Kappen Meorial Lecture, 2001

Enigmas of Time: Reflections on Culture, History and Politics

I would like to thank Visthar for giving me this opportunity to reflect on time.  Time, I thought, would be a timely subject because we have assembled here in the memory of one of the most radical religious thinkers in post-independence India, Fr. Kappen, and the relationship between time and memory is always worth pondering.  We also share a historical moment—the millennium—that has been assumed to mark the passage of time in a specific way.  Though, this could be an exaggeration, if not a delusion.  Barely two months into the much-hyped millennium – indeed, if it was the millennium—the world information order seems to have survived that manufactured terror of the Y2K bug.  No significant charge has taken place in our world.  The political crises continue, global warming intensifies, and the poor remain poor.  The millennium, I suspect, was just another day.

And yet, at a strategic level, it can be put to use in so far as it demands nothing less than a reckoning of our selves in relation to the accumulations of the past; the immediacies of the present and the possibility of new beginnings.  Not interested in a stock-taking of the last century, I am more concerned with figuring out where we are now at this point in time.  We think we know where we are, but before we can grasp that moment, it has already passed, alerting us to the traveling of time that can only take place in time within the fragilities of the present moment.  What I say, therefore, has already passed.

On a less enigmatic note, let us begin with an exercise.  Indeed, if this was a workshop, I would have you all on your feet, and I would ask you to improvise this exercise with your bodies and voices.  But, since this is a lecture, I will ask you to imagine this exercise for yourselves in your mind’s eye while listening to my running commentary.  There are four distinct beats in this exercise that you are free to punctuate in your own way within a larger narrative of time that is at one level scripted and yet left open for your mental meanderings:

Someone is calling your name.
You respond to the call.
You travel in your mind to the source of the call.
You react to something in that space.

Stripped of embellishment, this four-part narrative does not seem to be particularly enigmatic; it follows a sequence, a causality, a passage of time.  But if someone is calling your name – and you as an actor are compelled to voice your own name while listening to it – then who are you at that point in time?  You are not that someone.  You are in another place.  The voice is from somewhere else.  There could be a time-lag in the transference and picking up of the voice depending on the distance – a time-lag which could be amplified and distended through echoes.  Do these echoes exist in the past or in the future? Do they resonate in relation what has already been named, or do they anticipate the name that has yet to be uttered in a different cadence?

In all probability, you would want to free yourself from the uncertainties of this moment.  So you suspend the voicing of your name.  Now you have all the freedom to respond to the call by recognizing its otherness.  You voice the other’s name, not your own.  A duality is comfortably established.  But this freedom is likely to produce a different kind of restlessness.  Now you want to go to the source of the call.  This is the point when it would seem that you are going back to a point in time, to something that has already existed and passed but is not yet a memory.  It is still there hanging in the air, waiting to be encountered in the future continuous.  In responding to the call, therefore, you do not go back to the past; if anything you are going back to the future that has yet to be fully articulated.

Following the impulse of this moment, you enter a drift of time as you travel in your mind to the source of the call.  A pre-expressive state of being, this passage is best left silent and entrusted to the specters of your own dreams.  You arrive.  Are you there yet?  Only an unconscious act of will, an inner heightening of breath can break the aporia of that moment.  You break your waking dream, your somnambulistic sleep.  You disrupt the silence of the future continuous by grounding it abruptly within the ordinariness of the present moment.  This jolt has all the jarring familiarity of the alarm clock in the morning, which is the most insistently timely reminder of the relentlessness of everyday life.  ‘We are not free, and it begins with coffee in the morning’, as Bertolt Brecht put it with deadly wit.

This four-part mental journey that I have described can be read as a somewhat impressionistic rite de passage improvising on the larger metaphysics of time, particularly its shifting locations and search for the future in the past, and the past in the future, as bound within the contingencies of the present.  Clearly, the past, present, and future are interchangeable and fluid. The point is neither to valorize this state of flow nor to reduce it to an illusion, but to call attention to the unprecedented blending and separations of differentiated times.

There is more than one time.  This truism is often lost in the dogmas surrounding monolithic conceptions of time where a pure Past is invariably fundamentalist, a pure Future the emptiest of utopias.  In the plurality of times, there are some that lose their bearings and enter different energy-fields, while others return compulsively to their own orbits.  It is not just the flights of time that matter, therefore, but their points of return.  No point of return is ever the same: even though one may be returning to the same place, one can never fully anticipate the imminence of irregularities, bumps, forced landings, and near accidents along the way.  Like a note in a raga that careens and sweeps through a vista of sounds, picking up all the deviations and varied textures of a particular melodic structure, the return of the note is invariably marked by an element of surprise.  The note is there, and yet, it is not quite the same.  It is somewhere else in time.

Perhaps, the greatest enigma to time lies in the blurring, if not invisibility, of those intersections in the points of departure and return so that it is no longer clear whether one is coming or going or, indeed, whether one has left at all if one has just arrived.  Such enigmas cannot be easily explained in the language of the social sciences.  Historians, the chroniclers of time, are generally out of their depth in dealing with temporal ambiguities. Physicists probably come closest to mapping the whirligigs of time.  However, in order to see the trajectories of time moving back and forth, there can be no site, to my mind, more concrete than theatre for our critical scrutiny.  For a visualization of time, where the past, the present, and the future are interwoven into the very structure of the performance, a glimpse of Nirvahana would be illuminating.

