NOTES

Economic & Political Weekly EPW may 10, 2014 vol xlIX no 19
75
An Engagement with Camus
Thirty Years and Two Disparate
Social Imaginaries
Makarand Sathe
Existentialism and writers like
Albert Camus have inuenced
literature and thought, including
in India, since the 1960s. This
account of the engagement of an
Indian writer from his teens to
maturity with Camus tries to
look at this inuence, its validity
and its relationship with the
Indian social imaginary. It argues
that the content of the absurd
and the realisation of the
limitations of modernity
were very different in Indian
conditions from those prevalent
in post-war Europe, even though
there were overlaps.
This was an invited paper at the conference on
Perspectives globales sur sa vie, son oeuvre et
son heritage held on 3 and 4 December 2013
organised by four universities in Paris to
celebrate Camus centenary.
Makarand Sathe (makdhan@vsnl.com) is a
Marathi playwright, novelist and theatre
historian based in Pune.
D
ear Albert Camus,
Any relationship in which one
party knows the other quite
closely and the other is totally oblivious
of the rst is a weird relationship. We
share such a relationship. So my friend,
with whom I have developed closer ties
and growing differences over the last
three decades and more, spread over
vast difference in time and place, let me
take this opportunity to reduce this imbal-
ance that has existed in our relationship.
Can I nd a better place than Paris
and a better time than a conference on
your centenary to do so? A number of
wonderful intellectuals and great acad-
emicians have gathered here and let me
confess that I am a bit bogged down. I
doubt if they would accept a personal
letter to you, from a creative writer from
a faraway country like India, in a
conference as a paper. But I am sure you
would have welcomed the idea. I am
equally certain that you would have
been sympathetic towards a creative
writer facing all these intellectuals and
critics. So let me launch into what I want
to tell you about my relationship with
you over the last 30 years starting from
the point I got acquainted with you
through The Outsider in the late 1970s
and early 1980s.
The Outsider A Perspective
I must confess I did not understand The
Outsider at all then. But at the same
time, I was totally amazed by it. I am not
ashamed of this fact as your close friend
and fellow writer Sartre has expressed
similar feelings (Sartre 2010). To start
with the novel itself was an outsider in
the eld of literature as he writes in his
essay. It was even more of an outsider in
Indian conditions and for my age. Then I
read your other works as well. I had just
passed my teens and was in a rebellious
mood. I was not satised with all the
efforts that were being made to under-
stand my civilisation and its situation at
that time through literature coming out
of my mother tongue, Marathi.
The conditions around me were also
very different from yours. We were deal-
ing with a peculiar kind of socialism
which by then was no more a cause of
elation but of frustration. Puritanical
ideological pursuit was still attractive to
most. We had just been through a period
of Emergency. My country was barely
coming out of the rst phase of its
encounter with modernity a somewhat
subconscious phase of hatred of and
infatuation with modernity. We had now
come consciously face to face with
the discontinuity that was produced
because of this encounter between western
project of modernity and our traditional
world view, which was a product of last
two and a half millennia. The rupture
that was produced by this encounter
was different than yours. It was produced
not by a process that was spread over
three or more centuries as it happened
in Europes transition to modernity, but
by a sudden encounter between two
unrelated world views.
This was to produce a feeling of rup-
ture that had come to stay with us, right
from our contact with the colonial British
rule from early 19th century. We had al-
ways felt the heat of this encounter but it
was in the late 1970s and early 1980s
that we really came to understand that
the discontinuity it had produced has
come to stay with us, that we would
not feel united, either as a person or
as a civilisation, that we would feel torn
for many more centuries to come if
not for ever.
Your Modernity, Our Modernity
We knew by then, that we have to nd a
different content for our modernity
but were not sure what that would be. I
have always felt that the role played by
two world wars in the formation of the
European mind in early- and mid-20th
century has been played, albeit with
NOTES
may 10, 2014 vol xlIX no 19 EPW Economic & Political Weekly
76
many differences, by this discontinuity
in India. One of the common results of
this discontinuity was the stark reali-
sation of the absurd. Naturally your fas-
cination with the absurd, your philosophi-
cal position on the absurd, and your con-
cern for lack of unity, touched my
young, rebellious and dissatised mind.
What bafed me then was that I did
not understand why I was so moved by
you, and why I felt close to you. Neither
did I understand why I was also not
totally in tune with you, what exactly
made me feel somewhat separate from
you. Both these emotions have persisted
and have become more and more clear
to me over the last three decades, as I
got more and more acquainted with you,
as well as more conscious theoretically
about the discontinuity that I have
been talking about.
After the 1990s the conditions changed
and I read your work again and met you
in different conditions altogether, when
we had faced another onslaught in India,
that of globalisation, of the realisation
that not only our modernity had to be
different but there were many different
modernities even in the West as Sudipta
Kaviraj seems to imply in his essay on
modernity (Kaviraj 2005). This realisation
that there were many modernities also
brought to my notice that there was a
spectrum of absurdities as well. This was
more evident with globalisation but ear-
lier too I could sense this when I read with
writers like Kafka, Beckett and Ionesco.
Fragmentation after the 1990s
My fragmented world after the 1990s,
where the fragments slowly stopped
identifying with each other, became
even more troublesome than the bipolar
discontinuity that I have been talking
about. The sharp and often stark divi-
sions in your world, be it on religious,
political, ideological or cultural lines,
were emanating from the relatively stable,
logically coherent and historically iden-
tiable frameworks. It was yet to turn
itself into a chaos of the atomising world
of today, where the social, political,
cultural groups constantly disintegrate
into smaller and smaller universes with
decreasing identication, understanding
and tolerance for each other.
This process of disintegration even
lters down to a single individual, who
further gets fragmented into tiny pieces
not resembling or identifying with each
other any more. My world now is com-
posed of such fragmented individuals
who are simultaneously members of
hundreds of small universes either un-
related to each other or colliding with
each other. Not only these small universes
but also the tiny fragments within every
individual exist in different historical
times. This compelled coexistence of
the premodern, modern and the post-
modern having no alternative than to
deal with each other, constitutes the
absurd in this world. It is as if the
consciousness of rupture itself is lost, as
if now we dont need unity. Your rupture
and mine in the 1970s were different
from each other; but this rupture from
the beginning of the new millennia is
vastly different from both.
This made me go back to you, over the
last few years. Despite the vast change
that occurred from the late 1970s to the
1990s and further till today, your The
Outsider worked for me again, albeit in a
different sense than what you might
have intended. Now the absurdity was
strongly felt even by a common person,
in her routine daily life. This may be at
a subconscious level but it existed and
excited the common person. I could see
it around me.
An Indian Journey with Camus
A letter can never hope to communicate
the identity and relationship of the writer
to his friend in entirety. What I plan to
do is to talk about my journey from my
earlier encounter with you and that of
today on the background of our respec-
tive social imaginaries. It is not easy
wading through these three decades, in
search of the course of my relationship
with you. Arguably, the changes that
have occurred over this period in my
world are more than what occurred over
the last three centuries. As a result, we in
India have started living in many times
at the same time from the prehistoric to
the postmodern. It is a cauldron full of
complex mix of such diverse elements
that the sense of absurd it produces is
even more thick in nature. So let me
go back to narrating in what state I met
you to start with in some more detail.
Back in late 1970s it was different
for my generation the impressions
samskara of the traditional were still
quite alive. I was born luckily or un-
luckily in a family which was extremely
conscious of traditions and at the same
time quite modern, intellectual and
academic. I am the odd one out, an
architect by profession, one of the rare
ones without a masters degree or a PhD.
As a consequence, even though, I had
serious in the European sense modern
atmosphere around me, on the other
hand I was steeped in old philosophical
thought. I, like most others in India, was
introduced through cultural tools to
basic tenets of Hinduism, Buddhism, our
mythological traditions and values cheri-
shed through them, without even read-
ing the relevant philosophies. Isnt this
how social imaginaries are created? I
knew my Mahabharata, Ramayana and
Gita. My teacher told me in seventh
standard that it was the Europeans who
wrongly claim that there have been two
world wars; actually there have been
four, two earlier ones, one of Mahabharata
and the other of Ramayana. And Gita,
the core text of Hinduism, was born out
of one of these wars.
Philosophy, that Gita preaches, also,
in one sense deals essentially with the
absurd, with reference to war, death and
violence. But it deals with it so differently
from the modern European intellect. It
was through the basic tenets of the
philosophy of Gita, that I had learned
from childhood, that life was in a sense
absurd, we wrongly feel that we were
the doers when in reality it was some
bigger scheme of things that is unfold-
ing. But then why should I think at all
before acting? That is the central ques-
tion related to absurdity. How and why
should I act, what can be called a moral
act, is there one at all?
According to Gita, I should act accord-
ing to what is my lot or my duty, I
should do my karma according to my
dharma without bothering for the
rewards Karmanyevadhikaraste ma
phaleshu kadachana in Sanskrit. It teach-
es to deal with death differently from
the way you deal with it, Albert. And its
NOTES
Economic & Political Weekly EPW may 10, 2014 vol xlIX no 19
77
teachings are also related to a grand
war, that of Mahabharata; a parallel to
your second world war.
Nearly all the philosophical inuences
from Indian tradition, other than Gita as
well, also talked in similar voice about
death and absurdity of human life, quite
different from yours. For example, in
contrast to your Caligula who says Men
die and they are not happy (Camus 2006),
our great 17th century saint Tukaram
had said that he could see his death in
his lifetime and it had become a happy
occasion, one which had no parallel,
which he devoured and enjoyed through
all his senses. (In Marathi it reads
Aapule maran pahile mya dola, to jala
sohala anupamya.)
This was vastly different, you see.
Absurdity of death was still there, but
the reaction of my social imaginary was
extremely different. It had seeped into
my mind deeply. Similarly Hindu philo-
sophy basically believes in the oneness
of the living world, humans as well as
non-humans. This too made your expe-
rience of torn-ness very different from
my sense of discontinuity.
Same is the teaching of Upanishads.
And Buddha is no different. All claim
that this sense of anguish, anxiety, is not
because of the existential condition, but
because of my avidya my ignorance
about its true nature. They are basically
very humble, not so self-absorbed. The
question is when one is living within
the limitations imposed by reason and
death, how does one avoid this anguish?
The Western answer to it is somewhat
more self-indulgent and rebellious against
this state of nature.
In a sense, Hindu philosophy is on one
hand even more individualistic, it makes
one renounce the world, but on the other
it takes one back to society. Buddha says,
by achieving individual transcendence
you can only become ready for nirvana,
you can only become an Arhat and not a
Buddha. You can become the latter only
by going back to society. Hinduism has a
similar concept of Loksangraha going
back to the masses without which there
is no moksha. In a sense both Indian and
western thought realise the limitations
of reason and inevitability of death. But
the traditional Indian way is to bow
before it, to be humble. It claims that
you should be more detached from how
reality appears to you maya and
realise the real reality. For these philo-
sophies, both nihilism and hedonism
arise out of ignorance avidya. Gandhi,
our latest ideologue, was no different,
though far more political. Modern
western way is much more violent and
self-indulgent and as a consequence
nihilist. The idea of absurdity as seen by
these two imaginaries and our reaction
to death was different mainly because
our ideas about collectivities were dif-
ferent. The problem was that I was
attracted to both.
But I am no student of philosophy,
leave aside being a master. What I am
talking about is my background when I
was introduced to you, my dear Albert.
This was my background. But at the
same time I had also been introduced
to modernity, science and reason. I was
an ardent student and follower of
modernity. I was rebellious. I was totally
against the idea of renunciation that was
inherent in the Indian traditional world
view and its spiritual and metaphysical
support structure. I was fascinated by
secular modern European thought. I was
just barely introduced to leftist ideology.
I used to have huge debates with my
grandfather and my mother. I was in
an emotional turmoil, not being satised
by either.
Lonely World of The Outsider
That is when I read The Outsider rst.
I was shocked at the nihilism. It terri-
ed me, it challenged my inherited
thought and emotions, with which I was
in an ambiguous relationship anyway.
My reaction to modernity, science and
reason was equally ambiguous. The Out-
sider was a product of a totally different
social imaginary. It was not fed on Indian
philosophies and mythology, but was
rooted in Christianity, modern European
philosophy and Greek mythology. I was
soon to read Myth of Sisyphus you see,
and I was even more devastated. At the
same time I was thrilled by your bare
to the bone modern way, the pitiless
lucidity of your protagonist (Sartre 2010:
159) while targeting modernity itself. I
was encountering a modernity different
from the one to which we were exposed
by our colonial rulers. Now I came face
to face with European modernism; it
was very different from the Anglo-Saxon
one, and I was thrilled.
I started writing passages miming you,
Albert! Without me even knowing con-
sciously I started following The Outsider
in my own writing. These passages
still remain unpublished. I doubt if I
will ever expose them thus; they are
so naive! I just took them out last
week, from my cupboard where my old
work lies buried harmlessly, dusted
them and had a look at them before
writing this. They are as aloof as your
outsider in their approach, but they are
so free of violence that is so basic to
your approach which was inspired in a
sense by the world wars! My disenchant-
ment with my world then, compared to
yours with your world, was intellectu-
ally far immature and rudimentary.
Well, some would argue that this has
hardly changed even now but that is
besides the point; neither do I mimic
you any more, you see!
Anyway, what is more important is
that my approach even when I was
following you was different and now I
realise, that this difference was a result
of my aloofness arising not of violent
wars, not out of realisation of futility of
reason and death, but out of the discon-
tinuity I subconsciously felt between
the world view I had inherited through
Indian culture and mythology on one
hand; attraction of modernity, reason and
secular, materialistic ideologies on the
other, and me being not totally satised
with either on the third. To confound the
confusion, as Sudipta Kaviraj writes,
this duality between modernity and
tradition is not as bilinear as it seems
(Kaviraj 2005). The society around me
available at
Oxford Bookstore-Mumbai
Apeejay House
3, Dinshaw Vacha Road
Mumbai 400 020
Ph: 66364477
NOTES
may 10, 2014 vol xlIX no 19 EPW Economic & Political Weekly
78
was equally confused by it. The trajectory
of modernity of my world was different
from that of Europe (ibid: 508).
Naturally the disillusionment with
modernity also set in much later, to a
much lesser degree and in a different
way. The result was that my aloofness
was always accompanied by a contradic-
tory sense of concern! I realise this now.
Then I was just shocked, to put it in a
word, by your world view. These two
social imaginaries are just too different
from each other. Albert, even if you just
compare the reaction of your Caligula to
the death of his sister with the reaction
of Buddha to death and human suffer-
ing, this difference will be quite clear. I
was fed on this anecdote from Buddhas
life in my early childhood. No surprise
that I was shocked by your Caligula as
well! Why Caligula, western approach to
Buddha himself shocks me even today.
Our history, not only ancient but even
modern history, makes us approach
Buddha very differently.
So, shock it was, but I was also attracted
to your sense of irreverence, anarchism,
nihilism and anguish. There is anguish
in Gita, Upanishads and Buddha as well
but that is of such a different kind. It
made me think consciously. What was it
that was tearing me such? How was it
different from your feeling of lack of
unity and your anguish over it? I started
reading more European ction then. I
read Dostoyevsky and Sartre and Kafka. I
read the history of the second world war
and the history of western philosophy.
And I also got introduced more con-
sciously to Indian intellectual tradition
from Buddhism to Gandhi. I read
haphazardly and tried to meet you at
some point. This has been a weird jour-
ney which has two simultaneous direc-
tions, one towards you and the other
away from you.
Absurdity versus Drudgery of Life
As I slowly began to understand through
my undisciplined but eager effort what you
meant and who you were, two questions
slowly started emerging Who am I?
And, why do I write? These questions
were naturally related to my surround-
ing and my inheritance both ancient
and modern, Indian and European.
Slowly, my fascination with death was
taken over by my concern for exploita-
tion and sheer poverty which were
rampant in my surroundings. Sure, there
was existential agony and anxiety. Death
too was there. But the focus changed. At
one point your Caligula says, If the treas-
ury has paramount importance, human
life has none (Camus 2006). True, but on
the other hand, when the question how
to get your bread tomorrow becomes
of paramount importance, death as an
abstract concept has no importance. You
really do not need a Marx to tell you
this. I started thinking that you Albert
and your friends were taking the absurd
too seriously. Why should I write and
for whom? Why should they be reading
about my existential angst when the life
itself was such a burden materially? I
thought it is absurd to be too concerned
about absurdity.
Ironically such thoughts brought me
back to the question of the absurd. But
by now I was against your other related
preoccupation of earlier times nihilism.
I continued to be fascinated by you as
the thought of the ultimate condition of
absurdity always remained at the back
of my mind. I always turned to The
Outsider whenever I was faced with the
inevitable anguish of modernity. But
I must confess Albert, such incidents
became less in number over time.
I rst drifted towards surreal themes
and then to ideological issues and politics.
I felt an immense need to understand
patterns of exploitation and social mech-
anisms. After the mid-1990s there was
further shift away from ideologies and
I started focusing more on moral
issues. It was then that I remembered
your The Plague again. I read it again
and was not startled this time but got
immensely engrossed in how you had
tried to understand the moral problems,
politically as well as philosophically at
one go. How you were still bothered
being united, and how I too was torn
in a different way by then. I was so
happy by your tone of aloof concern,
for the want of a better term, that I was
striving to achieve, rst unconsciously
and later quite consciously. I liked the
way you avoided making your prota-
gonist heroic but treated him more as
a human being. I liked the way you
transcended the traces of self absorp-
tion in this phase.
The Rebel Dening Nihilism
Then I read your The Rebel and I could
sense something of the old Camus back
again. This rebel was a philosophical
being and it again struck me how differ-
ent the ideas of rebellion are in our two
social imaginaries. I also realised that it
is wrong to blame this nihilism entirely
on the two world wars though they did
contribute to it. This kind of violent self-
centred world view is in the nature of
individualistic modernism itself. It is
obsessed with the issue of reasonable
basis for justice and secular basis for
social interaction and morality.
This is something I was and am till
now seriously engrossed in. But moder-
nity cant nd the basis in reason and
so we become nihilist, maybe out of the
spiritual vacuum of Europeans, as the
Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk claims at
one point. I was not ready to turn into a
nihilist, as you too fought to avoid it by
the time of The Rebel. Probably we need
a different kind of faith to tackle this
human predicament and this issue has
been debated in my world from my
childhood till today, even by a few
staunch Marxists.
You yourself write in The Rebel that,
Men of action, when they are without
faith, have never believed in anything
but action (Camus 2000). Here you
were close to what I was sensing but
not entirely. There were similarities but
there were differences as well. But that
was to be expected. For that matter
Gandhis non-violence and compassion
was very different from that of Christ. I
was again torn between two ends, I
could not unite them regardless of how
much I wanted and tried.
However, I was by now in total agree-
ment with your negation of nihilist
escapism and that is where the two
social imaginaries now met to a certain
extent though not completely (ibid: 233).
Samantha Novello says, The way in
which the western world conceives of
power in terms of effective action and the
Oriental ideal of contemplation, under-
stood to mean a withdrawal from the
NOTES
Economic & Political Weekly EPW may 10, 2014 vol xlIX no 19
79
world and internalization of the western
outward struggle for domination, are
two sides of the same nihilist coin
(Novello 2010). Are they? This question
arises because we dene nihilism dif-
ferently. In fact nihilism has been
dened in so many different ways that I
am left bafed. I realised that the same
can be said about loneliness. According
to Yoga, to be alone is to be whole or
full. It was similar to the Gita and a
large chunk of Hinduism. The way in
which modernity makes us lonely is
very different and you were concerned
about the latter. Problem was I was con-
cerned about both.
Then I came across the famous debate
between you and Sartre. This was some-
thing that was much closer to the very
questions I was trying to grapple with
then. That debate played a key role in
my understanding of reality around me
and my own position in it. I must confess
that I was not entirely on your side, but
neither was I totally opposed to you. By
now the troublesome discontinuity in
my reality had given way to total frag-
mentation as India started going global.
Now, to be socially conscious about this
changing reality became of such para-
mount importance to me that nihilism
lost its attraction totally. Though I must
confess that on a purely emotional level
the rising density of absurdity faced in
everyday life pulls me back again to The
Outsider at times.
The Plague When the Twain Met
However, it was then that I remem-
bered The Plague for the third time.
I read it again and attempted to weigh
in the complex moral issues it talks
about on the background of hard times.
This is so much different from The
Outsider. Is it a global truth that most
writers travel from being brilliant at
the beginning to being wise in their
later years? In The Plague you are so
much wiser than brilliant. In the novel
there is a key dialogue between your
protagonist Dr Rieux and Tarrou, in
which Rieux says,
...When I entered this profession, I did it
abstractedly, so to speak; because I had
desire for it, because it meant a career like
another, one that young men often aspire
to. Perhaps, too, because it was particularly
difcult for a workmans son, like myself...
And then I had to see people die. Do you
know there are some who refuse to die? ...
And then I saw that I could never get hard-
ened to it. I was young then, and I was out-
raged by the whole scheme of things, or so I
thought. Subsequently, I grew more modest...
(Camus 2010).
This, I feel, is true about yourself as
well, Albert. Modest, humble that
was close to my social imaginary, when
dealing with the reality of death and
absurdity. Now, I too could understand
you better. Now, in this case, the chasm
between our respective social imaginaries
had reduced. Both of us had walked a bit
towards each other while we advanced in
years at the same time. You even wrote,
The evil that is in the world always
comes of ignorance (ibid: 127) which
was again so close to my own inheritance.
I had come over my discomfort at my
discontinuity, at least to a certain extent
and was more focused now. This novel
gave me deep satisfaction then, which I
had not associated with you earlier.
But in a few years I was to turn around
another corner. By now, I had shifted
from the overtly political and at least
partly ideological world view to a much
mellower look at the world. I, by now,
accepted the fallibility of a human being
much more than I was previously ready
to. Is this what happens with growing
years, Albert? Or do some people get
ready for this much earlier than you and
me? Does this make them more intense
or less? I think less. I am nearly sure that
you would agree with me. I had a
glimpse of this in your The Plague itself.
You did suggest at a point in the book
that justice was not a nal thing but
love! (ibid: 183) I had not understood it
earlier but now I did.
However it was in The Fall and The
First Man that this aspect came out with
full force. I must confess that I had to
read the former once again at this stage;
however the latter came out just at this
point and so I did not have to reinterpret
it. Even earlier I had enjoyed the twist in
the tale in The Fall. Now I got interested
in the tone in which your narrator talks
throughout the book. This book belonged
to me really in its second reading. I dont
know what will happen in the third as
you keep on revealing new things to
me as soon as I start challenging some
elements that I had liked earlier.
This relationship of mine with you
had to end with The First Man. I do
not want to say more about it at this
juncture, the letter has already become
too long. Why would you be interested
in such a long letter from a writer from
India, born in the year when you got
your Nobel award? You must have met
many like me over the last century.
However, I must point out one fact that
struck me when I wrote this letter and it
is related to this autobiographical novel
of yours. In your novel the protagonist,
standing for the rst time before the
grave of his father, realises suddenly
that, The man buried under the slab,
who had been his father, was younger
than he. I suddenly realise that you are
younger to me, Albert Camus! Though it
has been you who has given me so much,
in spite of the number of occasions on
which I had fought with you and had
differences of opinion with you, when I
thought that there was nothing more to
be got from you. I am sure that there is
much more to get even now. You have
been like an unending source, and I real-
ise how deep my relationship with you
is, in spite of our disparate social imagi-
naries. At least from my side, that is.
Warmly,
Makarand.
References
Camus, Albert (2000): The Rebel, translated by An-
thony Bower (New Delhi: Penguin Books).
(2006): Caligula and Other Plays (New Delhi:
Penguin Books).
(2010): The Plague (New Delhi: Penguin Books).
Kaviraj, Sudipta (2005): An Outline of a Revision-
ist Theory of Modernity, European Journal of
Sociology, Vol 46 (3), pp 497-526.
Novello, Samantha (2010): Albert Camus as Political
Thinker (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), p 17.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (2010): Critical Essays (Calcutta:
Seagull Books), pp 148-49.
available at
Khan News Agency
Residency Road
Opp Shakti Sweets
Srinagar 190 001,
Jammu and Kashmir
Ph: 9906787325