One hardly expects a mainstream Hollywood film to haunt you in your professional sphere. Groundhog Day , a 1993 film, has become a metaphor for the correspondence I get from the art critic and cultural commentator, Sadanand Menon. Every time he shoots off his sharp and unsparing missive, it has been about some failure by the mainstream media in general, or The Hindu in particular. In North America, the popular legend is to look at the behaviour of groundhogs to determine whether it is early spring or an extended winter. The belief is that on February 2 the groundhog ends its hibernation and emerges from its hole and if it notices its own shadow it goes back into its hole indicating six more weeks of winter weather. In idiomatic terms, Groundhog Day symbolises “a situation in which a series of unwelcome or tedious events appear to be recurring in exactly the same way”.
Last week, Sadanand Menon had sent a pithy message about a sketchy obituary of the legendary artist and thinker, > K.G. Subramanyan , in this newspaper. He has been consistent in raising this issue. In 2009, he questioned the superficial coverage given to the passing away of painters and sculptors like A.P. Santhanaraj, T.R.P. Mookiah and Tyeb Mehta. As a journalist, I have learnt from Subramanyan not only about the trajectories of modern Indian art but also how to look at the cultural wellsprings. His creative interventions, drawn from the Gandhian and Tagorean worldviews, were a perfect antidote to bigots who try to appropriate every cultural symbol for narrow political gains. In 1994, Subramanyan said: “In my universe everything exists; one does not wipe out the other […] So I find many ancient works, whose themes and rationale I may not fully decipher, greatly stimulating. I find some new works, on which large tomes are written, vapid and puerile. But old or new, many are rewarding in their own fashion. So I get along readily with the old sibyls and the new oracles. Each opens a passage to the world that is. And through that the world within. My main concern is this passage.”
Though the Sunday Magazine of this newspaper did carry a tribute to Subramanyan, some of Sadanand Menon’s observations about obituary writings in Indian newspapers deserve serious introspection in our newsrooms. When some of the great artists — musicians Bhimsen Joshi, Bhupen Hazarika, Sultan Khan, Asad Ali Khan, Jagjit Singh; artists M.F Husain, Jehangir Sabavala, Mario Miranda; theatre persons Badal Sircar, Satyadev Dubey; film-makers Mani Kaul and Raveendran; cartoonist Kutty; writer Indira Goswami; photographer Gautam Rajadhyaksha; and actors Shammi Kapoor, Dev Anand — departed in 2011, Sadanand Menon asked: “Why do we need to respond to these dear departed? Why do we feel that each of these departures took away some part of ourselves? And what makes us incapable of articulating the loss in a marginally intelligent way?”
Art or entertainment? Sadanand Menon attributes this lacuna to the de-skilling that has taken place in the mainstream media, where the arts have been re-conceptualised as “entertainment”. He argues that the space for arts writing in the media has shrunk to invisibility and every leading paper and periodical has done away with a professional cog in the wheel called the “arts editor”. His plea to the media is that every one of these departed luminaries needs to be treated as an entire university in herself or himself and we need to be able to find a collective means to tap into that story and relay it back to us for renewing our own humanity.
I think it is not just about the disappearance of the arts editor. I am not sure whether any of the major Indian publications has an obituaries editor. An obit is a way to understand not just the person who has departed but the world s/he inhabited and made a difference. It is about life rather than death. It is a sneak preview to history. It is about individual quirks and brilliances. I am an avid reader of the obituaries in The Economist . Its obituaries editor, Ann Wroe, who also writes most of the obits, once shared an interesting take on death which allowed her to face it with a sense of interrogation and reflection on a regular basis. She said: “I don’t think of dead as dead, that’s the thing, and therefore it doesn’t trouble me. It’s an absence, if you like… I think an obituary is a celebration of a life.” For her a mere chronology fails to sum up the life. “I want to get the texture and the sound and even the smell of someone... get right inside the essence of that person,” she declared and this reflects in her writing.
Keeping the whistle audible Talking about art in a multicultural setting, K.G. Subramanyan said: “To live constantly in the presence of only one’s self should be a petrifying bore. So we choose to come out, bend over the balcony and whistle at the stranger. And, I presume, the stranger is happy to whistle back. We may not get very far, but we will still be all the better for even these imperfect encounters.” A well-crafted, earnest and insightful obituary is a whistle for meaningful encounters. It is the media’s job to keep it audible.
readerseditor@thehindu.co.in
