Literature: A Corrective to Politics

CHANGING events outside have been demanding of me an answer to the question whether literature is related to politics in any form of obligation. I have procrastinated and not faced the question squarely. Rather have I rationalised with myself saying that both of them after all belonged and owed allegiance to the wholeness of life and therefore they need not be viewed in juxtaposition to each other. To confess, I have been a little naive at it and thus effected an escape for myself from a situation which threatened to be overwhelming. In my philosophisation I rendered the question, as it were, void of validity to myself. But that was self-delusion. The reality and duality will not get shut out and I realise that the question is urgent and imperative. It has to be solved and resolved in one’s being in order to be able to participate fruitfully in either literary or political activity.

We have known wars and they have been total wars. The next, if and when it comes, will have to be a global one in the full sense of the word. It will touch all and each and none shall have leave to feel unaffected and unconcerned. Thus the politics that regulate and govern human affairs and lead them on to the destinies that be are not to be considered as the special concern of some technically trained and skilled parliamentarians or diplomats. It is no more to be taken to as a career and vocation for the ones specially gifted or selected. It should be the care and concern of all in order that mankind be one family and the world one home.

So politics covers all and literature, too, embraces the whole span of life. The two cannot be relegated to any special and separate compartments, each to each, and thus kept apart. No, they are bound to have a direct bearing on each other, the two being not any specialised proclivities touching this or that sector alone of life to the exclusion of the rest. Anyone is free to write, likewise is he free to go ahead and get elected. In fact langauge belongs to all, so also progress. All of us want to express ourselves and each one of us hopes to get on top of the other. Thus both literature and politics irretrievably appertain to the man in whole, the man in common. To be a man is enough to entitle him to have a say in both. Both shall thrive on the common man and therefore both shall have to serve him also. To go astray from him is to go wrong both in literature as well as in politics.

Now that they are so close and allied to each other we have to find what relation should exist between the two if they are to be true to themselves and at the same time complement each other.

We know the variation in the perspectives that they hold respectively to themselves and the difference in emphasis that they bring to bear on life. To literature a man is essential as he is. It is his being that matters there, not his belongings. To literature man is the end, not the means. In politics it is rather the other way round. There the man comes second, he is valued in reference to what he holds or represents. His possessions come first and the man is assessed in their context. How much he holds of power, influence, money or commodity; how many he commands or represents, in terms of members to a party, association or affiliation–that is what is important to politics. Not the man who feels and thinks, but rather the man that votes and does. It is not intrinsic value but rather market value that would be relevant there. Man would be adjudged not against virtue but against goods. To politics, man is never the end, he is but a means. Each is, therefore, held useful or otherwise in the measure that he becomes or does not become an effective and convenient means to achieve the end. Man is therefore justified in politics only to the extent he sub-serves the state or the party. End being the State and means the men; and the end justifying the means, all those who do not justify themselves in view of that end i.e., the State, render themselves superfluous. They are allowed to shift as best they may, or they may even be done away with as a security or economy measure. For ought it matters little to politics. Pledged to gain the end, politics need not halt at the means. They are always out to fight and get victory which must in the nature of things mean the wiping out of the obstacle, the adversary, the opponent, the enemy.

Each, of course, will have to learn to be and live for all. That “All” to the man of religion is God; to the man of ethics it is the Good; to the man of art it is Beauty and Harmony; and to the man of politics it is the State Sovereign. Now State is not an abstraction like the rest. The abstract does not impose on the personality of the individual. Far from being abstract the State is so very tangible. It can consume the man, fetter him, and commit him to death. With that dirge in hand the State demands and exacts absolute and implicit conformity to what are called its regulations and rules. It tends to becomes in its sheer composition so much of a compact totality as to leave little space to a person to develop personality. It promulgates law to enforce uniformity. It stifles difference and steam-rolls opinion to suit its solid sanctity. Politics, while trying to make each live for all, so patterns the living as to limit it to those who constitute the state in themselves. For the rest it means no life, and not infrequently means slow death. It is politics that creates the incessant and evergrowing problem of personl liberty. That problem takes innumerable forms such as minority problem, or conflicting and competing claims of different groups, classes and organisations. Politics can at best hobnob with them and in resolving one problem it can succeed only in creating two others.

So politics have definitely and flagrantly failed us. The wars, ever recurring and always threatening, are a monumental testimony to the utterness of that failure. And it was bound to happen in as much as politics leave out the other half, and the major half, of the whole truth, that is ‘each for all and all for each’.

Here I feel that politics may come to literature for the needful correction. To literature ideals as obstructions do not matter at all. God, to exist, will have to reside in man and express Himself through personal behaviours, or else, for literature, He will remain non-existent. Likewise for other conceptual obstructions literature has little use and lesser reverence. The ‘Good’ of the moralist, the ‘Beautiful’ of the aesthete, the defied Society of the Socialist and the State Sovereign of the politician–all these are entities wholly irrelevant, almost fictitious, to literature. They have no way, no power, no panic over the man who has to create. Every one of these big idealistic concepts will have to climb down, split up and lose itself in the eachness of the man and then come out through the texture of reciprocal behaviours in order to acquire meaning and validity to literature. For aught else, they in themselves, are to be allowed no sanction and absolutely no sanctity whatever. The man will be the end and everything else the means. And these means would be justified only in the measure that they serve him. Literature will have all such concepts as arrogate to themselves a collective absolutism and commit no transgressions against him. Man shall stay inviolate.

If we must achieve harmony in human relationship and bring about peace amongst us we have to evolve in a manner as makes the one live for many and many for the one. All organisms that denote group or collective life should have in turn to serve their component parts. An organisation should bring out and unfold the wholeness of man rather than coerce him into being its soulless part. Unless the “All” spreads out and pervades each one of us there will be no peace brought into mutual intercourse, nor co-ordination or co-operation, and the tension will continue and grow ever more to multiply problems.

Literature which emphasizes the eachness of all, and preserves to us diverse uniquenesses, can alone give to politics the requisite corrective. Otherwise politics will never know how to come out of the vicious circle that their exclusivisms have created round them and through which they are obliged to work and move.