The Limits of Allegory

I SOMETIMES ASK MY STUDENTS ABOUT THE first thought they have after waking up. Not one of them has ever said that they begin the day thinking of themselves as Indian. I congratulate them—this is what being an Indian should feel like, the freedom from the burden of awareness of nationality. That kind of awareness I associate with disease—the discomfort of becoming aware of one’s throat and chest and nose when attacked by a cold, of the thing inside one’s chest when heartbroken, or of one’s arm when it dangles from a sling. To be Indian is to feel the opposite, to feel unencumbered by this iden­tity, as one is—or should be—of one’s surname or parentage. How freeing it is, we tell each other, to not have to be the bearer of the burden of superlatives—say, as in, ‘the greatest nation on earth’.

And then I think of the bearer of a name such as Swadhin. The Indian languages allow us that freedom—to become anything through our names; these are often the first poems we utter (so what if they are shorter than the haiku?), unaware of the freedom that they give us to inaugurate our relationships with the world. What happens when a boy with the name Swadhin is called by his name?

‘Swadhin.’
‘Yes.’

Every time he responds to his name, he’s adding a chorus of affirmation to the condition of being free. I might be saying this casually, but such a name can exist because it has been enabled by schools of thought in the Indian subcontinent. The root word for ‘swadhin’ would be ‘adhina’, meaning ‘dependent’. Prefixes attach themselves to it with ease— ‘swa’ and ‘para’, swadhin, independent, paradhin, unfree. I’ve not heard of anyone who has names like that—Adhina or Paradhin. The languages take responsibility for our freedom, they want us to be assured of it. That is what I mean when I say that I feel that freedom is—or should be—the natural condition of being Indian, of becoming an Indian. It was to find—or taste and savour, if we must use the words—this kind of freedom that so many travelled to this landmass. Take another word for ‘independence’—‘swatantra’, deriving from ‘swa’, self, and ‘tan­tra’, system or theory. The literal meaning of the word implies a kind of eudaimonic energy, a pursuit of happiness specific to the individual, made possible by the freedom one can give to one­self. It would have, of course, been an intuitive understanding of this experience of freedom, the kind of freedom that is related to joy, to ananda, that would have impressed upon the template of ‘swarajya’, self-rule or self-government.

These words—and others in the many languages through which freedom asserts and questions itself—carry the instinct of a geography that is amorphous, without definable boundaries. That geography is not necessarily land but consciousness. The ‘varsha’ in Bharatvarsha is not just ‘land’ but ‘realm’, a spiritual unit. The fluidity that a concept such as ‘realm’ allows, is—I’ve come to believe—a condition of being Indian. It is this that is also at the heart of the Indian national anthem—we see places being marked, as they are on a map, Punjab, Sindhu, Gujarat, Maratha, Dravid, Utkal, Banga; soon they are followed by the names of water bodies, where marking definite lines is impossible, and be­fore that by the names of mountain ranges: Yamuna and Ganga, Vindhya and Himachal. The names of the mountains and rivers, both of which resist the sternness of fixed demarcations, abet this sense of freedom. There’s also something else—take the national anthem itself. There are some who say that ‘Jana Gana Mana’ is sung in the raga Alhaiya Bilaval; there are others who believe that it is in raga Gaud Sarang. It is neither of these, it has some of their charac­teristics. That it allows this freedom, to the ear and to the song, to be either of these, similar or different, is, for me, the kind of freedom that I and others, without aware­ness, have taken as a given. It has been this comfort that keeps us Indian.

Since we’re on the subject of music, take the khayal. Imagine a genre that derives its name from the flexibility of the imagination, for that is what ‘khayal’, deriving from Arabic and Persian, means: ‘imagination’. Not just the name, it’s in its DNA— the khayal can be anything. It is this freedom that Amit Chaudhuri notes in Finding the Raga—its indifference to the meaning of the composition’s words: “Words are for melodic improvisation, to explore the upward and downward journey (arohan and avarohan) through the raga’s notes. Any word can serve this purpose; a syllable will do. Meaning is marginalised. (I’ve heard that Ustad Amir Khan, when asked what words he hummed to, replied: ‘My telephone number, sometimes.’) …. a syllable is enough, and the names of gods get no more respect than other words. If it’s the first syllable of ‘Hari’ that’s to land on the sama, then the singer may sing ‘Ha’ with power and mumble the ‘ri’.’’ There are other kinds of freedom: “A singer might interrupt a performance because the tanpura is fractionally off-pitch. Classical musicians depend on the tanpura’s tonic and on the string playing the interval to navigate the raga. So the strings need to be true. A tabla player too might bring proceedings to a halt to knock diligently on the right-hand tabla (tuned to the sa) because its pitch has strayed slightly. In no other kind of music, not Indian, Western, pop, jazz, or even Carnatic, are we witness to such a break.’’ Or “a singer might clear their throat from time to time, to get rid of phlegm, or a cough. The khayal allows for fresh beginnings and drafts. … There’s a beauty to this brief struggle. … The concert is an attempt at immersion; impediments are dealt with as they occur.’’

