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Dear Ram,
Appended below please find the
"Preface" to the drama NIRVANA. I had to deal with the debate of
Huntingtons
singular identity vs. Amartya Sens many identities in this Preface. The
approach may be considered as an alternative to what Fouad Ajami has tabulated
as hopelessness. In the PREFACE, I used the collapse of
post-second-world-war dramatic art as an indicator of the same hopelessness.
We Indians need not fall for this.
That's what the drama NIRVANA stands for. Indian philosophy is positive,
self-corrective and self-sustaining. At the grass-root, Indians see the Universe
as True, Conscious and Joyful (sat-chit-ananda) --- something not
obvious to the Western mind. The drama NIRVANA is now under print. I'll
appreciate if netters send me theirs comments, starting with the PREFACE
below. My efforts will be
successful only when the young generations will enjoy a peaceful
world.
With love to
everybody,
Himendra
APPENDIX: Preface to drama
NIRVANA:
PREFACE
Being published in 2006, the drama
NIRVANA is a desperate attempt to apply the wisdom of Particle Physics for
preventing global terrorism that causes slaughter of human
beings.
Terrorism nurtures fanaticism, which
leads people to differentiate themselves into different identities. In his March
2006 book Identity & Violence,
Dr. Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize Winning Harvard Professor, has suggested many
identities of a human being as an answer to the singular identity advocated by
another Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington who predicted a major
intercivilizational war between core states in his influential 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking
of the World Order. Professor Huntington based his argument on a system of
singular categorization of human beings along his so-called civilizational
lines, which closely follow religious divisions made up with cults and
sects.
In this debate of Huntingtons singular
identity vs. Amartya Sens many identities, the drama NIRVANA invokes the
wisdom of no identity from particle physics.
Human Consciousness, first observed
when a caveman etched a hunting graphic on a cave wall --- precursor of Leonardo
Da Vinci's paintings and scientific imaginations ---- gradually developing into
a faculty of logic and science, helps us today travel two million light years to
the Andromeda Galaxy with our mind in the drama NIRVANA. When we look back, the
Earth appears as a mere dust particle. We are all dust particles, rather
subatomic electronic particles, getting arranged and rearranged at every birth
and death.
As I finished reading Dr. Fritjof
Capras momentous book The Tao of
Physics in 1975, I attended lectures of Swami Sarvagatananda, who taught us
the Advaita philosophy at Ramakrishna Vedanta Society of Boston in 1976 to 1980.
Many of my thoughts were initially shaped from those experiences. So, I dedicate
the drama NIRVANA to Swamiji.
The wisdom of The Tao of Physics did not penetrate
into the minds of religious fanatics. Foreseeing the coming of religious and
sectarian terrorism, I wrote the drama NIRVANA with a US-Europe background and
copyrighted it in 1990. The recent version is rewritten with an Indian
background focusing on hereditary caste system in India, similar
to racism all over the world. The blind folly of identity by racism has
already caused the Second World War in 1939-1945 at the cost of thirty million
lives. It is a matter of great frustration that, half a century later,
subtracting civility from the word civilization, some scholars advocate for
remaking of World Order based on racial, cultural, religious, sectarian
identities along the so called civilizational lines.
Pinning hope in the future, NIRVANA
is targeted at younger audience, fondly remembering how my son grew up with his
Star Wars movies which had significant impact on his thought process. However, when it came to its
dissemination by professional drama groups, particularly in India, it had to be tested against the Theatre
of the Absurd that they have imbibed from the post-Second-World-War Europe.
The world has not yet recovered from
the post-Second-World-War pessimism. It may be worthwhile to examine one
indicator : the loss of the theatre
art.
The term Theater of the Absurd was
coined by drama critic Martin Esslin, who derived it from an essay 'Myth of
Sisyphus', written in 1942 by Albert Camus, a tragic figure witnessing the moral
collapse of the Western Culture during the Second World War.
After the First World War
(1914-1918), all the hopes that Western intellectuals pinned on the radical
social revolution were shattered when Stalin turned the Soviet Union into a totalitarian dictatorship. To assuage
Germany who suffered from the war
penalties forced by the Treaty of Versailles, rise of Hitler was naively
tolerated by the Western intellectuals. However, they very soon found out the
immorality practiced by Hitler by his widespread untruthfulness and denial of
treaties which ultimately led to the Second World War, during which Hitler
continued to commit unbelievable barbarism, mass murder and genocide.
In the aftermath of the Second World
War, the intellectuals observed the spiritual emptiness in the outwardly
prosperous and affluent societies of Western Europe and the United States.
