“…that any comparison of Marxism with religion 
is a two-way street, in which the former is 
not necessarily discredited by its association 
with the latter.”

—The Political Unconscious, Frederic Jameson 

John Abraham’s Amma Ariyan (1986) is a film that unequivocally espouses the time-spirit of 1970s insurgent India, which was in communication with the larger global thrusts towards communism. It is a tale of India’s tryst with disenchantment with bourgeoise democracy in the decades after “independence” and the loud dissension that follows in the wake of a “new democratic revolution” under the aegis of an influence borrowed from Mao’s China, most profoundly voiced by the leader Charu Mazumdar. This movement, widely known as Naxalbari—named after the place in North Bengal where it first came to be—became an ideological mantra around which thousands of young students, peasants, factory-workers and women organized themselves as guerrilla fighters to construct a new regime based on values of equality away from the decadent parliamentary democracy. The film emerges as a reflection about life in such times, from another province of India—Kerala—which also marked its presence in this ideological project for social and economic emancipation. In this brief essay, I propose to assert a different modality to read the moment of insurgency in India. I assert that this social and economic emancipation within the logic of communist politics, as Abraham shows, was in dialogue with a longer history of ruptures in Indian traditions: namely the primal ideological warfare that happened between Hinduism and Buddhism quite vehemently through early centuries, which led to a near decimation of the religion or, an appropriation into the Hindu fold by the 9^th century AD. It has already been demonstrated that the ideological differences between Buddhists and Hindus emerged out of their relationship with the caste-system, where the former wished to move beyond it while the latter upheld it. But more broadly Buddhist thought was a challenge to the Vedic idealism, its rite-based economy and vouched for a much more personal approach to the notion of the sacred: it was a turn to the world of human life, and that was based on the historical life of the people as well as their ‘consciousness.’ In other words, my project—as a comparatist—is to reveal the ways in which the language of rupture in the 1970s moment, as depicted in the film, fuses with the vocabulary of sacred traditions of India even when it continues to advance a thoroughly modern and rational means of critique against the bourgeoise (semi-colonial and semi-feudal?) democracy. To carry out this dialogue, I will pay attention to Purushan—the protagonist and story-teller—through whom we participate in the film, and the Buddhist notion of saṃvega alongside the notion of false consciousness/class consciousness question that Marx raises. 

Let us, in first instance, look at the most defining moment of the film which occurs about ten minutes into meeting Purushan. Purushan is leaving home to pursue higher studies in Delhi, and converses with his mother before walking out. We see him travelling through a narrow lane, crisscrossing strangers and double guessing his choice to leave the place. A while later, we see he dismounts from the taxi carrying him and a crowd is gathered on the street. The camera zooms into a corpse lying on a cot. We see Purushan surprised and worried, and soon, a voice-over (which is the “report” he is writing to the mother) takes the plot forward: “Ammi, I’m sure I know him.” As the most distinctive ‘conflict’ moment in the film, it establishes two specific facts we must now reckon with: first, that Purushan has left home and is now in the world; second, he has come across the reality of the world which will now shape him (and us, as onlookers.) The staging and arrival of this conception in the film is a rather easy and simple exploration of the inside-outside dichotomy which gives rise to the crux of the cinematic journey Abraham is about to take us into. By this I mean to highlight the experience of watching the building up of this scene, the procedures Abraham will take to arrive at a ‘resolution’ and the way it reactivates the memories from the pool of symbols that a culture has constructed. I cannot but be anecdotal here to establish the mythic significance that Purushan’s journey holds for onlookers like me. The repository of our cultural memories, particularly for me, is enmeshed with many stories of leaving home. For when I did leave home about eleven years ago to attend college in Delhi, from a nondescript city in India, it was my father who could barely come to show his concern and affection in any other form, reminded me of the story of Buddha leaving home as a token of advice. He anticipated that I will be moved by the world and perhaps I would need to decide what I wished to do with that hardship which I will encounter. In that story—which he used to narrate to me as bed-time stories since I was seven and has as many iterations as there are humans—Gautama, the prince who will later become Buddha, is on a tour outside his palatial residence and he comes across senescence, death, disease and ascetism (the “four sights”) which transform him. When he enters the palace again, his father—a King—arranges the dance of courtesans, but Buddha would no more be satisfied with anything. This experience transforms the worldview that he had so plainly been unaware of from the inside, and he is struck with a perplexity. It is this feeling of terror with urgency, the sense of deep existential unfreedom and of being worried about one’s own ignorance that Gautama portrays in saṃvega. In the Pali text Attadanda Suta, Buddha develops the grounding of this concept:

“When embraced, 

the rod of violence

            breeds danger & fear:
Look at the people quarrelling.
            I will tell of how
            I experienced
            saṃvega.

Seeing people floundering 

Like fish in small puddles,

Competing with one another—

 

as I saw this,

fear came into me.

 

The world was entirely

without substance.

All the directions 

were knocked out of line.

Wanting a haven for myself,

I saw nothing

that wasn’t laid claim to.

Seeing nothing in the end

but competition,

I felt discontent.

