Dawn will come, but when?

The really complex and unfamiliar part of the human mind, from which symbols are produced, is still virtually unexplored…

— Carl Jung

I bent until I damn near broke/But that’s the thing about resilience/It shows up just as your soul begins to cry…

— Alfa

I bought the little bronze — the one that I write about, and around — many years ago from a small metal craftsman’s booth in the Crafts Museum in Delhi. The booth — more a display stand than a real booth — was crammed full of objects: tawdry little copies of well-known sculptures, like Krishna subduing the serpent Kaliya; the Buddha seated, meditating; diya and agarbatti stands. But stuck between them somewhere was this bronze, all of 5 inches or so in height, which caught my eye. It was deceptively plain: a man sitting on his haunches, dejected head resting against the palm of a hand, no detailing, all surfaces smoothened out to a near-abstract finish. A symbol of dejection? Of thoughtfulness? I had never seen its like anywhere else; the simplicity of the form was compelling, the abstraction seductive; the negative spaces oddly reminiscent of Henry Moore.

There was no one minding the display stand at that time, however — the craftsman-owner had just gone somewhere, I was told — even as I looked around. But the helpful gentleman from the museum who was taking me around picked the piece and placed it in my hand. To touch it, and roll my fingers over the smooth surfaces, felt wonderful. I paid the negligible amount as per the price label, and moved on. Not, however, before inquiring about the craftsman, for I wanted to know something about him and find out if he had turned out other works in a similar style, born of the same vision. But I drew a blank, and, for some odd reason, repeat inquiries later also brought me no fruit. The bronze, with all its lack of pretentiousness and all its anonymity, has been with me ever since. It has been some 20 years.

At home, the little bronze comes in for talk from time to time. We have been calling it an ‘Indian Thinker’: light-heartedly sometimes as ‘The Poor Man’s Thinker’, with reference obviously to that iconic bronze, Le Penseur (‘The Thinker’), by Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). Rodin’s work, described often as ‘one of the greatest sculptures ever made’, ‘a resounding symbol of art and of the human spirit’, is clearly of a different order and scale. Conceived originally, if arguably, as the figure of Dante — author of the monumental epic poem, The Divine Comedy, which includes the searing Inferno — (but named simply as ‘The Poet’), looking down in heroic isolation from his perch at the stunning ‘Gates of Hell’ that Rodin was commissioned to make, it showed a man, wearing no clothes, seated on an unhewn rock, ‘his back hunched forward, brows furrowed, chin resting on his relaxed hand, and mouth thrust into his knuckles’. The whole aspect of the man was ‘still and pensive’, as if he was observing the twisting figures of those suffering in the circles of Hell below. Slowly, however, Rodin isolated this figure from the Gates, and developed it into an independent sculpture on a much larger scale: a deeply moving work — with versions and editions now displayed all over the world, from Paris to New York, from Venice to Victoria, from Dresden to Buenos Aires — that has been described now simply as ‘the thinking man in preparation for action’, now as ‘a transcendental figure in a universal sense’, and then again, as a work combining ‘the characteristics of Dante, aspects of the Biblical Adam, and the mythological Prometheus’. In Rodin’s own words about sculpture, there is here ‘all that vibrates on the surface: soul, love, passion, life’.

I am not pitching our little bronze against Rodin’s great work. The scale is dramatically different; the rippling physicality that marks Rodin’s thinker is nowhere in sight; our little desi man has no rock to perch on; there is a hollow where the torso should have been; one looks in vain for the other hand. And yet, there is something moving about it. As I was looking at it the other day, it even took on another meaning. That is the thing about symbols. Mottled images began to rise in my mind and questions started swirling. Who is this man that the craftsman unknown to me had in mind when he sat fashioning it years ago? If we see him in the context strictly of our own times, his state and his stance — head despondently inclined against a restful hand, elbows placed on knees, all the weight of the body borne by the posterior pressed against the ground underneath — go perfectly with what countless humans are going through, day after day. He seemed like a migrant labourer catching his breath during his hundreds of miles long trek back towards ‘home’. Is he someone sitting, socially distanced, waiting for a meal to be doled out to him? Or a labourer waiting at a labour chowk to earn a daily wage? Is he some rehriwallah who has transgressed some un-understood law and is waiting for his confiscated vehicle to be returned to him? Is he simply thinking of his loved ones sitting and waiting in some far-off village?

Or, there is always the other possibility: that this is just a moment of exhaustion, and the man, like millions of others like him, is thinking of getting back into action. Or, yet again, is he, in his own fashion, contemplating the Future? The ‘Human Condition’?