The root causes that disintegrated all previously held firm beliefs of the
Western civilization now reappear as The
Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order rationalizing
indirectly the cult of terrorism in modern era.
Focusing on spiritual emptiness in
their absurd plays, the dramatists like Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, Eugene
Ionesco, Jean Genet, Harold Pinter and others saw the human situation as
basically meaningless and absurd. They all contributed to the view that man
was inhabiting a universe with which he was out of step. According to these
intellectuals, the meaning of the Universe was indecipherable. Mans place in
the Universe was without any purpose whatsoever.
India did not have this problem. Indian
philosophy is positive, self-corrective and self-sustaining. At the grass-root,
Indians see the Universe as True, Conscious and Joyful (sat-chit-ananda) --- something not
obvious to the Western mind. It is true that India did go through the sufferings of the two
world wars and communal rioting created by non-Indian thought, and it is also
true that India did
degenerate throughout the eight hundred years of foreign rule, but
India never lost its soul. At the
time when Hitler was hatching his plans for secret rearmament with camouflaged war tanks
and airplanes (1922-1934), Mahatma Gandhi was perfecting his technique of a
non-violent struggle and surprised the world with his Salt March (1931).
Unfortunately, today many
intellectuals in India copy their Western counterparts
blindly. The field of drama has been a major victim. The atmosphere of Indian
drama today is overwhelmed by the absurd dramas copying Samuel Beckett, Arthur
Adamov, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, Harold Pinter, and others. Most of the new
dramas are based on exaltation and euphemizing of the defunct and illogical
postulations of Freudian psychology.
The gap between the intellectuals
and common people is widening every day. I would like to cite one example here.
In his Nobel-Prize winning drama of 1953, Samuel Beckett presented two vagabonds
Waiting for Godot which kept the western audience spellbound because every
person in the audience had been "waiting" for the second-coming of
Christ as the last ray of hope deep in their mind. In India, this
feeling is absent. The Indian audience failed to respond to Waiting for Godot
to a great dismay of the importers.
Carrying the torch from The Tao of Physics, the drama NIRVANA
is a journey to Truth, Consciousness and Joy (sat-chit-ananda) through the path of
particle physics, quantum mechanics and relativity, the climax being the Truth
seen in the Chandogya Upanishad Whatever is Sky so is the Love (yadeva kham tadeva kam iti), resolved
into the ideology of unconditional love (niskama prema) to everybody, where all
the barriers of hereditary caste system and racism disappear, all identities
vanish, and the world becomes a joyful place.
My efforts will be successful only
when the young generations will enjoy a peaceful world.
Himendra
Thakur
May 17,
2006 .
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, June 12, 2006 11:30
AM
Subject: [Assam] Amartya Sen on the
'Clash of Civilizations' - Wash. Post
If there really isn't a Clash of Civilizations as Sen
claims, how does he explain away the constant and continuing
clashes amongst religions.
Sen, does, however make a point in saying that
'civilizations' are not that cut & dried, and there are many influences
and mixes. But by looking at the situation in today's context, there are some
clearly defined broad categories of religions.
--Ram
Enemies, a Love Story
A Nobel
laureate argues that civilizations are not clashing.
Reviewed by Fouad Ajami
Sunday, April 2, 2006;
BW07
IDENTITY AND VIOLENCE
The Illusion of Destiny
By Amartya Sen
Norton. 215 pp. $24.95
Nowadays the economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen travels the world,
opinions at the ready. His subjects are rarely economic. In the main, he works
"out of area," taking on a wide range of political and social issues that have
little to do with the dismal science. He is serene and confident, full of good
cheer, ready to see the best in everyone.
Over this discursive little book lies the shadow of Sen's formidable
Harvard colleague, the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, with his
celebrated theory of the "clash of civilizations." Sen has assigned himself
the role of the anti-Huntington: Sen sees Huntington's thesis of cultural
conflict yielding a one-dimensional approach to human identity -- and leading
to the "civilizational and religious partitioning of the world," which can
only occasion greater global disorder.
ere, in contrast, is Sen celebrating the complexity of human identity: "The
same person can be, without any contradiction, an American citizen, of
Caribbean origin, with African ancestry, a Christian, a liberal, a woman, a
vegetarian, a long-distance runner, a historian, a schoolteacher, a novelist,
a feminist, a heterosexual, a believer in gay and lesbian rights, a theater
lover, an environmental activist, a tennis fan, a jazz musician," etc. One's
civilizational identity is not one's destiny, Sen observes, and civilizational
"partitioning" -- seeing the planet culture by culture -- does not capture the
messiness of the world. This Earth of ours, he says, is made more "flammable"
by warring definitions of human identity, rather than an embrace of the many
different facets that make us human.