 

And then I saw

an arrow here.

so very hard to see,

embedded in the heart.

Overcome by this arrow

you run in all directions.

But simply

on pulling it out

 

you don’t run,

you don’t sink.”

In this, the notion of saṃvega emerges as a personal experience, an internal voice that, steadily, transforms itself into a new modality of thought. Rather than trying to solve the problem by

looking for a larger puddle for himself, Buddha advocates here, to see why people would want to be fish in the first place. In other words, the feeling of dismay with respect to the society takes the shape of a question, and then Buddha answers that with the prescience through which emerges a systemic praxis. More importantly, in the poem that I refer to above, Buddha describes the feeling of disturbance, as being hit by an “arrow” which takes us back to the most elusive of his teachings—papañca. In Buddha’s world papañca is a “mental proliferation” that creates an endless chatter of concepts taking us away from being present in the moment. For Buddha, there are two arrows: sufferings of the world which cannot be tamed (the first arrow) but the reaction that we demonstrate toward it (the second arrow) is under our control, and thus, the way in which we respond to that saṃvega, he argues, should not be through papañca. 

If we may return to Abraham’s film for a moment now, I wish to argue that Purushan’s reaction to the sight of the dead body, his adamant recollection of the death he notices on the street, his attempt to uncover the identity of Hari (whose story we never truly know for certain) is what I consider to be a moment of saṃvega—a moment of terror and urgency. Once Purushan has encountered the moment of profound reality of Hari’s death, he can no longer turn around and do his life in the way he had planned. My point here is to read Purushan’s quest, like Buddha’s, which is oriented towards a contemporary nibbāna, liberation. Abraham’s protagonist, Purushan’s journey, operating as a Buddha-figure in the narrative, opens for the audience a sensation of life strife with deep social and political inequality. Purushan moves from person to person, meeting different kinds of sufferings: once he meets a factory-worker who has lost his feet, at other times he finds himself amongst college students who are protesting fee-hikes, and our vision gets affected. Most clearly, in a scene where one of the characters has come to Vasu’s house, and while waiting for him, leafs through pages of an encyclopedia that depicts the goriest events of twentieth century life as well as moments of hope—the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Vietnam War, Bhopal Gas Tragedy, the ravages of missiles, the capture of Che Guevara by CIA, famines, and many more while we hear a woman reading another’s palm. The woman whose acousmatic voice takes over, speaks breathlessly about the familial life of Vasu’s while his mother silently listens. Abraham’s brilliance lies in the interweaving of these two seemingly disparate moments: he juxtaposes the interior world of these two women and their concerns about their immediate family to the broader, global machinations which impact the lives of their children, without a hint of ridicule. Abraham creates a seamless link to the world of outside for the onlooker who rests inside. Cinema becomes the moment, like Buddha’s entourage across the city, that invokes saṃvega in the audience, as it did for the person who was waiting for Vasu, too. Towards the end of the film, however, Purushan exclaims he wishes to share the political beliefs of others like Hari, but he cannot and that remains perhaps a sense of failure for him. Abraham’s protagonist is an astute observer, a person involved in the task of changing the world by taking account of that saṃvega, but at the end the liberation remains elusive. In this sense, the quest of the film, by positing an individual (who keeps gathering a crowd, in a singularly repetitive ritual of going to their home, meeting the mother and including the new son, which keeps happening in every sequence) for a common cause, much like Buddha, is a masterful re-creation of a historical experience within the modern circumstance, but where the teleology is unfinished, yet to be drawn out and is oriented toward the onlooker’s participation. 

It may sound incredibly comical, or even legitimately outlandish to make any comparison of Abraham’s film, his politics, and the subject-matter of his art that directly corresponds to an intensely political moment set in the 1970s, and is imbued in communism to that of Buddha’s saṃvega. I would suggest perhaps it is not so unlikely. Though Abraham has no such direct references to Buddha in his film, nor do we find any indirect allusions, the protagonists’ name “Purushan” is an allusion to the Puruṣa (male) and Prakṛti (female) relation in the Sanskrit as well as Pali worldviews. The Puruṣa and Prakṛti, together form the world of illusions, the prapañca in which we live, obfuscated from the true self, and from which we must move away to attain a better existence. Purushan and his mother, Hari and his, or the countless other mother-son pairs open a world of illusions, prapañcas for us. Each of them shows suffering, hope, life and its fragilities in their own right and we, the onlookers need to stand up to that world of illusions: where do we work from and how? The point of my relationality between the two, at the outset, is an attempt at grounding a critical legacy from within the tradition of the cinema’s locale. But can we not attempt to envision saṃvega in the light of a materialist philosophy that Marx proclaimed so clearly in The German Ideology? If so, we may perhaps want to understand the sacred and the profane, the modern and the pre-modern in a continuum of our human experience. 

Works Cited

1. Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. “Sam̧vega, ‘Aesthetic Shock.’” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol. 7, no. 3, 1943, pp. 174–79. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2718013.
2. Thapar, Romila. “Imagined Religious Communities? Ancient History and the Modern Search for a Hindu Identity.” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 23, no. 2, 1989, pp. 209–31. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/312738.