Like the raga, which allows almost everything to find a home in it, no matter how temporary, so with different schools of religious thought that, while originating from the teachings of those worshipped as gods, are as accommodative of those who reject the idea of their worship. That is why, for instance, Ajivika philosophy, a school of atheism, is cited liberally in Buddhist texts. The freedom to disagree, to argue, to recognise, this as an utterly human function and condi­tion, is the driving force of most philosophical schools that are grouped as ‘Indian’. The Bhagavad Gita, that a political party suggested should be declared as India’s national book, is—as even those who haven’t read it but feel they know it from having been born here—an utterly argumentative text. Krishna and Arjun argue, with the freedom that friendships allow—they are cousins, besides being close friends. Friendship, which, to my mind, is the most freeing among all social relationships, one whose shape is formed by differences, is what comes to my mind when I think of Krishna—his is a life of argumen­tative relationships, of teasing and even minor fights in Vrindavan, then a host of friendships in adulthood, unbound by the expectations of gender. There’s something else that is freeing about the figure of Krishna—that he is a child, Bal Gopal, a god allowed the free­dom to be irresponsible, that his actions are not chained by a puri­tanical moral waiting at the exit door of every experience. Krishna is—like India—both a protec­tor, when on the battlefield, and in need of protection when he’s a child, eating and sleeping with tiny pillows and bolsters by his side, pampered with sweets and other delicacies by his devotees in their houses. This freedom, to be something at one moment and something else at another, is also at the core of the well-circulated analogy of the two birds in the Mundaka Upanishad, jivatman and paramatma, participant and observer. To be Indian, I’ve always known, even before I had the language to articulate it to myself, is to have the choice to be either or both, depending on one’s own condition and India’s. I see the impress of this freedom in Indian philosophy, in its name, besides its various schools—that ‘darshan’, the word for philosophy in many Indian languages, includes both these urges, of darshan, looking actively, and also observing.

That freedom to be anything, depending on desire and dis­tance, also marks the clothes that have been worn here—the sa­ree, the dhoti and lungi, the dupatta, their drapes coming from the shape of the wind and water in the various regions of their origin. That these unstitched pieces of clothing will take the shape of our bodies, that they are not a ‘fixed size’, like freedom isn’t, like India’s never been. And so with cooking methods, recipes with­out precise measurements, leaving everything to ‘andaz’, a word that means both ‘guess’, a rough estimate, but also ‘style’. A word like ‘rasa’, which derives from a school of Indian aesthetics, can be the root for various kinds of food, the extremes of sweet and sour—rasagulla and rasam. How can it not, when the the­ory from which it derives its name, indulges that free­dom, that every member of the audience can make of a play what their experience of the rasas leads them to, that the literary does not have to pay obeisance to the expectation of, say, the morality play?

When I think of Indian democracy, I therefore do not necessarily think of a system of thought and practice im­ported from Europe. It is to the rasa theory that my mind goes, which is democratic in a way no other kind of understanding of human experience is. Without the majoritarian bias of democracy-based politics, it gives every partaker of an aesthetic experience the right to delight or diss or diss and delight. To be Indian is to have a natural right to that freedom, a freedom from the secondhandness of allegory.

It must be from the comforting bagginess of this freedom that the outsider’s joke about India has remained in circula­tion—that when an Indian shakes their head, one can’t be sure whether it’s an affirmative or negative. If that is not a semiotic for freedom, what is?

Alhaiya Bilavalculturefreedom issue 2025Jana Gana Mananational anthemraga Gaud Sarang