The Aesthetic of Revolution in Hazaron Khwahishen Aisi
Manhar Bansal
Baawra mann/Dekhne/Chala ek sapna
Baawre se mann ki dekho/Baawri hain baatein
Baawri se dhadkanein hain/Baawri hain saansein
Baawra mann/Dekhne/Chala ek sapna
(Baawra Mann, Swanand Kirkire, Hazaron Khwahishen Aisi, 2003)
—
This mad heart embarks on a journey
To dream
Behold this mad heart’s
Mad suggestions
Its mad heartbeat
Its mad breath
This mad heart proceeds to dream.
(My Translation)
—
Thus ends Sudhir Mishra’s pathbreaking film Hazaron Khwahishen Aisi (These Thousand Desires; 2003). Geeta, the film’s lead character, sits on a rock in a faraway Indian village. The love of her life, Siddharth has left for London, disillusioned by the revolution. Her friend Vikram, paralysed after a brutal police attack, sits by her side. She stares into oblivion. Swanand Kirkire sings the melancholic Baawra Mann in the background. I ask myself: is this a story of defeat? Or of life’s madness? I will return to this question towards the end.
Hazaron Khwahishen Aisi unravels itself as a commentary on the aesthetic of revolution. What does revolution feel like? How do people experience it? Or better: how does revolution insert itself into the lives of its actors? The film, set in the 1970s India of the Naxalite movement and the Emergency, tells the story of three college students – Siddharth, Geeta, and Vikram. Siddharth joins the Naxal movement. Geeta, in love with him, follows. Vikram makes his way up the business ladder. The three friends inhabit different physical, social, economic, emotional locations through the film. Yet, the revolution touches all of them. Bhojpur and Delhi are not too far. Delhi University and the Naxal camp come in conversation with each other. Desires are ignited and extinguished. Madness gets enacted everywhere – the university, the village, and the national capital.
University/Theory
The film begins in Delhi University. Siddharth and his friends are Marxist revolutionaries. They speak in English. They talk theory. They listen to rock music. They consume drugs. And they desire to change the world. Ha. Pretentious. What can 20 year-olds in a fancy university situated in the national capital possibly understand about injustice and revolution? All high theory.
What do we make of this disdain for the university revolutionary? I am remined of a conversation with an old friend who’s now in medical school. I was telling him how an alum from NLS had gone on to get a doctorate in anthropology from the US and was back at NLS as a professor. His response, etched in my memory, “That just shows a failure of your university.” I was rendered speechless. But he was right. Our imagination of the university today, especially of the engineering/medical/law school variety, is a site of factory production of trained professionals – doctors, engineers, lawyers. Forget becoming a revolutionary, the very idea of a to-be lawyer becoming a social scientist evokes great discomfort. There is no place for desire, let alone desire for revolutionary change, outside the logics of the factory production system that is the contemporary university.
Has this always been the case? The film tells us otherwise. It tells us a story of these young college students who give up lucrative careers to join the Naxalite movement. Faculty at NLS tell us stories of students going to join the Narmada Bachao Andolan. This is a story of thousands of young people of an older generation, harbouring a courage that our systems of security today do not allow us to fathom. Regardless, I would argue that even if students do not travel to a far-away place to foment revolution, the university retains the potential to cradle a new generation of mad dreamers who can dare to desire otherwise.
I am often told by my family that “my theory is very different from their reality.” I refuse to believe that. Theory is not useless; or rather, it is useful precisely because it is useless. “To change the world” is radically different from “To reform a society.” One can reform a social practice as a civil servant, but one cannot dream to change the world. Only the luxury of not having to translate thought into action allows for the birth of revolutionary desire. Hazaron Khwahishen Aisi is not an argument against high theory. To the contrary, it brings together the university and the village – theory and practice – in ways that are at once revolutionary and tragic.
Village/Time
Much of the film takes place in Bhojpur, a village in Bihar which acts as the base for Siddharth’s Naxal comrades and the site for Geeta’s adult literacy program. The village appears in the film as the ground zero of revolution. It is presented as being far removed in time and space. In his letters to Geeta, Siddharth tells her that the village is thousands of years behind in time. It is a site of economic exploitation, state torture, caste discrimination. It is inhabited by small huts, kutcha roads, open latrines, police outposts. We see Siddharth transform from a jeans wearing college hippie to a tanned, bearded, kurta-donning villager. Geeta’s London bags vanish into the seams of her plain cotton saree. Dust becomes aesthetic.
