28.01.2018
One day, after having arrived back to England and our home from a trip to India, my mother dressed me and my two brothers up in brown kurtas and pyjamas. She then adorned our foreheads with vermillion, put crowns upon our heads and handed us each a bow and an arrow. We sat there, waiting to strike our enemies with our keen eyes. There is a photograph in the family album which bears witness to the event. There were various motivations behind this re-enactment. We watched the Mahabharata religiously every week on the Indian morning on British TV. The characters in the epic were our heroes. It was the love of my Indian mother for her children that led her to see us as those inspirational warriors in the Mahabharata and as princes. It was the uncanny intuition of an Indian mother that we were in an invisible war and were to fight an invisible enemy. This intuition, compelled by instinct and knowledge beyond comprehension, was absolutely correct.
Let us not start with the Mahabharata, however, for we will return to this great work and I will explain why my Indian mother was correct in her intuition. Let us start with the Iliad by Homer, a work with which my Western audience will have much greater familiarity, I hope. The Iliad, it is somewhat apparent, is about beauty and its destructive force. The most obvious subject of the work is therefore beauty and its relationship to vision. The Trojans take off with the most beautiful woman in the world, called Helen (which means “Greek”). However, Helen belongs to the Greeks. They feel they have the monopoly on beauty. They punish what they call the abduction of Helen, although it is clear that Helen elopes with the supposed culprit of her own volition, to bring the greatest beauty in the world to Troy.
How do the Greeks beat the Trojans in the contest of beauty? Famously, it is the Trojan horse stratagem that wins the war for them. The Greeks hide inside the Trojan horse which is presented as a gift to the Trojans. Through hiding, they enter the city at night and then massacre all of the Trojans in an ancient genocide. But have you ever considered carefully how the Trojan horse is related to vision in this epic about beauty and the contest to possess it? Let us take a little time to do so now.
The Trojan horse stratagem works through concealment, invisibility and blindness. The Greeks hide inside the Trojan horse, concealing their identities. They are invisible. They present the Trojan horse as a gift when in fact it is more akin to a curse, the reverse of a gift. They thus conceal the meaning of what the Trojan horse is and do not allow it to be seen for what it literally is. The Greeks therefore institute blindness on several levels: the Trojans can neither see the horse for what it is nor can they detect that their enemies are concealed inside it. The Trojans become blind. However, it is not just the Trojans who are blind. Everyone is blind. The Greeks hiding inside the horse cannot see the outside world. They sit in darkness. They are abstracted from the outside world.
The Trojan horse is the product of a Greek and Western culture in which what is considered valuable is not external appearance, but what is conceived of as hidden deep inside things, their essences. The Trojans are considered foolish because they look at external appearance and do not go deeply into the essences of things, the inside. This is regarded as their fatal weakness. This simple idea, that external appearances are deceptive is the founding tenet of Western civilisation and its supposed truth. It is the mark of the Western visual culture in which our thinkers state that the externally visible world does not exist, just as the Greeks blindly sit in the belly of the horse, doing away with the vision of the world. It therefore becomes clear why Helen is castigated for her very beauty, our heaven on earth. The external beauty of persons and their visual appearance are at odds with the idea of essences and internal value. External appearance, which is associated with the body of Helen, the body of a female, in a particularly misogynistic manner, can only be destructive in this world view: it destroys both the Greeks who fight for Helen and the Trojans who are misled by the external appearance of Helen and the Trojan horse. Yet the Greeks are thought to surmount the external appearance of things and finally win. They are not the victims of a genocide.
The Iliad is from the 8th Century B.C.E. The Mahabharata is written in roughly the same period and I contend that it responds to the visual culture of the Greeks. The Mahabharata is not about conquering a people and subsequent genocide. It is about a family reclaiming what is rightfully theirs. The people that dispossess the princes in the epic are the sons of a blind king that greedily wish to hold onto their power. They represent the blind. Let us focus on the way that the war is won in the Mahabharata and how it is related to vision. I believe that there are two important scenes.
The first scene is the killing of the implacable enemy Duryodhana. Duryodhana’s mother had blessed him so that he was invincible. She was living a blindfolded life so that she could be the same as her husband. However, she took off her blindfold to grant her son invincibility with her vision which had lain dormant all those years it had not been used. Duryodhana, however, was ashamed to reveal his body to his mother and wore a loin cloth so that he would not appear fully naked before her. His nether regions were therefore not protected by vision but were invisible to his mother’s gaze, concealed. He therefore insisted on his mother’s partial blindness. Bhima killed Duryodhana because of this very insistence on the blindness of a mother. Bhima struck Duryodhana below the waist at his weak point. Thus, Bhima destroyed the way of the blind, the way of invisibility and concealment. It was where the world was concealed in the genitals of his opponent that he knew he could gain the victory and deliver the death stroke. The concealing of the body, world and nature is always wrong.
A prior scene reveals the ethic of the Mahabharata and its idea of vision and power, which is that war is to be fought openly, without concealment. This scene also reveals why Duryodhana’s inflicting of blindness on his mother is seen as a terrible sin and why the misogynistic Iliad, which castigates female beauty, is so wrong. This is because the Mahabharata celebrates the vision of the woman’s body. One of the other prominently invincible foes of the dispossessed princes was Bhishma. Bishma had once caused a woman to lose her lover and she had vowed to be reincarnated so as to kill him. She came back as a man, but Bishma knew that she was a woman. The man/woman Sihandhi was used as a shield so that Bhishma could not attack as it was against his warrior code of honour to attack a woman. So long as the vision of woman was before him, Bhishma was powerless and could not fight for the sons of the blind king, the party of the blind. Blindness was defeated by the sight and the form of a woman. Instead of hiding and concealing themselves, therefore, and attacking by cowardly stealth, the princes won the battle by putting themselves behind woman and using her as their shield and weapon of utmost power. It was the form of a woman which won the battle for them. The form of a woman did not cause destruction, but gave them back their kingdom. They immersed themselves in the vision and feeling of a woman to revenge herself on the man who wronged her. The princes’ fight against the wrong that has been done to them is therefore in parallel with the wrong that has been done to women. Their invincible enemies fall because they have wronged women and those who have been put into the position of women: in the weaker position. This is a direct response to the misogyny of the blind who can only see a woman’s body and vision in negative terms. It is a response to a Western culture in which women, like Helen are to be won as objects of status. In the Mahabharata, woman is not to be won. Woman is to win.
The vision and intuition of an Indian mother puts me firmly in the grounds of the Mahabharata. Yet my location in this Western society has aimed terribly to seduce me into the path of misogyny, concealment and blindness. In the past, I have truly made errors of judgement and of feeling but I wish to free myself of that horrible past. I put before my eyes the beautiful vision of a woman’s body and I remember the goddess. As I have very briefly noted here, the clash of visual cultures is thousands upon thousands of years old and it is fighting in my breast today. I am continuing the fight because I remember the day when my mother saw me as one of the great warriors in the Mahabharata. It is not easy. There is a new challenge every day. My basic Ancient Greek and ignorance of Sanskrit stand in my way, certainly. However, I continue the war in my analysis of the relationship between law and photography in English fiction from the mid-nineteenth century because the language of my thought has been in English. I have no platform, no network, very little audience. I am one son of Mother India in a world of foreigners and strangers. Yet I ask those that do read my writing to question their own place in this great and invisible war with an invisible enemy and ask themselves whether they would be the children of India or the children of the Ancient Greeks. That, I argue, is the essential question.
diary of a lone man 