The
Tragic Reality of Representing Trauma through Art
The
other day, my wife and I had gone to the nearby mall to buy some essential
items. As we sat down to eat, we noticed that in the hall near us, the show of ‘Padmavat’
had ended. The audience had started to trickle out and soon became a crowd,
jostling, pushing and elbowing, cracking jokes.
There
was a feeling of excitement on the faces of most people. Many of them looked as
if they had been injected with a dose of adrenalin.
“Don’t
they all seem to be on a high?” I asked myself.
As
some of them now sat around us discussing the film, I couldn’t help but
overhear the remarks. I have outlined some of the most frequently heard ones.
“Solid
entertainment for three hours.”
“Koi
aisa scene hi nahi tha. Faltu ki controversy banadi gai.”
(There
was no scene like that. The whole controversy was unnecessary.)
“Kya
acting thi Khilji ki. Ranveer Singh toh chha gaya tha. Deepika bhi.”
(What
level of acting for playing Khilji. Ranveer Singh was the best. Even Deepika.)
“Ratan
Singh to gazab ka lag rah tha. Aur do teen dance hone chahiye the.”
(Ratan
Singh looked fabulous. There should have been 2-3 more dance sequences.)
“Bhansali
ne kya sets lagaye hai. Ghoomar dance solid tha. Jauhar bahut cinematic dikhaya
hai. Only Bhansali can do it.”
(Sets
put up by Bhansali were the best. The scene on jauhar was very cinematic.)
All
the comments were on the personal appearances of the actors, on the huge sets
and scenes and lastly on the dialogues. The adulation around Ranveer Singh, the
one who played villain as Khilji, seemed similar to Gabbar Singh, the dacoit of
the movie Sholay whose dialogues went on to become a hit and whose character
became larger than life.
I
asked the man sitting with his family next to me how did they find the movie. “Poora
paisa vasool. Jabardast excitement thi hall mein. Entertainment wali picture
hai. Ek bhi controversy wali cheez nahi thi,” he told me. (It was worth the
money. The hall was full of excitement. Its an entertaining movie. There was no
controversial thing in it.)
The
place had filled up with the people who had come out of watching the film. There
was no one who looked affected or shaken. Everyone seemed to be on high
praising either Deepika’s beauty or Ranbir Singh’s mannerisms. If the cross
section of people I was seeing at the city mall was any indicative of audience satisfaction,
then I must say the movie had truly been an entertainer.
As
I surmised from the comments, entertainment and not projecting the grief, the
trauma of a whole society was the central message of the movie. Scene after scene,
the focus was on garish and loud sets and songs and the audience had felt
captivated by it all.
As
I listened to the voices that didn’t stop raving, my mind went back to another moment
twenty five years ago. In Europe, I had come out with my friends after watching
Schindler’s list. We all walked past silently in the cold night glad to be out
and breathing fresh air. Similar to us people had walked past silently, a
solemn expression on their face.
Some
of the responses I remember were:
“Very
painful.”
“Became
aware of Europe’s history. Will never let it happen again.”
“Understand
how terrible it was for the Jews and his bravery in saving them.”
“How
could people be so cruel?”
Many
people looked downcast and walked. It seemed they avoided all eye contact. No
one seemed as if they are on a high after seeing the movie.
Two
different times. Two different movies. Two different people. Yet one thing
stands out as a stark reality. The two moments that I witnessed at a gap of
twenty years have an uncanny similarity. One was a movie on a theme where
hundreds of Jews were murdered in gas chambers while the other was where
hundreds of women committed suicide to prevent being taken as slaves. Both were
shown through art forms of cinematic medium and portray a traumatic event. Yet they
both seemed to have ended up transmitting two entirely different messages of a
wound that is historical that has not healed.
As
Claude Lanzman in his “Obscenity of understanding” says, “The real issue for true
art is not to just entertain but to transmit its role as an agent of truth to
bridge the gap between what is knowable and what is unknowable in human understanding.
