Michael Murphy’s Golf in the Kingdom (the movie)

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Michael Murphy

Golf in the Kingdom (the movie)

From: The New York Times

by Charles McGrath

At last, though, “Golf in the Kingdom” is coming to the screen. It opens in New York on Friday in a version written and directed by Susan Streitfeld, who has never played golf in her life, and produced by Mindy Affrime, an independent producer who says that “Hollywood is a men’s club for guys who don’t need to work.” She made the movie not on a shoestring but on the discarded baling twine you use when you can’t afford a shoestring. The cast, which includes Mason Gamble as Murphy, David O’Hara as Shivas, and Malcolm McDowell as a crusty Scottish doctor who thinks the electric golf cart spells the end of civilization, worked for $100 a day.

For reasons of economy, the film was shot at Bandon Dunes, a golf resort in Oregon that looks more Scottish than much of Scotland, and Mike Keiser, owner of the resort, wound up feeding and housing the cast and crew free during the 20 days of shooting.

“It’s hard to escape Mindy,” he said last week. “Using ‘Golf in the Kingdom,’ she became an expert mooch. I think Michael approved, and I’m sure the Shivas character would have approved too.”

Mr. Murphy, now 80, is better known as a founder of the Esalen Institute, home of the human potential movement and scene of countless nude hot tub encounters. He gave up golf a few years ago when his brother began to outdrive him, but took a keen interest in the film and helped write the script. He focused particularly on a long meditation sequence at the end and also suggested a scene, not in the novel, in which a golfer and a barmaid turn each other on by quoting the Robert Burns poem “Nine Inch Will Please a Lady” to each other.

“I’ve been waiting for this a long time,” he said of the movie. “I had got to calling ‘Golf in the Kingdom’ the world’s longest virtual movie, coming soon to a mind near you.”

One reason the film took so long to get made is that the book is close to unfilmable. It’s less a novel than a philosophical parable, in which the Murphy character plays an eye-opening round with Shivas; attends a dinner party, probably based on Plato’s “Symposium,” where the guests takes turns expounding on the meaning of golf; and has a nighttime mystical encounter with Shivas, and while swinging in the dark discovers the importance of his “inner body.”

It ends with a little coda of speculations about matters like the whiteness of the ball, the holeness of the hole and the importance of becoming one sense-organ. There is hardly any plot, and no love interest. By the end the Murphy character has become so spiritual that he has sworn off sex entirely. The book’s popularity among golfers probably  has less to do with novelistic elements than with its tantalizing suggestion that there is already a perfect golf swing inside you, if you can just close your eyes and find it.

Mr. Murphy guessed that the absence of a traditional narrative is what thwarted so many filmmakers, and said he knew of some 15 different screenplays that had tried to impose more of a story on his book. In one version the Murphy character is a used-car salesman in the Bronx who falls in love with Shivas’s daughter and winds up a remittance man in Tahiti.

Ms. Affrime, who grew up playing golf, was introduced to the book by Mr. Van Sant and remained eager to film it even when he bowed out. After finally acquiring the rights, which she did by wheedling Warner Brothers, now the owner, she interviewed a number of male directors.

“There were all these guys who said they wanted to make ‘Golf in the Kingdom,’ ” she recalled. “They all had their opinions on what it should be, and they all had their own relationship to golf. It became their story, not Michael’s.”

Ms. Streitfeld, whose film “Female Perversions” Ms. Affrime had produced in 1996, was Mr. Murphy’s idea, and what she brought to the project was essentially a blank slate. She comes from “an extremely tall, nonathletic family,” she said last week (her uncle is Paul Volcker, the 6-foot-7 former chairman of the Federal Reserve), and saw the book less as a golf story than as a “layering of ancient religions and philosophies and ideas.”

Talking about “Golf in the Kingdom,” Ms. Streitfeld sounded like someone who had spent a great deal of quality time with Shivas Irons. She referred to the book not as a novel but as “the material,” and said she had spent years “standing around and listening to it.”

“It was very elusive and mysterious,” she added. “There’s so little that’s holding you, so little you can grab onto.”

For many golfers Michael Murphy’s 1972 novel, “Golf in the Kingdom,” is practically a sacred text. It’s about a young man, modeled on Mr. Murphy himself, who on his way to an ashram in India stops off in Scotland, where his life is transformed by an encounter with a golf pro and mystic named Shivas Irons, who knows as much about Pythagoras and the Hindu scriptures as he does about hitting a high fade. Several filmmakers have felt similarly transported by reading the book, and “Golf in the Kingdom” has been optioned or in development since before it was even published. Gus Van Sant was interested for a while. Sean Connery was approached about playing Shivas. Clint Eastwood fell in love with the book and clung to the rights for a decade or so before giving up.
Normally a very methodical director, she more or less improvised “Golf in the Kingdom.” She and the cinematographer, Arturo D. Smith, went to Bandon Dunes with a script but no story board or shot list, and some of the most striking scenes are in parts of the Bandon landscape that don’t look Scottish at all.

“It was a process of all the senses being in relationship to the essence of the material,” she said, and added, “The crew basically wanted to kill us.”

The finished version is nonlinear, jumping forward and flashing back in time. This was not her original intention, Ms. Streitfeld said, but the movie resisted being edited into a traditional form.

“The sense the film had of itself was very, very strong,” she said with Shivas-like wonder, and went on: “The whole thing really was instinctual. I would hope I never do that again.”

Mr. Murphy said that at a certain point during the filming he was “advised to retire to the perimeter of the set,” but he nevertheless highly approves of the movie.

“I’ve seen it five or six times, and it depends on my mood what my reaction is,” he said. “The second time I had had a couple of glasses of wine and I thought it was hilarious. I said, ‘What have you done?,’ and they said, ‘No, it’s the same movie.’ ”

The Accidental Tagore by Amit Chaudhuri

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The Accidental Tagore

Amit Chaudhuri April 2011

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)

Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh.
—D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse

I began to feel put off by Tagore in my late teens, around the time I discovered Indian classical music, the devotional songs of Meerabai, Tulsidas, and Kabir, not to speak of the work of the modernists. I was also—to place the moment further in context—reading contemporary European poetry in translation, in the tremendous series edited by Al Alvarez, the Penguin Modern European Poets. My father knew of my promiscuous adventurousness when it came to poetry, and, in tender deference to this, he (a corporate man) would buy these books from bookshops in the five-star hotels he frequented, such as the mythic Nalanda at the Taj. Among the poets I discovered through this route of privilege was the Israeli Dan Pagis, of whom the blurb stated: “A survivor of a concentration camp, Dan Pagis possesses a vision which is essentially tragic.” I don’t recall how my seventeen-year-old self responded to Pagis, but I do remember the poem he is most famous for, “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car.” Here it is in its entirety:

here in this carload
i am eve
with abel my son
if you see my other son
cain son of man
tell him i

The resonance of the poem escaped me at the time: This history was not mine. What struck me were the qualities I found most attractive when I was seventeen—metaphysical despair; deliberate irresolution. I mention the poem because I think it figured as a subtext to a difference of opinion I had with my uncle when my parents and I visited him in London in 1979. My uncle, a bachelor and an executive in shipping, was the most shameless propagandist for Tagore I have ever met, and his enthusiasm only furthered my dislike for the Bengali poet. Walking around Belsize Park, he would tell me that Tagore was the greatest poet the world had ever seen, surpassing everybody, including “the poets of the Bhagavad Gita.” (Homer and Shakespeare didn’t even merit a mention.) I countered with the name of my favorite poet, T. S. Eliot, flag-bearer of a certain kind of twentieth-century despondency especially attractive to teenagers, and spoke too of Meera’s devotionals, saying I preferred the latter to Tagore’s lyrics. “You somehow feel,” I said, “that there’s a real urgency and immediacy about her songs. They could have been scribbled upon a prison wall.” I was probably invoking Pagis here, and also having a go at Tagore’s premeditated and loving craftsmanship. Many poets—besides, of course, philosophers—have insisted that there are things that are more important than poetry, especially in the face of trauma; for poets, this disavowal is, in fact, a respectable literary strategy. Even an adolescent detractor could tell that, to Tagore, nothing was as important as poetry.

My uncle attempted to indoctrinate me each time I went to London in the 1970s. In his eyes, Tagore was an amazingly contradictory agglomeration of virtues and characteristics. “If Tolstoy was a sage whose heart bled for mankind,” said my uncle, “then Rabi Thakur was a greater sage. No one has felt more pity for man’s sorrows.” He spoke of him in the semi-familiar, affectionate way of the Bengali bhadralok, as if Tagore were a cherished acquaintance—“Rabi Thakur”—and not hieratically, as “Gurudev,” the appellation Gandhi had conferred on him (as, in turn, Tagore had reportedly conferred “Mahatma” on Gandhi). He sometimes hummed Tagore’s more popular and plangent lines (“My days wouldn’t remain in the golden cage / those many-colored days of mine” and “I know, I know that the prayers that went / unanswered in life haven’t been lost”) mainly to express his sadness: for he was a man who loved company, and family, but had oddly chosen to be alone, and an expatriate. Then, the mood would change abruptly. Tagore, according to my uncle, was a “tennis player”—this odd metaphor was deployed to suggest, I think, a series of departures: the breaking away of Tagore’s family, starting with his great-grandfather Nilmoni Tagore, from its conservative Brahminical roots; Tagore’s own breaking out from his “aristocratic,” landed past into modernity, art, individualism, and, of course, glamorous mystique. The latter, presumably, is what Tagore, the celebrity poet, and the tennis player had in common—besides finesse and control.

“All men who repeat one line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare,” said Jorge Luis Borges; all Bengalis of a certain generation were, at one point or another, Tagore.
My uncle was as much in awe of Tagore’s looks as he was of his work—both were, in fact, impossible to disentangle from one another. Despite his immemorial, world-denying air from his forties onward, Tagore and everything associated with him—his handwriting; the interiors he inhabited, with their new “ethnic” design; the habitations he constructed for himself in Santiniketan; the paintings created out of manuscript corrections—had an air of provisionality and experiment. They emanated from a man taking his cue from, or experiencing resonances with, a number of sources and excitements—tribal arts and crafts; the devotional-mystic music of Bengal; the dance traditions of neighboring regions, like Manipur; Shelley; the Upanishads; Paul Klee. All this translated, in the public domain, into the personality and the appearance themselves—the commanding but ineffable, and somehow wholly contemporary, presence of the “world poet.” It was this image that held my uncle in thrall. “’People who compare me with Shakespeare should realize that I had to make a leap of five hundred years to write as I do,’ said Rabindranath,” reported my uncle calmly. There was a remonstrative edge to his words, though, for his identification with Tagore was fierce. “All men who repeat one line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare,” said Jorge Luis Borges; all Bengalis of a certain generation were, at one point or another, Tagore. And, of course, there are many Tagores, as you will discover in this volume. The phrase “Renaissance man” does not capture the restless energy and vitality with which he—a colonial subject—journeyed toward different genres in the manner of one learning, mastering, and finally altering new languages. He undertook each genre as an exploration: the revealing (in all kinds of ways) letter-writing of the young man; the shadowy microcosm contained in the plays; the great novels and stories; the often deeply original but underrated essays; the paintings that emerged almost by accident—from manuscript corrections—when he was a much older man. The act of journeying and the element of chance were (as I discovered later) both crucial to Tagore.

For the versatility I’ve just mentioned, Tagore is occasionally compared to Goethe. I see him as being closer to another German, Josef Beuys, as someone who wants not only to address or to influence the world around him, but to rearrange and reorder it—creatively, radically, sometimes physically. As a consequence, Tagore was interested not only in literature but in book design, apparel, and the decorative and cultural aspects of our drawing rooms. Indeed, Buddhadeva Bose, writing about a visit to the Tagore household, mentions how subtly innovative and experimental (and finely judged) both the food and the decor were. Tagore’s urge to experiment was relentless; and we can’t really pretend that what he did within the covers of a book and what he did outside it emerge from two wholly divergent impulses. Beuys refuses to distinguish between the text and the world that is his immediate material and, in many ways, dissolves the frame around the artwork; Tagore, too, frequently refuses to make the same distinction. This volume’s songs, poems, stories, extracts from his novels, reflections on literature and politics and on his frequent and exhausting travels, and even instances of his sui generis humor shouldn’t be read as his “writings” alone, but seen in conjunction with Tagore’s larger interest—evident in almost all he did—in intervening in and reshaping his surroundings. His school, Santiniketan, served as a hothouse and a laboratory for this creative experiment. In important ways, Santiniketan—indeed, the many-pronged, all-embracing Tagorean project—was a precursor to Beuys’s vision of “total art” and “social sculpture,” and a successor to the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, the art performance in which every form of art is incorporated. Yet Tagore’s impulse needs to be distinguished from Wagner’s messianic vision. Tagore was absorbed in the everyday, the domestic, and his modernist love of the momentary.

To recover Tagore today as a poet and writer must entail some sense of the Bengali language becoming a realm of literary possibility.
Naturally, my uncle had a view on Tagore’s metamorphic effect: “Let’s say you were to set a murder mystery in the early twentieth century, and the murder had been committed by someone who grew up before Tagore became famous. Let’s say a manuscript page was the single available clue. You’d catch the murderer just by looking at the handwriting, because Bengali handwriting changed forever after Tagore.” Moreover, “Words like Keatsian and Wordsworthian describe a literary style associated with that particular poet,” he pointed out, for he had read a great deal. “Only Rabindrik” —the Bengali adjective derived from Tagore’s first name — “encompasses an entire generation, an outlook, that came into being with the poet’s work.” For my uncle, this was a matter of intransigent pride. For the very original poets who followed Tagore in the Bengali language, the legacy was a mixed one. “It was impossible to write like Rabindranath, and it was impossible not to write like Rabindranath,” said Buddhadeva Bose. When, in fact, I quoted and cited the great post-Tagorean poets I particularly loved, like Jibanananda Das or Bose, to my uncle, he was completely immune to their music: “I’ve heard it all before. Don’t you see none of this would be possible without Rabindranath?” Thus my uncle, an idiosyncratic but sensitive reader, deliberately echoed a vulgar undertone of a particular form of Bengali romanticism—that Tagore was a historical pinnacle, after which everything was a kind of decline, and every writer a latecomer. This view precluded any further fruitful discussion between my uncle and myself, though that didn’t stop either of us.

There was another dimension to these conversations in London. My uncle knew, as I think I must have, that the dismantling of Tagore’s reputation as a serious poet had started early—soon after the Nobel Prize in 1913—and that, by the seventies, very little survived of that reputation in the West, or, for that matter, anywhere outside the cocoon of Bengal. The rise itself had been at once astonishing and suspect, impossible without the interconnectedness of the world from the nineteenth century onward, and points to the dangers and benefits of the sort of global fame we’ve now become familiar with. In my introduction to the Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature, I’d said that Tagore was probably the world’s “first international literary celebrity”; an Indian reviewer, who must have immediately concluded I was celebrating the fact, said my claim was “risible.” An English poet who taught at Oxford said the dubious honor might belong to Byron. People have forgotten how startling Tagore’s incursion was into the various languages of the twentieth century. Martin Kaempchen points out that he was Germany’s first bestseller; Jiménez’s translations made him a cult in the Spanish-speaking world; this is not to invoke his renown in China, Japan, Russia, Eastern Europe, and the United States. This fame was a product, largely, of Tagore’s English-language, Nobel Prize–winning Gitanjali; the English Gitanjali is perhaps one of the earliest examples of how capitalism fetishizes the book. To use the word celebrity, then (rather than terms like “high critical standing”), isn’t inappropriate, as Tagore’s presence was felt so predominantly outside the field of literature, as it still is—except in the forgotten sphere of Bengali literature. And to recover Tagore today as a poet and writer must entail some sense of the Bengali language becoming a realm of literary possibility.