Nirvahana

Nirvahana (not to be mistaken for nirvana) literally means ‘to accomplish’ or ‘to carry out’.  It is an actor’s improvisation that forms part of one of the most ancient Sanskrit performance traditions called Kutiyatt, still performed in Kerala.  After over a thousand years, this living tradition continues to provoke audiences with its sheer audacity in dealing with epic time.  The tradition of Kutiyattam is not interested in telling stories.  Kutiyattam insists on taking an entire performance (lasting up to eight hours) to introduce a single character in all his resplendent solitude – an epic figure who appears at a particular point in the narrative, in mediasres.  The story is not the issue.  It is that moment in a story, that particular juncture in a narrative, which initiates a journey in time within the consciousness of a particular character that could extend into several nights of performance.

Imagine a performer playing a god.  I offer no description of make-up, costume, head-gear, eye-movements, the temple setting…  What matters is Time in all its omnipresent, labyrinthine monotony.  After gesticulating a particular verse in a narrative, with each adjective, conjunction, and participle being given due weight and elaboration (such an elaboration of a few verses could take up the entire performance) the actor stops for that particular night.  The next night, after an entire day has passed, he begins again.  While you might expect him to take a step forwards (‘get on with the show’), he goes backwards with a totally centered serenity.  Step by step, he retraces his character’s journey, like an antique tape-recorder slowly rewinding in the cosmos.  At some point, which is not necessarily an impasse, he stops again.  And this time, when you would expect him at long last to come forwards, he takes a leap beyond the past in which he is already positioned into primordial time.  From here, he begins ‘before the beginning’ as it were, reincarnating the ancestry and genealogy of his character in a condensed version of his biography.

Later, the actor (or is it the character?) jump-cuts to that exact point in the narrative where he had initially begun his journey.  This entire reverie is improvised over three nights, eighteen nights, even forty nights, depending on the specific circumstances of the performance.  The question is: When the actor/character eventually comes forwards in time, is he returning to the future, or is he pushing forwards into the past?  When he is already in the past and then takes a leap into primordial time, can he be said to have inhabited a provisional present in relation to a more distanced past?  At what point does the past become a present for him?

These questions are further complicated when one considers that, regardless of the fluctuating times within the narrative, the performance itself is bound by the historical present.  While this present is suspended within the imaginary of a performance, it is nonetheless there, punctuating both the flight of fictional time and its point of return to the real world.  The history of time does not disappear so easily, even though it may not be readily perceived.

History, Tradition and Time

Moving out of the fiction of performance into the realities of history, there are some concepts of time in the Indian context that would seem to be fictions in their own right.  More often than not, they are subsumed in a notion of ‘Indian time’, which has been essentialized, mythologized, orientalized in terms of an ‘ancient’ past, an ‘eternal’ present, and less generously, a ‘non-existent’ future.  Our time has been conceived in terms of cyclicity, sacredness and myth, which in turn have contributed to a dominant prejudice originating in India’s colonial past that Indians are incapable of thinking in linear time. Predictably, our alleged ‘refusal of history’ has been equated with a rejection of, or even indifference to, the sequential, chronological, material, secular demands of history, as exemplified in Judaeo-Christian philosophies of time.  So deeply entrenched is this prejudice that, for a long time, it was assumed that Indians lack a sense of history.  We could aspire to the state of gods, but we could never be recognized as conscious agents and subjects in the articulation and making of our own history.

This is, of course, an intensely myopic and Euro-centric reading of history, which the distinguished Indian historian (and my worthy predecessor in this lecture series) Romila Thapar has no difficulty in debunking in her pertinent reflections on Time as a Metaphor of History (1996).  ‘Not only does cyclic time have a genesis and a predicted termination,’ as Thapar emphasizes, ‘it can also encompass segments of time consisting of historical chronologies’.?  Cyclic and linear times can co-exist; there are ‘grey areas’ in which they can overlap.  Cosmological time can incorporate other forms of ‘time reckoning’ with shorter, more fragmented time spans.  Above all, profane time is not necessarily abandoned in the narration of myths. Through these critical truisms, Thapar calls attention to the differentiations of time and the simultaneous use of contradictory categories of time, which indicate a far more reflexive and textured awareness of history in early India than is often assumed, particularly in recent communal and fundamentalist affirmations of the Indian past.

Such fundamentalist affirmations, which I will discuss later, are not the only means of congealing the liberating possibilities of time.  In what would seem like a more harmless regimentation of time (and here, like the performer of Nirvahana, I move back from history to cultural discourse and practice), traditionalists fossilize time in their own right through endless calculations, codifications, formulae and nit-picking.  Everything about time would seem to be fixed in a traditional eschatology, so much so that even the duration of a kappa, the longest span of time which would seem to be immeasurable, is nonetheless confined to 4,320 million years.  What one misses in the derivative discourses on traditional concepts of time is the poetry of numbers, the fantasy woven by the ancients into their conception of figures and forms.  From Thapar’s tract on time, we imbibe not just the facts, but the aura of facts: ‘If there is a mountain in the shape of a cube, measuring one yojana (roughly extending from two and a half to nine miles), and if every hundred years the mountain is brushed with a silk scarf, then the time that is taken for the mountain to be eroded by the scarf is the equivalent of a kalpa’.2  How much more evocative is this description of the kalpa than its reduction to 4,320 million years – a mere statistic; knowledge reduced to anachronistic information.

