sense of self-identity is grounded in his sense of belonging, forcible or voluntary, from his world of childhood, language and religion would lead to a profound feeling of loss.
This is all true and has been adequately explained by modern sociologists and historians. And yet, a doubt persists that all such academic narratives relating to man’s alienation only touch the surface of a malaise, whose roots lie much deeper than in the mere physical or geographical ‘rootlessness.’ How is it that the feeling of ‘estrangement’ is experienced by societies and individuals who enjoy a relatively stable existence and who have never suffered the misfortune of being displaced from their familiar surroundings? How can one explain the spiritual homelessness of a man who has never left his home? Indeed, there are instances, where the excessive familiarity of one’s environment, the suffocating feeling of being ‘rooted,’ the mental vertigo generated by the habitual repetitiveness of life rhythms which throws a man into panic, makes him feel that he is living in a nightmare, persuading him to make a flight into darkness where everything is unknown, strange and alien? I find it awkward to speak of my work. But just to illustrate the point, I am reminded of a recent story of mine, in which a man suddenly decides to leave his home and relatives and start an entirely different life of seclusion in a remote hill-station. Years later, when his brother finally tracks him down, he flatly denies that he had any ‘reasons,’ or if he had any, they were not clear to him.
Thus, there may not be any apparent reason for feeling ‘alien’ in the world, though there can be any number of external factors contributing to its aggravation. We often speak about and discuss the crisis of identity caused by these factors, but hardly bother to define the nature of the identity which constitutes man.
Could we say that it is the ‘self’ which the man is seeking in order to be assured that he is human? Is it the ‘loss of self’ which constitutes the crisis of self-recognition in each human being? Perhaps, this is much nearer to the truth than all other forms of uprootedness. Being human, it is certainly more usual to feel ‘at loss’ than to feel ‘lost’ as a Jew, a German, an Arab or an Indian.
What exactly do I mean by the ‘loss of self’ and why do I feel that the existential experience of emptiness it causes could only be described in literature? I think both these questions are intertwined. After all man reveals himself only through his actions, the way his self relates to the world outside. What we regard as the ‘essential self’ of man is neither a fixed phenomenon, nor an abstract notion. It consists of a series of actions which are either usually inconsistent with one another, or are incoherent and driven by contradictory motives. Man cannot be reduced to “an actor with one role,” because the role assigned to him consists of multiple identities clashing with one another. Literature provides the battlefield where through such inner conflicts we get a glimpse of human nature. This seems to be an impossible task. Can we reach the inner self of man through his acts which in themselves are self-contradictory? It was this despair which led a modern philosopher to say that man has no nature, he only has a history.
And, yet, if despite this despair, literature has imposed the task of describing this sense of alienation upon itself, it has reasons. Man’s nature is not exhausted merely by his actions; it also consists of the way he looks at them. He can be at once inside and outside his action; that is what Krishna asked Arjuna to do in the battlefield of Kurukshetra. The notion of looking at oneself from the ‘outside,’ as a detached observer, a drashta, is peculiar to the Indian tradition. It arises, not by cutting oneself off from the web of relationships, from sansara, as is usually understood, or misunderstood. On the contrary, the power to look at oneself from the outside is not something transcendental but is deeply entrenched within the ‘self’ itself. It is the most fundamental attribute of man’s identity on this earth. What exactly is this power and in what way does it govern man’s actions? This is the question, which has haunted literature from the very beginning of time.
The answer cannot be sought in the will of the individual; at least that is what the tradition from which I come tells me. In any moment of crisis, man ought to act in the same way as he had in the past under similar circumstances. The great Indian epic, Mahabharata, is replete with instances in which the past is invoked in order to find a way out of the most agonizing moral dilemmas. The identity of a man is a myth, an empty illusion, unless it draws its content from the way man has always been, from that which constitutes his parampara, from the past, which flows into the present. So the ‘past’ is not something dead and gone-by, it co-exists with man’s present. To be uprooted from one’s past, as Simone Weil has pointed out, is the worst form of self-alienation. It deprives man of the only thing which connects him with his ancestors, his memory. Memory is a moment of recognition which at the same time defines one’s self. Nothing could be more grievous than atma vismriti, self forgetfulness, for it is both an act of betrayal and blasphemy; it violates that which constitutes the most sacred aspect of man’s identity as a human being.