 

Looking back today to the middle of the nineteenth century, we feel compelled to admit that something exceptional occurred with the emergence of Bengali as a literary language. Disturbingly, we still know very little of this moment, partly because an easeful way of looking at colonial history (according to which modernity comes from elsewhere, bringing with it certain genres and practices) has saved us from engaging too strenuously with the question of how and why things changed when they did. For instance, I don’t think we still have a proper genealogy of the word sahitya, which we’ve been using for more than a century to mean “literature” and “literary tradition” in the modern, secular sense, and not to mean, as it once did in the Indian languages, “literary content” or “literary meaning.” Tagore’s own etymological gloss on the word asks us to look at its root, sahit (“to be with”), thereby turning literature into a social, companionable thing. It is fairly certain, though, that sahitya, as we understand it, is not a timeless Indian verity (for that, we should perhaps look up the word kavya) but a contingent, humanist construct, just as “Indianness” and the modern Bengali language are. It is also certain that the emergence of Bengali encompassed more than nationalism. It became—in lieu of English—a respectable vehicle for cosmopolitan self-expression by the 1860s. It is the latter development that failed in Ireland and Wales with regard to Gaelic and Welsh, and nationalism alone (of which there was no shortage in Ireland) didn’t succeed in turning those languages into viable literatures or prevent them from becoming, essentially, curios. In Ireland, it is the English language that became the medium through which the modern formulated his or her ambivalence and self-division, so giving Irish literature and diction its shifting registers in English. Gaelic, largely associated with identity and nation, became, with a few striking exceptions, an unusable artifact. Something quite different and exceptional happened in Bengali colonial modernity. The Bengali language emerged from not only a conviction about identity but an intimation of distance, from not just the wellspring of race but disjunction and severance. These essentially cosmopolitan tensions always animate Tagore’s language.

I used the word “curio” deliberately, in order to recall Buddhadeva Bose’s unfair but revealing attack on Indian poets writing in English in the 1960s, in which he accused them of producing, by choosing not to write in the mother tongue, not poems but “curios.” In one sense, Bose is right. It is the English language that has risked becoming, over and over, a sort of Gaelic in India: not because, as Bose would have it, it was a foreign or colonial tongue, but because, like Gaelic, it bore too notionally the burden of identity and nationality. The relative and paradoxical freedom from this burden in the emergence of modern Bengali gave it its special air of play and potential. In other, fundamental ways, Bose was wrong. The poets he attacked had based their achievement on a cunning with which they had sabotaged and complicated the possibility of a pan-Indian tradition; they too were writing, in their way, in a vernacular. In fact, it was the long poem that Bose held up as the great exemplary Indian English poem, “Savitri” by Sri Aurobindo, that the shrewd Nissim Ezekiel pointed out as the actual curio for, presumably, its faux high cultural atmosphere of the Orient as well as its emulation of the English canon (it was composed in iambs). It should be pointed out that Tagore’s English translation of Gitanjali would be—for Indian poets writing in English like Ezekiel, A. K. Ramanujan, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra—yet another Gaelic artifact to bypass or circumvent. In his brief memoir “Partial Recall,” Mehrotra quotes, with little indulgence toward his youthful self, from the ambitious and sonorous pastiche of that Gitanjali which he produced as a teenager.
The essence of literature does not allow itself to be trapped within a definition. It is like the essence of life: we know what it cannot exist without, but what it is we do not know.
The fact that literature—specifically English literature—was a university discipline first invented for the colonies is fairly well known today. In the 1880s, English literature became an object of study leading to a degree at the University of Calcutta, well before any such development had taken place elsewhere, let alone Oxford or Cambridge. But the incursion of English and European literary texts into Bengal had begun a century earlier. The study of literature cannot be seen simply as an instrument of imperialist pedagogy from 1820s onward (when it first surfaces as a taught discipline in Calcutta). By the early nineteenth century, Bengalis, especially when naming literary and cultural societies, were reflecting on what literature, or, in Bengali, sahitya, might be—great texts of all kinds, or a different way of approaching and valuing texts? A significant historical narrative is contained in the evolution of the word sahitya into its present-day meaning. What seems pretty sure is that it was not a word just lying around, ready to slip into its contemporary, secular role. Nor is it a simple translation of the word literature, though it means much the same thing from the middle of the nineteenth century onward. That is, it is neither a purely Indian (whatever that may be) or colonial term, but one that keeps abreast of these dichotomies until they start to waver. Tagore, in his first essay on the subject in 1889, defines it in negatives: “The essence of literature does not allow itself to be trapped within a definition. It is like the essence of life: we know what it cannot exist without, but what it is we do not know.” These are the words of a poet who has come into his own at a cusp in history. Perhaps the specificity of Tagore’s problem, and the duress of the historical moment he’s speaking in and of, would become clearer if the key word were left untranslated: “The essence of sahitya does not allow itself to be trapped,” and so on. But the translator, Sukanta Chaudhuri, doesn’t do so because he presumes Tagore has already leaped toward the sense in which that word operates today; and, in part, he’s right. By 1889, Tagore’s readers have definitely begun to recognize the literary, in spite of the strangeness of the sentences I have quoted. Yet one must keep in mind the strangeness of the time. Tagore’s complex and difficult position as a modern Indian, a colonial subject, an elite cosmopolitan, an inheritor and inventor of Eastern civilizational values, and a progeny of the Enlightenment allows him to partake of the exclusive secular ethos of literature but also to view it from the outside, as a process. You feel more than once as you gaze back on that crucial period that you are over-familiar with its outlines, and also that you are only on the verge of understanding it.
Tagore has been such a fountainhead of nationalist pride, such a static emblem ever since one can remember that we forget that he was clearly aware, as a writer, of living in a unique and transformative time. There is, in Tagore, a constant acknowledgment of the power of the past, and of the canonical riches of Indian tradition, and constant inquiry about the terms in which these are available to us. In this, he is different from either the Hindu reformers or the Indian nationalists, for whom tradition has an integrity and wholeness, and is a given to be improved upon or invoked in the services of politics and identity. For Tagore, tradition is at once contemporary and immediate, and inaccessible and disjunctive. As a result, contrary emotions permeate his great essay on the fourth-century Kalidasa’s poem on the rainy season, “Meghadutam” (“The Cloud-Messenger”):

“From Ramgiri to the Himalayas ran a long stretch of ancient India over which life used to flow to the slow, measured mandrakanta meter of the “Meghadutam”. We are banished from that India, not just during the rains but for all time. Gone is Dasharna with its groves hedged with ketaki plants where, before the onset of the rains, the birds among the roadside trees fed on household scraps and busily built their nests, while in the jaam copse on the outskirts of the village, the fruit ripened to a color dark as the clouds.”

The intimation of contemporaneity here is astonishingly suburban; it has to do with nature, yes, but nature viewed from the point of view of the town and the ebb and flow of domesticity: the “household scraps” the birds feed on, the ripening jaam that will be collected and brought home to the family. Kalidasa is not a naïve poet; he is a court sophisticate, an urban sensibility, already viewing the natural at one remove. The loss experienced here, then—“We are banished from that India, not just during the rains but for all time”—is a double, even a multiple, one. From which India, exactly, are we banished? This paradox—to do with immediacy, recognizability, and absolute inaccessibility—is also the subject of Tagore’s own poem, “Meghdut.” which records the experience of rereading Kalidasa’s eponymous poem. Tagore’s poem, filled with images of human activity and habitation, describes how the reader comes to inhabit Kalidasa’s world as he reads and becomes an exile from it once the poem is over.

Tagore’s fascination and absorption in heritage could have made him an elegist, or a poet who turned from the physical life of the present to contemplate the ruins of the past. This trajectory was, to a certain extent, T. S. Eliot’s. But, oddly, this is not the case. Tagore’s way of suggesting that he lives in a unique moment in history is to embrace change as a fundamental constituent of existence—indeed, as a crucial constituent of diction, imagination, and craft. “In order to find you anew, I lose you every moment / O beloved treasure.” In this line from a song and others like it, Tagore embraces accident. He weds contingency to the modernist’s love of the moment, the here and now. The latter—as in the Joycean epiphany—heightens the quotidian: Tagore’s welcoming of contingency introduces an element of risk to the epiphany and the image. He introduces the possibility of any imaginable consequence, including an intuition of the divine. Tagore’s apotheosis of his historical moment, his here and now, is not a surreptitious celebration of the colonial history into which he was born, but a recognition of the fact that no historical period can be contained within its canonical definition. Accident and chance ensure that its outcomes are unpredictable and life-transforming.

Tagore writes as if he knows that the self’s infinity or endlessness should be a natural consequence of divine play, while also knowing very well there is absolutely no logical reason for the one to lead to the other.
This embrace of life, of chance, of play, makes Tagore stand out in the intellectual and moral ethos of late romanticism and modernism—an ethos with which Tagore shares several obsessions (time, memory, the moment, the nature of reality, poetic form), but whose metaphysics he constantly refutes. By metaphysics I mean a system whereby value and meaning have their source elsewhere, somewhere beyond the experienced world—whether it is European civilization, antiquity, the Celtic twilight, or some other lost world. The present, severed from its organic resources in that past, becomes degraded and splintered, and yet continues to be haunted, even burnished, by what it has lost. I think Tagore is deeply interested in this metaphysics in the context of Bengal, and it runs through his songs, with their momentary scenes, encounters, and revelations, where any hint of transcendence is qualified by the temporal and the fragmentary. This metaphysics is partly invoked as incantation in the refrain from the poem “Balaka,” or “The Wild Geese”: “Hethha noi, hethha noi, onno konokhane!” (“Not here, not here—elsewhere!”) But there is also—in the same oeuvre, often in the very same songs and poems—the Tagore of whom I have become more and more aware, the near-contemporary of Nietzsche’s, who, like the latter, makes a break with that “elsewhere” and constructs a sustained argument against it in song, and in the terms that life and desire give him: “I’ve become infinite: / such is the consequence of your play. / Pouring me out, you fill me / with new life once again.” This, in many ways, is an astonishing and audacious assertion, all the more striking for being entirely self-aware about its audacity (this is a tonal characteristic Tagore shares with Nietzsche). The oeuvre is full of such assertions, running counter to both romanticism’s backward glance and his own “Not here, not here” refrain. It marks him out, like D. H. Lawrence, as a writer embodying a radical historical break. The lines I have tried to reproduce in English are among the most difficult to translate from the work of this largely untranslatable poet. They (in Tagore’s own English) are also among his most famous, being the opening lines of the first song in the English Gitanjali. In Tagore’s English prose-poem version: “Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure.” All sorts of echoes adorn the next two lines in Tagore’s English—“This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again …” and “This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales”—placing the song now in the context of a psalmlike, New Testament sweetness (“this frail vessel”) and now in an English arcadia (“little flute of a reed…hills and dales”). The words are removed, in effect, from the radical moment they inhabit in the Bengali. The original—“Amare tumi ashesh korechho / emoni leela taba”—is remarkable, as I’ve said, on many levels. The word leela can be translated as divine play: Hindu philosophy sees divine play as childlike and solipsistic, and the creation and destruction of the universe, and of man, among its various corollaries. Tagore translates the word as “pleasure,” to denote the primacy of delight and desire, rather than moral design, in divine creation. Among the unintended, almost inadvertent, results of that play, the song has it, is man’s immortality, or “infinity” (my word), or “endlessness” (Tagore’s). And so the centrality of the human is bestowed upon her or him by divinity, certainly, but not by design or according to a legible purpose. In this way, Tagore introduces the notion of chance and coincidence into the story of man’s emergence, and removes the human narrative from its familiar logical movement (an ascent or a decline) from the past to the present, from tradition to modernity.

Radical claims abound in the songs and poems. Also in the Gitanjali is the song beginning (in my translation): “To the festival of creation I have had an invitation: / Blessed, blessed is human life!” In Tagore’s English prose-poem, though, the song’s declaration is more modest: “I have had my invitation to this world’s festival, and thus my life has been blessed.” This is almost Christian, a muttering of grace. The Bengali is far more unsettling: it has “human life” (manab jiban) instead of the prayerful “my life.” It is more triumphal. Again, alongside the celebration of the occurrence of life and consciousness is the deliberate celebration of contingency. An invitation is always a bonus and a gift; you can’t really expect it or plan for it or demand it. And, once more, the two lines, with their narrative of cause and effect, are structured at once to invoke logic and to mock it. In the earlier song, Tagore writes as if he knows that the self’s infinity or endlessness should be a natural consequence of divine play, while also knowing very well there is absolutely no logical reason for the one to lead to the other. In the second song, the progression, from discovering the invitation to the festival of existence to the assertion that human life is “blessed” (dhanya), is presented seamlessly, although we know there is actually no good reason why the second should follow from the first. (In the English version, which adds a “thus” that is absent in the Bengali, the progression in the first line is far more acceptable.) But why should divine play lead to the speaker’s belief in his own infinitude? Why should his being invited to earthly existence be a cause of joy for all human life? There’s a logical structure to the way these statements develop, but it is a structure that conceals a deep arbitrariness. The second song strongly implies, in its movement from the first line to the second in Bengali, a “thus” or “therefore” or “tai,” without being able to quite justify or explain that powerful implication. The English translation, by adding a “thus” and substituting “human life” with “my life,” simply dispenses with that mysterious tension and diminishes the audacity of the opening. We, as listeners of the Bengali song, are moved and unsettled, but we ask, in the end, for no justification: it is almost as if we know that, in Tagore’s world, anything is possible.

Much of Tagore’s work, then, is preoccupied with—indeed, mesmerized by—coincidence and possibility. It is a preoccupation that seems to go against the closure and yearning of “Not here, not here, elsewhere,” because one can never predict when or where that moment of possibility will occur. One of the songs I have translated for this volume, “The sky full of the sun and stars, the world full of life, / in the midst of this, I find myself— / so, surprised, my song awakens,” is, again, a paean to coincidence. It is also a refutation of metaphysics, of a higher purpose (whatever that might be), according to whose design existence or consciousness might find its proper meaning and arrangement. I have translated Tagore’s word bismaye as “surprised,” though it could plausibly be rendered as “in wonder.” The role of the naïve or nature poet, or even a certain kind of romantic, is to wonder at the real, at the universe, but the speaker in the song is not just transfixed by the beauty of the universe but by the happenstance that’s brought him to it: “in the midst of this, I find myself.” This is what gives to the poet-mystic’s bismay (his sense of wonder) the element of the unexpected, of surprise—the surprise of the time-traveler (expressed in the poem “Meghdut”) moving between worlds and phases of history. Tagore’s peculiar lyric voice, with its curiously urgent apotheosis of the world, its constant note of arrival, can be partly understood through the trope of science fiction (one of whose recurrent themes is the sudden advent into new universes), or through the notion of rebirth and return, or both. This is an odd but powerful, and revealing, characteristic in the foremost artist to have emerged from a background of Brahmo reformism and the Bengali Enlightenment.
Tagore’s recurrent metaphors of time travel, return, and arrival, and the fact that the great protagonist of his songs and poems is a figure determinedly committed to journeying toward life and birth, were picked up by two great Bengali artists who came after him: the poet Jibanananda Das and the filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak. Das (1899-1954), who, after his untimely death in an accident with a tram, has come to be seen as the outstanding Bengali poet after Tagore, and whose personality—solitary, disturbed—is the antithesis of the older poet’s, sensed that Tagore was the principal writer of his time of the will to, and desire for, life. Without remarking upon this in so many words, he took on this mantle himself, but expressed himself far more equivocally, if no less forcefully. Das’s time traveler, in his poem “Banalata Sen,” moves through epochs and civilizations, arriving at last in a modern drawing room in Bengal, in a journey during which both mythic and ordinary place-names are made strange:

For thousands of years I roamed the paths of this earth,
From waters round Ceylon in dead of night to Malayan seas.
Much have I wandered. I was there in the gray world of Asoka
And Bimbisara, pressed on through darkness to the city of
Vidarbha.
I am a weary heart surrounded by life’s frothy ocean.
To me she gave a moment’s peace—Banalata Sen from Natore.