Such is the pedantry surrounding traditional performance as well, where one would expect the power of the imagination (kalpana shakti) to breathe life into the meticulous and multitudinous codes of the Natyasastra.  In calling attention to the shifting dynamics of time and imagination recorded in this ancient compendium of acting, one notes that almost every movement of the eye and psychic symptom have been precisely codified ‘for all time’ in this encyclopedic text.  Not surprisingly, it becomes easy to forget that the hastas (hand-gestures), for instance, only begin to register their auras when they are imbued with breath (hasta-prana).  Their significance begins to resonate only when they are animated in the immediate ‘now’ of performance and not merely illustrated with technical virtuosity.

If this ‘now’ is intrinsically held by the inner movement of one’s breath, it is also linked to a perception of the ecology that is embedded in traditional forms.  Indeed, time in traditional contexts of performance has an ecological base.  Apart from the passing of seasons and the agricultural rhythms embedded in the gestures of labour and everyday life, there are the stylized walks of peacocks and elephants that embody the most acute observations of animal kinetics in relation to the forces of nature.  Remember also the more humble forms of insect life that are embodied within the asanas of Yoga.  The scorpion and the locust have a place in this pantheon of energies because in their absence our ecology would suffer.  Take away the ecology from the movement and what is left are alphabets without language, outer shells drained of the inner processes of life, time without breath.

It could be argued that the inner resources of tradition have already been killed in the present world, in so far as the ecology that has sustained the poetic cosmos of the past is in the process of being decimated.  Indeed, if Kalidasa were alive today and he could traverse the skies from the Vindhyas to the Himalayas, what would his aerial vision of the contemporary Indian landscape reveal but the most devastating deforestation among other monstrosities of so-called development, such as the flooding of entire villages for the construction of dams?  The fragrance, texture, and colour constituting the biodiversity of his imagination would be neutered by the realities of an increasingly perceptible ecocide.  It is cruel, yet necessary in this regard, to acknowledge that the only rewrite of Meghadutam that would seem viable today would be one that acknowledges the loss, the pain, and the rupture of a hopelessly beautiful universe that was once a poem in its own right.  Tellingly, this rupture is precisely what traditionalists refuse to acknowledge in India today.  They continue to seek comfort in illusory continuities that have all the efficacy of a band-aid stuck over a gaping wound.

There is another kind of rupture, however, that needs to be acknowledged here, which has less to do with the relationship between the past and the present than with the interruptive dynamics within traditional practices themselves.  Only by absorbing the inner principles of this rupture in actual practice does it become possible to renew tradition.

Let us dwell briefly on one of the most banal examples of such creative renewal: the kolam or floor-drawing.  Traced in an infinity of patterns outside the threshold of one’s dwelling, the old kolam is invariably erased each morning and a new one sprinkled in its place.  In more elaborate floor-drawings in the ritual ceremonies of Kerala, in which an awesome figure like the goddess Bhadrakali emerges from the earth, after hours of a meticulous application of turmeric, lime, and charcoal with intricate filigree and strokes of colour, the culmination of this artistry is systematically followed by an erasure of the entire drawing.  The figure is either brushed away with tender coconut leaves or destroyed in a ritual dance, the performer in a state of possession.  Only after the goddess has been erased is the ground fully consecrated, facilitating the ritual performance and celebration that follows.

From these erasures, we learn a profound lesson in humility.  The most magnificent floor-drawings are anonymous.  They are not meant to be displayed or exhibited, still less claimed as intellectual property.  In their resolute impermanence, they challenge the most basic norms of commodification.  We also realize that the ingredients of worship embedded in such ritual practices are biodegradable in so far as they are returned to the earth as natural resources.  It would seem, therefore, that if we want to hold on to tradition, we have to be fully prepared to let go of it.  Not just once, but many times, repeatedly.  This is how tradition develops continuity. If we try to preserve it, we can only succeed in fossilizing the past.

Along with the erasure of the past, there is also the immersion of its most treasured icons.  Our deities are not for preserving.  In this regard, the ritual immersion of the goddess in her varied manifestations such as Durga, Kali and Lakshmi during the Pujas ensures her eternal life and ceaseless return every year to millions of surrogate homes on earth.  This commemoration of the goddess is different from the cults of memory that surround contemporary deities, like rock stars, beauty queens, Princess Diana and politicians, whose seeming immortality is incarcerated within the demands of the market.  The marketing of their memories has a fundamentally different telos from the renewal of cultural memory available to traditional communities, and it is with this incursion of the market that I would like to shift the discussion now to the materialist constructions of time in the contemporary world.

