Museums in our heads

Sehdev Kumar
Professor Emeritus in Canada. He has relocated to Auroville his new home. 

THE partition of Punjab was a defining tragic event in the lives of millions of people, many of whom are still alive on both sides of the divide. As a very young child, what I remember of that event would find no place in the Partition Museum in Amritsar, or indeed in any museum. Yet, for me, a vague but corroding memory of those events has reverberated in my own private 'museum' for well over half a century. 

After the Partition, as millions of refugees poured into the towns and cities of East Punjab, fierce quarrels and fights over meagre resources were commonplace. One location where these quarrels were most evident was over a public water tap. 

Jithhe bhande hon gai, khadkan gai

In Patiala, where we lived, women crowded in over the tap in thewee hours with their heavy metal containers — buckets etc — to collect water. And they bickered and fought like — well, like only humans can do: with abusive words, with hands and fists, with cunning and steadfastness, and in groups, small and large, and relentlessly. It was a matter of survival, and with little alternative in sight, they fought. Yet, to justify their fights, the metaphor they used most often was: "Jithhe bhande hon gai, khadkan gai (whenever there are metal utensils in one place, of course, there will be rattling)." 

As a young child growing up, I heard the same metaphor from my mother about the quarrels that went on in our or in other families over the pettiest of matters: "Of course, rattling is inevitable," she would say, "whenever there are metal utensils jammed together in one place." 

It was all explained away so neatly by an irrefutable metaphor. It has taken me all these decades to see the seductive absurdity of this metaphor and to still ask my long-gone mother: "But, Mamma, are we humans really like metal utensils in a container? Can't we imagine them somewhat differently?"

We use a misplaced metaphor, or ask a wrong question, and we are led away in obdurate directions finding difficult to return to a new rationality, sometimes for decades and centuries. 

"Nature is like a machine; universe runs like clock-work; life is dog-eat-dog; survival of the fittest". 

"All fingers on a hand," my mother would often say to explain away blatant inequalities in the society, "are not of the same size." 

For her, for us, her children, and for everyone around us, for a long time, as we wallowed in our ignorance, the debate about social inequality ended there. 

Eggs, omelette and the French Revolution

In 1789, in the name of "liberte, egalite, fraternite", the French Revolution broke out, on a scale unknown in the world history; it was a most bloody rebellion against royal absolutism, feudalism and the power and privileges of the Church. 

The upheavals of the Revolution continued for the next ten years, causing panic not only amongst the ruling classes but also amongst writers, scientists, journalists and artists. Everyone was mortified of being accused of any counter-revolutionary sentiment or activity.

"Mercy is a not a revolutionary sentiment," it was declared; during the Reign of Terror, as tens of thousands of 'enemies of the revolution', including 'the father of modern chemistry', Antoine Lavoisier, were led to the guillotine, which came to be known as the 'National Razor'. 

All revolutions — whether French or Russian or Chinese or Cuban — are woven in dreams of Utopia. And so was the French Revolution; it "came, bringing with it the promise of a brighter day, the promise of regenerated man and regenerated earth," the historians assessed. "It was hailed with joy and acclamation by the oppressed, by the ardent lovers of humanity, by the poets, whose task it is to voice the human spirit."  

Indeed, giving birth to new movement, Romanticism, the poets — Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron — all hailed the French Revolution. 

However, some dreams can sometimes turn into nightmares, and the revolutions have a way of devouring their own children; the French Revolution did this on a grand scale. The 'Enemies of the Revolution' were seen hiding everywhere; there was no other way to deal with them but to eliminate them. Every momentous act of vengeance, however, seeks a disarming rationale which is rarely grounded in thought or reason but, instead, in a highly provocative and a misplaced metaphor. What drove the Reign of Terror was the passionate slogan of the radical Jacobian leader, Maximilien Robespierre: "On ne saurait faire une omelette sans casser des oeufs: One cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs."

What the metaphor suggests is the inevitability of breaking eggs — breaking heads — for making an omelette. 

In the frenzy of the Revolution, did anyone ever question Robespierre, I wonder, for comparing the transformation of a society with making an omelette? 

People are not eggs and a society is not an omelette. Then why this strangely seductive but highly misplaced metaphor?

Power of metaphors

Of course, artists are forever inventing new metaphors about life and about its varied and rich hues and shades: "Life is a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing." "Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key." "Our lives are like a candle in the wind"; "Life is like an onion: You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep"; "Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament"; "Life is like a Box of Chocolates... You Never Know What You're Gonna Get!"

Not social theories or mathematical equations but metaphors and stories may be essential for us to create a meaning for life; these are the fossils that inhabit our private museums.

"It may be that the universal history is a history of a handful of metaphors," suggests the great Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). 

German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) famously wrote in ‘Philosophical Investigations’ that one of his goals in philosophy was "to show the fly the way out of the flybottle."  

One may ask; "Who is the fly? Where is the flybottle?" 

"I think it is Wittgenstein himself," declared philosopher of science, Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994), "who is in the bottle and never finds his way out of it; and I certainly don't think he has shown anybody else the way out."

These wordy duels between the philosophers aside, one cannot but wonder how a metaphor can give wings or claws to our imagination, and trap us like a fly in a flybottle, not knowing, sometimes for decades and centuries, how to get out of it.