TRADITION, STATUS QUO AND THE COSMIC IRRESPONSIBILITY… Dr. Jernail Singh Anand

Generally, I do not quote other authors to justify or support what I have to say. But, as the topic of this article envisages, I have to bring in T.S. Eliot and his famous and most discussed article, ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’. He talked of individual talent, which modifies the tradition. But, does the job of the individual talent end here? Eliot talks of the past, but does not talk of the Movement Forward. How the individual should move into his future. What he says in plenty, however, is what is tradition and how it affects and gets affected by new writers. Eliot was many cuts above his contemporaries in his understanding of the pastness of the past, and its contemporaneity. And his theses were lapped up by subsequent generations of scholars, even up to now when so much waters has flowed down the Thames, as well as the Ganges.

What bothers me in this article is why writer after writer is focusing on tradition, and why they are supporters of status quo. Time is moving forward, and things are changing fast, still, we are being reminded of things which stick to our traditional vaults. Do we forget that those were different times and our times are entirely different in tone and tenor? Milkha Singh, the famous flying Sikh, just looked back for a fraction of a second, and he lost the race. But, poet after poet is trying to dig up Shakespeare and Keats, and they refuse to grapple with what is happening today, and what might happen tomorrow.

A successful CEO always keeps his eye on the future of his enterprise. Life is an enterprise, but we have fixed all our eyes on the past, as if there is no future, nor any present. I may be taken for a man highly irreverent of tradition. But I am a strong critic of status quo. Tradition pulls us back from the front, and forces us to look at what the great protagonists of olden times did. Here, let me state one timeless truth about the timelessness of art and literature, and concede that characters like King Lear and Macbeth and even Hamlet embody eternal truths about human life. Literature and art do so, but this does not mean that we should become votaries of status quo. He who dangles scriptural stories before your eyes, wants you to get lost in the romance of the past, in which you have no stake, no risk, as you stand nothing to lose, and you can enjoy this ever expanding interval. While watching these wonderful texts on the screen, our time passes without interfering with us. When the going is easy, we may be going downhill. Someone said somewhere.

Not only our elderly masters, even our political and social prophets want us to delve deep into our history. Go back to medieval or even ancient times. There, study the history of French Revolution. And Glorious Revolution. Go back to Restoration Comedy. You will know how lecherous the society was. How was Richard II. What type was Julius Caesar. Antony and Cleopatra, how romantic! How can I fault you if these books provide you a great ‘masala’, entertainment and passive instruction, if any. Now, turn to holy scriptures and books of divine battles. Go on learning each and every thing about them. Gods will take care of you. This is what protagonists of status quo tell you. You have no right to question what has happened in the history. The fact is you can’t change the facts how and why a hero or an antihero of history died. This is History, which we cannot alter. Yet, we are trained to read it again and again. It is said all the great lessons lie embedded in history and if you do not dig them out, and honour them, they will haunt you like skeletons.

So, in such circumstances, it has been the official narrative of all times, to put the cart before the horse, and twist his movement. At least hamper his eyesight. When he can’t see clearly, how can he think clearly, and where shall he lead the cart to? So, we have come to the final truth. It is the post-truth scenario in fact. We, the courtiers of official narrative of our time, do not want the cart to go anywhere. With the cart before the horse, the road to the future is blocked. We want the horse to keep looking back. That is all.

If the present is chaotic, and if the present generation of mankind seems to be without a visible or tangible future, the ‘credit’ goes to those ‘narrative-masters’ of time, including our poets, scholars, actors and propheteers who are obsessed with tradition, and at the most they adjust the individual talent, but fail to come up with a radical fusion of past and the present into the future. The pre-truth era was marked with cosmic irresponsibility and the era of truth was never seen by this world, and, now, we have been pushed into the post-truth era, in which all structures have collapesed. It is neither surprising, nor shocking, nor in any way, out of the way. The past is meant to flow down the Ganges. And a new river needs to flow from the hair of Lord Shiva. We forgot how to renew ourselves, how to position ourselves in such a way that we lookback, and look forward too, like Janus. Tradition and Status-Quo are the hall marks of the generations that have gone by, and the generation which refuses to go. Past, in the form of tradition, is still alive. We have caught it by its tail. Until we let it pass into oblivion, we shall not have space for the new world. The new world which we talk of, which is overpowering us, is not new, it is a rehash of the old world only, which we have refused to dump. It is coming before us in its confusing ‘avatar’. That is why, in this post-truth era, we find all narratives twisted. It is good we leave the past behind, and move on the road which leads into the hazy future and remember, it is always good to travel light.

[Dr. Jernail Singh Anand, [the Seneca, Charter of Morava, Franz Kafka and Maxim Gorky awards Laureate, with an opus of 180 books, whose name adorns the Poets’ Rock in Serbia]] is a towering literary figure whose work embodies a rare fusion of creativity, intellect, and moral vision. Ethicsacademy.co.in]