(trans. Clinton B. Seely)

The irrepressible Tagorean energy, the irresistible will to arrive—“in the midst of this, I find myself— / so, surprised, my song awakens”—has faded here but not vanished. Das gets his habit of repeating ancient place names from Tagore as one of the ways in which the traveler orders his journey while commemorating past arrivals; here is Tagore in his eponymous essay on Kalidasa’s poem, “The Meghadutam”: “Avanti, Vidisha, Ujjayini, Vindhya, Kailas, Devagiri, the Reva, the Shipra, the Vetravati.” But Das’s speaker experiences a fatigue that the radical Tagorean protagonist didn’t know. Das’s hero, or antihero, must press on, despite his “weary heart”: he has inherited, perplexingly, the same life-urge. Das too is a great poet of the will to live—precisely because his view of it is darker, and far more qualified. His protagonist desires to be born despite being conscious that birth is not an unmixed blessing. This is Das’s troubling modulation upon the Tagorean idea of the “invitation” to earthly existence, as a result of which “human life” is “blessed”:

Drawn to the Earth’s ground, to the house of human birth
I have come, and I feel, better not to have been born—
yet having come all this I see as a deeper gain
when I touch a body of dew in an incandescent dawn.

(“Suchetana,” trans. Joe Winter)

In the first two lines of this famous stanza, Das has a familiar Sophoclean moment; but, in the third and fourth lines, he’s come round to the Tagorean belief that arrival and return create their own article of faith; the body becomes an incarnation of the will (“I touch a body of dew”); in Tagore’s words, “I’ve pressed upon each blade of grass on my way to the forest.” Again and again, Das will be of two minds about this matter, about withdrawing from the cycle of life or, taking his cue from his great precursor, returning to it:

When once I leave this body
Shall I come back to the world?
If only I might return
On a winter’s evening
Taking on the compassionate flesh of a cold tangerine
At the bedside of some dying acquaintance.

(“Tangerine,” trans. Clinton B. Seely)

For Tagore, withdrawal was out of the question. “In the midst of this, I find myself,” he’d said in the song. In the poem “Liberation” (“Mukti”), he put it elegantly but with directness: “Liberation through enunciation—that’s not for me”; and, later, “To shut / in penance, the senses’ doorway—that’s not for me.” We can connect this to the Buddhist thought that deeply attracted Tagore; but if we place it in the context of his oeuvre, of the modernity he lived in, and the modernism he was always ambivalent about, we must put him in the lineage of Nietzsche, Whitman, Lawrence, and others who made a similar rebuttal of negation. Actually, looking again at the poem “Balaka” (“The Wild Geese”), in which the admonitory refrain “Not here, not here, elsewhere” occurs, I find it lit not so much by a desire for “elsewhere” (the foundational desire of metaphysics) but, again, by the subversive urge for life itself. The poet is standing after sunset before a landscape of hills and deodar trees, near the river Jhelum, when, unexpectedly, the sudden transit of a flock of geese flying transmogrifies the observer and his vision of nature. The Tagorean landscape is often orchestral, participatory, musical, synchronic, but not Wordsworthian, with the “still, sad music of humanity”; it is alive, but not in an anthropomorphic sense. In another, early poem, “Jete nahi dibo” (“I Won’t Let You Go!”), all of nature, as the speaker departs from home and family on a long absence involving work, echoes his daughter’s final words to him in an actively participatory way, in what can only be called an orchestral threnody:

What immense sadness has engulfed
The entire sky and the whole world!
The farther I go the more clearly I hear
Those poignant words, “Won’t let you go!”
From world’s end to the blue dome of the sky
Echoes the eternal cry: “Won’t let you go!”
Everything cries, “I won’t let you go!”
Mother Earth too cries out to the tiny grass
It hugs on its bosom, “I won’t let you go!”

(trans. Fakrul Alam)

This is not anthropomorphism; it is the landscape agitated by the life urge, and making a vocal, direct intervention. In “The Wild Geese,” Tagore revisits and revises his vision:

It seemed that those wings
Bore away tidings
Of stillness thrilled in its innermost being
By the intensity of motion …

And again:

… The grass fluttering its wings
On the earth that is its air—
Underneath the darkness of the soil
Millions of seeds sprouting wings
I see today

(trans. Fakrul Alam)

From Tagore, the filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak (1925-1976) got his sense of the landscape being not just a serene, indifferent, permanent background to human endeavor, as in the Brueghel painting of Icarus’s fall described wryly by W. H. Auden in his “Musée des Beaux Arts,” but as a multivocal, orchestral entity actively involved in the desire for existence. So, at different points of time in Ghatak’s films, the landscape appears to move and listen; it is aware of the protagonist, just as the protagonist is partly conscious of it being conscious of him. Ghatak’s great modulation upon “The Wild Geese” and its cry—as well as the cry “I won’t let you go”—occurs toward the end of “Meghe Dhaka Tara” (The Cloud-Covered Star), his most fraught and painful film. Nita, once the breadwinner of a family of East Bengali refugees displaced by migration, is now terminally ill with tuberculosis. She has been transferred by her brother, Shankar, from their house in Calcutta to a sanatorium in the hill-station, Shillong. Anil, now a successful singer, comes to visit her; the two figures are surrounded by an astonishing panorama. As she listens to him talk about their younger sister’s mischievous child, Nita bursts out without warning, “Dada, I did want to live!” Crushed, attempting to placate and silence her, Anil responds with “Idiot!” (Indeed, there is something comic, even imbecilic, about the life-urge and its insistent simplicity; which is why we, on occasion, shake our heads in consternation at Tagore and Whitman and Lawrence and Ghatak—all very different kinds of artists, admittedly.) In a series of rapid frames, we witness the landscape congregating from various angles and echoing her words, “I so love life, dada! I will live!” This is the primordial Tagorean “message” (“I felt the message of those beating wings”) of a near-heretical faith; ironicized by Ghatak, seen unflinchingly for its heresy, but not made meaningless. This faith contains an acknowledgment of death and “elsewhere,” but also an answer and a refutation.
Tagore’s work is less about universals, absolutes, and unities (though it is also about these) than about the role of chance governing the shape of the universe and of the work itself, taking the form of a sustained meditation.
Death and life share the quality of being contingent, accidental: We don’t know when and how they will happen, or even, really, why they do. (This would have been pretty clear to Tagore, who lost his muse and sister-in-law Kadambari Devi when he was twenty-two—she had died by her own hand—and then, over the years, his wife and two of his children.) Tagore’s work is less about universals, absolutes, and unities (though it is also about these) than about the role of chance governing the shape of the universe and of the work itself, taking the form of a sustained meditation: “In order to find you anew, I lose you every moment / O beloved treasure.” Contingency preoccupied him all his life. In 1930, when he had a couple of meetings with Albert Einstein, he opened the dialogue enthusiastically with, “I was discussing with Dr. Mendel today the new mathematical discoveries which tell us that in the realm of infinitesimal atoms chance has its play; the drama of existence is not absolutely predestined in character.” Einstein replies with a dampener: “The facts that make science tend toward this view do not say goodbye to causality.” This famous, over-publicized conversation can be read in a number of ways. Einstein clearly sees Tagore as a “poet” in the “high” cultural western sense, but still more as an eastern sage, and is dry and cautious as a result. He—not Tagore—keeps bringing up the word religion in a mildly defensive, mildly accusatory manner. Einstein, responsible for a shatteringly disorienting theory that would forever change philosophy and the humanities, not to speak of the sciences, forecloses, in response to Tagore, that strand of insight, and becomes a conventional scientist-empiricist: for “that,” he says, “is my religion.” Tagore, in the course of the two slightly anxious, circular conversations, appears in various fluid incarnations: as a romantic poet, talking about beauty and truth; as a transcendentalist; a believer in the absolute; a propagandist for universal man. We have dealt with him in these guises in the last one hundred years of discussions about Tagore; no doubt we will again, 150 years after his birth. But Tagore’s secret concern with life, play, and contingency keeps resurfacing in his part of the dialogue; he might well have believed that this powerful undercurrent would provide common ground with the German. Einstein, though, pushes the interaction toward a more conservative dichotomy: that of the romantic, the man of religion, or the metaphysician with his purely subjective response to the universe, on the one hand, and the scientist with his empirical and objective vantage point, on the other.
For me, there are two great lineages in poetry from the upheavals of the nineteenth century onward: the metaphysical, or the poetry of the beautiful (sometimes anguished) fragment made radiant by the light of the vanished old world and of bygone value; and the polemical, sounding the note of constant, occasionally arbitrary, arrival and return, disrupting not just linearity, as the former does, but causality. I think Tagore belongs deeply, if only partially, to the first category, and I have written before of his songs in this light. But, increasingly, I believe his great power derives from being essentially in the second camp, from denying, like Whitman and Lawrence, that there is any need to apologize for life and its accidental provenance. One characteristic of the writers in the first camp is how they practice their art and their criticism in distinct domains, and, in a sense, detach themselves from the “meaning” of their artistic work, like Joyce’s fingernail-paring author-god, or James’s evolving “figure in the carpet,” upon which the narrator will deliberately not elaborate. The polemicists, on the other hand, not only immerse themselves in the thrust of their work with every fiber of their being—“a man in his wholeness wholly attending,” as Lawrence said of poetry—but in every sphere of activity they undertake, as Tagore did. This is why they seem open to deciphering and are more vulnerable to misunderstanding.

I had begun by mentioning my adolescent impatience with Tagore and my enthusiasm for Dan Pagis’s poem about the Holocaust. I still admire that poem—in fact, more than I did when I was seventeen—for its craft, tragic exactness, and its shrinking shape informed by Adorno’s stark dictum that poetry is no longer tenable after Auschwitz. Adorno’s admonition, however, has a history older than the horrors of the twentieth century: it comes from a metaphysical belief that, on many levels, life (and, as a result, its chief expression, language) is too fragile to wholly justify itself. Tagore is still the great poet in our age of life’s inherent and inexhaustible justification—this is what he is actually conveying to Einstein—but his argument is plainest in the songs and poems. Accustomed as we are to the luminosity of elsewhere, to the backward glance, to action and outcome with a cause, and less accustomed to the joy of unforeseen arrival (which, after all, rapidly wanes into alienation), encountering Tagore has to be an unsettling experience—but one through which we also come to recognize our deepest unspoken urges and beliefs incarnated in the most surprising and incomparable language.

comment:

……..

To recover Tagore today as a poet and writer must entail some sense of the Bengali language becoming a realm of literary possibility….”

AL:This seems to be akin in some ways to trying to recover Sri Aurobindo’s Guru English that he expresses in Edwardian prose and Romantic poetry to restore contemporary relevance. The project requires both a refolding of language and the modernist aesthetic.

Another relevant passage for this project from the Chaudhuri article is followed by a link and a response of sorts offered by Marakarand Paranjape:

“I used the word “curio” deliberately, in order to recall Buddhadeva Bose’s unfair but revealing attack on Indian poets writing in English in the 1960s, in which he accused them of producing, by choosing not to write in the mother tongue, not poems but “curios.” In one sense, Bose is right. It is the English language that has risked becoming, over and over, a sort of Gaelic in India: not because, as Bose would have it, it was a foreign or colonial tongue, but because, like Gaelic, it bore too notionally the burden of identity and nationality. The relative and paradoxical freedom from this burden in the emergence of modern Bengali gave it its special air of play and potential. In other, fundamental ways, Bose was wrong. The poets he attacked had based their achievement on a cunning with which they had sabotaged and complicated the possibility of a pan-Indian tradition; they too were writing, in their way, in a vernacular. In fact, it was the long poem that Bose held up as the great exemplary Indian English poem, “Savitri” by Sri Aurobindo, that the shrewd Nissim Ezekiel pointed out as the actual curio for, presumably, its faux high cultural atmosphere of the Orient as well as its emulation of the English canon (it was composed in iambs). It should be pointed out that Tagore’s English translation of Gitanjali would be—for Indian poets writing in English like Ezekiel, A. K. Ramanujan, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra—yet another Gaelic artifact to bypass or circumvent. In his brief memoir “Partial Recall,” Mehrotra quotes, with little indulgence toward his youthful self, from the ambitious and sonorous pastiche of that Gitanjali which he produced as a teenager.

The essence of literature does not allow itself to be trapped within a definition. It is like the essence of life: we know what it cannot exist without, but what it is we do not know.
The fact that literature—specifically English literature—was a university discipline first invented for the colonies is fairly well known today. In the 1880s, English literature became an object of study leading to a degree at the University of Calcutta, well before any such development had taken place elsewhere, let alone Oxford or Cambridge. But the incursion of English and European literary texts into Bengal had begun a century earlier. The study of literature cannot be seen simply as an instrument of imperialist pedagogy from 1820s onward (when it first surfaces as a taught discipline in Calcutta).”

And here is Paranjape whose entire text can be found here: http://www.makarand.com/acad/EzekielforSAR.htm:

” In offering yet another account of its growth, spread, and dominance in Indian English poetry, I have tried to show that modernism is not merely a matter of changing poetic fashions and tastes, but more properly a literary, cultural, movement, an ideology, and, in its most instrumental sense, a discourse. It is, in other words, a body of related and cohesive texts with shared assumptions and aims, common codes and conventions, and similar values and goals. Further, the poetry that modernists wrote is actually more diverse and varied than their poetic ideology. What really binds them, as I said earlier, is the one common factor their rejection of the past. Thus, the politics of modernism is, paradoxically, a turning away from politics, a retreat into the experience of the solitary and alienated poet; this, for the modernists, is the best antidote against the prevailing hypocrisy and abuse of language that politics entails.

It is truly astounding how little the opinions and beliefs of our modernist have changed over the last thirty years. In a manifesto offered in the introduction to Modern Indo-Anglian Poetry (1959), the first anthology of modernist poetry, Lal divided readers into those who liked Sri Aurobindo and those who couldn’t stand him. Though Lal himself seems to have moved closer to the former from being a champion of the latter, this division seems to still persist. It takes quite a bit of experience to realize how deeply entrenched this hatred is. Mehrotra, always the most candidly intemperate of the modernists, simply says that Sri Aurobindo “spent the last years of his life composing a worthless epic of 24,000 lines.” The very dismissive ease and forthrightness of this judgment is what makes it so seductive. If one can, on its strength, avoid the trouble of having to come to terms with the thirty volumes that Aurobindo’s collected works occupy, which lazy or superficial undergraduate can resist its temptation? Of course, the problems with this assertion start with its very grammar. There is something comic about the sentence: why would anybody compose a worthless [my emphasis] epic of 24,000 lines? The very length and seriousness of purpose implied in the information supplied in the statement would appear to contradict the adjective (expletive?) with which Mehrotra prefaces “epic.” Doubtless, what Mehrotra really means is that the epic is worthless to him, not necessarily to Sri Aurobindo or to anyone else. But why doesn’t he say so in the first place? Why accord an infallible objectivity to what is so blatantly a personal prejudice?

I do not wish to defend either Aurobindo or Savitri against the strictures of the modernists. Indeed, they do not need any such defence: Savitri is by far the most discussed Indian English poem and Sri Aurobindo the most studied of Indian English poets. This evidence is not merely statistical but suggests a history of serious appreciation or and engagement with the poet and his epic. Savitri, moreover, is the only Indian English and probably the only English epic which has acquired the status of a sacred text. Thousands of devotees of Aurobindo all over the world consider it a modern Veda, a book of revelation, something which can alter their consciousness. What all this means at the least is that it is not likely to be a “worthless” poem.

I shall offer two more personal anecdotes to illustrate the modernists’ prejudice against Aurobindo.

In a seminar in USA2, Shiv K. Kumar once made disparaging comments on Aurobindo and other mystic poets. In the audience was Karin Schomer, the translator of Mahadevi Verma. She took umbrage at his remarks; she offered a heated defence of the kind of poetry Kumar hated. Later, Kumar confessed to me that he had been taken aback by the vehemence of Schomer’s defense. What struck me as extraordinary was Kumar’s own complacence about his modernist poetics; he was incapable of believing that any sensible person could actually admire Aurobindo’s poetry. That he had faced no such serious opposition in India was obvious by his surprise.

