Illuminated by the aura of nostalgia

Not often does one get to be part of a big family get-together, where almost every NRI cousin and the last surviving uncle make it a point to attend. And thus, as we all gathered at the porch of our ancestral home, chatting away late into the night, the stories began to tumble out. As always, first came the funnies — the anecdotes you know too well but that get more hilarious with each retelling. Then it was time for the remembrances of the dear departed. And finally, as a sombre mood set in, came the general lament over the good old days of joint families.

At such gatherings, liquor becomes the leveller, age becomes a number and time becomes a healer of some long-festering fractured ties. Such reunions, be they with family or friends, don’t just take you back to a beautiful time in the past. They also teach you a little more about yourself: they help nudge out some forgotten memory or fire up some flickering ones.

Nostalgia, these days, is never in short supply. Social media is a big enabler, too, ensuring a steady stream of nostalgia nuggets. Every day, there is someone on your feed posting an old song, a throwback photograph or an old city landmark. There are those umpteen forwards of old ad clips, sporting highlights or a movie reel. It also explains why people still turn to reboots of old sitcoms or shows or get triggered by smells, sounds and taste that remind them of home. Or why they give new life to old clothes, furniture or any possession they can’t discard. Nostalgia is thus repurposed and kept alive.

Wong Kar-wai, the master auteur of highly stylised movies like ‘In the Mood for Love’ or ‘Chungking Express’, did that too. He often pulled back a pre-1990 Hong Kong from slipping into memory. And in an interview, he explained why: “I always wanted to put some place in my films, a corridor, a restaurant or a street, because I knew it would be gone soon. Things change so fast here.” He added that what he pictures in his films is something from collective impressions, “from our memories, a certain wonderful moment of our city”.

So is nostalgia the longing for a place or a time that is past? Is it a rosy retrospection or the reassurance of a benign familiarity? Milan Kundera worded it best in ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’: “In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”

It’s therefore a little hard to believe that a few hundred years ago, the term was associated with disease. In 1688, a medical student named Johannes Hofer noticed that young Swiss mercenaries sent to war in foreign lands were afflicted by a fervent desire to return home, and the inability to do so drove them to a demonic madness that sometimes took their lives.

Over the years, nostalgia has acquired a bittersweet meaning. For writers, especially from the diaspora or those tackling the traumas of Partition, nostalgia unlocks a multitude of meanings and lends itself to various experiences, not all of which are pleasant.

Partition novels especially deal with the fuzzy, fragmentary memories of a homeland, often overshadowed by the trauma of dislocation and dispossession. In his novel ‘Basti’, Intizar Hussain collectivises this nostalgia of a homeland when he writes of the refugees: “They had left their cities but carried their cities with them as a trust, on their shoulders.”

VS Naipaul, never the one to embrace nostalgia, recalled how as immigrants, they brought a “kind of India with us, which we could, as it were, unroll like a carpet on the flat land”. For Jhumpa Lahiri, the pervasive nostalgia of her mother clouded her childhood and she perceived it as a rival. In an interview, Lahiri said, “It was a shadow over my life because I couldn’t participate in it; that world had nothing to do with me.”

Salman Rushdie, who considers the “Bombay of a certain time and space” as his home, wrote about this predicament of diaspora writers in ‘Imaginary Homelands’: “It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge — which gives rise to profound uncertainties — that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, India of the mind.”