Kashmir: Embracing the Tragic Point of View

Admittedly difficult questions but the answers are not difficult to comprehend in principle.

How come good is seemingly defeated, justice undone, and the strong have the day; and the poor common people suffer like dogs? Or there is a meaning in all this and one can see some ground to avoid despair? If the oppressed fail in political terms, how do they find will to go on, to suffer with dignity (“Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”) and not lose heart? These are admittedly difficult questions but the answers are not difficult to comprehend in principle. Marxist and other fundamentally secular answers aren’t convincing beyond a point where we need to marshal spiritual resources to keep fighting. In fact we seem to know the answers and we can rest assured that “all is well.” And Ghazzali wasn’t far from the mark when he said this is the best possible world and none of the ills it has in store for us are gratuitous. One possible answer we all can appreciate and feel the force of, involves understanding tragedy’s philosophy. After watching tragedy spectators feel a strange kind of pleasure, a relief, some sacred tears and a sort of purgation or ripening or transformation. This tragic pleasure is ennobling. The tragic hero wins our hearts and we somehow identify with him/her and in the process we are lifted up and though our bodies may bleed but souls, through baptism in fire, get clothed in otherworldly glory. Since the world is a play and we have reasons to think that on this side of grave it is mostly tragic play, it is fitting to summon great tragedians and such modern philosophers of tragedy as Nietzsche and Critchley for an explanation or “consolation” for what we are seeing in Kashmir (and elsewhere in Libya, in Syria, in Palestine). Before we do that, we may note how tragic plays have been enacted throughout history and sacred history.
      God “sacrificed” in creating the world and man and sees the drama unfolding as people mostly fail to recognize or betray the plan of creation and it is Satan who is mostly pulling the strings. The world history is God’s act of “sacrifice” and “redemption” and all this involves tragic action – prophets, their companions, saints, martyrs, poets, philosophers, some communities and nations have been hurled into the centre stage of this tragic play. God asked Adam to enjoy in paradise and avoid a particular tree and directed Iblis to prostrate before him. Both disobeyed in their own way and we landed up in a world that, since Cain, as Shabir Akhter would phrase it, is “mostly bad news” or a species of tragedy. The Quran is full of complaints of man’s moral failure. Noah’s divine mission hardly worked and ended in flooding and hell for so many people. Many a time, as the Quran testifies, prophets have been laughed away and many communities judged severely. Hussains have been murdered. Yazids have been crowned. Most people fail to live lives as ordained in scriptures and land in hell, at least, for some period. Jews saw Jesus off the scene. Even Jesus’s own companion betrayed him. The history of classical Islam is marred by fitna, death of three Caliphs, civil wars between the Companions who are the nation of heroes whole humanity must be proud of. In history weaker sections, slaves, have-nots have been deprived of beauties and joys that life had to offer. Kings have made castles of human skulls and empires with the mortar of blood and tears.
      One of the important voices on philosophy of tragedy, Simon Critchley, notes that one of the meanings of tragedy lies in “its savage and troubling beauty, its conflict with and superiority to philosophy, and its massive and unacknowledged relevance to the contemporary psychical and political situation.” For Nietzsche tragedy is to be embraced as  we see the lines between myself and the Other disappear in it and we get communal fusion or universalization of consciousness that itself is a great value and makes drama fifth veda for great Kashmiri critics and aestheticians. In this world where tall walls divide all of us and we are usually reduced to islands of consciousness this isn’t an ordinary achievement. We really live only when we don’t live as egos but as friends or lovers or as community. Extreme expression of life lived for the other, for truth, is that of a martyr. Martyrdom isn’t courting death for an ideology, for imposing a belief but for defending freedom including freedom of religious minorities to be truly themselves in relation to the Transcendent. Communities that have been almost buried or torn by internal contradictions, divided loyalties and taunted for all kinds of moral failures by its own people and foreigners have moments of coming into their own authentic being and discover that they have indeed superhuman power to suffer. And tragedy is all about suffering, inescapability of suffering and how it does ennoble some (of course it degrades more ordinary people and communities).
      Let us not claim goodness or assume that all good is on one’s side (“Only the Father in Heaven is good” said Jesus when someone ascribed goodness to him) one’s is a moral position that ends up in holier-than-thou attitude. This world isn’t, as ordinarily experienced by us mortals, neatly divided into the forces of good and evil. And it is hard to choose our loyalties or heroes sometimes. Even one doesn’t know what to do. It is of this morally ambiguous world that tragedy makes us aware and we don’t know how to resolve or judge well, my conscience says ‘Launcelot, budge not.’ ‘Budge,’ says the fiend. ‘Budge not,’ says my conscience. ‘Conscience,’ say I, ‘you counsel well;’ ‘ Fiend,’ say I, ‘you counsel well:’ (The Merchant of Venice)
      In a world (we are in, or, Kashmir is caught in) where “Justice is divided. It is not that the hero is right and villain all wrong. It is divided and that explains power and enigma of tragedy” we need to be conscious of the play of ambiguities (living with doubts, with “holy confusion,” encompassing polar opposites). For instance, in the play by Euripides, The Trojan Women, in which “the women are gathered together, the city has been burned, the men have been put to death and the women are about to be sold into slavery,” Critchley takes cognizance of the argument of Cassandra who can see the future although no one believes her “in our defeat and humiliation is our glory finally because people will realise what bastards the Greeks are and that by raping the city and then raping us and committing violence and murder they will be undone.” We find that although reason can produce strong arguments “but in the end it bumps up against the facts of history or the reality of violence, which it cannot overcome.” The founding delusion of philosophy – of cool analysts – is that reason can ultimately find an underlying pattern in reality or history and can, through the force of the better argument, transform things. Tragedy does not believe in such a view. Tragedy is more pessimistic.” Since providence is something that can’t be scanned or fully comprehended by reason and we see tragedy all around that outrages reason, we can choose either despair or move to a higher plane provided by faith and art of great tragedians that though bumps against conventional rationality does a wonderful salvific work. We don’t find those convinced of their mission or destiny to renounce their commitment to the same even if the sky falls on them. All epic battles, all great dramas of history tell us, that one can’t foresee turn of events (it is foolish to be prophetic about history,  as Lewis noted) but one can choose to conduct oneself with nobility and dignity even if it requires descent into purgatory. Heroes can’t be petty or mean but they can err or misjudge or be rash or too ambitious. Kashmir has such heroes or consciousness  of heroism is developing.
      People often ask when will Azadi come or how long this suffering, this waste of lives, these tears and sighs? But the tragedian, like other great poets and prophets, wouldn’t be much interested in this question. His question is how is soul helped or strengthened in the process of suffering. From all appearances it is clear that the soul – or heart – of Kashmir has been strengthened even though the mind can’t ward off doubts. Kashmiris are achieving certain ripeness. With India unrelenting – divided and weaker Pakistan, profit oriented rather than Prophet centric business community of world as represented by different nation states, higher shares of blood and tears Inc. in the heartless sensex, somewhat exhausted victims not playing for victory but stretching the match to make it drawn, the only option available is to embrace the tragic mode of existence and the sublime beauty and heroism of the Greeks that is now accessible to the Kashmiris. From tragedy we might be required to move to tragicomedy of a sort that allows us to laugh at our unhappiness/despite our unhappiness. Recalling Beckett’s character “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness” we achieve a victory over the most dehumanizing of conditions.
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