This also explains why rites and rituals play such a vital role in the so-called traditional societies, for it is through them that man personalizes that which is alien, the other and the non-self. And this act of personalization goes beyond the human world. It includes within its luminous intimacy the entire vast non-human universe. Social realism is far too constricted a device to encompass within its imagination the drama of continual transactions that have been going on between man and his non-human jeev lok. Indeed, the myths of different cultures are nothing but “signals in the dark” to communicate with this world. I feel that the sense of uprootedness of modern man lies precisely in feeling so forlorn and orphaned because he has lost the meanings which these signals once contained, brought what seemed ‘beyond’ man into the realms of his self-awareness.
Doesn’t then the ‘loss of self’ consist of, in some significant way, the loss of the sense of ‘beyond’ itself?
Let me be more explicit: if the ‘idea of beyond’ were merely a conceptual construct or a matter of religious faith, it could have been left to philosophers or religious thinkers to reflect upon. And, indeed, there are philosophers like Heidegger and Paul Tillich who have dwelt upon the problem with great concern and penetrative insight. And yet even in their best moments, philosophy and religion seem to remain at ‘second remove’ from the experience of ‘alienness.’ Meditations on the concepts of ‘Being’ and ‘God’ are important in their own way, but they can neither compensate for, nor illuminate, the ‘terror of loss’ which modern man feels in the innermost recesses of his own self. Only in imaginative literature can it be depicted with all its complexity and magnitude, for in literature the ‘beyond’ is conceived not as some transcendental power, over and above the human situation, but as something entrenched and in-built within the texture of human relationships.
Since literature is primarily concerned with the exploration of ‘truth’ as it emerges in the very process of living, it can never evade the problem of meaning. Can meaning be found if man, for reasons mentioned above, feels estranged from the sense of the ‘beyond’ guiding him at every moment of crises? To recover the ‘beyond’ in one earthly and ephemeral life, then becomes the quest to recover one’s own self.
For me as a writer, the question of uprootedness is inevitably linked with the question of the ‘self.’ It goes into the very heart of the problem of man’s identity as a human being on earth. All other forms of ‘alienation’ become secondary to it.
Thus, what seemed to us in the beginning an existential question acquires a moral urgency, which unfortunately much of the modern literature lacks. If modern literature appears to be so thin and impoverished in its content, it is not because it doesn’t seek answers but because it doesn’t even attempt to pose these questions.
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Notes Courtesy: https://web.archive.org/web/20080516093929/http:/www.museindia.com/showcont.asp?id=238 --From: Alok Bhalla (ed) India and Europe: Selected Essays. IIAS, 2000. Pages 53-56. --Main visual photo image of Heavy Despair by S.L. Parashar is not part of the original essay --On S.L. Parashar in The Beacon read Portraits of Unspeakable Anguish
Nirmal Verma (3 April 1929 – 25 October 2005) was a Hindi writer, novelist, activist and translator. He is credited as being one of the pioneers of the Nai Kahani (New Story) literary movement of Hindi literature, wherein his first collection of stories, Parinde (Birds) is considered its first signature. In his career spanning five decades and various forms of literature, like story, travelogue and essays, he penned five novels, eight short-story collections and nine books of non-fiction, including essays and travelogues
Alok Bhalla is at present, a visiting professor of English at Jamia Millia Islamia. He is the author of Stories About the Partition of India (3 Vols.). He has also translated Dharamvir Bharati’s Andha Yug, Intizar Husain’s A Chronicle of the Peacocks (both from OUP) and Ram Kumar’s The Sea and Other Stories into English.
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