Another such incident involves Ezekiel himself. When he took a look at my dissertation “Mysticism in Indian English Poetry,” he was surprised to find himself in it. He asked to read the section on himself and then sent it to Commonwealth Quarterly for publication. Later, he told me that of all the poets I had discussed, he was the only worthwhile one! What he didn’t say, of course, was that he was the also the only modernist poet in it. I would have thought that he was being facetious except that he went on to repeat his opinions on poets like Aurobindo. “Whenever anyone says anything in favour of Aurobindo or the others, I ask him, `Tell me, do you read Aurobindo.’ That clinches the issue.” I told Ezekiel that I actually read Aurobindo and even enjoyed him. There was a deathly silence after that.

What I have been trying to suggest through these examples is that it is possible to like modernist poetry without being allergic to Aurobindo or Sarojini Naidu. The modernist either-or option is, ultimately, a false one. The appreciation of modernist poetry and poetics does not necessarily imply a rejection of the nationalist-romantic-idealist-mystic poetic. True, they are naturally opposed, difficult to reconcile, but are they totally incompatible, totally incommensurable? I do not think so. On the contrary, to me they are a part of an ongoing dialectic of Indian culture and sensibility, neither entirely true or false, but both together offering a richer, more complete view of Indian literary history. Indeed, this is the chief thing that distinguishes us from the modernists–at any rate, it distinguishes me from them. Like a child of divorced parents who loves and gets along with both of them, I like both Aurobindo and Ezekiel, both Tagore and Moraes, both Naidu and Mehrotra.

Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India, and ‘The Mystic East.

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Aldous Huxley

Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India, and ‘The Mystic East.’

King, Richard.
London: Routledge.

Link to Book
ISBN:    0-415-20258 paperback
0-415-20257 hardcover

Contents: acknowledgments, introduction, 9 chapters, chapter notes, bibliography, index.
Excerpt(s): Introduction
Changing the subject

This work can be located within the history of ideas and is an examination of a constellation of categories surrounding the cultural symbolic of the ‘mystic East’ in modern Western consciousness. The history of ideas is often distinguished from philosophy on the grounds that the latter involves an engagement and evaluation of ideas rather than a non-committal examination of concepts within their own cultural and historical context. However, I wish to argue that both philosophy and the history of ideas should take more seriously not only the social location of the concepts under examination but also their involvement in a wider cultural field of power relations, or what has become known as ‘the politics of knowledge’. In particular, I wish to argue for an awareness of the mutual imbrication of religion, culture and power as categories. This is not to say that religion and culture can be reduced to a set of power relations but rather that religion and culture are the field in which power relations operate. …

Overall, my interest within this work has been to explore the interface between postcolonial theory and the comparative study of religion. Such a task is overwhelming in its enormity and work within this area has hardly begun. To focus my analysis I have concentrated upon the notion of ‘the Mystic East’ as a prevalent theme within Western understandings of India as ‘the Other’, particularly in relation to scholarly approaches to the study of religion and mysticism.

… Nevertheless, the account contained therein is intended to furnish the reader with a broad, if somewhat selective, sketch of some of the cultural, philosophical and methodological factors that form the tapestry upon which scholarly approaches to the mystical have been painted. It will also provide an opportunity to discuss some of the underlying trends that directly impinge upon the search for a postcolonial approach to the comparative study of mysticism and religion. …

… Here I argue that religious studies as a discipline might better conceive of itself as a form of ‘cultural studies’, rather than as an offshoot of theology. In this way, the study of religion can bring an interest in cross-cultural engagement and the role of religion within culture to an emerging discipline that has generally been characterized by its secularist agenda and the Eurocentricity of its approach. (pages 1-2)

Since the Enlightenment, it would seem, dominant representations of Western culture have tended to subordinate what one might call the ‘Dionysian’ (as opposed to the Apollonian) aspects of its own culture and traditions (that is, those trends that have been conceived as ‘poetic’, ‘mystical’, irrational, uncivilized and feminine). These characteristics represent precisely those qualities that have been ‘discovered’ in the imaginary realm of ‘the Orient’. Of course, this is a grand narrative about a highly complex and contradictory set of cultural processes, but it involves the ascendancy of secular rationality as an ideal within Western intellectual thought, a concomitant marginalization of ‘the mystical’ and the projection of qualities associated with this concept onto a colonized and essentialized India. (pages 3-4)

… Virtually all contemporary studies of mysticism fail to appreciate the sense in which notions of ‘the mystical’ (including those that are adopted in the studies themselves) are cultural and linguistic constructions dependent upon a web of interlocking definitions, attitudes and discursive processes, which themselves are tied to particular forms of life and historically specific practices. Not only are contemporary notions of the ‘mystical’ subject to the cultural presuppositions of the day, they are also informed by and overlap with a long history of discursive processes, continuities and discontinuities and shifts in both meaning and denotation. Just as these various meanings and applications of ‘the mystical’ have changed over time, so too have the variety of attitudes towards them and evaluations of their importance differed according to circumstance. Defining the mystical then is never a ‘purely academic’ activity (in the sense in which one means ‘of no real consequence’), nor can it ever be completely divorced from the historical remains of past definitions of the term. …

As Jantzen aptly demonstrates, the way one defines ‘the mystical’ relates to ways of establishing and defining authority. This is obvious in the pre-modern context since anyone claiming direct experiential knowledge of God or the ultimate reality is in effect claiming unmediated authority to speak the truth. In a traditional Christian context, for instance, such a claim might be seen as undermining the claim of the Church to mediate between humanity and the divine. Defining mysticism then is a way of defining power. One’s answers to the questions ‘What is mysticism?’ and ‘Who counts as a mystic?’ reflect issues of authority. But, one might ask, of what relevance is mysticism to power and authority in the modern Western context? Surely the way we define mysticism today has nothing to do with social or political authority. Yet this can be seen to be a misguided (if understandable) objection, if we only pause to look below the surface. The very fact that ‘the mystical’ is seen as irrelevant to issues of social and political authority itself reflects contemporary, secularized notions of and attitudes towards power. The separation of the mystical from the political is itself a political decision! (pages 9-10)

In the modem era, Certeau suggests, the traditional hagiographies and writings of the saints become adapted and designated ‘mystical’. Thus one finds the invention of a Christian mystical tradition. Emphasis shifts from a focus upon the virtues and miracles of the saints to an interest in extraordinary experiences and states of mind. It is at this point in European history, Certeau argues, that ‘already existing writings were termed mystic and a mystic tradition was fabricated’.

Why did this happen? Seventeenth-century usage of the term ‘mystical’ appears to have become increasingly pejorative. Critics attacked the apparent novelty of the mystic – having a history, they argued, that spanned barely three or four centuries and usually said to originate with figures such as Meister Eckhart and John of the Cross. Apologists for the mystical responded to this critique in two ways. First, they claimed to reveal only what was already present in Holy Scripture. However, the claim to access the ‘secret’ meaning of scripture was always likely to be seen as a threat to the Church’s institutionalization of biblical meaning if made by those outside its auspices. So, we find the predominance of a second strategy, namely the invention of an ancient mystical tradition within the orthodox walls of Christianity. This involved a selective colonization of classical Christian authors – in particular the early church fathers and a variety of medieval Christian writers and saintly figures. The consequence of this second strategy, of course, was that it tied the newly sanctified mystic and their apologists to the established tradition of exegesis and the overarching authority of the Church, as well as binding them to a canon of acceptable and orthodox ecclesiastical literature. So it would seem then that the birth of a ‘Christian mystical tradition’ also coincided with its domestication by the ecclesiastical authorities. (pages 17-18)

[Chapter] 8    The politics of privatization
Indian religion and the study of mysticism

In Chapter 1 we noted that a peculiar feature of modern conceptions of mysticism is the emphasis that has been placed upon an experiential definition of the subject matter The dominant trajectory within the contemporary study of mysticism, following William James, has conceived of its subject matter as the study of ‘mystical experiences’ or ‘altered states of consciousness’ and the phenomena connected with their attainment. However, exclusive emphasis upon the experiential dimension of ‘the mystical’ ignores the wider social, ethical and political dimensions of the subject matter and also misrepresents pre-modern usage of the term within the Christian tradition.

As we have seen, in early and medieval Christianity the mystical denoted the mystery of the divine. For Origen the mystical represented the key for unlocking the hidden meaning of scripture. Christian liturgical practices such as the Eucharist were also described as mystical, being that which transforms a mundane activity (taking bread and wine) into a religious sacrament of cosmic and eternal significance. Although there was a place within the Christian tradition for an understanding of the mystical in terms of religious experience (that is, as the direct apprehension of the divine), this was not divorced from the other dimensions of the term. Thus, for Origen, the mystical interpretation of scripture and participation in the Eucharist cannot be divorced from a mystical experience of the divine. The separation of these various aspects of the mystical and the elevation of one aspect – the experiential – above all others is a product of the modern era and the post-Enlightenment dichotomy between public and private realms. … (pages 161-162)

The comparative study of mysticism

A prevalent, one might even say perennial, theme within modern writings on mysticism is a theological position known as perennialism. According to this doctrine there is an essential commonality between philosophical and religious traditions from widely disparate cultures….

In terms of the modern study of mysticism the most influential work of this genre is clearly The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley (1944). …

… The problems with such an approach are, of course, manifold. For example, the very fact that all of the excerpts occur in a single linguistic medium, namely the English language, has already significantly transformed and homogenized the selections to begin with. Without recourse to the originals from which such translations were made, Huxley’s perennialist thesis remains unsubstantiated and problematic. Equally, to suggest that one can lift out sections of a text (which have already been transformed by English translation) and recontextualize them without significantly changing the meaning and interpretive tone of such excerpts is to display considerable hermeneutical naïvety. Quotations are provided but there is no attempt to provide a sense of the social, historical or cultural location of these religious expressions. This is perhaps no surprise since the perennialist position tends to underplay the significance of sociohistorical context. It is precisely the particularity of human religious expression that we must look beyond if we are to see the ‘common core’ or philosophia perennis underlying apparent differences.

Huxley describes the philosophia perennis as:

the metaphysic which recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being.

For Huxley, this perennial philosophy exists in all human cultures throughout history and remains the focal point or essence of the world’s religious expression. In 1954 Aldous Huxley published The Doors of Perception, an account of his experiences as a result of taking the drug mescaline. The result of this was a mystical experience of the ‘unfathomable mystery of pure being’, where visual sensation became greatly enhanced and Huxley experienced ‘being my Not-Self in the Not-Self which was the chair’. Huxley compared this to the mystical experiences of the various world religions:

Words like Grace and Transfiguration came to my mind, and this, of course, was what, among other things they stood for … The Beatific Vision, Sat Chit Ananda, Being-Awareness- Bliss – for the first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate hints or at a distance, but precisely and completely what those prodigious syllables referred to.

Huxley was heavily influenced in his description by Vivekananda’s neo-Vedanta and the idiosyncratic version of Zen exported to the West by D.T. Suzuki. Both of these thinkers expounded their own versions of the perennialist thesis. For Huxley, his experiments with mescaline overwhelmingly demonstrated the enduring validity of monistic experiences as well as the enduring truth and unanimity of mysticism in the various world religions. (pages 162-163)

In 1957 a direct response to Huxley’s Doors of Perception was published in the form of R.C. Zaehner’s Mysticism Sacred and Profane. There are two fundamental aspects of Zaehner’s response to Huxley. First, Zaehner’s work can be seen as a critique of Huxley’s claim that drug-induced mystical experiences are noetic and that they bear some resemblance to the mystical experiences of the major world religions. Second, Mysticism Sacred and Profane involves an explicit repudiation of Huxley’s perennialist claim that ‘mysticism’ represents a ‘common core’ at the centre of all religions. Instead, Zaehner argued, there are three fundamentally different types of ‘mysti-cism’: theistic, monistic and panenhenic. …

Panenhenic or ‘nature’ mysticism, Zaehner’s third category, seems to be something of a ragbag collection of those mystics not easily classifiable in terms of the ‘world-religious traditions’. Thus, this category includes poets such as Wordsworth, the mystical experiences of animistic or so-called ‘primitive’ religions and drug-induced experiences in general (exemplified for Zaehner by Huxley’s experiences with mescaline, which Zaehner takes as normative for all drug-induced mystical experiences). …

In 1960 Zaehner’s distinction between theistic and monistic mysticism was challenged by Walter Stace in his book Mysticism and Philosophy. Stace criticized Zaehner (as later authors such as Smart and Staal have) for his obvious Catholic bias. Replacing Zachner’s threefold typology, Stace distinguished between two types of mystical experience (cross-culturally) introvertive and extrovertive mystical experiences. The introvertive mystical experience is a complete merging of everything and constitutes for Stace not only the superior of the two types of experience but also the mystical core of all religions. The extrovertive experience is only a partial realization of introvertive union – and amounts to a sense of harmony between two things. For Stace all mystical experiences have the following characteristics: they provide a sense of objectivity or reality, a sense of blessedness and peace and a feeling of the holy, the sacred or the divine. Mystical experiences are also characterized by paradoxicality and are alleged to be ineffable by mystics. Both extrovertive and introvertive mystical experiences are of an underlying unity (a unifying vision of all things in the case of extrovertive cases and a transcendent unitary consciousness beyond space and time in the case of introvertive mysticism).

Furthermore, Stace argued that Zaehner and his predecessors had failed to make a distinction between mystical experiences as such and the interpretations placed upon them. Zaehner’s typology, Stace suggested, was based not upon the mystical experiences themselves but rather on the reports and interpretations of those experiences offered by mystics. …

… For Stace, what we have is an unmediated and ineffable mystical experience that is then understood according to culturally conditioned interpretations. This is a significant feature of all perennialist accounts of mystical experiences. The apparent differences between a revelation of Christ for Teresa of Avila and an aware-ness of the presence of Krsna for a Vaisnava Hindu are undermined by driving a wedge between the ‘pure’ experience itself and the mystic’s inter-pretation of it. As we saw with Huxley, perennialism supports its position by suppressing (or at least radically underemphasizing) the cultural and historical particularity of mystical experiences. (pages 164-165)

Stace accepts that one cannot isolate a ‘pure’ experience from interpretations of it simply because we remain reliant upon reports of the experience in our analysis of it. However, it is possible, he says, to distinguish between levels of interpretation. For example, consider the following statements:

‘I have a visual sensation of black and white.’
‘I see a black and white cloth.’
‘I see a chequered flag.’
‘I have won the race.’

This is a point that has also been made by Ninian Smart who argues that ‘phenomenologically’ mystical experiences are everywhere the same but that they differ according to the nature and degree of ‘doctrinal ramification’ involved in the interpretations of such experiences. …

Stace’s epistemological position, of course, also undercuts the particularity of any claims that may be made by specific religious traditions. For Stace, mystical experience validates ‘Religion’ as opposed to ‘the religions’. However, as Stace himself admits, this argument from unanimity, based upon the apparent similarity of mystical experiences cross-culturally, will not convince the skeptic. Even if all mystics experienced the same thing and agreed that their accounts were of the same objective reality, they might all be deluded. If I drink too much beer the ceiling appears to spin. If other people have the same experience when they also drink too much beer does that mean that the ceiling really is spinning? How does one distinguish between delirium tremens and Otto’s mysterium tremendum?

