Cleaning our conscience

Recently, I saw the film Haider in a multiplex. Before the film began, the ubiquitous message about Swachh Bharat, combining the visions of Gandhi and Narendra Modi, filled the screen. This message is a brave one, going against what seems to be a fundamental ‘Indian’ impulse — throw the garbage in your neighbour’s space or any other place you like! It is also a brave move putting Gandhi as the centre of attention for a party which has deep antagonism towards him.

The juxtaposition of the swachh movement and a film about Kashmir was an interesting one. For me, the short message on ‘clean India’ became the dominant background against which I saw Haider. After all, both Narendra Modi and Vishal Bhardwaj are constructing narratives about cleaning: the former about cleaning the physical space of public India and the latter about cleaning our conscience. Gandhi becomes the central figure for both these activities. 

Cleaning is always a metaphorical act. There is little that is functional about the idea of cleaning. Some housewives clean as a cathartic act, some as a meditative act. Some derive great joy and sing while cleaning. Some others take out their anger and frustration while cleaning. Then you have those who do cleaning as a profession, a job for which they are paid, most often meagrely. Some people fetishise cleaning: just ask maids who have to labour to produce sparkling houses for employers. There is also a gender stereotype about cleaning: men are indifferent to cleaning, whereas women are not. 

Cleaning also has an important aesthetic element along with these psychological ones. Our houses are meant to be kept clean not just for reasons of health but also because the unclean is seen as the un-aesthetic. Cleaning, in this aesthetic sense, is not just to remove the dirt but it is also to replace that dirt with prettier things. Cleaning is not getting rid of but also involves the act of replacing and adding to. What kind of cleaning is Swachh Bharat about? 

Cleaning can accomplish two tasks: one is to bring back the original state after removal of the accumulated dirt and the other is to show something new after the act of cleaning. Susruta, often called as the world’s first surgeon, describes ‘dissecting’ human bodies not through cutting but through cleaning with brushes. This is a wonderful illustration of the power of cleaning: gently opening out the insides of that which is being cleaned.

Cleaning needs tools. The ubiquitous tool in India still remains the broom; it is also the tool of choice across millions of households. The brooms made of coconut strips are also used to clean plugged drains. And brooms have a larger role than merely getting rid of dirt: they get rid of ghosts as well and are commonly used in rituals to ward off evil spirits. Indeed the broom is the tool-of-all-trades. It also has a rich cultural world in which it is embedded: I am reminded of Rustom Bharucha’s work on the brooms which is captured so well in the documentary Jharu Katha.

The broom can only do so much. It can clean what has slowly and gently accumulated over time and what has mostly accumulated without our conscious awareness. Bad habits and negative thoughts drift down gently and become part of the furniture of our mind. Gandhi’s notion of cleaning was not just about the garbage out in the streets. It is about a deeper sense of cleaning — cleaning ourselves. And, most importantly, it is about cleaning our conscience. Our conscience gets filled with dust and accumulates a garbage of thoughts and beliefs. Perhaps, we should see the Swachh Bharat campaign as a call to clean our conscience as much as the dirt around us.

Cleaning our conscience is not easy. It needs a gentle broom to scrape off all the settled dust and pieces of garbage thrown on it by ourselves and various others. What brooms cannot do, literature and films can. Watching Haider was an act of the cleaning of my conscience. The senselessness of violence across conflicts in the world has been expressed with much anguish for millennia, and across cultures. But to see it once again happen around us is not pleasant. To see ordinary citizens being forced to show identity cards, obey curfew rules, get sucked under the influence of militancy, or find themselves crushed in the tussle of two elephants (as a dialogue in the film reminds us) is not just to see the way Kashmir was or is but also to see ourselves in the way we respond to the film. Art has the capacity to show possible futures as it were the living present — for those who think that the movie is about Kashmir, they are mistaken for it is about what can happen to any of us, anytime and anywhere. And art has an intrinsic capacity to show us truth which is not easily visible to us. 

It is essential to clean our conscience regularly, for it is through conscience that we make sense of things around us and even make sense of our true selves. Art and literature have the responsibility of being gatekeepers of our conscience, more so today than ever before. The act of cleaning may not be pleasant since being scrubbed out of our comfortable beliefs and desires is not an enjoyable act. But it is necessary at least for two reasons. One, conscience is a form of perception that influences what and how we see the world. Two, it is the possibility of a clean conscience that will make India a civilisation and not just another nation. 

The author is director of the Manipal Centre for Philosophy and Humanities, Manipal University