The classical forms of creativity and philosophy of arts in India do not have any recognized place for three states of consciousness: despair, banality, and absurdity. Indian classicism, however, does have a place for sorrow, cynicism, pessimism, and even alienation. It has also a place for, as anyone who has read Bhasa will know, the trivial, the lowbrow, and the comic.
But, till now it has shown no sign of formally registering a state of despair, an emotion that afflicts, for instance, some works of Van Gogh or Franz Kafka, involving a sense of the futility of it all, melancholia or total hopelessness. Nor has it created a place for the cultivated pop that celebrates the banal the way Andy Warhol does or for the unashamedly surreal. Of the three states, this book is concerned with the first, as it affects aesthetic philosophy and awareness.
The absence of a proper philosophical and aesthetic status for despair is not unique to Indian traditions. Despair is alien to most traditional cultures, including premodern Europe. True, some have mentioned the personification of despair in Judas Iscariot in Late Antiquity Europe. His betrayal of Christ and subsequent suicide, it has been argued, have left their mark on European consciousness.
Surely, one sees the shadow of that Biblical instance of desperation and self-destruction in modern times, on the likes of Friedrich Nietzsche, when he takes on the voice of a madman to proclaim that God is dead and that we are the ones who have killed him. However, it is doubtful if that premodern model of despair has any close philosophical links with the full-blown recognition of ontological despair in our times that Nietzsche himself comes close to admitting.
One is tempted to affirm that, in the premodern West, despair as a philosophy of art or of literature was not known. The most one can say is that some works of art and some characters in literature, Sophocles’s Oedipus and Shakespeare’s King Lear, for instance, can be read as pointers to, rather than instances of an ontology of despair. Perhaps, despair traditionally is not so much an unknown state of mind as a rare analytic category. It is an existential state that has acquired a serious moral, philosophical, and aesthetic status only in modern times.
It can be argued that in South Asian traditions one guesses that even when confronted with total existential hopelessness, in a world imbued with sacredness and alive with transcendental possibilities, existential hopelessness does not easily translate into the hopelessness of the soul. In these ancient civilizations despair remains a psycho-social response rather than a philosophical position. I use the term ‘transcendental’ broadly here, not necessarily in the sense in which it has been used at places in this book.
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In Mahabharata, after Krishna reveals to Karna the secret of his birth, Karna has every reason to give in to despair, but he does not. Both life and death continue to make sense to him, as does the difference between them. Even in contemporary Europe the open-ended, fuzzy transcendentalism in the world-view of Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger supplies, in the form of a unified or integrated philosophy or meaningful frame of life, a defense against an utter hopelessness that infects the creative efforts of many like Samuel Beckett.
Even when his world-view comes close to the idea of despair, Albert Camus remains somewhere in touch with hope, unlike Van Gogh. Indeed, Camus imposes a framework on an existential experience that recognizes the first or primordial question: why should I not commit suicide? He answers it by imposing a meaning on his world by a sheer act of will.
On the whole, however, a philosophy of despair has more immediate relevance and appeal in secularized and urban societies where the individual has been atomized and cut off from most community ties and where impersonal, contractual relationships have come to dominate social life. For, everything said, for despair to be something more than an artistic posture, the gods have to die.
Our term for despair, nastika nairasya, makes that clear. Even existential despair is primarily the disease of a society that offers its inhabitants not merely the option of a nihilistic world-view, but also fragments a way of life that contributes to or underwrites the nihilism, and the tacit, if sectional, codes of conduct that legitimize it. However, it is doubtful if even the term nastika nairasya captures for the older South Asian philosophies of art the range of meanings associated with the concept of despair. This book itself recognizes that atheism enjoys a certain legitimacy in the Indian spiritual domain that Nietzsche could not have dreamt of.
In Buddhism, Jainism, and in philosophical schools represented by the likes of Charvaka, for instance, atheism, godlessness, or the denial of the authority of the Vedas does not convey the feeling of total abandonment and hopelessness, tinged with a touch of rebelliousness, that it does in European Judeo-Christian traditions. South Asian atheism certainly does not convey any impassioned acknowledgement of utter loneliness in a godless universe that forces one to define one’s own fate, morality, and meaning of life. However, things have been changing in South Asia during the last hundred and fifty years.
The reasonably stable psycho-ecological balance, which large sections of the population have experienced in the region for centuries is under severe stress. First of all, the introduction of modern political economy under an apathetic colonial regime and the gradual spread of values and systems of knowledge, inadequately sensitive to the cultural, environmental and community-based concerns of the region, have been traumatic. The breakdown of embedded theories of life that once mediated between the sacred and the profane and, above all, the introduction of a ruthless theory of progress and its cannibalistic progeny developmentalism, have released cultural forces that threaten to destroy that balance.
Not so much by subverting a pan-Indian way of life, as by subverting and desacralizing the diverse integrated concepts of life. Many of the communities now facing despair are exactly the ones that have lived with world-views that are more integrated and do not allow the controlled splits with which the Brahminic world-view is more at ease. What was once a source of strength has thus become a source of vulnerability. Between them, the breakdown and uncritical progressivism have turned despair into a recognizable state of mind in the landscape of Indian creativity.
Despair is not incomprehensible in Indian arts and letters anymore; it hounds many painters, writers, and thinkers.
This excerpt from Harsha V Dehejia’s ‘’ has been published with permission from Aleph Book Company.