A radical insurrection of
The imagination of the public has been captured by corporates, media and hegemonic ideology and a radical insurrection of the imagination has to happen in the current times, cultural critic Sadanand Menon has said.
He was delivering the Chinta Ravi commemoration lecture here on Saturday.
Left movement
‘‘There is lot of strength and possibility in what we broadly call the Left movement. It is a huge community of people. The question is how do we reach them. We need excess of insurrectionary imagination and get into the messy space called culture. Hegemonic ideology has seeped into our system. How do you fight it? Mere sloganeering is not enough. Is that going to terrorise someone who is already a terrorist? Everyday when you wake up, before you do anything else, pause, and imagine what tyranny are you going to support today and work the whole day against it. Work against yourself,’’ he said.
He said the present state of cultural nationalism was exactly where the forces of cultural nationalism wanted us to be, working tirelessly over the past several decades.
“The noise around culture entraps us on a day-to-day basis. We are being made aware of our religion, caste, gender, patriotism, and food in multiple ways. We might think it is the loony, uneducated fringe. None of them are uneducated. It is serious business. This is the middle class rediscovering itself. The post-liberalisation middle class of India is a class that is becoming a virus, out to eat society from within,” he said.
In the second lecture of the day, literary scholar Sunil P. Elayidom said that what was being currently thought of as the Indian tradition was an artificial, anti-democratic and Brahmanical hegemonic conception that had destroyed the original argumentative, scientific and non-religious tradition of the country.
“An invention of tradition is happening, borrowing from what is being thought of as traditional symbols and then the construction of a monolith from it. There is no space for plurality, arguments or differences in it. It is a western myth built by scholars such as Max Mueller that India is a land of spirituality. Today that myth is ruling us. The seed of the Hindutva ideology is western. There is nothing Indian about it,” he said.
He said that India’s argumentative tradition was not of having arguments and winning, rather these were meant for gaining and spreading knowledge.
False concept
“This false concept of Brahmanical Indian tradition could easily communicate with the uneducated lower strata, leading to the current situation. Even the education of our middle classes have been all about instrumentalised knowledge, which never touches our world view. So, on the one side you are an expert in software and on the other side you practise and believe in myths and magic. This is the middle class that Hindutva has conquered,” Prof. Elayidom said.
Veteran journalist Sashi Kumar said that it was important to reassert that we would not normalise what was not normal. In times like these, public intellectuals become crucial in making the last stand, against the grain of the popular, which might reverse the tide.
Writer Zachariah said that every individual should become part of the resistance. B. Rajeevan, in his tribute to Chinta Ravi, said that Ravi could communicate seamlessly with people from every shade, without looking at their political leanings.
Film critic C.S. Venkiteswaran paid tributes to filmmaker K.R. Mohanan who passed away recently.