The constructivist response to perennialism

In 1978 a collection of influential articles written by contemporary scholars of mysticism was published in a single volume entitled Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis. This was followed in 1983 by a companion collection entitled Mysticism and Religious Traditions. Together both anthologies provide a sustained critique of the perennialism of authors such as Aldous Huxley and Walter Stace with regard to the phenomena of mysticism in the various world religions. The editor of these two collections, Steven Katz, describes his work as a ‘plea for the recognition of differences’, involving a much greater sensitivity to the cultural particularity of mystics and their traditions than is to be found in the works of the perennialists. The primary focus of Katz’s approach is a consideration of the question ‘What is the relationship between a mystical experience and its interpretation?’ Katz asks his readership to accept a basic epistemological principle which provides the theoretical foundation for his own position – namely, the impossibility (indeed incoherence) of the idea of a pure or unmediated experience. There is no such thing, Katz argues, as an experience that is free from interpretation, an experience free from any recognisable content. (pages 166-167)

Katz, like Robert Gimello, Hans Penner, Wayne Proudfoot and numerous others agree in rejecting attempts to drive a wedge between interpretation and the experience itself. Mystics do not have context-free, ‘pure’ experiences that they later interpret according to their own particular cultural and theological presuppositions. The very nature of the experience is itself socially constructed according to the culture, beliefs and expectations of the mystics having the experiences. Catholics do not experience a vision of a young woman that they then interpret as the Virgin Mary – they experience the Virgin Mary. This is what their tradition tells them to expect, this is what they hope for, and this is what they end up seeing. On this view, mystical experiences are preconditioned by cultural values, beliefs and expectations and are radically contextual. …

Upon analysis most mystics can be seen to be rather orthodox in the sense that they tend to see precisely what they have been conditioned and expect to see. It is not just the language of mystical reports that is culturally conditioned but the experience itself. The problem, Katz suggests, is that scholars have tended to emphasize the radical examples in order to suggest that mysticism somehow transcends the particularity of the religious tradition in which it occurs and is evidence of a spiritual ‘common core’ underlying the religions of the world. As a number of critics have pointed out, however, Katz’s own epistemological position does not provide an adequate account of innovation within religious traditions. If one’s experiences are socially constructed, how can one ever come up with anything new?’ (pages 168-169)

Grace Jantzen draws attention to the fact that the perennialist-constructivist debate is peculiarity modern in its exclusively experiential definition of the mystical. She suggests, rightly in my view, that ‘the modern conception of mysticism, with the characteristic of ineffability as the key ingredient, is as much a social construction as were all the previous constructions’. However, we should also note that the modern (that is, post-Jamesian) characterization of the mystical as well as the social constructivisms of Katz and Jantzen are also peculiarly Western. The predominance of post-Kantian influences in Western forms of constructivism (whether modern or post-modern in nature) reflects a series of post-Christian and post-Enlightenment presuppositions about the nature of humanity and its inherent limitations. …

… This recognition of the agency of the human subject in the construction of a world-picture and the impossibility of an unmediated cognition of reality has had such a lasting influence upon Western intellectual thought since the Enlightenment that it is often simply taken for granted.

Katz has made his own allegiance to a neo-Kantian position explicit in his response to criticisms of his position. Indeed, he suggests that ‘this “mediated” aspect of our experience seems an inescapable feature of any epistemological inquiry’. However, since the late 1980s a number of critical responses have been made to the constructivist position. Most of this work has involved questioning Katz’s ‘single epistemological assumption’ that all experiences are mediated by cultural, historical and religious factors. Robert Forman, for instance, makes a distinction between two alternatives: complete constructivism (the view that the entirety of one’s experiences are structured by one’s cultural context and mind-set) and incomplete or partial constructivism (the view that concepts and beliefs are not the only factors involved in experiences, there being other factors such as sensory input, etc.). …

However, once this debate moves beyond Western intellectual horizons and one attempts to make universal claims about human experience one is obliged to reconsider the ethnocentric presuppositions of the neo-Kantian paradigm and consider the political and colonial implications of imposing one’s own position on the debate. I suggest that there is a need to problema-tize the modernist and Eurocentric framework of this debate. For my own part I wish to suggest two trajectories that such a problematization might take. First, one might question whether the way in which Kant and his successors have framed epistemological debates is the only, or even the most fruitful, way of understanding human experience. … Second, however, one could problematize the modernist construction of ‘the mystical’ as a predominantly experiential phenomenon, … . The first approach involves a ‘plea for the recognition of differences’ in the realm of epistemological theory. The second seeks to undermine the false dichotomy between perennialism and constructivism by displacing the psychologically inspired paradigm that has framed the debate in the first place. (pages 173-175)

… Katz, however, denies that his position is reductionist there may indeed be a transcendent reality but the crucial point, he suggests, is that one cannot have an unmediated experience of it.

Scholars such as Huston Smith and Donald Evans have made casual (though no less pointed) references to the cosy compatibility of this stance with Katz’s own Jewish tradition. Katz’s analysis safeguards Jewish beliefs in a transcendent reality and the inherent limitations of human beings, while at the same time underscoring the exclusivism of Judaism in his emphasis upon a recognition of differences between religions. It is clear that Katz’s account creates problems for the non-dualistic and monistic traditions in particular. Mystical experiences of a ‘unitive-absorptive nature’ (that is, precisely those forms of mysticism that tend to presuppose some kind of unmediated experience of ultimate reality) can be found in Buddhism, ‘Hinduism’ (Advaita and Yoga), and Islam (Sufism). Testimony to such an experience can even be found, Katz notes, in the Christian mystical tradition but ‘is absent from its Jewish counterpart’ (page 176)

My intention in drawing attention to Indian alternatives to Western forms of constructivism is to offer my own ‘plea for the recognition of differences’. There are other ways of seeing the world than are dreamt of in post-Enlightenment Western philosophy and one should not seek to close one’s account on reality too prematurely. To accept modern Western epistemological theories without highlighting their cultural and social particularity is to remain within a long and well-established tradition of Western arrogance about the superiority of Western ways of understanding the world. The introduction of indigenous forms of Indian constructivism to the debate, therefore, both broadens its parameters and causes a transgression or disruption of the hegemonic philosophical trends of modern Western intellectual orthodoxy. …

Perennialism is based upon what one might call the ‘Myth of the Transcendent Object’. Perennialist philosophers postulate a common core – that is, some kind of transcendent reality or truth that underlies the diversity of mystical accounts. In contrast to this, Katzian constructivism is grounded in a form of cultural isolationism or the ‘Myth of the Isolated Context’. On this view all mystical experiences are fundamentally culturally bound, rendering the establishment of cross-cultural similarities inherently problematic. As we have seen, the perennialist or common-core thesis presumes and requires a distinction of some sort between experience and interpretation. On the other hand, the pluralist account offered by constructivists such as Katz presumes and requires that experience is itself constructed by culturally determined interpretations. …

As we have seen, there are alternatives to Katz’s neo-Kantian constructivism. One could, for instance, uphold a position of partial constructivism. On this view, experience is produced by pre-experiential conditions such as tradition, mind-set, expectation and so on, and it is these that provide the limits of possibility for one’s experience. Nevertheless, there may be dimensions of human experience that are not conditioned by such cultural factors. A constructivism grounded in an epistemology of enlightenment postulating an unconstructed awareness – provides some light at the end of a very dark tunnel. One might also opt for a more open-ended and agnostic position, refusing to pass judgement on the question of the farthest reaches of human possibility. Further work is also needed in the development of alter-natives to the late Capitalist constructivist or productivist metaphor as a paradigm or model for understanding the nature of the interaction between humans and their cultures. … (pages 182-184)

The answer to the question ‘What is relationship between a mystical experience and its interpretation?’ has been represented by scholars as central to debates about the nature and significance of ‘mysticism’, as well as to the question of the possibilities and limitations of cross-cultural analysis in this area. The privatization of modern notions of ‘the mystical’ has caused the comparative study of ‘mysticism’ to be reduced to a debate about which epistemological theory one wishes to hold. Such debates ignore the shifting meanings and contexts of the category of ‘the mystical’ throughout its history. More specifically, no attention has been paid to the way in which the construction of a number of stereotypical images of the East D. T. Suzuki’s ‘Zen Buddhism’, Vivekananda’s or Sankara’s ‘Advaita Vedanta’, Patnijali’s ‘Yoga’, Lao Tzu’s Dao De Jing have been pressed into service as token representatives of ‘the global phenomenon of mysticism’. Whether colonized and homogenized by perennialists or essentialized and segregated by the constructivists, these stereotypes of ‘the Mystic East’ have been used to make a variety of competing claims about the ‘mystical’, spiritual or other-worldly nature of Eastern culture and the limitations (or not) of human experience. Such debates also serve to locate certain aspects of Asian and Western culture within a modernist and psychologized framework that misreads the phenomenon of ‘mysticism’ on a number of levels. From a postcolonial perspective, contemporary debates within the comparative study of mysticism ignore the inequality of power implied when Western scholars pass judgement upon the belief systems and forms of life of cultures that are still coming to terms with centuries of Western colonial hegemony.

As Grace Jantzen has pointed out, the tenor and framing of these debates are modern in nature and reflect neither the concerns nor the agenda of the pre-modern mystics and literature that are the subject of such analysis. However, as I have been arguing, these debates are not only peculiarly modern in their orientation and agenda, they are also Eurocentric in their failure to question the post-Enlightenment assumptions that continue to structure the debate. Moreover, such comparativism fails to engage seriously with the indigenous theories, categories and forms of life of those under analysis. Fundamentally, the problem with this entire debate is that the study of mystics has become skewed by the contemporary (post-Jamesian) construction of ‘mysticism’ in exclusively experiential terms. This, above all else, does violence to the traditions, literature and lives of those who are described as ‘mystical’, as well as to those who are subject to the sweeping cultural caricatures that such representations frequently imply. …

… Rather, my point is that Western scholars should pay far more attention to the nature and operation of the ‘fusion of horizons’ that occurs in comparative analysis. Engagement with the theories, categories and world-views of the cultures under examination also requires an acknowledgement of the cultural particularity of Western concepts and theories and a recognition of the politics of comparative analysis. (pages 185-186)

Ramachandra Guha:Ban the Ban w/comments on Peter Heehs and others

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July 30 2011, The Telegraph …

BAN THE BAN

- The republic of India bans books with a depressing frequency

Politics and play: Ramachandra Guha

Earlier this year, the Gujarat government banned a book on Mahatma Gandhi by an American writer. The book was not then available in India, and no one in Gujarat had read it. The ban, ordered by the chief minister, Narendra Modi, was on the basis of a tendentious news report and a still more tendentious book review.

After Modi announced his ban, the first instinct of the government of India was to emulate him. Congress spokesmen called for a countrywide ban. The then law minister, Veerappa Moily, indicated that he would follow their lead. There was a spirit of competitive chauvinism abroad; how could the Congress allow a non-Congress politician to claim to be defending the reputation of the Mahatma?

In the event, the government of India did not enforce a ban on the book. This was principally because of two quick, focused interventions by Rajmohan Gandhi and Gopalkrishna Gandhi. Both are grandsons of the Mahatma; both, besides, are scholars and public figures in their own right. Rajmohan and Gopalkrishna wrote signed articles in the press saying that a ban would be contrary to the spirit of Gandhi, a man who encouraged and promoted debate; it would also call into question India’s claims to be the world’s largest democracy.

A ban makes news; the withdrawal of a ban does not. Gandhi scholars in particular, and Indians in general, owe Rajmohan and Gopalkrishna a debt of gratitude, for pressurizing the government to allow the free circulation of Joseph Lelyveld’s The Great Soul in 27 states of the country. It remains illegal to own or possess a copy of the book in the 28th state of the Union, which happens to be Gandhi’s own. By banning the book before it was available, Modi thought he could camouflage his sectarian leanings in the protective cloak of the Mahatma’s pluralism. In the event, once the government of India — bowing to the sensible advice of Gandhi’s grandsons — allowed the free circulation of the book, the fact that it is not yet legally available in Gujarat only exposes the insularity and xenophobia of that state’s chief minister.

Sadly, the bravery (and decency) of Gandhi’s grandsons has not been emulated by defenders or descendants of some other great men of modern India. Consider the fate, within India, of a biography of Sri Aurobindo written by Peter Heehs. Heehs is a real scholar, the author of several substantial works of history (among them The Bomb in Bengal). What’s more, he was for many years in charge of the archives in the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry.

In 2008, Columbia University Press in New York published Peter Heehs’s The Lives of Sri Aurobindo. The product of a lifetime of scholarship, its empirical depth and analytical sharpness is unlikely to be surpassed. For Heehs knows the documentary evidence on and around Aurobindo’s life better than anyone else. He has a deep knowledge of the political and spiritual worlds in which his subject moved and by which he was shaped.

Alas, this remarkable life of a remarkable Indian cannot be read in India. This is because of an injunction on its sale asked for by self-professed devotees of Aurobindo, and granted by a hyper-active high court in Orissa. Heehs’s book is respectful but not reverential. He salutes Aurobindo for his contributions to the freedom struggle. Before Aurobindo, writes Heehs, “no one dared to speak openly of independence; twenty years later, it became the movement’s accepted goal”. He praises Aurobindo’s contributions to literature and philosophy. However, Heehs is gently sceptical of the claim that Aurobindo possessed supernatural powers. “To accept Sri Aurobindo as an avatar is necessarily a matter of faith,” he writes, adding that “matters of faith quickly become matters of dogma”.

This understated, unexceptionable statement drove the dogmatic followers of Aurobindo bananas. Some devotees filed a case in the Orissa High Court, restraining the Indian publisher from circulating the book in India. Other devotees filed a case in a Tamil Nadu court, seeking the revocation of Peter Heehs’s visa and his extradition from this country. By these (and other) acts, the contemporary keepers of Aurobindo’s flame showed themselves to be far less courageous than the grandsons of Gandhi. Is their icon so fragile that he can be destroyed or even damaged by a single, scholarly, book?

Consider, next, the case of The Polyester Prince, a book about Dhirubhai Ambani published in 1998 by an Australian journalist named Hamish McDonald. This was no work of scholarship — slight in weight and substance, it was yet noteworthy for its documentation of the intimate connections between a successful entrepreneur on the one side and senior politicians and government officials on the other. The book was not sold in India — for reasons never made clear, but which certainly had something to do with the thin skins of the subject’s descendants.

In fact, it was almost impossible to get a copy of The Polyester Prince outside India as well. Someone — we may speculate who or whom — had apparently bought up and pulped the remaining stock. The few available copies were selling on internet sites for upwards of $500 a copy. Last year, the book was issued in a new edition, and with a new title. Now called Ambani and Sons, it contained some fresh chapters on the next generation of the family. However, many critical references to politicians and to the Ambanis themselves, present in the original edition, had been dropped. This was the price asked for by an Indian publisher in exchange for the rights to distribute the book in this country.

As these cases illustrate, the republic of India bans books with a depressing frequency. Three factors promote this culture of banning. First, the descendants or devotees of biographical subjects are often too nervous or insecure to have them discussed with objectivity and rigour. Second, these fanatical or insecure followers have found an ally in the courts. Although the Supreme Court has tended to act on the side of the freedom of expression, lower courts have been less wise. Judges who are malleable or publicity-hungry pass injunctions forbidding the free circulation of books and works of art. Few petitioners have the time, or money, or energy, to wait and fight till the case reaches the Supreme Court (a process that can take years). A ban once invoked is therefore rarely revoked.

The third and most significant reason for the proliferation of bans is the pusillanimity of our political class. An early example was the ban on Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses by Rajiv Gandhi’s government in 1989. As the historian, Dharma Kumar, wrote at the time, the ban was “a sign of the Government’s weakness. In a secular state blasphemy should not in itself be a cognizable offence; the President of India is not the defender of any nor of all faiths”.

In subsequent years, governments and politicians of all stripes have recklessly banned books, films, and paintings that simply express a point of view. The Left Front in Bengal promoted a ban on the novels of the brave Bangladeshi writer, Tasleema Nasreen; Narendra Modi has banned a book on Jinnah as well at least one film by Aamir Khan; the party of Sharad Pawar in Maharashtra was instrumental in a ban on a scholarly book on Shivaji; rampaging bands of Hindutvawadis destroyed paintings by M.F. Husain and, by filing case after case against him in the courts, forced him into exile.

