The river Otter flows through southwestern U.K., past farmlands, through salt marshes and mudflats, offering itself as wintering grounds for birds with resonant names: ringed plover, water rail, and red-breasted merganser. Arguably, the river’s most important claim to immortality in human imagination comes via the great English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge who was born in the area and wrote a poem titled ‘To the River Otter’. In his childhood, Coleridge explored the places along the river. In a cave that was famous for being haunted, he carved his initials, STC, on its walls. Nearly 200 years later, Coleridge’s biographer, Richard Holmes, made a trek to the same cave. To his surprise, at the back of the cave were still inscribed those three letters.
Holmes was exhilarated. It was as if he were in communion with his subject whom he had spent 15 years researching and of whose complex and creative mind he had written thousands of pages about. In his excitement, Holmes stood up in the cave only to bang his head on the cave’s roof, much of which was, according to Coleridge himself, made up of “the roots of old trees”. As Holmes recovered from the shock, he saw that “a large sliver of sandstone came down.” Thinking about it, he realised that the cave’s geology — soft, porous stone — would not have allowed the initials to survive for 200-odd years. As it turns out, the initials had been carved over the original by subsequent generations of cave visitors. They had kept the memory of the poet’s presence and his carving alive till it became a ritual of sorts. It was a non-religious ritual worship of a Romantic poet.
Collective remembering
This relatively obscure event throws sharp relief on how public memory operates. The glow of individual lives eventually mellows out and ultimately vanishes. Yet, for some of those lives — usually, politicians and historical figures — we collectively keep the flame alive. Each generation carries forward memories of that life and passes it down to the next. In each phase, we take what came down to us, embellish it a bit, recreate it, mishear the rest. Before long, these lives are endowed with clarity and purpose. They become characters in stories we tell of the past. In parts, we do this collective remembering and transmission to actively recognise what came before. But more fundamentally, we do so because our lives continue to be influenced by actions and institutions created long ago.
Yet, despite the influence of these lives on our collective imaginations, an irony is the poverty of thoughtful biographies. Few lives in India are as well documented as those of our political leaders. Their vast oversized presence is recorded, their decisions and signatures filed away in cabinets, their pettiness and magnificence critiqued and fawned over. Nowadays, even their private lives, unlike the rest of ours, undergo a public inquisition. Despite all this, our bookstores are threadbare as far as deeply researched and judiciously written biographies of our leaders are concerned.
Personality cult
If one wanted to read about political leaders who have had a long and influential innings in Indian politics, such as Kanshi Ram, M.S. Golwalkar, N.T. Rama Rao, Madhavsinh Solanki, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, Farooq Abdullah, J. Jayalalithaa, E.K. Nayanar, Periyar, or H.D. Deve Gowda, one would be hard-pressed to find a biography of quality, particularly in English. Instead, as the uneven coverage in the aftermath of M. Karunanidhi’s death revealed, we have lulled ourselves into thinking that we know, or even understand, these political leaders by simply parroting biographical facts, trivial anecdotes, or by furnishing a list of legislative achievements. Upon their death, the lives of Indian political leaders are entombed along with exaggerations and convenient half-truths. And this closure is before we have said anything of what are treated as no-go areas — their private lives, sexual proclivities, addictions. All this adds to the personality cult around which much of our politics accretes. To defend the party is equivalent to rendering the memory of the all-too-human political leader impregnable to criticism.
To change any of this to ultimately lead to a reading and writing culture that seeks to see a complex live in its entirety would mean changing how we think and speak about our figures of authority, and whether we can assess their works and lives fairly. Any such change is the work of two or three generations. Till then, all we can do, as readers and writers, is to be aware of our own biases and ask, how does the author know what he claims to know? If we fail to do this, we would be no different than all those who see the Coleridge initials in the cave and think it was the poet’s original carving.