Death of Utopia

If the marketing of memory has become a viable proposition, this is because we live in an age of globalization where the unknown of the future is constantly being short-circuited and introduced to the priorities of the present.  Indeed, the future is in the process of being patented.  What does not exist even at the level of genes is already being predicted, marked, and claimed as intellectual property.  Even the outer space – akasha – has become subject to the speculations of galactic real estate.  In such acquisitive times, when the earlier romance associated with the moon and other distant planets has become an increasingly anachronistic dalliance, it would seem as if the ‘unknown’ of the future is eminently within our reach.  Either that or it has been ‘virtualized’ through video games and other postmodern fictions that have trivialized our dreams and capacities to envision brave new worlds.

Most critically, the ethos of the market economy has called into question the significance of utopias, which are no longer considered necessary or desirable in order to catalyze the possibilities of change.  The alleged ‘death of Utopia’ has been hailed by a wide range of theorists and thinkers as the soundest way to avoid the tyrannies of ostensibly achieved utopias.  And yet, how reductive is the anti-utopian argument in its relentless equation of failed utopias with a failed socialism, as if there were no other political or cultural alternatives, and as if the utopian strains within socialism have been exhausted forever.

Not surprisingly, the flip side of the ‘death of Utopia’ is the ‘end of history’, Fukuyama’s glib thesis affirming the benefits of the liberal democratic and global capitalist system that has culminated in the Maya of the Market, the grant illusion of our times.  This unequivocally neo-liberal utopia of our times is different from the critical and oppositional utopias of the past.  It is more emphatic in its positing of solutions, and therefore resistant to irony, ambiguity, self-criticism or a sense of play.  This Market of a utopia is so permeated with the hubris of the present and the euphoria of a unilateral world order that is actually presumes that the future does not need to be liberated from the present.  Indeed, the future is already under the corporate control of an eminently civilized First World global order.

If this ‘end of history’ has ended sooner than even its critics might have anticipated, its demise (which has yet to be fully acknowledged) needs to be linked to its gross underestimation of the unpredictability of the present, which it would seem to control.  Countering Fukuyama’s triumphalist discourse, the seemingly omnipotent gods of the global economy would seem to be grinding their teeth impatiently as nations prove to be unwilling to dissolve their national boundaries and economies into a nebulous, borderless world.  Indeed, within and across nations, borders have solidified as ethnic cleansing, genocide, nuclear tests, and racism have proliferated while new forms of poverty have emerged specifically in those parts of the developed world in which poverty would appear to have been liquidated forever.  It would seem, therefore, that the ‘death of Utopia’ needs to be extended beyond its socialist avatars to its capitalist manifestations within the global system.

Where does India stand in relation to the seeming disappearance of utopia in the world?  Technically, if we accept the eschatologies of time contained in the shastras, we would be compelled to acknowledge that today in India we live outside of Utopia. This is the age of Kaliyuga after all, the worst of times, when all the utopian possibilities of earlier, more paradisal time-cycles (yugas) would seems to be denied to us. Within the violence and bloodshed that we are destined to suffer in these times, resulting in the shortening of our life-spans and the systematic destruction of our dharma, it would seem as if we are doomed to labour in order to survive.  And yet, it is possible and indeed necessary to think of Kaliyuga in a somewhat less alarmist context than its unequivocally dystopic predicament would suggest.

As Romila Thapar indicates in Time as a Metaphor of History, the creators of earlier utopias were representatives of an ideal brahminical society who did not have to labour for their intrinsic well-being. Within the futurist projections of this society where a utopia is a projection, a mental construction, not an essential state of being, Kaliyuga represents the dismantling of brahminic privilege embedded in the caste hierarchy. Apart from the lower castes, women are among those minorities who defy the decorum of this hierarchy by asserting their sexual freedom in the age of Kaliyuga, thereby challenging earlier norms of procreation, which apparently did not require sexual activity.  Surely this alleged ‘loss’ could also be read as an undeniable heightening of the pleasure principle by contemporary standards. Likewise, it is eminently possible to argue that the diminution of brahminic supremacy in the age of Kaliyuga has also been accompanied by the historic rise of dalit communities as active participants in and interrogators of the democratic process of India.  One community’s dystopia could be another’s utopia within the mutations of history and time.  It all depends on whose utopia we are considering in the first place.

Is it surprising, therefore, that the oppressed communities’ struggles for liberation in the age of Kaliyuga should coincide with the most consolidated efforts by the Hindu Right to hold on to its threatened hegemony?  While utopia may fortuitously be denied to the votaries of Hindutva in this lifetime, it continues to be projected through increasingly emphatic fabrications of Ramarayja.  Not only has this utopian state been evoked within the synthetic trappings of a national television serial on the Ramayana and in a number of pamphlets, icons, and images, it has more ominously been envisioned in the form of a Rama Mandir that will be built on the devastated site of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya.  While this temple can be regarded as a substitute, compensation, and a wish-fulfillment for a Ramarajya that does not and indeed, cannot exist, it has already assumed the power of an awesome fetish even in its non-existence.  A future is being constructed here to counter the imagined evils of the more recent past (typified in the demonization of the ‘Muslim invader’), in order to liberate the Vedic past of Hindu supremacy.

