If, as is said, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, instead of being affronted by Trinamool Congress MP Kalyan Banerjee mimicking him, Vice-President Jagdeep Dhankhar should applaud the act, which Rahul Gandhi recorded on his cell phone and which has created a toofan in a teacup.
According to the mechanics of humour – if something as spontaneous and effervescent as humour can be associated with the prosaic nuts and bolts of mechanism – the target of humour must always be someone superior in power, pelf, or status than the humorist. Humour must be directed upwards, not downwards; at princes, not paupers.
Perhaps it was for this subconscious reason that Nehru was seldom more pleased than when he was lampooned by cartoonists like Shankar, master of the graphic art of mimicry. By mimicking the V-P, the MP far from belittling him, was implicitly acknowledging the former’s eminence.
The term mimic, as noun or verb, is derived from the Greek word for imitation, ‘mimesis’, which itself comes from ‘mimos’, imitator or actor.
In ancient Greece, mimesis was the foundation stone of all art, from poetry and drama to sculpture. In The Republic, Plato distinguishes between mimesis and diegesis, which is narration. Think of the two, one as a novel, a fictive imagination of events, and the other as a diary, a recording of real happenings.
Mimesis was central to Aristotle’s Poetics, in which imitation of nature and the natural world was the basis of all literary creativity.
Aristotle deemed literature, to which both tragedy and comedy belong, to be more educative than history, as history deals with specific facts while literature is at liberty to roam the imaginary and imaginative realm of what might have been, as an imitation or mimicry of restrictive reality.
Commentators and interpreters of the mimetic include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, Iris Murdoch, and mythologist Roberto Calasso.
In his Tradition and the Individual Talent, T.S. Eliot said that all creative writers, consciously or otherwise, reflect and echo, or mimic if you like, those who have preceded them.
A Milton would not have been a Milton without a preceding Shakespeare, nor for that matter, a T.S. Eliot a T.S. Eliot…
Eliot was delighted when a sharp-eyed reader charged him with copycatting the repeated refrain of “falls the shadow” in The Hollow Men, from Ernest Dowson’s poem, Cynara, about a lost love: “There fell thy shadow, Cynara!”
Far from taking the reader’s comment as an accusation of plagiarism, or imitation, Eliot saw it as a vindication of his proposition of the passing on of the baton of literary tradition through successive inheritors of a common legacy.
Less academically, but more amusingly,
American comic Tom Lehrer did his own take on the subject of imitation and mimicry when he sang:
“Plagiarise, plagiarise, plagiarise!
Why do you think God gave you eyes
But to plagiarise, plagiarise, plagiarise!”
Mimicry, in myriad forms, is our manifest destiny. How could it not be, seeing that our Creator, in an act of self-mimicry, created us in His – or Her – own image?
Jug Suraiya is a columnist.
