Learning the Alphabet.

Two things that happened in the last week prompted this post.

One, a link to a blog that defiantly raises an "angry" fist  to the issues of the world from the all too sure perspective of literature and theory. Second, a seminar where a highly intelligent presentation collapsed into theoretical noise.

I remember my teacher at College, the nutty and cranky Dr Roy, sagely telling us what Adorno said to his students during a confrontation- theory is praxis. That was on one of those Royesque hot Delhi afternoon tutorial sessions spent in his dusty office up on the roof of St. Stephens. I still remember that moment. The creaky fan swirled hot air and dispersed Dr Roy's words into fragments of charged particles that settled around my soul, and opened up and justified to me, my world.

I loved, still love, the abstract words, weighed down by intended and interpreted meaning, that colonize the pages of texts tagged philosophy and theory. I dismissed my love for the more simple and direct. Charles Dickens, Lev Tolstoy, Steinbeck. But what nagged me, surrounded as I was, with friends who would sit  on candle light vigils, participate in marches, take trips to riot ridden Ahmedabad, raise their voices for the cause of those displaced by the Narmada project, my  boredom and disinterest in participating in a social cause. I felt guilty, terribly useless as a thinking individual, but I found the 'committed to a cause' bandwagon slightly neurotic with the penchant for speaking in the same and old language of 'activism'. 

Theory is praxis. It delighted me, it gave me conviction; it set my sense of wrong to right. I eased into myself. It was okay. I could read, think, write and yet feel I am somehow contributing. The blog I stumbled upon recently would have warmed the cockles of  my heart some years ago. It is full of subjectivities and issues of identities and representations and ideologies. The humanities departments in India, particularly the English Departments, constantly stumble into the fallacy of applying theory. They take historical, theoretical, philosophical responses to political , economic and social upheavals, and despite their own cautionary warning against universalization, promptly turn their meanings into categories, analysis into fixed concepts and critical language into jargon.

They reproduce without basis the historical consciousness of another age and era without scrutinizing the complexity and new realities of the present. Look at the way, for instance, Said's analysis of the Orientalist discourse is irresponsibly reproduced, cited, 'applied' to whatever might seem like a relationship of domination and colonization. Derrida is not understood, yet his trace, erasure and differance ceaselessly multiply across dissertations in India. Marx is sightlessly grasped and quoted to establish a reputation of sorts. It is 'fashionable' to use theory. The danger is when it is used as fixed unchanging thought.

In the pages and conversations of a persuasive old man, I found truth. Some years ago, I would have called truth debatable. Now I know that I can simply and confidently say truth according to me. It does not deny anyone else's version. It  identifies my authorship.

What did I find? I found that if I do not give my reader, my listener, the key to enter my world, if they cannot comprehend or fail to identify with what I am saying, theory can not ever be praxis. It is not for your audience to step up. It is up to you to step down. When I stepped down, I  realized I had to unlearn everything I thought I had learnt. When I stepped down, my learning was of no use. But I have started re-learning the alphabet.

Thomas

I remember, the day my brother died, the phrase that slipped away from the labyrinths of my mind.

Thomas liked reading and quoting from the Ecclesiates in The Bible. I think it represented for him the challenges of offering a singular definition to the Biblical narrative. I can still see him, a small child of seven, velvet headed, big eyed, asking the Valya Thirumeni (the Bishop of the Marthoma Church) academic, theoretical questions about the Bible. That day, it seemed as if God spoke through the much impressed wise old man, "Come, I shall make you a priest". It was not said in laughter or in sarcasm. My mother's ambitious heart, proud of her beautiful intelligent child, chilled. She could not imagine giving up her son to priesthood.

Thomas inherited my father's alert, analytical, evaluative intelligence. To keep up with his elder sister, Thoma voraciously read whatever I read. My father did not treat us as children as far as reading was concerned. He wanted me to read Nehru's Discovery of India at the age of ten and insisted I read Naipaul's bitter scathing satire on India in his India: A Wounded Civilization at the age of fourteen. Thomas was undettered by age or size. Thomas absorbed rapidly, quickly, and soon outpaced me in knowing this world, different realities, life.

Thomas never had it easy. Perhaps because he was singularly capable, bright, and good looking he invited envy and suffered the burden of expectations. 

Once, all primed to participate in an inter-school debate competition of much repute, Thomas went on stage to deliver his best. It started well. But something, as usual, went wrong. The clock missed a stroke, the cars stopped honking, traffic stopped mid-way. Thomas froze. He missed a beat. The moment was gone. The rigour of his speech faltered. Thomas knew there was not a chance in a lifetime that he would win. 

This happens to all of us. I remember I was once invited to judge an inter-school debate at a prominent school in Delhi. Many a  child sweated it out. Some spoke gloriously, completely at ease in the limelight. Some gulped for air, paused, gulped some more and gave up. This has happened to me. I remember I abandoned the speech half way and ran till I couldn't feel my legs.

Thomas blinked. He picked up where he had left off and finished to a resounding round of applause. He didn't win. But he won every debate or elocution contest he participated in after that. He refused to let the demons of failure taunt and worry him.

What worried us when he left for engineering college in Kerala was his acute ignorance of Malayalam and the Malayali mode and manner. We worried about how he would adapt to a milieu he was not too fond of. Thomas was very apprehensive himself. He cared not a whit for engineering. His heart was in history, politics, geography, literature, philosophy. But he climbed the train fuelled by middle-class ambitions to Kerala and went up the hill to study the mysteries of engineering science. If life gives you lemons, make lemonade out of it. I speak not as a proud sister but as an envious sibling. Thomas was very popular in college. He made many a friend in that strange world called Kerala. He used his charm, his wit, his ideas to organize his College's first ever tech fest. We, anti-socials to the core, wondered if he was our own.

I remember, the day my brother died, the phrase that slipped away from the labyrinths of my mind.

What a waste I said, as if I was speaking about a stranger. What a waste. The phrase kept slipping away from me in the midst of my screaming in busy busy Connought Place suddenly gone silent, suddenly abandoned.

"Everything is meaningless," says the Teacher, "completely meaningless!" Ecclesiastes 1:2.