In all such delusions of a manufactured, fundamentalist history, there is a systematic annihilation of enigma.  The consistent strategy is to literalize metaphors, images, and symbols in the form of concrete edifices, agendas, programmes, and more menacingly, pogroms.  Within these manipulations of the realpolitik, there is no place for cosmic geography – temples in the sky, castles in the air.  Poets cannot presume to be the true legislators of the world; it is politicians who lay down the law and determine the imagination for others. In this predicament, the very attempt to re-envision utopia in a political culture that either denies its existence or reduces it to a violent subterfuge assumes an unprecedented significance.  The question is: How does one re-invent utopia for our times without submitting to the tyrannies of the past and the vacuity of the future? Tellingly, it is in the writings and practice of Mahatma Gandhi that one can find an extraordinary alertness to the political ambivalences of this predicament.

Gandhi and Time

No politician to my mind has revealed a sharper critical sensibility in discriminating between metaphors and realities than Gandhi.  A phenomenal communicator, he recognized the emotional resonance of religious metaphors in relation to the cultural memories of specific communities.  If Gandhi used the word ‘Ramarajya’, for instance, in a particular discourse, he was aware that it was a ‘convenient’ and expressive phrase’ that would resonate for the Hindus in his audience, not unlike ‘Khudai Raj’ and the ‘Kingdom of God on earth’ which he used in order to reach Muslim and Christian constituencies respectively.3  These switches in vocabulary were not merely politically expedient.  They coincided with Gandhi’s own experiments in inter-faith worship, which he practiced every day in his ashram, thereby nurturing his insight into ‘the religion underlying all religions’—a genuinely pluralist (and not merely ecumenical) faith.  This trans-cultural faith that seemed to cross all boundaries of space and time co-existed in turn with Gandhi’s own ceaseless mantra of Ramanama (the name of Rama) which had sustained him through childhood and the darkest days of the Partition, lingering on his lips even at the moment of death.

‘More potent than Rama is the Name’, as he once put it, emphasizing the spirit embedded in language.  And yet, Gandhi had no difficulty in extending this spirit to the battleground of politics by punctuating—and qualifying—his religiosity with self-consciously secular references.  At critical moments, he could define Ramarajya, for instance, as ‘independence—political, economic and moral’. ‘My conception of Ramarajya excludes replacement of the British army by a national army of occupation.  A country that is governed by even its national army can never be morally free.’4 It goes without saying that this Ramarajya would certainly condemn the testing of nuclear missiles in the most forthright terms that one associates with Gandhi’s lament for Hiroshima and his withering dismissal that it could be regarded as initiating a new era for ahimsa (non-violence).  Indeed, Gandhi can be regarded as one of the first Indian critics who were able to see through the dubious logic of nuclear deterrence, which is built on the perverse assumption that a nuclear-free future can be sustained only through the accumulation of nuclear weapons in the present.  In other words, a manufacture of fear would seem to be mandatory for world peace.

Countering the cynicism of such assumptions, where the negative elements of the present are imagined to circumvent the potentially disastrous course of the future, Gandhi invariably posited a more positive future that has the conceptual and moral energy to transform the imperfections of the present.  At times this future was envisioned unabashedly in utopian terms: ‘We must have a proper picture of what we want before we can have something approaching it.’5  In other words, utopia precipitates the very direction and sustenance of any struggle.  It may lie in the future, but it has the retroactive force to catalyze those elements within the present which have the potential to move in its direction.

Thus, in Gandhi’s most memorable passage on utopia, we are given a ‘picture’ of what lies ahead in our search for independence:

In this structure composed of innumerable villages, there will be an ever-widening, never-ascending circle.  Life will not be a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom, but it will be an oceanic circle… [T]he outermost circumference will not wield power to crush the inner circle but will give strength to all within and derive its own strength from it.6

While Gandhi draws extensively on a vocabulary of geometry (‘circle’, ‘circumference’, apex’, ‘pyramid’) to visualize his abstraction of utopia, he also alludes specifically to ‘innumerable villages’, which are more conceptually enigmatic than they would appear to be in reality.

Tellingly, towards the end of his life in 1945, when Gandhi had returned compulsively to his tract on Hind Swaraj in order to persuade Nehru to rethink the modernist priorities of independent India, he had qualified: ‘My villages today exist in my imagination…You will not understand me if you think that I am talking about the villages of today.’7  Unfortunately, Nehru, for all his sophistication or perhaps because of it, never picked up on these candid clarifications, and proceeded to demean the Indian village in the exclusivist, rationalist terms for which modernism in India is unavoidably maligned: ‘A village, normally speaking, is backward intellectually and culturally and no progress can be made from a backward environment’.8

But what about ‘imaginary villages’?  Are they to be dismissed as ‘completely unreal’ in the way that Nehru had dismissed the radical thrust of Hind Swaraj, the seminal text that dares to articulate a concept (swaraj or self-rule) that does not, by the very admission of its author, exist in our world?  How do we deal with the realities of what does not yet exist?  I believe that if Nehru—and indeed, our own neo-Gandhian communitarian thinkers of today—could find time for a real dialogue with Gandhi and challenge him precisely on his own grounds that he lays open for our debate and scrutiny, our much-maligned modernity could have been inflected instead of being rashly demonized or valorized for our times.

