The Parable of Dover Beach

Life is most sorrowful. Only when you are asleep, or when you are dreaming, do you find respite. In the past fifteen days I have slept very little—on average only four to five hours. And because of this dreadful exhaustion, not a single dream has alighted upon my eyes. The beautiful architecture of dreaming has gone missing. Instead, there has been a backdrop of ceaseless and excruciating torment. Whatever life once bestows, it comes again at the appointed time to reclaim.
 
My father is ill, bedridden for many days. My mother too had become unsettled and anxious for quite some time. It was the season of Durga Puja. I kept thinking—what could I possibly do? There was no leisure for reflection. Nor was there any element of entertainment. At last, last week, I ended up watching four films. Night shows. Two at Nandan, and two more on my laptop, deep past midnight. Cinema distracts one well. Above all, it keeps the nerves occupied.
 
Whenever I find myself shaken, and feel the need for inner reconstruction, I return to Godard’s Breathless. I have lived that film many times within myself. Therefore, every anguish in it appears to me as clear as water. There is a distinct joy in revisiting what one already knows. This time I also watched another new film—Mani Kaul’s Dhrupad. In the subterranean waters of that film, the vision of a white sari with a red border drifting downstream carried me far, far away. As though under the guise of an intruder, into another land, another time, another vessel. The classical music of that film was also extraordinary—it carried the mind far away from the world.
 
The other two films were Kurosawa’s Dodesukaden—a rather enjoyable meditation on life’s monotony, the endless spiral of repetitive habits, the eternity of cycles. The last was a Hindi film, Patiala House, which offered the familiar inspiration of popular cinema. The song “Kyun Main Jagoon” pleased me immensely—as though it were saying: I could go, but why should I? After many years I had heard such a fine Hindi song. I even found myself humming along. From such signs I understood that I had no wish to return to the past.
 
The most widely acknowledged fact is that the morning newspapers no longer bear news. The editorials are the worst of all. Those who write them are less writers, more courtiers. You find no philosophy of ideals there. It is all a cooked-up mishmash. In this regard, Nehruvian trash-bin Anandabazar, or the Leftist fever-barrier Ganashakti, are willing assistants. Such dishonesty thrives everywhere, that sometimes I feel alienated from this world itself, separated from the eternal truth of existence. This may be the negative impact of globalization. Cultural and ideological rifts have always existed. It is like finding oneself in Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach—where the eternal waves rise and fall ceaselessly.
 
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
 
The “Sea of Faith” is itself a metaphor of an age—perhaps equally apt for the medieval as for the modern. This modern era began with Darwinism, the Industrial Revolution, imperialism, and communism. The Church’s influence over society waned. The shadow of doubt began to haunt religious experience. Capitalism and democracy were faint concepts. But the crisis of religion appeared more palpable.
 
Matthew Arnold uses the vestments of words to paint this complexity. When religion stood intact, the world was singular, one-dimensional. The afterlife, the belief in fate, bound human existence in unending pain. There was a bloody struggle for an unknown, unseen, unheard God. And now, when that God-belief has ebbed away, the form of human faith lies naked. Hundreds of ideologies surround us in eternal emptiness. The sky still hangs above, but it knows no boundaries in its dispersal. Yet within the soul persists the languor of centuries.
 
This is our modern age. The world stands now at the threshold of the twenty-first century. Capitalism, democracy, socialism have all been tested. Religion has changed its countenance—become spiritualism. The Sea of Faith stands again at the threshold, spreading its wares. And yet, even today, we are restless, hesitant, caught in perpetual oscillation. Searching for the right path, we stumble, lost. Bound by the illusions of time, place, and vessel. Nerves clutching the past, while the heart bears the eternal melancholy of the present.
 
I returned home to my ailing father. I sat by his pillow. After the second stroke, he could no longer sleep at night. Whenever I had time, I sat with him. Sometimes we exchanged thoughts, sometimes sat silently.
 
Ideologically I had been opposed to him all my life. He was a true Marxist. I, a staunch liberal. Yet in exchanging views I was a little tolerant. He was unbending. His whole life was one long process of disproving his own ideology step by step. He disliked the politicians of his creed—often abused them. Yet he remained intoxicated with the dream of socialism. It was like the fairy tale of a princess who loved a handsome boy on the pavement but never attempted, in reality, to reach him—only in imagination. She would not walk the difficult road, yet she loved to dream that by some magic she would reach that youth, and gain both the youth and the royal palace together. As though in a Hollywood film, where human beings are puppets of an imagined world, where everything the heart desires becomes true in the carnival of delight.
 
Such was my father’s belief. He had no clear idea who would implement socialism upon society, yet he was convinced that one day the world would be socialist. He was a devout believer in the project of socialism. Like the promise of Ramarajya. Like him, I too thought one day a free and humane liberalism would reign upon the earth. But I did not know how. I preferred to think of myself as a liberal. Father would say, “You are actually a socialist.” With my right-leaning arguments, I could see Marxism only as speculative fiction. Later I discovered that all liberals of the world are, in fact, deeply leftist. Then I thought—perhaps I alone am the world’s only right-leaning liberal. Or perhaps I too am a hypocritical leftist. But when I realized that these matters were not ideological at all, but mere excretions of petro-dollars, I never again wished to sell myself to any ideology.
 
The finest moment of our discussions was when Father said: “More important than ideology is—do not be a hypocrite.” This resonated so deeply in me that I had to revisit history once more. When I measured without the scales of ideology, I found Hitler less of a hypocrite than Churchill. In the absurdity of two tusked elephants inhabiting one forest, I felt that the war of religions was then a dire necessity. I even cried out in anguish when I heard the tale of the monkeys who created havoc in Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram and were beaten to death. So many such tales—of candor and hypocrisy.
 
At last came Father’s stories of his childhood and youth, which I gradually drew out of him. He spoke to me of his youthful loves and beliefs. He narrated in detail how he suffered from the rupture caused by Partition. How communal frenzy forced him to flee from his birthplace in Faridpur, East Bengal, to West Bengal with my uncles, aunts, and cousins, just to save his life. These Partition events were no defense of religion. They were political. Father was a vehement opponent of both Gandhism and Nehruvianism. Perhaps without reading weighty tomes, he had become a communist purely from his comprehensive opposition to Gandhi and Nehru. Later in life, before his death, he turned against the very Marxists who had, out of lust for power, allied themselves with Nehruvianism and Gandhism.
 
Before dying, he became somewhat emotional and expressed his desire to return to his motherland. To me it felt like Alex Haley’s epic Roots—that yearning to return. The very soil that had snatched away everything from him and cast him into a refugee camp, that soil still commanded his extraordinary love. What he lacked was anger. In foreign land, in exile, he never could grow wrathful. Yet I sense that the generations to come will one day grow angry. They must. Because the false history composed by political hypocrites will one day collapse—here, in this India.
 
At five in the morning Father finally fell asleep. At seven I awoke to prepare for office. Life was the same as ever. I did not see him in the morning.
 
Yet this morning, I had learned of my father’s wandering across the Dover Beach of the 1960s and 70s.
 
Ah, love, let us be religious one day! For the sake of the world—that by stripping away the dream’s enchantment, it might lead us toward truth.
 
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new.