by Rustom Bharucha

This is the written version of a lecture delivered at the Lift Festival, Riverside Studios, July 3, 2001
In this presentation Rustom Bharucha (see biography below) reflects critically on the gap between past and future, he begins by asking a question - ‘where are we at this point of time?’ - posited at a juncture in time (the start of the ‘new millennium’), a moment of restructuring for Lift (the process of ‘un-framing’ the biennial festival format having begun) and a point of review and revaluation for himself. He evokes a journey with different paths taken, unpredictable and serendipitous; with divergence but also convergence.

It’s a pleasure to return to Lift. In 1993, Rose Fenton and Lucy Neal had invited me to speak on ‘Somebody’s Other’—a provocative title that compelled me to make my first articulation in public on the subject of religious sectarianism or ‘communalism’ (as it is known in the subcontinent). Over the years I’ve been witnessing the normalization of this phenomenon within the growing hegemony of the Hindu Right in India, and I’ve also been observing the different manifestations of sectarianism burgeoning in different parts of the world. A sectarianism that is increasingly more imbricated in the larger narrative of globalization.

In response to this collusion of globalization and communalism, I’ve written a new book The Politics of Cultural Practice, where I find myself positioned today at a very different point in time from 1993, when Theatre and the World had just come out. Indeed, Lift itself is positioned at a very transitional point in time, as it prepares to restructure the format of the ‘festival’ in which it has gained tremendous success over the last twenty years. In this lecture, I would like to reflect on a certain convergence in our agendas today, a meeting point, which does take me by surprise, because Lift and I haven’t really kept in touch in the intervening years. We’ve gone our separate ways, and yet, we meet up again, rather like travellers in a journey that cannot be fully predicted. So I’d like to reflect on journeys, differing routes, meeting points, and divergences.

Let me begin by throwing open a question for all of us: Where are we at this point in time? Speaking for myself, I would say that I find myself at a very critical juncture that cannot be explained through the millennium (if indeed it was the millennium), which has already passed, leaving you in London with an empty dome—a very telling sign indeed of the ‘sound and fury’ animating spectacles of the state which amount to ‘nothing’. I think we need to interpret this juncture in time more critically, more introspectively, as a ‘gap’ between past and future.

Here I draw on the philosopher Hannah Arendt’s remarkable book Between Past and Future, in which she calls our attention to a parable by Kafka, which she re-interprets as a ‘thought-landscape’. In this landscape, we are presented with a battleground—a ‘fighting-line’—in which the protagonist is positioned in the middle of two forces—time past and time future—converging onto him. Arendt hypothesizes that had he not inserted himself in the middle, these two forces, rather like missiles in a Star Wars narrative, might have clashed and neutralized each other. Given this grim possibility of extinction, Kafka’s protagonist dreams of jumping out of the fighting-line, so that he can assume the position of a celestial umpire looming over the two warring antagonists. But this is a transcendental solution, and it is not agreeable to Arendt, and I daresay it is not agreeable to us, because we can’t opt out of where we are positioned today—the juncture is far too critical.