Personification and memory

PERSONIFICATION refers to the process wherein human qualities are attributed to plants, animals, objects, ideas or concepts. Ancient cultures imbued natural elements such as the wind, water, sun and moon with supernatural qualities and personified them, depicting them through human forms. Zeus, in Greek mythology, is the god of the sky and rain. His Hindu counterpart is Indra. Varuna, the lord of the oceans in Hindu mythology, has responsibilities paralleling those of Neptune, the ancient Roman god of the sea.

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Saraswati personifies learning, music and the arts, while Lakshmi is the personification of wealth and prosperity. Venus is a Roman goddess, personifying love, fertility, beauty and desire. Saturn, the name of a planet, describes a malefic god who controls human destiny. The art of personification reveals how our ancestors, tried to name the world they lived in, to understand  it, overcome anxieties and make it a more familiar place for themselves. 

Particular forms have been attributed to abstractions or things and this has been represented in hymns, poetry, sculpture and painting. Religious poetry, epics and hymns personified the elements of nature while morality plays and pageants personified vices and virtues. Aesop’s fables  and  Vishnu Sarma’s Panchatantra personified animals and birds by giving them  human traits, thereby enabling humans to empathise with  both other humans and beasts.

As a literary/artistic device, it uses figurative language to enhance/heighten our understanding of abstract concepts. Shakespeare’s description of “sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care”, personifies ‘sleep’ as a conscientious caregiver, restoring ‘care-worn’ beings to good health. 

Emily Dickinson reveals that: “Because I could not stop for Death/ He kindly stopped for me.” ‘Death’ drives the poet around in his horse-carriage and is an amiable and sensitive companion during the long journey, freeing both the poet and reader from the terrors associated with the cessation of life.

The verb ‘personify’ (from French  ‘personnifier’, from noun ‘personne’, early 18th century) is the process by which an abstraction or an object is represented by a human form. Examples of personification have found their way in everyday life, outside the realm of religious and literary narratives. For instance, ‘justice’ is a recognisable human value, represented by sculptures that depict a blindfolded woman with a scale. The adage ‘Justice is blind’, emphasises that justice must always be seen as impartial and unbiased. However the adage ‘Love is blind’ focuses on the irrational, illogical and impetuous nature of love, as most humans experience it. Personifications of abstract things can be as complex as the abstractions themselves.

This brings us to the moot point about personification. Personification enables the human race to shape and connect to its deepest fears, hopes and emotions. Personifications can be benign (the sun smiled, stars twinkled) and malevolent (scorching sun, howling wind, weeping willows). These contribute to the telling of stories and the extending of narratives. Commemorating public figures by naming hospitals, airports, educational institutions and roads after them and allowing them to remain in collective memory could be identified as ‘personification tributes’. The Outer and Inner Circles of Connaught Place were renamed Indira Chowk and Rajeev Chowk,  defying geometry and logic, (chowk has four corners). Renaming   Aurangzeb Road as Abdul Kalam Road erases history and gratuitously inconveniences residents, who will need to fill forms in triplicate to validate the new address thrust upon them. Political acts of ‘tribute personification’ do not make for great narratives.