Notes for an essay on Independence

 

Pic by Dinushika Thimali Perera

Sometime next week, perhaps on Monday, somewhere or maybe even in most parts of the country, teachers will task students to write an essay on ‘Independence Day.’  This is as ‘annual’ as Independence Day. Time passes, ‘days’ acquire importance and later get footnoted. Histories are created and erased. Somewhere down the line, we seem to have forgotten the 22nd day of May and the year 1972. Some child who knows history or students who’ve had the benefit of informed teachers may mention this date and its significance, I wouldn’t know either way.

All that said, the 4th of February is not entirely uninteresting nor unimportant, notwithstanding the fact that it effectively rubbished the 22nd of May simply because the United National Party government of J.R. Jayewardene wanted to mock the leader during whose tenure we finally unshackled ourselves from formal colonial rule. Both dates are important and both could have been noted and celebrated, but petty politics as often is the case, won the day.

And so we have Independence Day. The 4th day of February. And we will have children writing essays in which names, dates and details will be included, and teachers assessing them for content and style. We will of course have the flags, the airshows, the military parades, the pomp and pageantry.  

Can we afford it, someone asked. How can we spend money on such events when things are tough for people, one could ask. Legit. On the other hand, nations and life are not just about stomachs or the inability to afford what, in the end, we can do without. We could argue the point from another angle. Through a few questions.

Should we not celebrate anything (independence, victory over terrorism, becoming a republic, etc)  until poverty is eradicated? Should we retire the flags until we are finally done with the caste system? Should we keep the bugles in storage until we have gender equality? Should we wear sombre expressions until we have the much celebrated and called for (in another era, especially by Marxists of every conceivable ideological hue) ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’?  Wouldn’t we then be a down-in-the-mouth nation?

Of course there has to be a sense of proportion and the appropriate decibel levels of the cheer can and should be debated. It always lies between the positions defended with fervour and decried with snicker.

More important would be reflection. What have we achieved over the past 74 years, what have we lost, what crossroads did we arrive at, were there wrong-turns, was there intelligence and humility to effect course-correction? Such questions we can ask. And should.

High moments are made for reflection. However, such moments are used too frequently for moralistic posturing. The high points seem to be made for the rhetorician. We’ve seen that. As a result the entire exercise turns into an opportunity to throw barbs at one another. It’s the bread and butter of barb-throwers, this we need to understand.

What should citizens do and think? Well, that’s for each citizen to decide. This, however, can be stated: at some level a citizen reflecting on the roads taken and not taken and envisaging one or more of many possible pathways into the future could ask him/herself ‘what is citizenship?’ More correctly, ‘what does my “citizenship” mean, what does it entail, what rights have or can accrue and what horrors has it bestowed?’

One’s political, economic, social, cultural and even geographical location would obviously color the answer to such questions. However, it cannot be denied that citizenship has meaning only in a collective. As such one’s relationship to one’s neighbor as well as the larger fraternity of citizens has to be considered. Their perceptions of self, of citizenship matter. Their versions of history and the futures they’d prefer to inhabit matter.

In other words, if we want to think ‘independence’ and if we want to reflect on ‘citizenship’ we are compelled to think ‘collective.’ And when we think ‘collective,’ it won’t hurt to think ‘solidarity.’

Now there are all kinds of solidarities. Solidarities, moreover, can and do clash. Each and everyone of us has multiple interests. They don’t always coexist happily. We make choices and we pay prices. We forego one thing to secure another. It is the same in a collective. The world would be dead boring if no individual could be distinguished from another. This is why we have social contracts. This is why we have laws. This is why, indeed, that laws are amended. People change, circumstances are altered and old rules cease to be as useful.

It’s obviously a complex universe that we inhabit. All the more reason to remember that none of us know everything. All the more reason to remember that someone else’s idea, concept or blueprint might be superior, only we weren’t equipped with the necessary facts and scales to make an informed and balanced call. All the more reason to nurture humility. All the more reason to commit ourselves to listening.

Listen! You’ll hear the jets flying overhead. Listen! You’ll hear the flags fluttering in the wind. Listen! The National Anthem is being played. Listen! Someone is mocking all these things. Listen! Someone is framing a national celebration in terms of a narrow political agenda. Listen! Did someone ask, ‘who are we really, as a nation, as a citizenry?’ Listen! Did someone ask, ‘did we lose a sense of who we are, where we’ve come from, what our roots are, in which kinds of soils they ran deep and who ploughed the good earth and buried our sense of self-worth?’

If we listen carefully, we won’t hear the speeches. Not the celebrations nor the crass mocking of celebration. If we listen carefully, we may hear what the land that has sustained us has to say. We may hear each other. We may, in this and other ways, rediscover nation and citizenship, the individual and the collective, forgotten solidarities, unities that can but weren’t forged, love that we lost by loving (by the book, as in dominant ideologies) and life we lost by living (i.e. inhabiting some outsider’s version of our reality).

Dhammapada Verse 160 (Kumarakassapamatuttheri Vatthu) illuminates:

Atta hi attano natho


ko hi natho paro siya


attana hi sudantena


natham labhati dullabham.

[One indeed is one's own refuge; how can others be a refuge to one? With oneself thoroughly tamed, one can attain a refuge, which is so difficult to attain.]

This side of ventures into such sublime pathways, there is a lesson here that can be learnt simply by replacing ‘one’ with ‘all,’ a lesson which although it won’t take us closer to Enlightenment, may not necessarily lead us astray either. If we think ‘nation’ then we must think ‘citizenry.’ We look at each other often enough but don’t really look for each other. If we did, or committed us to doing so, we would see beyond (and through) both celebration and mockery. Not that today is dark and gloomy and foreboding, but tomorrow may bring more reasons to smile.

malindadocs@gmail.com

 
[Malinda Seneviratne is the Director/CEO of the Hector Kobbekaduwa Agrarian Research and Training Institute. These are his personal views.]