April is indeed the cruellest month: Of T.S. Eliot and The Waste Land that India has Become
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain. — The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot
This may be the first April in my life that T.S. Eliot’s famous lines made any sense to me. April — a symbol of spring, sun, flowers and festivities — the cruelest.
For a world shutdown by quarantines.
For a country ravaged by a virus.
The videos capturing helpless cries for oxygen and medicines, photos of bodies burning even as others pile up at the crematoriums…
You can almost feel the stench of death and despair coming out of those photos.
Wait. I am not talking about the bodies and cremations. I know they aren’t suited for our fine Indian sensibilities.
Instead let’s look at the grand project that the Indian government is building for itself.
“The monstrous monument to Narendra Modi’s ego: As millions suffer in pandemic, India’s narcissistic Prime Minister is building a vast folly at a cost that could fund 40 major hospitals. Now his nation is in uproar.”
That’s a headline in Daily Mail. Yes, a headline. Only it read like an intro.
Yes, Mail is known to sensationalize news. Let’s look at another one.
“Modi’s pandemic choice: Protect his image or protect India. He chose himself.” — ran The Washington Post.
Still sensational?
Oh right, death offends our sensibilities.
And so does “Western” criticism of our “internal affairs”.
Let’s cut out the death and despair.
Let’s look at the grandness of the grand Central Vista plan.
Grand, did you say?
“Symbolic of self reliance,” said the Indian Prime Minister.
Whose self reliance?
Estimated to cost around INR 200 billion (US$2.8 billion), the project aims to revamp a 3-km stretch on the Rajpath between Rashtrapati Bhavan and India Gate, create a new Central Secretariat, a new Parliament building near the present one, new residence and office for the Vice President and the Prime Minister, among others. It is expected to be completed by August 2022 to mark 75 years of India’s Independence.
Let’s look at the photographs again. Work going on in full swing amid a raging pandemic.
Don’t go away. I am not talking of the deaths.
But can we talk about the workers? As the virus runs riot across the National Capital, have these poor laborers been vaccinated? Are they in PPE suits at least? What about the logistical issues of moving them every day in a locked-down capital?
And most importantly, why is this project an “essential service” right now?
Still sensational? Okay.
Let’s move to something else. The grandness of the plan.
The pristine Rajpath torn apart and 100-plus-year-old jamun and neem trees uprooted. The entire stretch barricaded by ugly yellow metal dividers. The beautiful water fountains dug out. A dirty, dusty orange filling up the air.
For the show must go on.
There are no families lazing around, no kids playing football, no ice-cream and balloon sellers loitering to make a sale. Of course, they haven’t been there for over a year since the pandemic struck.
Who goes out in a pandemic?
Why should the families be there on the Rajpath? Is this a picnic?
Oh yes! Sorry, no.
A grand Central Vista in the heart of the Capital. Symbolizing the seat of power.
Now, that sounds grand!
But can you imagine London without the Big Ben? Or devoid of the Houses of Parliament sitting on the Thames in its full Gothic Revival glory holding history in its walls?
Or Moscow without the Red Square after the collapse of the Soviet Union? Or even before, imagine the post-revolution USSR pulling down the Kremlin. It was after all linked to all the most important historical and political events in Russia since the 13th century.
Can you imagine the Lafayette Square surrounding the White House, with its historic buildings, the sprawling seven-acre park and public art, disappearing one fine day?
To be replaced by ugly buildings.
To house the government. You say.
Oh yes, I heard you.
The seat of power. It needs to be consolidated.
While nothing that lives is allowed to grow there — not trees, birds, monkeys, squirrels, crickets. Nor human beings.
“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.”
Back to Eliot.
When Eliot says April is the “cruelest month”, he is not really making a general statement about April as we know it — the harbinger of spring and joy.
Eliot is talking as an inhabitant of a bizarre, post-Modernist fantasy realm he called “the Waste Land”.
A land profoundly shaped by a global pandemic.
Not many know that Eliot wrote this famous poem after the last global pandemic that shut down the world — the Spanish Flu. In fact, he and his wife caught the Flu in 1918, and he penned The Waste Land after recovering from it.
In her book Viral Modernism, Elizabeth Outka reveals the literary and cultural impact of the Spanish Flu and how it shaped the post-War/pandemic literature, something that we have long called “Modernist”.
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
In this passage, Eliot overlays Dante’s Inferno onto the London cityscape. London seems full of not living souls but the dead who are on their way to hopeless damnation.
I had not thought death had undone so many
as passed before me in that mournful train. — Inferno, III, 49–54
Replace the London Bridge with any of bridges over the Yamuna in the Indian capital. And you get the drift.
In The Waste Land, Eliot seems trapped in a land incapable of growth, productivity, or renewal. He uses a dramatic monologue, changing narrators, locations, and timelines continuously, drawing on an array of historical, mythical and popular cultural symbolisms to present the terror and futility of modern life in the wake of the First World War.
Or was it the pandemic?
A pandemic marked by not only deaths, but also by the loneliness brought about by quarantines and physical isolation.
“My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
“Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
“What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
“I never know what you are thinking. Think.”
I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
Dead men did lose their bones. For we collect the ashes and the bones after cremating the departed. Asthi we call it. To pour in the holy river.
The holy river did you say?
Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence,
Then spoke the thunder…
Bodies found floating in the river.
Bodies that could not be cremated. Flung in the holy river. Perhaps by grieving families, sick and gasping for oxygen themselves, who could not find a cremation slot in some faraway village.
Bodies flowing down the river, thousands of miles.
May they find peace in the holy river.
Critics say Eliot was particularly inspired by the myth of the Fisher King, most famously embodied in the Arthurian story of the quest for the holy grail. The Fisher King is impotent, his lands infertile and drought-stricken.
April is the cruelest month because in non-Waste Land it stands for hope.
In the Waste Land, nothing can be crueler than hope. Because hope only leads to disappointment. And disappointments often hurt.
In the Waste Land, April hurts most. By mocking us with the chances that we lost, possibilities that can never be realized.
The Waste Land is the narrative of an entire culture caught in crisis.
