The history of the ‘hero’ as a category of description in popular imagination is surprisingly fragile and also complex. It is fragile because a hero is born of a marriage of circumstance and wilful action, and is midwived into this world by a fleeting rearrangement of what is considered possible — when our present world, one filled with all-too-familiar cause-and-effect, splits to reveal another, improbable world. A world wherein a 1970s MiG-21 can shoot down an advanced F-16 jet in a dogfight. In due course, this story of improbability accretes around it a halo of awe.
The idea of a hero is held together in public memory by a carapace of sentiments cemented by an insinuation of greatness, and ultimately baked dry as a fact by the very act of repetitive narration. All the while, inside this collectively architected reality lies the truth of the heroic action, which is obscured for all but the hero himself.
Traditionally, what is meant by a ‘hero’ is itself complex: is it one who wars valiantly against the die of fate cast by the gods (say, Karna in the Mahabharata ) or one so extravagantly blessed by the gods that his mere presence is an event (say, Achilles in the Iliad ).
In our secular age too, intuitions about the heroic are still born from the wellspring of violence — Somnath Sharma at Badgam in 1947, Arun Khetarpal at Bara Pind in 1971, Vikram Batra at Point 4875 in 1999, or Sandeep Unnikrishnan at the Taj, Mumbai in 2008.
Homer and Bharata
In ancient Greece, a world where violence was frequent and often eulogised, we find that narratives of Homer and those inspired by him tend to have three characteristics.
One, all heroes are born from war. Two, the hero often faces a choice between a long, middling life or a shorter, glorious one. And third, others are uncertain about how to think of the hero — is he to be venerated, or merely respected?
The heroic mode is as much an internal one as it is one about the responses of others. In contrast, the taxonomies of the heroic mode in Bharata’s Natya Shastra — Dhirodatta Nayaka , Dhiralalita Nayaka , Dhiraprashanta Nayaka etc. — are preoccupied with an underlying psychology.
The hero is a means of embodying a complex set of emotional valences constrained by social prescription and emotional maturity. In neither of these understandings does being heroic come without costs.
Upon coming face to face with his enemy Priam, all Achilles could do was admire him; he “watched his handsome face and listened to his words”. In that penultimate moment before executing his eternal enemy Karna, even the great Arjuna baulks for a moment — his humanity burbles past the barbarisms of a holocaust at Kurukshetra.
In contrast to these traditional understandings of the hero as a complex being, in our modern media narratives, the ‘hero’ is a placeholder, into which an inchoate attachment and highly particularised ‘patriotism’ pours in. This patriotism is reducible to a specific set of actions that allows for convenient demarcations of good and evil, a cartoonish portrayal that has little interest in the everyday lives of soldiers in a warrior culture.
In her illuminating essay on the Iliad , the French philosopher Simone Weil writes about ‘force’, which permeates all instances of violence,. She defines ‘force’ as an intervention which changes any human into a phantom approximation of the living.
It is this dehumanising urge that informs hero-narratives in our media. Our understanding of the heroic is progressively limited to the ability to kill or avoid being killed.
This implies that today’s anointed heroes will cease to matter by tomorrow’s news cycle. More troublingly, it means our understanding of the security forces, their struggles and strifes — all become irrelevant in the relentless need to manufacture new heroes.
Keerthik Sasidharan is a writer and lives in New York City.