It is a sorry tale, this tale of cowardice in the face of intimidation. Lower courts and even some high courts have been accomplices in this process of the stifling of free speech. So too have been politicians of all parties and governments. Indian democrats may take solace in the few exceptions: these being the institution of the Supreme Court, and those public-spirited public figures, Rajmohan and Gopalkrishna Gandhi.

……

and a further note on this article:

please see the true professor Kamal Das here: http://trueprofkamaldas.wordpress.com/

From Prof. Kamala Das

Dear Fellow Bloggers,

In the past few days I sent a couple of nasty e-mails to Ramachandra Guha because he wrote a realistic and depressing article on the pathetic state of affairs of some of our fellow citizen from our glorious republic. You may read Guha’s article here:

http://iyfundamentalism.info/htdocs/joomla15/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=166:guhaban&catid=22:standpoints&Itemid=244

I even used Arundati Roy’s name to insult him, but he doesn’t know that in reality I would also like to ban a few of her nasty books because she too believes in this alien notion called Freedom of Expression.

My e-mails to Guha have been widely circulated by the well-oiled propaganda machinery that I have established so I need not reproduce them here and unnecessarily clutter my blog with it.

What must be of greater interest to my readers is Guha’s response, below:

On Tue, Aug 2, 2011 at 2:32 PM, Ramachandra Guha wrote:

Dear Mr Das,

The anger and animosity, the viciousness and the vituperation, in your mail is unbecoming of a man who carries the title ‘professor’ and who is an admirer of Aurobindo.

There is only answer to a book– another book. If you and your colleagues have sufficient moral and intellectual courage, then have the case against Peter Heehs withdrawn, let his book be circulated, and publish and let your book be circulated too. Till such time as you do so, I can only conclude that you have no moral or intellectual case to stand on. with best wishes

R. Guha

From Sage to Simulacrum: Sri Aurobindo a Photographic Essay ….rc

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From Sage to Simulacrum: Sri Aurobindo a Photographic Essay

R. Carlson

 

The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed rations, which ultimately touch me, who is here, the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being will touch me like the delayed beams of a star. …. Roland Barthes Camera Lucidia

From time to time images of others, portraits, are indeed able to usurp reality because a photograph while an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask. While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, never does more than state an interpretation, a photograph never does less than register an emanation’ (light waves reflected by objects)—a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be. ….“Susan Sontag”, On Photography

“To take a photograph is to align the head, the eye and the heart. It’s a way of life”
…. Henri Cartier-Bresson

“I have never seen a man like this he was absolutely immobile.”..
…Henri Cartier-Bresson after photographing Sri Aurobindo

Emanation

Every photograph is both an absence and a presence, temporally displaced yet spatial immediate, false on the level of perception, but true on the level of time, an image trace whose absent referent is indexed in a coming to presence of something that once was there. Roland Barthes called it a temporal hallucination whose “noeme” is the transmissible thought-image whose “eidos” is death, or perhaps our being toward death.

In meditating on a photograph of his deceased mother Barthes reflected “we can be certain that the image will outlive the subject, whose photograph lingers long after her death”.  But more than this the photograph represents a certain kind of death as a subject undergoes transformation into an object.

The process of reification that transforms a specific instance into a permanent image is a process in which the subject becomes a specter. Other than as a photographic image, the only other time that one can be viewed solely as an object is when one achieves the status of a corpse.  “Ultimately, what I am seeking in the photograph taken of me (the “intention” according to which I look at it) is Death: Death is the eidos of that Photograph.” (Barthes)

For Barthes a photograph involved three different phenomena, a simulacrum, a spectrum, and the return of the dead.

“The person or thing photographed is the target, the referent, a kind of little simulacrum, any eidolon emitted by the object, which I should like to call the Spectrum of the Photograph, because this word retains, through its root, a relation to “spectacle” and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead. (Barthes)

Before considering the simulacrum and spectrum we will remain with death for now specifically, how it relates to memory. It is interesting that Barthes uses the term “the return of the dead” rather than the memory of the dead because even if it reveals the past with precise detail a photograph is scarcely a memory.  In fact there is a question as to whether images and memory can co-exist at all. Images interrupt memory’s work turning eidetic imagination inside out. .  “Not only is the photograph never, in essence, a memory… but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory” (Barthes)

Among concerns that this raises critical questions regards to what extent the fabricated idols/eidolon of any technological milieu can replace internal memory. When one relies on photographs for memory, one performs a McLuhanian flip and an outering of the sensorium occurs. In this sensory “outering”, a technological extension necessitates a biological atrophy. When a new technology takes on the task that was previously done manually or mentally that particular biological/brain function falls into disuse and slowly begins to atrophy.

While McLuhan instances the processes of automation and mass media, this is also precisely the phenomena that King Thamus of Egypt warned against when presented with the gift of writing from the god Thoth, as a recipe for memory and wisdom. Thamus responds that writings true effects are likely to be the opposite; it is a remedy for reminding, not remembering, he says, while it gives the appearance it is not really wisdom. “Future generations will hear much without being properly taught, and will appear wise but not be so, making them difficult to get along with”(Plato). In Plato’s retelling of this tale writing is considered to be external to our internal memory.  We could take this same lesson and apply it to photography and memory.

But, while Plato argument seems convincing, Jacques Derrida in interrogating this dialog in Phaedrus demonstrates that Plato also has to admit that writing penetrates to the core of memory, that it infects memory as a supplement.  “Memory always needs signs in order to recall the non-present, with which it is necessarily in relation”. (Derrida) As a supplement a photograph can spark memory in a way that can facilitate recall or realization.

When the spectators consciousness coincides with the instance of the light spectrum that comes to presence in the chemical reactions on a photosensitive negative, memory is augmented by a unique supplement, a true image of the referent. If one brings to the photographic encounter a certain reverie for the objectivity of these supplemental images a new category of space-time opens, one of spatial immediacy and temporal displacement.  While one may question the effect on memory this process can allow one to participate in a mythical presencing of a subject over time.

The space-time of a photograph poses new questions to our understanding of temporality  and presence that boarder on the metaphysical. Barthes even compares photographs to “mediums” who put us in touch with the world of deceased people and things. Barthes study of photographs was not only critical but also phenomenological. He believed that the “noeme” of photography – its essence or thought-image – are its transmissible packets of self-referential thought that reveal what materially “has been”.

The phenomena that began in 1837 with the daguerreotype invented by Louis Daguerre who created an image on silver-plated copper, coated with silver iodide and “developed” with warmed mercury constituted a rupture with the past, “Since that moment of the first photographic image a door opened between worlds and a parallel universe of captured time began to flood across boundaries erected by the language of written symbols.” (Stiegler)

In the early 20th century the Surrealist used photographic images to open portals to the uncanny. Their photographs allow entrance into alternate realities, rendering uncharted regions of the unconscious, assessable through art. In constructing their photographs they favored natural images, objects with real referents rather than, retouched photographs.  The real image was thought to be better vehicles for accessing the chaotic semiotic reality underlying our own.

Man Ray

(Man Ray used the photogram method and solarization photography methods to create his works. A photogram is created without a camera. The subject is laid directly on the paper and then exposed to light and developed. Solarization was used to create a surreal effect in his photographs.)

In his 1920 essay on Max Ernst, André Breton 1920 refers to automatic writing as “a camera of poetry, a blind instrument for recording a landscape to which no human effort can add a single new element”. (Sontag) In the juxtaposition of surrealist imagery one encounters fragments of worlds whose contours thrust images at us violently that puncture our gaze.

“Photography has powers that no other image-system has ever enjoyed because, unlike the earlier ones, it is not dependent on an image-maker. However carefully the photographer intervenes in setting up and guiding the image-making process, the process itself remains an optical-chemical (or electronic) one, the workings of which are automatic. Its machinery will inevitably be improved to provide still more detailed and, therefore, more useful maps of the real. The mechanical genesis of these images, and the literalness of the powers they confer, amounts to a new relationship between image and reality. And if photography could also be said to restore the most primitive relationship—the partial identity of image and object—the potency of the image is now experienced in a very different way. The primitive notion of the efficacy of images presumes that images possess the qualities of real things, but our inclination is to attribute to real things the qualities of an image.” (Sontag)

If primitives often fear photographs it is because of the encounter with the spectral image, the haunting presence of an absent referent, whose light emanations remain.  Bergson says, ”the conscious present is the condensing of the entire past” if so, then what allows an image to live in the present is the displacement of temporality as a light spectrum from the past settles onto an immobile photographic surface.

“The instant of the snap coincides with the instance of what is snapped and it is this co-incidence of two instances that the basis of the possibility of a conjuncture of past and reality allowing for a transfer of the photographs immobility in which the spectators consciousness coincides with the appearance of the spectrum. “(Stiegler)

It is from the photographs haunting immobility that primitives withdraw, fearful of being photographed and having ones soul imprisoned in the photographic image. Here we will flip the question and rather than consider soul stealing will explore whether the two dimensional photographic surface could serve as a vehicle for soul revealing?

If photography is a technology of objectivity it is also a technology of aesthetics and the question that can be asked is one posed by Thomas Mann in 1928:  “Technologization of the aesthetic—it certainly sounds bad, it resonates with decay and the downfall of the soul. But what if, even as the soulful falls victim to the technical, the technical becomes ensouled?”(Mann/Downing)

Immobility

When asked to pose for a photograph in1940 Sri Aurobidno responded “plenty of people have proposed that before” (Heehs) It would be another decade until Henri Cartier-Bresson arrived in Pondicherry before he finally agreed. The encounter was short and as intense as it was unique as one of India’s greatest yogis met one of the great photographers of the 20th century. As described by Robi Ganguli who accompanied Cartier-Bresson to Sri Aurobndo’s room “after his ten minutes of shooting he was perspiring and visibly agitated, when asked how it went? with elation he replied “I have never seen a man like this he was absolutely immobile.” (Ganguli)

Aurobindo was born in India but raised in England where he had been sent by his Anglophile father to be educated. He graduated from Kings College of Cambridge University where he studied the classics of Western Civilization and won prizes for Greek and Latin poetry. He could read and write in multiple European and Indian languages. Culturally he was a cosmopolitan figure with certain literary and philosophical affinities to Arnold, Nietzsche, Bergson, Tagore.

After graduating from Kings College he returned to India but rather than becoming a privileged member of the British Indian Civil Service (ICS) he embarked on a rediscovery of his Indian heritage.  He immersed himself in India’s indigenous spiritual traditions and the practice of Yoga. His will to cultural and self-discovery transformed him into both a yogi and a revolutionary who fought against the foreign powers occupying India. It did not take long for him to find himself on trail for his life on charges of treason.

As the 20th century began Sri Aurobindo became one of the first leaders of the revolutionary movement in India against British occupation that would eventually result in its independence. In response to the injustices of the Raj he advocated insurrection and led a resistance movement in Bengal whose armed tactics conferred upon him the status of terrorist.

As an author he took on the task of marshaling the heroic spirit of self-determination that had languished on the subcontinent after centuries of occupation and its subjugation to foreign powers. But, he was equally as critical of India’s malaise and its caste system, whose injustices he renounced vehemently. He also wrote and edited one of the key early journals of the independence struggle called “Bande Matram”, whose name invoked the goddess Durga, slayer of demons. The British considered the publication most dangerous and constantly monitored it for seditious activity.

Aurobindo was eventually arrested, placed in solitary confinement and put on trail for his life on the charge of treason, of waging war against the King. While in his cell he claims to have heard the voice of another one of India’s great cultural and spiritual figures Swami Vivekananda. The voice he heard promised him that India would be free and so summoned him to pursue the path of yoga.

His decision to dedicate his life to a process of spiritual transformation had begun while in a solitary cell nine feet by five feet that had no windows. In front stood iron bars and a hole in a wooden door beyond a small stony courtyard. When he finally stood trail he silently looked out from his courtroom cage but his vision had been entirely transformed. The judge, jury, the prosecuting attorney appeared to him as divine forms of the gods Vasudeva, Narayan and Krsna. He lost all fear that they could do him any harm and was eventually acquitted of all charges.

After he was freed he received an inner calling to go to the French territory of Pondicherry in South India. There he could avoid further British harassment although they still pestered the French to keep close watch on him. The French surveillance of him did not last long however, when the Chief of Police suddenly walked in and found there were Latin and Greek books lying about on his desk, he was so taken aback that he could only blurt out, “Il sait du latin, il sait du grec!” — “He knows Latin, he knows Greek!” — and then he left with all his men. How could a man who knew Latin and Greek ever commit any mischief?(Purani)

He was subsequently left in peace. Having been given an inner assurance that India would he now began to seriously embark on the practice of yoga (sadhana). It was a practice that he believed had evolutionary implications, both for himself and for the nation. He was one of the first voices to speak of an evolution of consciousness.

The first step of his yogic practice includes achieving perfect stillness, or the silencing of thought in attaining a nirvanic state. Aurobindo’s yoga is called “purna” or “integral yoga”. The aim of his yoga does not end at nirvana but rather, uses the experience of nirvana as a foundation for a spiritual practice that aims at synthesizing knowledge, devotion, works in a project of immanent transformation, in which the yogi functions as a physical laboratory at the vanguard of species evolution.

In 1926 after having experienced a “siddhi” -a Sanskrit noun that can be translated as “perfection”, “accomplishment”, “attainment”, or “success – in ones yogic practice- he retired completely into his residence in Pondicherry until he died in 1950.

Aurobindo’s main activities during the period of his retreat involved walking meditation and writing, mostly hundreds of letters to those spiritual seekers who sought his counsel. He did however continue to meet with a close circle of followers and would occasionally entertain such notable guests as the Nobel prize winning author Rabindranath Tagore who wrote of him “India will speak through your voice to the world, Hearken to me”

His presence is described by those few who visited him during the period of his retreat in terms of the sheer force of its silent immobility that could be felt throughout his entire room.  One person describes being in his presence in Heideggerian terms of being “geared up” or prepared. In this case, the preparation was for a transition from man to superman.

By first insisting on a silent mind and perfect equanimity integral yoga begins with the deconstruction of thoughts that intruded into consciousness. One comes to spontaneously see how thoughts are generated outside oneself and enter the mind conditioned by culture, history and desire. By detaching oneself from the compunction of desire one gains freedom to perfect action in the world. But perfected action began with the cultivation of a silent mind as a solvent for the world’s disturbances.

His spiritual collaborator Mirra Alfassa once describes racing to his room to close the windows during one of the raging typhoons that often hit southern India. Although the Ashram buildings were being pummeled by gale force winds with torrential rain and the compound was in disarray when she arrived in his room the window was wide open but, everything inside was perfectly still, all she found was the lone figure of Sri Aurobindo immobile in silent meditation.

Although he may have maintained an immobile poise Sri Aurobindo was reluctant to remain still for a posed photograph.  In fact, -and for good reason as we shall see- he does not seem to have been drawn to photographs at all. While many pictures were taken of him when he was a public figure between 1906-1910, only about ten photographs exists that were taken between 1910-1926 when he withdrew to dedicate himself to yogic practice. (Heehs) In 1940 when asked to allow himself to be photographed Sri Aurobindo responded “plenty of people have proposed that before”.

There were no photographs taken of him after that time until 1950 when Henri Cartier-Bresson visited Pondicherry and asked permission to take his picture. The photographs Cartier-Bresson took were the first ones taken in approximately twenty-five years and are the last ones we have of Sri Aurobindo prior to his death in December of that year. The only ones taken of him after that were those taken after he had left his body as he lay in the crystal blue silence of samadhi.

Perhaps Aurobindo intuited something in Cartier-Bresson who viewed photography in much the same integral terms as Sri Aurobindo did his yoga”, he wrote photograph, “is putting one’s head, one’s eye and one’s heart on the same axis.”  When we look at his portraits, that head-eye-heart relationship is especially evident.”

