The 125th birth anniversary of Federico García Lorca (1898-1936), the dramatist and victim of the Spanish civil war, is being observed the world over this year. Lorca’s plays, especially the trilogy of Blood Wedding (1933), Yerma (1934) and The House of Bernarda Alba (1936), have exerted a compelling influence on more than one art form.
Fashioning his Rukmavati ki Haveli on The House of Bernarda Alba in 1991, the filmmaker, Govind Nihalani, transported his viewers to a village in Rajasthan at the beginning of the 20th century. After Rukmavati’s husband dies, she decrees a five-year period of mourning for the family which means wearing black and the cessation of all social intercourse. But her five young daughters, like their Spanish sisters in the Lorca original, can barely take the renunciation. In the end, as passion and the seething will to live get the better of matriarchal exhortations of class, honour and tradition within a feudal ambience, tragedy shatters the unquiet silence of mourning. But even as her youngest daughter hangs herself after a nocturnal tryst with an unseen stranger, a shaken yet unbending Rukmavati declares, “My daughter died a virgin,” which is a lie, as pathetic and powerless as a host of other lies produced by authoritarianism.
While critiquing the policing mentality of tyrants, big and small, Rukmavati ki Haveli conveys a warning against those elements in the Indian polity who would want to arrest the march of history for their narrow gains. Such elements, once strong in the Hindi-speaking heartland but now given to flexing their muscles in previously untouched territories, would think nothing of setting the clock of civilisation back.
Lorca suffered a violent end when he was not yet 40 because he saw through the absurdities and cruelties of the politics of status quo and persecution, expressing himself memorably in poems, plays and other writings. These were characterised by a quiet outrage against feudalism, ultra-religiosity and militarism. In one and the same breath, he alienated the church, the landed aristocracy, and the army — a more lethal combination of reactionary forces would be difficult to imagine. In continuing to recall Lorca almost nine decades after his assassination, people all over the world honour the profound ideas he expressed with poetic fervour and the shining ideals for which he perished.
It is not difficult to follow why Lorca seems especially relevant to contemporary India. The reactionary rhetoric that has come to grip a sizeable section of Indians today promises instant retribution to anyone opposing the inherent shortsightedness.
Patriotism overdone has been a safe and profitable refuge for many a wayward element. Bertrand Russell was proved correct when he held this position during the War years, but not without causing himself considerable trouble at the hands of British hawks and warmongers. In more recent times, the late scholar and educationist, Edward Said, had articulated the same point of view in many of his distinguished speeches and writings. Addressing students and teachers of Jawaharlal Nehru University and Delhi University some years before his death, Said made many friends and not a few enemies when he dismissed exaggerated notions of patriotism. He was categorical that societies tolerant of hyper-patriotism have paid a heavy price by passing into the choking embrace of obscurantists and fundamentalists.
Lorca was a patriot to the extent to which his poet’s instinct and lyrical temperament, his social conscience, and his understanding of the political realities of the day allowed him to be. He loathed fanaticism, which many make the mistake of construing to be their duty to their country and to the people. Judging by the way things are shaping up in the hands of ultra-nationalists in power, aided and abetted in their designs by opportunists and hangers-on, there is an important lesson for Indians here, which they may fail or refuse to acknowledge at their own peril.
Vidyarthy Chatterjee writes on Cinema, Society and Politics