In the absence of a culture of dialogue, it has become only too easy to either reject Gandhi outright on modernist grounds, or to rhapsodize his memory with growing anti-secularist communitarian fervor that opposes the developmental agenda of the Nehruvian legacy. Within this polemic the categories of reason, progress, modernity, westernization, secularism, and inevitably, the nation-state, have been rashly conflated and denied their very real, if incomplete, disparate and occasionally aberrant contributions to contemporary Indian life. Apart from implicitly feeding the anti-secularist agenda of the Hindu Right, the more strident anti-modernist dimensions of the communitarian discourse have literalized Gandhi, reducing the ‘imaginary’ potential of his universal philosophy to the instrumentalities of the real.

It is too easy in this regard to tokenize Gandhi in the interests of an anti-modernist, anti-developmental polemic, and thereby relegate his wisdom entirely to the uncontaminated ecology of an essentially beneficent past.  Conversely, one can idealize his vision in such hagiographic terms that it can be conveniently jettisoned into the future, because the world after all is not yet ready for him.  The more discerning critics, however, would acknowledge that Gandhi is harder to place in time, and that his alleged resistance to the modernity of ‘our times’ needs to be qualified on the basis of his own highly reflexive ‘inconsistencies’ and occasional flaunting of his own political incorrectness and deviation from seemingly purist norms.

Thus, in his 1945 correspondence with Nehru in which he had reasserted the validity of Hind Swaraj, we find Gandhi acknowledging the necessity of ‘scale’ (the railways, telecommunications, etc.) in relation to the ‘essence’ of ethical principles (truth, non-violence, self-sufficiency) that he was not prepared to abandon. Note that, for this aging anarchist who had earlier made an exception of the Singer Sewing Machine as an example of technological validity, the acceptance of the ‘railways’ (earlier associated with ‘evil’) is a radical shift in paradigms.  It is also worth noting that while Gandhi re-asserts the ‘essence’ of certain principles, he does not do so on absolutist grounds, independently of considerations of ‘scale’.  Nor is he saying that ‘scale’ is intrinsically dangerous or that small is necessarily beautiful.

Gandhi’s subtly insistent dialectics, I would emphasize, which are more often than not reduced to homilies, provoke us into asking more difficult questions where the equations of wisdom with the past, and new technologies with the future are reversed both at the levels of concept and practice.  What would happen, for example, if we could shift our mental horizons and link the possible wisdom of the future to the principles embedded in the technologies of the past?  In addressing this question concretely, one has to get beyond mere experiments in energy conservation and the recycling of resources for the greening of the world.  The ecological bases of time itself will need to be re-activated.  Indeed, if the hope for the future today lies in the beginnings of a new global ethic where resources can be shared on the basis of ‘need’ and not ‘greed’, the world will have to reverse the patterns of time to which existing modes of consumption are linked.

In this regard, it is not just the consumption of water, energy, and other natural resources that needs to be addressed, but the consumption of other cultures in the new marketing of life-styles and behavioral patterns in our globalizing world.  At a time when even in the remotest parts of the world primitive cultures can become ‘ex-primitive’ overnight through the incursions of tourism, for instance, is there any hope of postmodern societies cutting down on their consumption of ‘cultures of choice?’  Which cultures have the power to ‘choose’ in the first place?  Perhaps a restraint in consuming other cultures could also lead to a slowing down of our increasingly peripatetic lifestyles and a rediscovery of new processes of living in time, countering the false touristic lure of ‘experiencing’ random times—the past tomorrow, the future yesterday.  The question is:  Can we actually live in time today?

Ending of Time

The Vietnamese monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, who has been ‘walking in the footsteps of the Buddha’ for some time now, calling attention to his ‘middle path’ even during the genocide of the Vietnam war, would say that it is possible to live in time in a state of mindfulness.  At the level of a direct contact with life, mindfulness can be related to an intensely self-sufficient awareness of ‘what is going on in the present moment, within one’s own body, feelings, mind, and objects of mind’—a state of being that is crystallized in the inner movement of one’s breath.9  This mindfulness is not to be equated with a mere absorption of the present itself, but with each moment in the present which has its own fullness.  In this state of active solitude, the mind is liberated from the desires and anxieties of the past and the future. If a seeker ‘does not pursue the past nor lose himself in the future’ this is because (the answer astonishes by the simplicity of its koan-like utterance) ‘the past no longer is’ and ‘the future has not yet come’.10

If there is equanimity in this realization of ‘living in the present’, there are other more radical propositions put forward by contemporary seers of time like Jiddu Krishnamurti, who would advocate nothing less than the ‘ending of time’ altogether.  Consciously setting aside the ‘fantastic and romantic probabilities’ of ‘fictitious time’ and the banalities of clock time that determine the duration of journeys and the professional demands of learning a language or doing a particular job, Krishnamurti poses a harder question: ‘[Can] time, really, actually, in the field of the psyche, ever come to an end?’11