Sen's faith in the multiplicity of claims on human loyalty is admirable,
but it can hardly stand up to the fury of the true believers. In our
combustible world today, Huntington's outlook has much greater power. His
"cartography" of civilizations may have been too sharply drawn and he may have
been a bit cavalier about modernity's appeal across cultural lines, but he
came forth with a formidable work. Nor did he fail to see the fissures at the
heart of particular societies -- hence his category of "torn countries,"
places like Turkey, Russia and Mexico, where the matter of loyalty and
identity is fiercely contested. But Sen needs his straw man, and Huntington is
pressed into the role.
Sen is a product of Western (British) education. But he sees no clear
demarcation between the West and the rest (the language is Huntington's).
There is nothing peculiarly Western about democracy, Sen argues. It has global
roots; there were antecedents of it in India and in the Muslim world at about
the same time when "Inquisitions were quite extensive in Europe, and heretics
were still being burned at the stake." In his most intensely argued assertion,
Sen sees the democratic inheritance as a truly universal enterprise. "The
Western world has no proprietary right over democratic ideas," he writes.
"While modern institutional forms of democracy are relatively new everywhere,
the history of democracy in the form of public participation and reasoning is
spread across the world." Western practice was not "sequestered" then, and it
has not developed in some "splendid isolation."
It is the unease of Islam, of course, and the violence of some of its
radical adherents that have given the question of identity its contemporary
global relevance. On that issue Huntington was at his most prophetic, writing
of Islam's "bloody borders" and of the "youth bulge" in Muslim societies that
had unhinged and radicalized the Muslim world. He did so in the early 1990s,
and then history -- 9/11 and all that followed -- provided his thesis with
cruel compliance.
Sen, however, wishes to rescue Islam from this "confinement." He makes his
way through Islam's history and its wide geographic sweep in order to find
great Muslim practitioners of tolerance and periods of genuine enlightenment.
There is Akbar, the great Mughal emperor, who "insisted in the 1590s on the
need for open dialogue and free choice, and also arranged recurrent
discussions involving not only mainstream Muslim and Hindu thinkers, but also
Christians, Jews, Parsees, Jains, and even atheists." In the face of the
anti-Semitic bigotry of today's radical Islamism, Sen offers the example of
Muslim rule in Córdoba and the Iberian Peninsula -- that time of
convivencia , where a Judeo-Islamic civilization in court life, letters
and philosophy had a genuine flowering.
Sen works with the anecdote: His potted history is tailored for interfaith
dialogues. He writes of the great Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who, when
forced to emigrate from "an intolerant Europe" in the 12th century, was able
to find "a tolerant refuge in the Arab world" in the court of the great Muslim
ruler Saladin. But this will not do as history. Maimonides, born in 1135, did
not flee "Europe" for the "Arab world": He fled his native Córdoba in Spain,
which was then in the grip of religious-political terror, choking under the
yoke of a Berber Muslim dynasty, the Almohads, that was to snuff out all that
remained of the culture of convivencia and made the life of Spain's
Jews (and of the free spirits among its Muslims) utter hell. Maimonides and
his family fled the fire of the Muslim city-states in the Iberian Peninsula to
Morocco and then to Jerusalem. There was darkness and terror in Morocco as
well, and Jerusalem was equally inhospitable in the time of the Crusader
Kingdom. Deliverance came only in Cairo -- the exception, not the rule, its
social peace maintained by the enlightened Saladin.
Here, for Sen's benefit, is a passage from Maimonides's seminal
Epistle to Yemen : "Our hearts are weakened, our minds are
confused, and our strength wanes because of the dire misfortunes that have
come upon us in the form of religious persecution in the two ends of the
world, the East and the West." Maimonides's geography was Islamic: The East in
the Epistle was Yemen, then a battleground between Sunni and Shiite Islam, a
place where Jews were being subjected to forced conversions to Islam; the
Western lands were the burning grounds of Andalusia. The Almohads' pitiless
warriors were in every way the Taliban of their age, the ancestors of today's
religious radicals in the world of Islam. They put to the sword the fabled
world of Andalusian tolerance, and young Maimonides witnessed the shattering
collapse of that culture. There had been Andalusian bliss, and Muslim rulers
with Jewish courtiers and poets, and philosophers who believed in the primacy
of reason, but that world was scorched.
Inspirational history can go only so far; it will not bend to Sen's good
cheer. ·
Fouad Ajami is the Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle East Studies at
the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. His
books include "The Arab Predicament" and "The Vanished Imam."
© 2006 The
Washington Post Company
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