Cartier-Bresson saw the world in terms of light and the reverie of form in which he declared; “in all this chaos, there is order” and through this process we are left to “to revel in the pure pleasure of form”. Although he trafficked in the singularity of the photographic images he also was a cinematic collaborator with famed director Jean Renoir on three films. He was “an artist who sees himself an artisan but who nevertheless established Magnum, the most prestigious of all photo agencies, and who immortalized his major contemporaries: Mauriac in a state of mystical levitation, Giacometti, Sartre, Faulkner or Camus, and as many more all taken at the decisive moment, all portraits for eternity.” (Assouline)

During his lifetime Cartier-Bresson witnessed some of the centuries most tumultuous events. Through his camera he captured some of the great social movements of the era, the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War, the joyous liberation of Paris, Mohandas Gandhi just hours before his assassination, Mao’s liberated China.

In the midst of all these events Cartier-Bresson approached photography by stilling the mind as a yogi or more precisely as a Zen archer would do. During this process the photographer like the archer perfects technical acumen by first emptying consciousness of all thought in surrender of the self to the process of perfecting the shot.

The archer starts with attentive practice by slowly drawing the bowstring backwards. Because if the arrow is properly drawn the archer is no longer conscious of herself, she gazes at the target while emptying consciousness of content and self as attention is enrapt in the “other”, in the target. It is a process that readies the string so once released it sets the arrow on a prefect trajectory.

“The archer ceases to be conscious of himself as the one who is engaged in hitting the bull’s-eye which confronts him. This state of unconscious is realized only when, completely empty and rid of the self, he becomes one with the perfecting of his technical skill, though there is in it something of a quite different order which cannot be attained by any progressive study of the art…” (Herrigel)

To Cartier-Bresson the camera was an “instrument of intuition and spontaneity –the master of the instant which in visual terms questions and decides simultaneously” Like the Zen archer Cartier Bresson’s process involved silencing the mind before engaging the photographic act, when his finger triggered the shutter, all thought was stilled as the Zen photographer targeted his subject with an arrow of light.

When he shot a portrait he looked for an inner silence. He said “I seek to translated the personality not expression”. The force of photography is that it prolongs instants which the normal flow of time immediately closes. This freezing of time—the insolent, poignant stasis of each photograph—is what produces beauty To take a photograph means to recognize – simultaneously and within a fraction of a second– both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. As Cartier-Bresson said It is putting one’s head, one’s eye, and one’s heart on the same axis. (Magnum Photos)

If there was any photographer qualified to take photographs of Sri Aurobindo it was Henri Cartier Bresson.

The photographs that Cartier Bresson took of Sri Aurobindo reveal an almost uncanny immobility in its subject. They reveal a perfectly composed Sri Aurobindo with one eye serenely looking into the camera and the other as if gazing inward into the depths of some other hidden world. Many of Sri Aurobindo followers use these pictures to facilitate meditation and as a vehicle of darshan.

 

Sri Aurobindo by Henri Cartier-Bresson 1950 (original images)

Darshan

If the photograph is employed as a darshanic image it is to facilitate a direct transference of the master consciousness into the aspirants own meditative state via a gaze that pierces its subject like an arrow. This form of wisdom transmission has a long history on the subcontinent stretching back to its ancient religious and philosophical traditions.

“In everyday language, darshan means “to see.”  But there are also specialized meanings to the word darshan.  Darshan also means spiritual philosophy.  All the schools of philosophy in India are known as darshans.  And thirdly, darshan is an encounter with an icon or a guru.   Darshan involves a form of non-dual seeing.   To arrive at this point, however, we must first acknowledge the fact that we start from dualistic phenomenal experience. In our experience is one of an ‘I’ and a ‘thou’, there is always that separation. There is a plurality of beings that are encountering one another. In the encounter with the icon or with the guru, the encounter of darshan too, we start with a dualism:  two states of consciousness encountering one another.  But eventually there is an overcoming of that duality, and this is the moment of darshan”. (Banerji)

Darshan is a hierophany, a revelation of the sacred gathered from, a direct seeing of and being seen by the divine in the form of an icon or guru. Traditionally darshan involves a personal audience with the guru or icon but with the evolution of technology a photograph or even a digital image (cyber-darshan) can stand in for the guru or icon. Since a photograph consists of traces of actual photons that reflect off the guru its use is seen as most appropriate.  As Barthes reminds us the photograph is literally an emanation of the referent.

Barthes splits the effect of the photograph into two aspects that he calls the studium and the punctum. The studium is the socially coded value of the photograph. It is its cultural, and political interpretation of the whole photograph that we tacitly interpret whenever we see it. Studium is the element that creates interest in how the photographer has composed the photograph.  By decoding the image we as spectators experience the photographers intention.  Culture is perhaps the most important reference within studium, as Barthes says ‘it is culturally that I participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions,’


Studium

In contrast the punctum refers to that particular portion of the photograph that has personal meaning; that “stings us”, that punctures our attention. This may or may not have been part of the photographer’s intention but rather it is that visual attractor that draws our gaze toward on a particular feature, face or form within the image. It is that part of the photograph that reaches out and pricks ones eyes with a form that we invest with personal meaning, The punctum allows us to establishes a direct relationship with the referent within the picture. It is that event horizon on the still photographic surface that reverses the flow of time between image and viewer to facilitate an affective connection.

“The punctum, then, is a kind of subtle beyond – as if the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see: not only toward “the rest” of the nakedness, not only toward the fantasy of a praxis, but toward the absolute excellence of a being, body and soul together  it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me “ (Barthes)

(Punctum)

The posed photograph facilitates a self-encounter within the subject photographed, which opens her up to the camera in such a way that the punctum can emerge from the individual’s psyche itself. The pose in a photograph for however brief an instant punctures time with the intentionality of the subject as she assumes complicity in her transformation into an object fashions duration to crystallize a time-image.

If the interchange of darshan occurs within the immobility of a photograph it would be within its punctum, in the personal space where the delayed star beams of its subject evoke emotional meaning for the viewer. The punctum in the photographs taken by Cartier-Bresson of Aurobindo are usually reported by followers as located in his gaze.

Sri Aurobindo by Henri Cartier-Bresson (original)

Unfortunately, in the case of these photographs Sri Aurobindo suspicion of photographs of himself was bore out when  –without the photographer’s permission- some were juxtaposed with unflattering captions in the British periodical The Illustrated  (Jan 1951) and satirized in the German magazine Heute (Nov 1950).

The Aurobindo Ashram wound up buying the negatives of the photographs. It was unprecedented that Cartier-Bresson agreed to sell, because both he and the artistic corporation that owned the rights to his photographs Magnum Photos had a strict policy prohibiting sale of negatives.

The Aurobindo Ashram paid three thousand dollars in 1951 for the photographs. It was an astronomical fee for the time yet, they would in turn churn out thousands of copies of these photographs over the next sixty years and that would make them a tidy profit,

Although Cartier-Bresson’s original photographs of Sri Aurobindo were successful in conveying his immobile presence, after his death some of Aurobindo’s more “geared up” followers in Pondicherry would retouch some of his negatives before circulating copies for distribution and sale. In these photographs suddenly a white halo or aura emanates from the serenely framed white clad, white haired, white bearded figure of Sri Aurobindo.


Sri Aurobindo by Henri Cartier-Bresson (retouched with aura)

Aura

In the context of one of the major works on photography it is ironic to think that the reproduction of Sri Aurobindo’s photographs would be framed by an aura, because it is precisely the erosion of “aura” in the reproduction of photographs that is Walter Benjamin’s subject in Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

Painting Sri Aurobindo’s images with an aura was done to suggest a certain excess of presence, a force of physical manifestation. For Benjamin an aura also suggests an excess of presence. Although for him this presence occurs through the historical testimony given by an artwork such as a painting or sculpture that is embedded in a culture or tradition. Benjamin saw in the photograph, an artwork in which presence was diminished, whose aura was eroded through its mechanical reproduction.

During the years before World War II while Sri Aurobindo was still in self-exile practicing his supra-mental yoga, struggling inwardly to free a new nation in the waning days of the Raj and Henri Cartier-Bresson was in Spain documenting the tragedies of the Spanish Civil War, Walter Benjamin was living penniless in France; the specter of the Third Reich looming, contemplating his own future self-exile. In 1936 he wrote Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In it he interrogates the mass production of art works, the proliferation of image that through photography and cinema had become the commodity form of what Horkheimer and Adorno in1944 called the Culture Industries that were emerging in America and Western Europe.

In his essay Benjamin compares a painting to a photograph. He argues that a painting or sculpture is obviously reliant on an original object whose materially provides historical  testimony of its existence within a culture and tradition.  In contrast a photograph is not dependent on a fixed object within a specific temporal sequence or spatial coordinate and therefore succeeds through the economics of mass reproduction.

A photograph undermines the authority of an original by replacing it with a copy. A photographic negative -more so the digital image- can produce limitless identical copies and for all practical purpose any copy can stand in for the original. The event of the invention of photography made possible the capture, copying, and circulation of an image of time. In the wake of this event two thousand years of Platonic metaphysics of forms began to flip. Susan Sontag writes:

“Since Plato philosopher’s tried to shed the dependence on images for interpreting reality in authoring an image free way to apprehend the real. “But when, in the mid-nineteenth century, the standard seemed finally attainable, the retreat of the old religious and political illusions before the advance of humanistic and scientific thinking did not—as anticipated—create mass defections to the real. On the contrary, in the new age of unbelief the allegiance to images was strengthened. The credence that could no longer be given to realities understood in the form of images was now being given to realities understood to be images, illusions.

In the preface to the second edition (1844) of The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach observes that “our era” “prefers the image to the thing, the copy to the original, the representation to the reality, appearance to being”—while being aware of these preferences. And his premonitory complaint has been transformed in the twentieth century into a widely agreed on diagnosis: that a society becomes “modern” when one of its chief activities is producing and consuming images, when images that have extraordinary powers to determine our demands upon reality, and are themselves coveted substitutes for firsthand experience, become indispensable to the health of the economy, the stability of the polity, and the pursuit of private happiness.

Feuerbach’s words—he is writing a few years after the invention of the camera—seem, more specifically, a presentiment of the impact of photography. For the images that have virtually unlimited authority in a modern society are mainly photographic images; and the scope of that authority stems from the properties peculiar to images taken by cameras.”(Sontag)

While photographs may carry more authority in a hyper-modern civilization to Benjamin aura is the cost for of authority. In tracing the erosion of “aura” and the loss of the real to a proliferation of copies, Benjamin understands the rupture that is underway as historical testimony shifts from reality to the strange cultural attractor of simulation. In contrasting paintings to photographs Benjamin finds that while both painting and photograph are representations, a painting is a cultural artifact, whose materiality allows it to be located within a ritualized collective space. Historically this collective space can be traced back from museum and cathedral to the caves that housed our earliest ritual apprehension of paintings.

To experience art is to encounter presence, in which the distance from its creation in time is overcome by the immediacy of the artist’s intentions and that like photograph’s pose, fashions duration to crystallize a time-image. To locate oneself inside a specific cultural space that facilitates a ritual apprehension of the object is to experience an artworks materiality. This phenomenological dimension of art we share with nature and its natural object such as a mountain, whose presence over eons is sustained before us.  Similarly, the aura of an artwork envelops us in its cultural essence and inscribes in us its historicity.

This experience of aura could also be found in early photography or the daguerreotype that produced only singular originals. But, the discovery by Maddox, of an emulsion of gelatin and silver bromide on glass to create the “dry plate” process in 1871 coupled with the Eastman Kodak’s corporation’s pricing and production strategies resulted in the availability of cameras for the masses and easily reproducible images fin de siècle.

In the 20th century photography accelerated its subversion of the dominant cultural logic since Plato, which privileged the singularity of the original or the “true form”” over its copy. With the widespread deployment of affordable cameras mass produced photographic copies would increasingly replace “true form” as ritualized space collapsed under the zero-weight of simulation.

In an age of mass production aura erodes with the public space that surrounds art. As the image draws closer to us the photograph or phonogram circulate for private viewing or listening. As the mass produced artwork draws closer to us it infiltrates (un)consciousness in ways that an object with aura would not, since the very presence of aura envelops the object with a distancing effect, that sustains its singularity. Mass produced artworks however more often are culturally assigned an entertainment value and are absorbed uncritically into our imagination.

This colonization of the imagination by the Culture Industries accelerates with the circulation of globalization’s commodity fetishism. When the copy replaces original and false consciousness replaces true witness the function of art is reversed.  The effect on consciousness is hypnotic as original is replaced by copy, and then copy is replaced by copy as the process re-doubles until what remains is a copy that lacks any original referent.  This makes it easier to employ images as efficient frictionless commodities with increasing propaganda value.

The positive value of photography Benjamin found in two ways, in its phatasmagoric function and in its location within the family tradition. In the former Benjamin believed that photography could bear witness to the ills of economic barbarism in such a way as to awaken us from our everyday stupor. As a phantasmagoric witness to the worst excess of mass culture the camera’s power resides in its very objectivity and its ways of capturing “fleeting and secret images”. The critical eye of the camera allows the inequalities of society to be revealed. He specifically references Eugene Atget’s photographs of crime and vacant Paris streets which “wiped off the mask [off the bourgeois profession of photographer] and then set about removing the makeup from reality too”(Benjamin) .

Eugene Atget – Paris

Ironically, one consequence of aura’s demise in mass culture is in the camera’s very ability to reveal the demise. Benjamin believed the camera has a critical eye for detail that no observer can claim because it portrays society in ways that enable the viewer to deconstruct its façade to wipe its mask off. This is what he calls the phantasmagoric characterized by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtapositions of realistic images that are also found in surreal art and literature.

These shadows and images reveal what otherwise we would blind to. The photographs prefect objectivity bears witness to the illusionary reality we inhabit as citizens and reveals our collective bad faith. “In the image it produces it reveal that which to us in everyday life as natural, is in reality socially constructed and destructive” (Benjamin)

Aside from photography’s potential for objectively bearing witness to the ills of society, there was one form in which Benjamin believed that photography sustained aura and that was in the tradition of the family photograph or album.  Benjamin believed that aura persisted in family photographs because in viewing a photograph of a family member especially, a deceased relative one interns oneself in a relationship to the person in which ones own gaze preserves ones own historical identity within the narrative of a family.

In this respect the photographs of Sri Aurobindo can be said to be handed down within a family tradition. That is if one considers an Ashram a kind of family, which seems reasonable given one often discards ones worldly identity when entering an Ashram or a Monastery. This is particularly true within the Aurobindo Ashram whose patriarchal figure can be found in Sri Aurobindo and whose Mother is so named in the person of his spiritual collaborator Mira Alfassa. The Ashramites often hail one another as brother and sister, aunt or uncle.  In this way the photographs of Sri Aurobindo, are certainly handed down and cared for within the context of a family.

In this context Benjamin’s critique supports a photograph’s authenticity in sustaining aura within a close intentional community, such as an Ashram. However, it remains to be interrogated how much further we are distanced from the real or original presence when the legacy of patriarch is sustained through the creation of an aura by artificial means. Because it is precisely here when the original referent disappears that a simulacrum begins to orient collective life.

The photos by Cartier-Bresson taken in 1950 were not the first to be retouched, earlier photos from the period between 1910-1926 when Sri Aurobindo allowed photographs to be taken also were retouched by followers.

Copies of photographs taken during this period were later sold to devotees some of whom commented “that the Sri Aurobindo that they saw at darshan looked quite different.” (Heehs) In retrospect it is not surprising they made this observation.

One of the most interesting things about the negative reception among the Sri Aurobindo Ashram community to the recent biography The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs has to do with the actual photograph with which the author chose to represent Sri Aurobindo on its cover.

In the photograph Sri Aurobindo heroically posed stares unflinchingly into the camera, his dark brown eyes shine with the fire of a revolutionary his face radiates with the tranquil composure of a yogi. It was an image that the author admitted his fondness for while seeming perplexed that others would prefer a retouched version of the photograph.

