“Myths turn back into concepts: that is decadence.”
~ E.M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay
The backlash against the newly released popular Hindi film, Adipurush is bristling with ironies. The man facing a mob attack on social media for writing the dialogue of the film was regarded till yesterday an able votary of traditionalist sentiments by those who shared them.
Political logic simmers beneath this irony.
The man has gone too far in the eyes of the same people for tampering with linguistic codes proper to the characters of the epic. Any tampering with epic codes will have an epic backlash, the latter being the new epic of cultural nationalism.
Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous description of the nation as “some ancient palimpsest” has a poetic and philosophical quality to it, where the history of culture and thought is visualised in terms of erasure, and a synthetic quality that retains a measure of multiplicity. It is envisaged that the modern history of the nation is enriched by this layered texture of artistic and intellectual culture.
There is however an element of persistence that can’t be ignored within the meaning of this metaphor. It is the persistence of decadence, of that excess in thought and culture whose time and legitimacy has long disappeared, but which refuses to exit.
The decadence of culture has a painfully new dimension today.
In The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler contrasted the classical – which he said “died unknowing” – with the modern, where “we know our history” (my italics). Our decadence is marked by our knowledge of the persistence of the dead remnants of culture. Since culture today thrives on daily doses of visibility, we can see and hear the sounds and images that emit the proofs of decadence.
The appeal of the dialogue writer of Adipurush who swears by his cultural heritage that people must accept informal and interpretative versions of the epic is falling on deaf ears because he reduced informal language to street-slang. It was a brash error of judgement to think a populist version of an epic can indulge in crass profanity.
An epic that is part of Hindu mythology can be recreated through western technology, but symbols can’t be fiddled with by infusing western cultural codes.
For instance: replacing the Pushpak Viman with a bat, transforming Ravana (respected as a powerful devotee of Shiva, but despised for abducting Sita) into a bearded devil, and the gold-studded Lanka into a dark dungeon of evil, cross the line of cultural permissibility. To contemporise by depicting the demons in one’s own head into a story whose temporal distance is part of its sacredness is a crude error.
Also read: ‘Adipurush’ Is Probably the Most Tacky, Derivative and Unnecessary Film of the Year
This is precisely what Cioran understood as decadence: when myth is taken out of its context and put into the service of an ideological programme, to serve the purpose of a politically-driven historical project where the self and the enemy are represented as actors in a mythical battle for power. When myth no longer remains myth, losing its meaning, even history no longer remains history but becomes farce.
Any recreation of a Ramayana must make nostalgia acute, and yet consumable. It must exhibit the grand paradox where an epic is both accessible and inaccessible. To make changes in the codes of language, attire and behaviour is to trespass cultural limits.
The conservative audience received a rude shock: since the codes were made too close to everyday life in the present, the sacred became profane.
The cultural sentimentalist erred gravely in his ambition to manipulate the audience by smuggling in a historical image of the idea of evil. The audience, alas, turned out to be more puritan than experimental. This is the crucial space where populist marketing gimmicks must face the test of reception. The writer, being part of the new mobilisation of cultural glory, misunderstood not just the nature of expectation of his audience, but the audience itself.
These are not safe times to play with culture. Those who decry or critique it are as vulnerable to mob attacks as overzealous enthusiasts. When the train of culture enters a complex field dominated by the combination of vanguard, vainglory and vindictiveness, we are no longer talking of culture. It is a communally charged state of culture, a sign of not merely cultural, but political decadence.
Also read: Neither Hindutva Signalling nor Hanuman Have Saved ‘Adipurush’ From Flopping
Culture has a vigilant, mobile army today. The slightest spark in the inflammable skin of culture can spread all over the body politic and raise a fire alarm. The use of violence in such a scenario (verbal or physical) is exemplary: it is a violence of decadence, a proof against itself, delivered publicly.
The idea of culture in such instances is held to ransom by an organised mob that is both spontaneous and rigidly stable. The mob ensures there cannot be any idea or act of culture that it does not understand. There is a fossilised dictum at play: culture shall interpret you, you can’t interpret culture.
The dialogue writer has naïvely shown his bewilderment on how people he imagined were on his side, his own people, could go against him. All cultural revivalists wrongly imagine a community of shared affectations. Culture is safest in the revivalist industry when it is not allowed to move, or move backwards, towards a nonexistent past. All revivalists suffer another paradox of decadence: they glorify culture by preventing it.
The association with culture is like that of an exotic and sentimental object of possession. Culture dies when it remains exactly the same. The strength of old epics and legends is not one sided. It does not lie only in what they tell us about their time, but how they make us re/imagine ours. Culture is a (critical) conversation. It dies (and stops growing) when it stops speaking to time.
If human imagination can’t tamper with tradition, culture is merely reusable material.
Cioran offers a difficult counsel: “The mistake of those who apprehend decadence is to try to oppose it whereas it must be encouraged: by developing it exhausts itself and permits the advent of other forms.” For now, all that remains as a permanent condition in these times is the groundless fantasy and fear of interpreting culture, the fear of culture itself, fostered by a culture of fear.
Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is an author. His latest book is Nehru and the Spirit of India.
