[Reader-list] aesthetic of indifference

[tarunksaint]

Friends, 

Why discuss poetry (including the P.M.'s) while Hindu -Muslim marriages are being targeted in Gujarat (eerily reminiscent of Kamleshwar's story Kitne Pakistan)? When brazen statements are boldly being made about the need to send all the Muslims of Gujarat across the border? When Gandhi is being targeted once again as the figure to blame for the unfinished business of partition?

Perhaps the clue to the answers to these questions may lie in a debate initiated by the Bosnian Muslim writer Dzevad Karahasan. Amitav Ghosh (in his piece 'The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi') cites an essay on 'Literature and War' in a collection of essays on Sarajevo, in which Karahasan raises the important connection between the aesthetic of indifference in literature and the contemporary world's indifference to violence. 'The decision to perceive literally everything as an aesthetic phenomenon-- completely sidestepping questions about goodness and truth-- is an artistic decision. The decision started in the realm of art, and went on to become characteristic of the contemporary world.'

The aestheticization of violence is a contemporary phenomenon we have come to take for granted. Karahasan allows us to see the ways in which what happens in language anticipates what happens in the real world. The surfeit of kitsch, the glib climaxes and formulaic explanations of complex historical phenomena in much current writing are thus precursors to an a evisceration of feeling in the domain of human interaction. There is no question that the PM's poetry is implicated in this process. Songs can be sung, or turned off, as at Goa recently, at will, in a mechanical attempt at manipulation of public opinion. An indication, perhaps, of the consequences of writers reneging on their commitment to 'goodness and truth', is the readiness of so many of us to sidestep the fascist logic that this pseudo-sentimentality actually conceals, as we shrug our shoulders and move on to the next episode of the serial on T.V . 



Rgds,

Tarun

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