It is in the quagmire of ‘psychological time’ that we encounter our nemesis.  Krishnamurti defines psychological time as ‘the time of becoming something’ (‘I am this, I will be that’).  Psychological time is the interval, the division, the gap between ‘this’ and ‘that’; between ‘one action and another’; between ‘one understanding and another’; between ‘seeing something, thinking about it and acting.’12  Krishnamurti’s intervention focuses specifically on the movement that is embodied in time which carries the conceptual baggage of our thoughts, memories, desires, and motives.  He dares to ask a seemingly impossible question that a physicist is more likely to understand than an artist or writer: ‘Is there a time which doesn’t belong to this category [of movement] at all?’  In other words, is there a ‘time of non-movement?’13

The enigma of this question is not free of contradiction, as Krishnamurti himself is only too keen to indicate in his unfailing capacity to engage the listener in dialogue, rather than to proselytize an already worked-out position.  As I indicated at the start of this essay, any reflection on time and, more crucially, any speculation of non-time can only take place in time.  So there is an obvious clash of perspectives in attempting to ‘understand the timeless with a mind which is the outcome of time’.14  As the master indicates wryly, ‘We are using words to measure the immeasurable, and our words have become time’.15  This observation would extend to any word, such as ‘violence’, for instance.  In a barely veiled critique of Gandhi’s concept of ‘non-violence’, Krishnamurti emphasizes that the evolution from ‘violence’ to ‘non-violence’ implies that you need time to become non-violent.  In working towards this ‘ideal’, which Krishnamurti equates with an ‘escaping process’, all that emerges is a ‘division’ in the mind, which can only perpetuate ‘conflict’.17  Indeed, the very resistance to conflict is itself a form of conflict.

If time, therefore, is not necessary for any radical change (indeed, it could be the very source of resistance to any real state of transformation) then how does one ‘end’ the violence of our times to which no ideology, religion, government, party or institution would seem to have an adequate answer?  Responding to the question not with a direct answer but through even more questions that are rhetorical, yet probing, Krishnamurti asks:  ‘Is it possible to end violence or greed, anger or whatever you will immediately?’18  Here we are given a clue in the primacy given to ‘immediacy’, which would seem to conjure a time so quick, sudden, and complete that it cannot be linked to ‘speed’.  The immediacy of non-movement is without momentum, direction and continuity.  Calling attention to the state of passive awareness in which the dissolution of psychological time becomes possible, Krishnamurti once again elides the availability of forthright solutions by compelling us to listen to his question: ‘Is there a comprehension, an insight, an immediate perception without the word, without analysis, without bringing all your knowledge into it?’  ‘Oh yes, sir’, he responds affirmatively, but ‘You can’t discuss it.  The word is the end of inquiry.’19

At this point it would seem that the enigma of time conceals an ultimatum in terms of our preparation to understand it: it is now or never.  The ‘insight’ that could facilitate an understanding of this ‘now’ which encapsulates ‘all time’ can materialize only through ‘the absence—the total absence—of the whole movement of thought as time and remembrance so there is direct perception.’20  While it is possible at this point in the argument to unravel the enigmas of a perception without time, I would rather shift the ground of this reflection to somewhat less rarefied territory by re-inflecting the political within a different reading of ‘immediacy’ as inspired by Rammanohar Lohia’s reflections on time in his memorable ‘Interval During Politics’(1965).  It is worth keeping in mind that Krishnamurti himself does not at any point deny the co-existence of historical time with the psychological time that he is attempting to end, even if he remains almost scrupulously indifferent to the physical demands of time.  The possibilities of bridging the gap between the ‘historical’ and the ‘psychological’ is what I would like to turn to now.

In Between Times

Undeniably, Lohia comes to the rescue of this tricky, if not non-negotiable juncture in this particular reflection on time, even if his ideological differences as a socialist clash with the non-political tenor of Krishnamurti’s philosophy.  And yet, there is something almost uncanny by which Lohia’s reflections on ‘non-time’ in his masterly essay ‘An Episode in Yoga’ seem to be unconsciously in dialogue with Krishnamurti’s more rigorous propositions.  Of course, there are significant points of departure as well in Lohia’s more tentative speculations on ‘ending’ time’ because he does not free himself from the political.  Eschewing any possibility of transcendence or deliverance, his reading of time inhabits an interstitial space of the real and the unreal, the active and the inactive, the inner life of the mind and the realities of the world.

Situated very consciously in an ‘interval during politics’, the very location of Lohia’s reflection on time is the Lahore Fort prison where he was incarcerated as a political prisoner during the freedom struggle of India. This space challenges the enigmas of time within the immediacies of survival and struggle.  Indeed, it is chastening to be reminded that time could be more oppressive for political prisoners than for seers and thinkers who are free to agonize about the ‘tyranny of time’ in more privileged circumstances.  This is not Lohia’s situation.  Mentally and physically tortured, he is not allowed to sleep.  If his eyelids rest for longer than an involuntary blink, his handcuffs are yanked and his head is shaken vigorously.  In this state of enforced sleeplessness, there is no room for metaphor.  Kshana—an instant of time—which has often been compared to the batting of an eye-lid, is under duress here.  Lohia has to keep his eyes wide open. Nonetheless, what is admirable about his testimony at the Lahore fort is that he does not make a virtue out of being a prisoner; he takes his act of thinking in prison seriously.  And indeed, it is thought that keeps him alive through all its imperfections of logic and speculation.

