The author is indebted to filmmaker Kumar Shahani for enlightening him on the epic form which he so subtly achieves in his films. This essay is dedicated to his memory.
It was only when I grew young that I came to know, strange though it may be, that my elder sister is actually Father’s elder brother. My eldest brother is Father’s father. Our house was full of stories around these facts, some old dreams also circulated in the air of the house, turning these facts into tangible realities. Father’s elder brother, who died many years ago, had the habit of chewing tobacco. My sister could also chew tobacco when she was not more than two or three years old. The family felt that she used to talk to her mother – our mother – not how a daughter would talk to her mother, but like an elder of the house talking to her bahu (daughter-in-law). When Father was dying in hospital two decades ago, he called his eldest son, perhaps for the last time, and the son responded, “Yes, my son!”
Father is said to have remained quiet for a few moments and then whispered, perhaps one of his last sentences, “Of course, you would address me like that, after all you are my father!” He died believing that he was being given farewell not only by his son but also by his father. Or rather by his father who is also his son.
My sister feels Father has returned, years after his death, in my son. She actually thinks that he is Father. I am sure someone in the family must have, by now, seen the return of my mother in one of the children born after her death. Everyone in the family – of what is left after a number of deaths – is sure that my dead wife, Anjana, has come back into our lives through my granddaughter Abhima. Whenever she tells me anything firmly, my present wife smiles.
One is never sure of the real identity of any of the family members. The age at which some ancestor is going to be reborn in a living family member is uncertain. So, one always relates ambivalently not only to other members in a family but even to oneself.
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A number of Indian houses have such persons living in them who are not only themselves but also someone else.
I hear that some traditional Japanese houses have rooms which are built for the dead to live in. Such rooms are kept vacant for such a purpose; an invitation to those who have deserted their earthly cloaks, an invitation for them to come in whatever form they are in and live invisibly in the house.
In India, too, there are some tribal communities where the dead of the village are given some memorial stone or wooden pillars to reside in.
The narrative with which this essay began does not belong to only one family. I hear such narratives quite often. It is perhaps a very common narrative to be found in many traditional families in India. Such narratives, along with certain others, lend a kind of open-endedness to the family. I would like to call the family living through such narratives a family with an epic form – or an epic family. In such families, one of the modes by which it endlessly extends itself and yet remains in a form is the functional presence of reincarnation. There might be some other ways also. Call it a method or the technology of the generation of epic family.
I am using the word epic in very definite and also limited sense here. Epic, in its Indian sense, suggests an open-endedness, it is a form without definite beginning or an end, a form without structure, which can include any number of digressions in it and is therefore richly inter-textual.
In a very similar manner, the practice of reincarnation transforms the family space into a meeting place of various times – time not as memories or desires but as presences, a place where identities are rendered doubtful and ambivalent. If one is not only oneself but also someone else then the question of identity becomes a difficult one. Not only that but even the identity of those who are related to such a person are rendered equally doubtful and uncertain. Fluidity of identities does not allow atomisation of the family members, they remain associated to each other through more than one relations: a father does not only remain the father of his son, he can at the same time be his son’s son, or his son’s younger brother and such like. His identity and authority as a father gets subverted incessantly through the practice of reincarnation. The flow of authority becomes multi-directional; every member plays more than one role even to each other; thereby, each one starts living on more than one level of authority.
Family becomes not a space of justice but of experience and tolerance, of decoding each other and thereby, decoding oneself in more than one ways: if I am not only myself but also someone else then what is the texture of this I. Such a family is the space where real and fictional have coalesced into each other; therefore, it is a unique space for its members, not only functionally where people have come together for the sake of security and livelihood or pure biological continuity, but as a space of rites where multiple presences and times are experienced, where lives on this side of death and those on the that side of death both make themselves tangibly present, a space in society and history and yet something beyond it because the practice of things like reincarnation opens the doors of family to times other than the present. A kind of open-endedness is brought into the structure of the family, a kind of rupture is created in its walls from where rigid historicity leaks out paving the path of multiple temporalities to enter like light beams into the family space.
The dead are brought back into the family, not as memory but as presences, as continuing solace. Or in other words, the dead are rendered deathless!
Such is the scene of the epic family. Such is the role the practice of reincarnation has played – and is still playing – in the formation of the family.
But reincarnation is receding into the recesses of reason. The epic family is fast losing its vitality and form. Rationality is made to replace the practice of reincarnation which is gradually being subjected to rational analysis and through that, it is being relegated to the category of superstition. The dead are hesitating to reveal themselves in the family spaces. Fictional might start bidding farewell to the real.
I am perhaps writing a swan song for the epic family. Or is there some possibility of its survival left? Or has the epic family already started finding some alternate technology for its formation?
Postscript:
My writer friend Madan Soni asks after reading this essay if I am advocating for the epic family. My answer is that this is not an ethical attempt I’m making. I’m aware that there are and can be other ways of making space available for the dead to live as presences. Literature is one such space. I would like to say that for a dead who no longer has a home, writing becomes a place to live. All significant writing, apart from being any other thing, is a delicate masonry for the absences, i.e. for the dead and imaginary beings to live. Perhaps.
Udayan Vajpeyi is a noted Hindi poet, short story writer and essayist, known for his writings on art, cinema and theatre.