What do we make of this spatial, temporal, aesthetic distance? Siddharth’s remark reminds me of Johannes Fabian’s argument in Time and the Other about the denial of coevalness to the Other. In Siddharth’s view, the village emerges as backward, primitive, in dire need of progress. Towards the end of the film, Siddharth remarks, once again, that the village had moved 5,000 years ahead in time; it was not as easy to rape a lower caste woman now as it was before. The well intentioned, middle class activist’s revolution appears no different from the extractivist white coloniser’s improvement project. In Time and the Other, Fabian points to the “aporetic split” between the use of Time in ethnographic fieldwork and in anthropological theorizing (35). In the film, Siddharth’s comments about the village are found in his letters to Geeta that are always written from a distance – either from Bhojpur to Delhi, or from London to Bhojpur. Thus, the “anthropological theorizing” of the village takes place in another time – that of his bourgeois relationship with Geeta. Ultimately, like the anthropologist, Siddharth also moves on. He returns to his own Time.
Geeta, on the other hand, decides to stay in the village. She also does not theorise the village for us. Her entire life from the university to her family home is consumed, overcome by the Time of the village. She is able to accomplish what Fabian calls the inversion of the “temporal fortress” of the Self by the “Time of its Other” (35). It is not insignificant that nowhere in the film do we hear the voices of the villagers. The film is not about them, even as the revolution is for their “benefit”. The film is about the bourgeois subject. Through the characters of Siddharth and Geeta, we confront the contradictions of bourgeois subjectivity in the time of revolution. Siddharth’s ideological commitment to the revolution is markedly different from Geeta’s emotional and affective commitment to him, and therefore, the village. Yet, it is he who leaves the scene, while she stays on. There is something to be said about what drives revolution in the last instance. The ideological clarity of Siddharth or the Baawra Mann of Geeta. The manner in which the village inserts itself into Geeta’s life transforms her forever. Their Times become one.
Capital/System
Let us now speak about Vikram – Siddharth and Geeta’s mutual friend from college who charts a different path for himself. Unconvinced by Siddharth’s revolutionary ideas or his father’s Gandhism, his sole aim is to make it big in life. So he does. While Siddharth departs for Bhojpur and Geeta is married to a civil servant, Vikram becomes a shrewd businessman with direct telephone connections in the national capital. He is the man who “gets work done.” In the film, Vikram comes to represent the very system that Siddharth is fighting against. It is with Vikram that the film’s camera shifts from the dusty huts of Bhojpur to the majestic buildings of New Delhi. The national capital appears as the symbol for the state-capital liaison, and Vikram as its dedicated soldier.
Nonetheless, the revolution comes to haunt Vikram too. He meets Geeta after many years at an officers’ party, soon after which he discovers her double life with Siddharth. The revolution disrupts the stability of Geeta’s marriage. She decides to divorce her civil servant husband in order to move in with Siddharth. However, from time to time, she falls back upon Vikram. He is there when her marriage breaks down. It is he who rescues her when in the middle of the revolution, she is captured by the police and tortured. He becomes an insider-outsider. Being inside the system, he is able to provide an infrastructure of temporary comfort to Geeta, which makes him an accomplice in the revolution (mere accomplice, never a participant). In him, the national capital and the countryside, the system and the revolution, come together. His liminal status, marked by his unrequited love for Geeta, becomes his tragedy. Towards the end of the film, in his attempt to rescue Siddharth from the police, he is himself captured, brutally tortured, and left paralysed for life. The system for which he built his entire life does not forgive his complicity in the revolution. Out of the three of them, it is ultimately he who suffers the most.
Mad Desire
The film’s last scene features Vikram and Geeta. Unable to speak, Vikram inscribes “I love you, Geeta” on a boulder, and leans on her shoulder as a broken man. It is this last scene that defines the film. The revolution has passed, blood has been spilled, justice has been done. There is nothing more to be done, except to stare into oblivion and remember a lost time. I refuse to read this scene as a sign of the revolution’s defeat. The melancholy of the background score is not the melancholy of defeat. It is simply a clear statement of the costs of revolution. The scene – with Vikram’s tragedy, Geeta’s realisation, Siddharth’s absence, the countryside’s solitude – is testimony that revolution is not reform. Revolution upends. It disrupts, and it disrupts everything and everyone. Delhi cannot be left untouched, nor can Vikram. The revolution does not die. It persists through this tragedy. And therefore, it is described as madness. The mad desire for revolution may falter, pause, scream, cry. But it does not stop. It is relentless, especially in its tragedy. It is thus that despite everything, Kirkire sings, “This mad heart proceeds to dream.”