On the one hand, therefore, he reflects on time in relation to pain: ‘The bearable appeared to be unbearable because of an error in the comprehension of time, and the unbearable became the bearable because of [a] correction in the mistaken notion of time.  The present was always bearable.  It was the future which appeared unbearable.’21  At another level, he gambles intellectually with the measurement of time in relation to his imprisonment and to what destiny has in store for him: ‘If the future was such that my destined stay in the torture house was considerably shorter than the duration of my life, it carried hope.  In the other event of the destined stay being coterminous with the destined age, the future carried despair.’22

It is to Lohia’s credit that he does not luxuriate in these amateur philosophical speculations.  Instead, he is critical of his self-referential thinking, and it is this alertness that enables him to move in the direction of positing the possibility and necessity of ‘non-time’.  Confronting the vacillations of his mind, Lohia unconsciously echoes the words of many seers in his search for a temporal alternative: ‘There was obviously something wrong with the mind and the will that was subject to both the trends of hope and despair.  It struck me that the cessation of existence was not an unpleasant or undesirable experience.’23  Lohia is not contemplating suicide here, but a different state of being that is perhaps most accurately reflected in the mental discipline of Yoga, where the mind and body are yoked in stillness.

Time is the source of unrest.  Lohia grasps this seemingly metaphysical axiom with an activist’s pragmatism.  He links this state of unrest to the different manifestations of time that haunt him like the ‘chimeras of a fancy dress ball’, metamorphosing in various guises as ‘fear, hope, despair and ultimate deliverance’.24  Can time be stripped naked of these unreal manifestations?  Can it stand still?  Without providing a description, Lohia acknowledges that on at least two occasions Time, indeed, did stand still for him, as ‘the everlasting present, pure and unsullied, without the past of regret and sorrow and the future of fear and greed to defy it.’25

While the evidence of experience is at best shifty and mutable, it is significant that Lohia does not deny the validity of its existence, even as he is careful to qualify that what he experienced lasted ‘for a flash too short to remember’.  And yet, ‘the memory of this experience lingers’, as Lohia acknowledges, and it ‘may’ have inspired his ‘theory of immediacy’ in political action.  Already, we are on shaky ground especially if we recognize the seeds of conflict embedded in any source of memory.  As articulated by Krishnamurti, the ‘ending of time’ can be sustained not through memory but through a profound alertness to what is.  Lohia, however, is not interested in ending time to begin with.  For him, ‘[life] is not a single disconnected act or event [but] an infinite series of events [that] follow one upon another.  If they did not, life would cease to be and time would physically stand still.’26  As for ‘revolution’, it is like ‘love’—yet another ‘series of numberless events’.27

In what would seem like a total refutation of Krishnamurti’s deepest assumptions, for whom ‘love is not of time’ and the ‘revolution is now, not tomorrow’, I would like to believe that these two dissimilar but equally passionate minds, locked in a seemingly Hegelian conflict of incontrovertible right, are nonetheless linked through their awareness of non-movement in time.  While Krishnamurti would like to hold this moment, initiating a ‘new beginning which has its own momentum’, Lohia attempts to translate this moment back into the realm of political action.  More pragmatic than Krishnamurti in so far as he believes that ‘the total eradication of desires’ is not humanly possible, Lohia has the grace to acknowledge: ‘I will let pass the question whether that is desirable’ (my emphases).28

Where does that leave us in relation to our own explorations in time? How do we act without anticipating predetermined results?  How do we free ourselves from the burden of our own agendas, the steady burn-out of our dreams?  How do we renew ourselves?  Lohia offers some home-truths in this regard specifically to those activists who have systematically denied any care of the self:

Whether I have been able to practice my experience [of time] in politics and in other spheres of life is wholly irrelevant to the advice that I now give to all those who would hear me, to attempt to control the trends of the mind or the will so that it lives in the present devoid of the fear and the greed that belong to the future.29

In order to ‘control the mind’, we could begin by giving time its due recognition, instead of using it for purely instrumentalist reasons.  Time is not just grist for the mill, the lubricant of our thoughts and desires.  It has its own dimensions and vulnerabilities which demand, in Krishnamurti’s unfailingly resonant words, ‘quick, watchful, attentive understanding’.30  Time is not just there when we care to think about it, it is always there even we are least aware of it, shadowing us through the limited spans of our lives on this earth and beyond.

If this seems intimidating, a form of cosmic surveillance that we can do without, it could help to think of time not in primordial terms as Mahakaal or The Great Time, but as a plurality of differentiated times, which are at once interchangeable and mutable.  We are responsible for these mutations through our own movements within the shifting contours of time.  Indeed, we shift time even as we are shifted by its imperceptible energies and, perhaps in certain contexts and states of preparation, it may even be possible to ‘end’ time, though there is no guarantee that this will necessarily result in a transformation of the world.  Therefore, in homage to the Nirvahana, let us begin our journeys in time wherever we may be situated by proceeding forward into the past only to return to the future with the renewed awareness that, while we may have left the world in our minds, our feet were always planted firmly on the ground.