Pius V Thomas

Quoting S. Schama’s Landscape and Memory, Ashish Nandy writes in his An Ambiguous Journey to the City, “…probably the greatest circumnavigators of the earth in this century have been Sigmund Freud and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

For both, all great journeys begin when one closes one’s eyes and looks within. All landscapes are, by definition, landscapes of the mind’’.But, I think, the political landscapes, where people indulge in dialogue with people whom they like or consider as their leaders, are meticulously out there, to be traversed and marked.

In post-independent India we have thousands of such journeys by all political parties, both national and regional status. The Rath Yathrasby L K Advani and the hundreds of Yathras made by the PM Narendra Modi across the length and breadth of India are journeys to manifestthe political sites ideologically.

In the pre-independent India, the journeys of Mahatma Gandhi, including the historically decisive Dandi Yathra, were powerful enough to etch and rewrite an anticolonial India. Rabindranath Tagore, another great traveller, who travelled to the inner courtyards of imagination and the concept of freedom writes, “Where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders”.

In the recent past the Bharat Jodo Yathra of Rahul Gandhi became the focus of attention in connection with the verdict of the Karnataka election, which was in favour of the Congress. (This write-up is not about the election and the author is not interested in the party-political dimension of the election results).

Political Commentator and Historian Ramchandra Guha in an Interview with Karan Thappar said that the Bharat Jodo Yathra of Rahul Gandhi was politically insignificant and it had only ten per cent impact on the election results.

I presume otherwise and think that all the Yathrasof all parties are very significant primarily as they ignite and invoke a very pristine form of deliberative democracy and politics. They are great occasions for the people to talk to each other and to make the normally unapproachable leaders to listen to them. Political Yathrascan lay out and make visiblepeople’s needs and rights.

Another major aspect that I would like to jot here in connection with the Yathras is that they are spiritually and ethically revitalizing and renovating the human and the biosphere of life. The Buddha was a traveller and who travelled inwardly and outwardly.

Jesus Christ was known as an itinerant, the one who was constantly on the move. When asked Jesus says, “And Jesus said unto him, “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath nowhere to lay His head”( Mathew 8:20).

The Ramayana speaks of Sri Rama as the one who had travelled and generated an imagery of India in his life in anonymity and his search for the soul mate. The Mahabharata is of ever-moving Mahaprasthna, which ends in an unending Vanaprastha. Jaina Thirthankarasmade India move with them as they incarnate according to the need of time.

Prophet Mohammed was travelling through and across a lot of primitive tribes to make them motivated and religious. Adi Sankara’s Advaitawas a journeying philosophy, the journey which, perhaps, made it logically invincible.

Similarly, theYathrascan be compared with the migrant or migrating soul and spirit of the human race. All major world religions’ originary narratives have in their core the pain and the experience of homelessness and of being refugees/migrants.

The Vedic-Upanishadicreligio-philosophical tradition experiences its profound spiritual and religious quest as a wandering race, which was seeking cultural refuge in a foreign land. Our epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are unparalleled narratives of losing home and becoming refugees. Judaism as a religious tradition keeps in its inner core the narrative of Abraham leaving his own land in search of a living space.

His descendants later are forced into an exodus as refugees in search of the Promised Land. Jesus of Nazareth was born as refugee and Christianity was a kingdom in exile and its members running from place to place to save their lives.

Islam will always keep alive the burning memories of the escape it had to make under the leadership of the Prophet from its birthplace to another city. Buddhism occupies a spiritual space of ever-moving religiosity. Sangha was primarily a refuge. Later, Buddhism becomes exiled from its own land of origination.

Contemporary Political Theorists and Philosophers tell us that the modern and postmodern figure of the human beings is that of the migrants. They say, “…in the ancient world, migrants were expelled from their territories by war and kidnapping; in the medieval world, they were expelled by enclosure and the removal of customary laws that bound them to the land; and in the modern world, they have been expelled by the capitalist accumulation of private property.
Although each dispossession of land is historically unique, each shares a common social kinetic function. Contemporary migration is part of this legacy.

Today, migrant farmworkers are expelled by industrial agriculture; indigenous peoples are expelled from their native lands by war and forced into the mountains, forests, or “waste lands”; and island peoples are expelled from their territory by the rising tides of climate change”.

Political Yathrascan visualize and concretize the refugees and the migrants as the people whoauthor their rights. They can distinguish between dialogue and demagogy. Perhaps, as Mahatma Gandhi showed us, they are one of the most subaltern political tools of all time, which cantransform people into demos.

(The author is Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Assam University, Silchar)