Erasing Peculiarities

I do disagree with Andrew Robinson; but not often…he has too much insight, so wide a knowledge, knows his subject too well, for me to call him out on key themes. When my arguments approach a disagreement I have to exercise extreme care; tiptoeing over the terrain so I don’t trip over my mistakes. Also why I stand here clapping loudly, as he writes good sense on Satyajit Ray’s Distant Thunder.

The Times reviewer David Robinson, [in a comment] intended as praise, [wrote] that ‘from the first moments of any Ray film the spectator forgets the racial and cultural difference of the characters and sees only human beings.’ It is certainly a tribute to Ray’s artistry that he can elicit such a reaction, but that does not make it a credible statement, as Ray himself agreed.  That it should be applied to his most caste-ridden film (excepting only Deliverance) makes it all odder. (Andrew Robinson, BFI Notes)

Our man goes on to suggest that these critics are not seeing the film; the cultural background, which determines the actions of these characters, does not enter their vision.1 A feature we see all around us, as public discourse turns insanely abstract. Commentators increasingly distant from the realities they describe, they transform Humanity into a kind of Heaven, about which we can only talk in theological concepts. For to discuss local ideas and beliefs is to disturb - to sin against - the pure idea of human oneness and unity. 

David Robinson’s words reflect a new kind of prejudice – we are all the same. Once the Christian missionaries toured the globe proclaiming there was a single God. Today their great-grandchildren tell us that humans are all one. And like those original Bible thumpers, superficially - that is, in the abstract - this new message appears progressive, good, just, humane. Behind our differences there is a commonality we can partake in, share. ‘Hey man! Nothing separates the man in us, man!’ Hugs and high-fives to follow. What can possibly be wrong with that?

Every footballer loves another footballer…. Already you are smiling. But after the joke, I ask you to think about this thought: between the concept of a person and the person herself there is an unbridgeable gap, a universe of possibilities; an experience's qualities of a radically different nature from the ideas describing them.

When we think about David Robinson’s comments, they start to feel odd, sinister. We can only understand, appreciate and sympathise with others if the same as ourselves. Let’s remove all differences and jump into the warm bath of mateyness! But what if I’m attached to my brocaded blouse, my dark velvet dress; the maquillage I’ve spent a fortune in time…. To reduce everyone to a common humanity - a sort of cultural nakedness - is to deny those essential elements of the culture; our identities clothed in its rich history and our efforts to shape it to our own designs. When I walk down the street I expect to be admired not just for my body but those beautiful clothes that fit my gymnastic frame. Nah! Says Missionary. Just fripperies. Such ideas are not important; at worst prejudices, at best meaningless entertainment; accessories to be discarded like plastic wrap. Oh dear! This common humanity. It puts the individual in the incinerator. A mind and its choices to go up in smoke. 

Of course these Humanity evangelists are projecting their own beliefs onto everyone else; the conceptual imperialism invisible because they believe themselves both benign and in possession of Truth. The Truth. Such blindness due partly to the nature of these large abstract ideas; separated by a great distance from life as lived the connection is broken between the actual life of the believer and the ideas they believe in. But I’m generous. Such Olympian ideas are not wholly wrong. They possess a little truth: every human has veins and arteries; all humans eat and drink. Alas, such tiny truths don’t give us much to live on.

A paradox. The bigger the idea, the less it has to say.

The simple-mindedness of such characters, the condescension and damage they cause, is brilliantly captured by Bharati Mukherjee in The Management of Grief. Most of us want an intelligent understanding of ourselves, such intelligence recognising our strangeness while at the same time trying to understand it intelligently and seriously; although some fumbling around the complexities is allowed. A tough call. Beyond the capacity of most; thus this dull insistence on a single idea of the human; which is actually my idea of the human, culturally specific, inadequately investigated.

In all educated people there is a tension between the universal and the local. A boxing match between what’s unique to me and what is shared with everyone else. Inside artists like Ray those boxers slog it out over fifteen brutal rounds. Extremely individualistic, yet suffused with a tradition they inhabit as family, intimate and physical, whose influence and atmosphere can suffocate them. Easy to overburdened by the rich baggage of a culture; which suddenly becomes too heavy to carry. ‘Argh! Throw it away! Smash it up!’ It is because the artist imbibes more codes, embodies more meanings, believes in many more ideas, than his fellow citizens; who rarely step inside a palace, never look at its paintings, or read the books scattered across those sofas. Hardly any effect at all. But for the artist: how find an identity if the tradition is creating it for you? ‘Get out of the way! Don’t burden me!’ It is why an artist self-consciously rebels against his past; the easiest way to feel one’s individuality, think we hear a new voice. Ever so common in an era that in fetishising originality encourages adolescents to reject their parents’s lifestyle and ideas. Only the future is free.

The past a weight we must drop in the sea.

Disciple as rebel. Another paradox; one that today’s artist finds hard to solve. Indeed, this anaconda riddle is apt to crush many as they kill what nurtures them. The great artists know that art is more than demolition or flight. For a work of art to have value it has to grow out of the truths of a life, much of which lives in the soil of our past, experiential and historical. It is the problem Ray has to face: imbued with the Indian cultural inheritance he is also wide open to cosmopolitan influences. How keep the balance in his own work? Enrich a tradition while changing it.

Andrew Robinson and me think Ray succeeds magnificently; modern films that at the same time reveal a specific time and place: Bengal during a period of rapid transformation. The other Robinson would have Ray fail….

This is one way to think about Distant Thunder. Of how a culture, a tradition, a whole way of life, creates a character who must find his own path out of it, if to survive as an original artist. Ostensibly about famine and caste; this film is also about the predicament of the Indian artist in the contemporary world; who has to engage with a modernity wiping out his (absolutely necessary, art-fermenting) past. To become wholly new - to erase all cultural and social differences - is to swap one total environment for another which, in lacking the thick texture of the old, a tradition that has been grown into one’s bones, is terribly impoverished; surface only. So easy to end up playing with meaningless labels. It is to enter a white empty room where credulous curators ask us to hang their fashion statements.

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Notes

1. “…no less than two major British critics wrote that the Brahmin’s wife, rather than her neighbour, eventually sells herself for rice…”