The Open Skies of History

SEVENTY-SEVEN years after Freedom at Midnight, the “open skies of history” beckon to us. What do they point to? Not Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history.”

But Kala Bhairava.

Benjamin’s famous essay, ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’ in the original German, first translated into English and published in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt (1969), is where we come across the angel of history.

But, we might ask, what about Kala?

The usual word for history in our languages is Itihasa.

Kala, on the other hand, encompasses all aspects of time—ordinary time, felt time, chronological time, mega time, cosmic time, meta time even.

How to free ourselves from historical time, this direst and dirtiest of colonialist impositions? We who were masters of time—worshippers of Mahakala and thus akalis—became its subjects.

Unlike asking “What is Kala?” we need not go through the trouble of asking, “What is time?” because we know instinctively that time is a human construct.

What is clearly discernable in the natural world is not time, but cycles of day and night, the change of seasons, lunar cycles, and the apparent movement of the planets and stars.

The ancients, not only in India, but elsewhere, knew about the rotation and revolution of the Earth, possibly about the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. Also, something about its obliquity, the angle and tilt of the Earth’s axis with respect to its orbital plane. As well as where the direction of its axis of rotation is pointed. That is its precession.

Many temples and monuments from thousands of years ago prove this.

Even ‘primitive’ humans were aware of how their own bodily patterns were connected with larger natural, planetary, and cosmic rhythms.

The very rhythm word is akin to Rta, the ancient word for the order of things.

But of time, we had no strict measure. Nor did we have a universal chronology.

In that sense, the chronometer, a mechanical device whose precision became a continental obsession, is itself the supreme symbol of modernity and the ensuing tyranny of time.

No surprise that the Gregorian Calendar, BC (Before Christ)/Anno Domini (AD), and, more definitively, Greenwich Mean Time (1884), were relatively recent inventions, all connected with colonial modernity and historiography.

Time cannot be the ‘same’ even at two different points along the same latitude. It is ‘frozen’ into zones for convenience and when you cross an imaginary line, even the date changes.

Yet, time became the measure of all things, universally applied across homes, schools and colleges, factories and parliaments.

If so, what is history but the reclamation of the past from the ravages of time?

We are reminded of these haunting lines from Walter Benjamin’s famous 1940 essay, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’: “Where we see the appearance of a chain of events,” the Angel of History sees “one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet.”

Ironically, even Mahatma Gandhi, the great anti-modernist, was a respecter, if not servitor, of time. The exact time of his death on January 30, 1948, is revealed by the hands of his Swiss-made Zenith alarm pocket watch. The watch fell out of his hands when he was shot, crashing on the ground.

The watch stopped.

His time on earth came to an end at 5.15 PM.

At another momentous event, during the French Revolution, the rebels shot all at once at the clock towers.

Time itself came to a standstill, as Walter Benjamin reminds us:

“Qui le croirait! on dit, / qu’irrités contre l’heure / De nouveaux Josués / au pied de chaque tour, / Tiraient sur les cadrans /pour arrêter le jour.” Or, “Who would’ve thought! As though / Angered by time’s way / The new Joshuas / Beneath each tower, they say / Fired at the dials / To stop the day.”

‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’ was the last major essay Benjamin wrote. He was fleeing from the French Vichy regime under German occupation. Jewish refugees were being hunted and handed over to the Gestapo.

Speaking of his own people, the Jews, in ‘Addendum B’, Benjamin observes: “It is well-known that the Jews were forbidden to look into the future. The Torah and the prayers instructed them, by contrast, in remembrance. This disenchanted those who fell prey to the future, who sought advice from the soothsayers. For that reason the future did not, however, turn into a homogenous and empty time for the Jews. For in it every second was the narrow gate, through which the Messiah could enter.”

Those Jews who still believed they were the chosen people, who had not turned their back to the very progenitor of their clan, Abraham, and his covenant with God, who still could see in that moment which was Jetztzeit, here and now, rather than in the past—only such Jews could keep open the narrow gate through which the Messiah could enter in the future.

Benjamin escaped from France, crossing the Pyrenees into Spain, ruled by the rightwing dictator, General Francisco Franco. Benjamin allegedly killed himself that very evening in a hotel room in Portbou. Supposedly, because he had been betrayed and was about to be captured.

But next morning, his Jewish fellow fugitives were allowed to escape, while he was found dead from an overdose of morphine. The doctor said he died of natural causes.

Something does not quite add up. Because he had just escaped certain death in a concentration camp from Jew-hunting Nazis wouldn’t he, like his companions, have tried to flee too?

That is why the new theory that Stalinist agents killed him seems more plausible.

Why? Because he had exposed the hypocrisy and hollowness of the Marxist doctrine so thoroughly that “nothing remains of historical materialism except the term itself.”

The immediate trigger was the shock Benjamin received by the Stalin-Hitler pact of August 23, 1939.

We may or may not entirely buy this revisionist interpretation of Benjamin’s career and his famous ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. For the text is quite elliptical as it is “fragmentary and tentative” (Beiner).

Only 20 pages long, Benjamin’s ‘Theses’ are full of pithy and provocative statements, the “dense ruminations” that he became so famous for.

At its heart is a devastating critique, as I see it, both of the pseudo-scientific claims of dialectical materialism as well as progressivist historicism. Long before the collapse of the Soviet Union or China’s capitalist turn under Deng Xiaoping.

Benjamin begins with an analogy. There is a chess game in which a mechanical puppet, dressed like a Turk, always wins.

But actually, it is not a mechanical contraption or doll, but a dwarf chess master hiding inside the box who is pulling the strings.

Benjamin says, “The puppet called ‘historical materialism’ is always supposed to win.” But only “so long as it employs the services of theology, which as everyone knows is small and ugly and must be kept out of sight.”

Benjamin, the disillusioned Marxist, is fleeing from the long arm of Jew-hating Nazi Germany.

What does he offer as solace?

Tradition, the past, history is not readymade nor rigid: “In every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew from the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it.”

Then, even more spectacularly, “For the Messiah arrives not merely as the Redeemer; he also arrives as the vanquisher of the Anti-Christ.”

The millennial man is not only the redeemer, but he is also the vanquisher of evil.

‘Thesis XVIII’ is so true of India during its darkest days of colonialism out of which both Mahatma Gandhi and Veer Savarkar tried to redeem us: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘emergency situation’ in which we live is the rule.”

But which of them, if at all, vanquished the “Anti- Christ?” Who, indeed, was that latter symbol of evil? British imperialism, along with its racism, economic exploitation, and structural violence?

Individual representatives of which Savarkar tried to eliminate through political assassinations? Including— perhaps unwittingly or deliberately—Gandhi himself? Though exonerated, the needle of suspicion, as Justice Kundanlal Kapur observed, still pointing at Savarkar?

Or was it the demonic history of Islamic invasions, conquests, and rulers from the past?

Or Gandhi’s self-sacrifice to save India from endless Partition, with the “Anti-Christ” being the monster of violence within each of us?

British imperialismcolonial IndiaIndian historyMahatma GandhiVinayak Damodar SavarkarWalter Benjamin