What is at stake here is art itself and the way it changes the little knowledge
that existed before its own creation and the knowledge it brings about human condition
and truth.”
Many
years ago I was at a conference in a US university. The speaker was Cornel West,
a highly eminent scholar and he was speaking on race relations in USA. In the
middle of the lecture, he had asked us what was the most visible symbol of
American art and someone had mentioned the movie ‘Gone with the wind’. Turning
to us he had pointed out how that movie whitewashed slavery and racial
discriminations for an entire generation and made it impossible to view the
trauma of Blacks that led to the civil war. The cinematic effects, the
relationship of Scarlet and Rhett had eclipsed the horror that was slavery for
millions.
Nearer
home, I often wonder why we as a society, as people, disown our trauma? Why do
we write, project it in a language that fails to be sensitive and disrespectful
to the survivors? Why do we forget that they uphold our deepest human values? Will
someone write or project it for us if we ourselves don’t do it in depth and
show our denial and don’t value the introspection? If we trivialize our stories
of grief and suffering by showing them through garish songs and dance, are we
not seeing to it our own stories are lost? Then does it not get lost in time disconnecting
us from our roots and to future generations who may need those stories to define
their identity? As a friend of mine, a historian, told me while discussing this
issue that what few people care to understand is that for a Rajput, it is just
traumatic to think of Rani Padmini and the movie is forcing him to do just
that, both as an individual and collectively as part of a race. To me this is
understandable.
When
an artist uses art to depict and bring out trauma of a people, unknowingly the artist
not only engages and illuminates social reality of the present but also builds a
provocative relationship with his own people forcing them to recreate the
original trauma that may never have healed. It is a fact that artists like
Spielberg have spoken about passionately for those who work with issues of war,
trauma and genocide so that they don’t open the raw wounds of a society.
Where
the difference lies is that some of our directors need to know that human
trauma is often sublime and can only be understood through subtle and deeper
emotions, not grotesque expressions whether by a survivor or perpetrator. They
need to understand for themselves that representing trauma in art requires us
to understand certain sensitive aspects that do not belong to Bollywood’s zeal
to see itself as an unrivalled medium of mass entertainment.
As
trauma researcher Caruth has pointed out, in each enactment and representation
of trauma whether in film or literature, the voice of trauma comes out from the
original wound itself and tries to tell the world about the injustice done by the
perpetrator. When one doesn’t see that message reaching out to the audience
after the creation of the artwork, one knows that the attempt by the creator
has failed.
The
history of Indian society is mired and woven with traumatic incidents that have
stayed as a fragmented memory in our collective through stories, songs and
narratives, passed on by generation to generation. There is now an attempt by
writers, poets and filmmakers to portray it through their art without many of
them caring to understand the experience of the very people who went through it
or even the issues that tried to destroy the existence of a race. When the very
people were confronted with insurmountable odds and faced it with silence and fortitude,
it has to be shown with dignity and sensitivity and not through swan like
movements. The invasions, the iconoclasm and conversion, the slavery and its
humiliation have left a wound that has yet to heal and one has to find a
language to show it. Therefore, it is perhaps needed, more than ever that art
and artists today through literature and cinema play a role to give a healing touch
to people.
I
believe that today we need artists and intellectuals who understand this complex
relationship between art and trauma. That we must see trauma and its
representation as something sublime that cannot be trivialized and portrayed as
a form of entertainment. At present, with artists who don’t bother to
understand the language of trauma, it may seem like a farfetched dream. We need
intellectuals who don’t subvert the legitimate aspirations of a people whose
ancestors left them with a story that is tragic and poignant as their identity.
Saying this, one can’t hide behind the cloak of ‘freedom of expression’ to
express what passes as their own inner fantasy and subverts the true nature of traumatic
representation of reality. I fear that if we fail in that aspiration we may unknowingly
create another wound for the future generations that comes from the tragic
realism of falsely representing trauma through an art that is neither true nor
legitimate.
Rajat
Mitra