Sri Aurobindo Circa 1920 (original)

 

Sri Aurobindo (retouched)

About the retouched photograph -whose original no longer exists-  Heehs writes: “There is hardly a trace of shadow between the ears, with the result that the face has no character. The sparkling eyes have been painted in, even the hair has been given a gloss. As a historical document it is false.” (Heehs)

Susan Sontag in her essay Photography: The Beauty Treatment, gives us a brief history of the retouched photograph

“People want the idealized image: a photograph of themselves looking their “best.” They feel rebuked when the camera doesn’t return an image of themselves as more attractive than they really are. But few are lucky enough to be “photogenic”—that is, to look better in photographs (even when not made-up or flattered by special lighting) than in real life. That photographs are often praised for their candor, their honesty, indicates that most photographs, of course, are not candid. A decade after the Englishman Fox Talbot’s negative-positive process had begun replacing the French daguerreotype in the early 1840s, a German photographer invented the first technique for retouching the negative. His two versions of the same portrait—one retouched, the other not—astounded crowds at the World Exposition held in Paris in 1855 (one of the earliest worlds, and the first with a photography exhibit). The news that the camera could lie made getting photographed much more popular.” (Sontag)

That some who pledge allegiance to Sri Aurobindo were offended that Heehs would choose a photograph that is striking in its stark naturalism, while preferring the widely circulated touched up photo is startling given Sri Aurobindo’s unsparing commitment to truth telling. The fact that the book’s detractors would prefer to replace the original representation, that captured the actual photons that emanated from his body, in favor of an image that was retouched, that is in essence an artistic rendition testifies to the power of the floating signifier to unconsciously structure conscious perceptions and to transpose the “mana” of a belief system into “floating chains of signifieds” that becomes the “doxa” of the community. But is the difference between the original and the retouched images simply a matter of preferring an image faithful to the truth to one that is a historical lie?

Retouching a photograph is a way for a photographer or whoever the customer is to regain control over the subject. In the posed portrait photograph “the subject’s psychological experience of self and the physical manifestation of this experience on the face and the body are one of the few elements outside of the photographer’s control.” (Espinosa)

The history of photography is already full of images that have been manipulated in some way or other. In fact now we realize that even the naturalist image is also an intentionally manipulated one that is specifically framed and constructed by the photographer through his cultural and historical orientation as well as through the physical constraints in fixing an artistic gaze through a camera lens. In early photography retouching portrait photographs was a common practice but today in the age of Photoshop it is ubiquitous. The ability for almost anyone to manipulate and reproduce countless images and transmit them globally at light speed is part of the evolution of photography since Benjamin, Aurobindo, Cartier-Bresson.

The effect on consciousness has been hypnotic as the manipulated original is increasingly  replaced by a copy, the copy by another copy, until what remains is a copy that lacks any original referent whatsoever.  This makes it easy to employ images as an efficient frictionless commodity form with an exponentially accelerating propaganda value. When reality disappears into simulation, Plato’s “theory of forms” flips into the post-human dawn rising under the sign of the simulacrum.

Before going further it is important to define two terms:

Simulation: “the action or practice of simulating, with an intent to deceive,” then as “a false assumption or display, a surface resemblance or imitation, of something,” and finally as “the technique of imitating the behavior of some situation or process…by means of a suitably analogous situation or apparatus” (OED online)
Simulacrum: “a material image, made as a representation of some deity, person, or thing,” as “something having merely the form or appearance of a certain thing, without possessing its substance or proper qualities,” and as “a mere image, a specious imitation or likeness, of something” (OED online).

“A simulation is a process whose intent is to deceive. Like the simulation, the simulacrum bears a resemblance to the thing that it imitates only on the surface level but as opposed to the simulation’s mimicry of a process or situation, the simulacrum is defined as a static entity, a “mere image” rather than something that “imitat[es] the behavior” of the real thing on which it is based.” (Sandoz)

In tracing the erosion of aura Walther Benjamin was working in an age in which the mass reproduction of images had just begun. Benjamin began his work on art and mechanical reproduction well before World War II, during the age of radio. He applied both an aesthetic and critical interrogation of the technical and economic apparatus that was employed by the emerging entertainment and cultural industries in “mechanically” proliferating images as commodity forms.

Simulacrum

Jean Baudrillard writing in the age of satellite television and the internet theorizes the “technological” (cybernetic) proliferation of images. What begins in Benjamin’s concern with modernity’s mass reproduction of photographic images becomes in the post-modern concerns of Baudrillard the fact that the “copy” no longer has any “real” referent whatsoever in the world; it is an image without an original. In Baudrillard’s view the current age is one in which the real is replaced by the hyper-real.

Lets extend Bernard Stiegler earlier quote on photography:

“In that moment of the first photographic image a door opened between worlds and a parallel universe of captured time began to flood across boundaries erected by the language of written symbols.

he continues:

With the exponential accumulation of images since the time of silver on metal plates exposed to light and mercurial gases, to today’s unlimited digital replications, the realm of imagination has risen as a flood that threatens everything that civilizations once accepted as true.” (Stiegler)
….

The technological evolution of media reconfigures the sensorium so that it becomes increasingly more difficult to distinguish reality and simulation, authentic from mediated experience, truth from deception.

“When media reach a certain advanced state, they integrate themselves into daily “real” experience to such an extent that the unmediated sensation is indistinguishable from the mediated, and the simulation becomes confused with its source. The simulation differs from the image and the icon (and the simulacrum) in the active nature of its representation. What are forged or represented are not likenesses of static entities, but instead the processes of feeling and experiencing themselves. Beginning as a primarily visual representation, the simulacrum (provisionally: the image of a simulation) has since been extended theoretically, and in the recent theory exemplified by the work of Baudrillard functions as a catch-all term for systems still operating despite the loss of what previous meaning they had held.  Jean Baudrillard writes in Simulations that an effective simulation will not merely deceive one into believing in a false entity, but in fact signifies the destruction of an original reality that it has replaced”(Sandoz).

If Baudrillard believes that simulation is the process through which reality is usurped, then simulacrum is the term for the reification of the process that produces an icon which stands in for a real object.  It is an image embodying a system of empty signs

According to Baudrillard the process by which our attention shifts form nature to its hyper-real replacement follows an evolutionary course:

1.The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where we believe, and it may even be correct that, a sign is a “reflection of a profound reality”, this is a good appearance, in what Baudrillard called “the sacramental order”.

2.The second stage is perversion of reality, this is where we believe the sign to be an unfaithful copy, which “masks and denatures” reality. Here, signs and images do not faithfully show us reality, but can hint at the existence of something real which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating.

3.The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the simulacrum pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. Baudrillard calls this the “order of sorcery”.

4.The fourth stage is pure simulation, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. “Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims.”  (Baudrillard)

Baudrillard goes on the equate the stages involved in the replacement of the real with three orders of historical process

1.First order, associated with the premodern period, where the image is clearly an artificial placemarker for the real item. The uniqueness of objects and situations marks them as irreproducibly real and signification obviously gropes towards this reality.

2.Second order, associated with modernity and the Industrial Revolution where distinctions between image and reality break down due to the proliferation of mass produced copies of items, turning them into commodities. The commodity’s ability to imitate reality threatens to replace the original version, especially when the individual person is only concerned with consuming for some utility a functional facsimile.

3.Third order, associated with postmodernity, where the simulacrum precedes the original and the distinction between reality and representation vanishes. There is only the simulacrum, and originality becomes a totally meaningless concept. (Hegarty/Wiki)

The retouched photograph of Sri Aurobindo present several unique problems. Foremost, because of his own unsparing commitment to truth but also because of the status assigned to him in India both as a spiritual and cultural figure. As a spiritual leader Sri Aurobindo shunned being labeled a guru, since he believed the guru resided in everyone’s heart. An Ashram did grow up around him because even if he was immobile thousands sought his spiritual guidance and made pilgrimages to Pondicherry, if just for darshan. As a spiritual leader he followers view of him ranges from status of a great teacher (mahaguru) to a god-like (avatar) stature imparted on him by his staunchest devotees.

Although one suspects that an evolutionary tendency in culture would be non-linear and much too complex to put into an ascending series of stages and orders, the curve of technology does follow specific physical laws that allows it to redouble its colonization of human consciousness every few years. In these terms there does seem to be a correspondence between the evolution of technology in advanced societies with the displacement of the real. So one could attempt to evaluate the original and retouched photographs of Sri Aurobindo in terms of the stages and orders of displacement of the real as follows:

The original photographs taken by Cartier–Bresson is an image that is still a faithful copy where we believe, and it may even be correct that, a sign is a “reflection of a profound reality” align with what Baudrillard calls the “sacramental order” This would also be true of the original photograph on the cover the Heehs biography taken of Sri Aurobindo after both standing trail for his life and his spiritual transformation.

These images are stark in the naturalness and correspond to Baudrillard’s first order when  images still stood in for what they replaced “where situations marks them as ir-reproducibly real and signification obviously gropes towards this reality”.

This photograph of Sri Aurobindo was retouched in France in the 1930s (Heehs) around the same time when Walter Benjamin, also living in France, was composing his thesis on aura and photography. Once photographs are retouched to beautify the image such as the one Heehs refers to in The Lives of Sri Aurobindo we begin to spiral from the faithful copy of the real toward the hyper-real. At this stage the copy is no longer faithful to an original but rather “masks and denatures” reality. –it can be retouched-  Here, signs and images do not faithfully show us reality.

This transformation of Sri Aurobindo’s image parallels that of his exploitation by Hindu fundamentalist groups like the RSS and VHP who cleave to him as cultural icon, leader of the early independence struggle and a champion of Vedanta. To these groups Sri Aurobindo is a heroic figure of both the Bengal Renaissance and the Indian struggle for self-determination. While his spiritual followers favor this particular image to bolster their assessment of him as an “avatar” members of the Hindu right exploit the image for its value as heroic representation of Hinduness.

A further evolution of Sri Aurobindo’s image that facilitates his transformation from sage the simulacrum occurs after 1950 when Sri Aurobindo’s Cartier-Bresson portraits have been painted with an aura. But perhaps more demonstrative of this move away from reality occur in some of the pictures after his death that seem to be brushed with a bluish light emanating from his lifeless body. At this point his transformation into simulacrum is complete.  This is Baudrillard’s “order of sorcery” where the simulacrum pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original.

In the case of the Samadhi photographs after he left his body it was displayed to his followers for four days. It is widely reported by many of those who viewed him during this time that his body- depending on accounts – radiated with either a golden or bluish light and showed no sign of decomposition despite the south Indian heat. Even though there are many who claim to have witnessed the phenomena of the bluish glow unfortunately in 1950 there was no color film available at that time in Pondicherry.  The following is an account given by Robi Ganguli, the gentleman who accompanied Cartier-Bresson to Sri Aurobindo’s room to take his photographs:

“What Vidyavrata has said about the glow around Sri Aurobindo’s body is correct. Like him I did not see this ethereal glow at night but only the next morning. At the Mother’s suggestion Chiman tried to procure from Madras a roll of colour film, which had for some time reached the commercial market. Perhaps the Mother thought that the glow around the body, which though visible to our eyes had eluded the black and white negatives, could possibly be captured in the colour shots. But unfortunately even in a big city like Madras, these colour rolls were not available.

I distinctly remember that only four of us took photographs. None other than Vidyavrata, Venkatesh, Chiman and myself were involved.  On the 9th when Sri Aurobindo’s mortal remains were put into the Samadhi, the four of us also took pictures of the ceremony. “

Although some may have indeed witnessed an ethereal glow the technology would simply not have been available at the time to portray any other colors than black and white.  It would have therefore been impossible to photograph the color emanating from his body.  Just like the aura on the Cartier-Bresson photographs these images would have had to be doctored to simulate the effect. Whatever the validity of the reports an image faithful to that event simply could not exists. That is the images of auras of ethereal glows are simply copies without an original.

Sri Aurobindo Samadhi (retouched)

Sri Aurobindo’s body (retouched with bluish glow)

When these images are employed by Hindu Nationalist to depict the god-like stature of their political mascot we are close to transiting to the fourth stage of Baudrillards hyper-real in which signs merely reflect other signs without any reality so that ethereal glow and painted aura only reflect the vacant fundamentalist signs of Hindu Nationalism.

The need to distort Sri Aurobindo’s images although troubling in exercising an ideological agenda is simple unnecessary, even for those whose agendas lie in fashioning idols. The authentic reproductions of the Cartier-Bresson photographs make those augmented by the wizardry of an aura, ghostly and unreal.  The faithful image of Sri Aurobindo’s repose in samadhi is more majestic in death than the bluish simulacrum. In the original Sri Aurobindo assumes a last immobile poise, a final profile of perfected peace and equanimity emanating onto a film base of cellulose acetate. The faithful image a “reflection of a profound reality”

Sri Aurobindo Samadhi (original)

Barthes believed that Photography was the eidos toward death in part because “we can be certain that the image will outlive the subject, whose photograph lingers long after her death”.

Susan Sontag argues that “the iconic properties of the more durable photograph will inevitably replace the myriad details of the experience represented in the image; in the end it is the photograph itself that is remembered” (Sontag)

Ironically, what is remembered of the retouched photographs of Sri Aurobino is the precession of simulacra across the screen of hypermodern consciousness.  This accelerating technomaya disappears the questing subject, who Sri Aurobindo envisioned in the first half of the 20th century as the transitional human form. One who through cultivation of the psychic being’s puissant silence fashion a liminal environment to channel supramental consciousness into human evolution.  In contrast the hyperreal desiring machines of neo-liberal globalization consume the psychic imagination of “real idea” excrete it as simulacra.

For those who fashion Sri Aurobindo into either cultural hero or spiritual avatar their desire follows a similar although more ancient  trajectory in which the real is replaced by simulacrum; the fashioning of idols. Today long after his passing the retouched images of Sri Aurobindo demonstrate just how easily the eidos of photography shape-shifts as the eidolon of photography.

References :

Assouline, Pierre: Henri Cartier-Bresson, l’œil du siècle

http://www.henricartierbresson.org/hcb/HCB_bio00_en.htm

Barthes, Roland: Camera Lucinda Hill and Wang; Second Edition edition (May 1, 1982)

Baudrillard, Jean:  Simulacra and Simulation University of Michigan Press (February 15, 1995)

Benjamin Walther: Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction CreateSpace (September 23, 2010)

Bergson, Henri, Creative Evolution Dover Publications; Unabridged edition (February 6, 1998)

Banerji Debashsih: On The Record of Yoga (2011) Forthcoming

Derrida, Jacques: Dissemination, University Of Chicago Press (February 15, 1983)

Downing, Eric: After Images: Photography, Archaeology, and Psychoanalysis and the Tradition of Bildung (Kritik German Literary Theory and Cultural Studies)Wayne State University Press (September 30, 2006)

Espinosa, Julie  The Advent of Myself as Other: Photography, Memory and Identity Creation. Gnovis Journal Spring 2010

http://gnovisjournal.org/journal/advent-myself-other-photography-memory-and-identity-creation

Heehs, Peter: The Lives of Sri Aurobindo Columbia University Press (April 28, 2008)

Hegarty, Paul (2004). Jean Baudrillard: live theory. London: Continuum.

Herrigel Eugene, Zen in the Art of Archery Vintage (January 26, 1999)

Plato: “Phaedrus” Plato’s Dialogue Princeton University Press (September 15, 2005)

Sandoz, Devin http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/simulationsimulacrum.htm (2003)

Sontag Susan. On Photography Picador; 1st edition (August 25, 2001)

Stiegler Bernard Stanford University Press (December 15, 2010)

Other References (Web Sites)

http://throughmylense2011.blogspot.com/2011/03/historical-constructed-reality.html

http://www.utata.org/salon/38067.php

http://www.sriaurobindoashram.org/research/show.php?set=doclife&id=31

http://www.sriaurobindoashram.org/research/show.php?set=doclife&id=25

http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP=XSpecific_MAG.Biography_VPage&AID=2K7O3R14T50B

from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation