Ideas - Singing in Dark Times | Sandeep Banerjee

Episode Date: February 22, 2024

"In the dark times, will there also be singing?" Bertolt Brecht once asked. World literature scholar Sandeep Banerjee explores the power of art in times of war — and how ghost stories can help us imagine another world. This talk kicks off a new public lecture series called IDEAS at Crow’s Theatre. 

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed.

And welcome to a live taping of Ideas at Crow's Theatre in Toronto. live taping of Ideas at Crow's Theatre in Toronto. This is the first in a brand new series. We've invited five stimulating thinkers to give a talk inspired by one of the plays in this year's Crow's Theatre season. The ideas in a play, we think, resonate deeply with our lives, the same ideas that concern us all, tackling some of the most pressing questions of our time. The first play in our series is the Crow's Theatre production of the musical Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, loosely based on an incident in Tolstoy's great novel, War and Peace. We are delighted to begin this series with a talk by Sandeep Banerjee,

Associate Professor of English at McGill University. One of the big themes in War and Peace concerns love and art, and the corrosive effect of war on normal human activities. War renders everything abnormal. Natasha comes to Moscow to meet her fiancé, but while she is waiting, she gets involved with very much the wrong man, and the possibilities for her life are turned upside down. Inspired by the questions raised by this play,

and the book on which it's based, Sandeep's lecture is called Singing in Dark Times, Art in Times of Distress. After we've heard this talk, I'll ask him a few questions and then we'll turn to the audience here at Crow's Theatre for your questions. So please help me in welcoming Sandeep Banerjee. Thank you, Nala. Thank you, Nala. It's wonderful to be here, and thank you for making time to come here on this Sunday morning.

And I'm delighted to be here, of course, and I'd like to thank CBC for inviting me. My talk is called Singing in Dark Times, as Nala just mentioned, a line that I borrow from Bertolt Brecht's short poem, Moto. This poem begins with the question, in the dark times, will there also be singing? It is difficult to miss the note of uncertainty in the question, a rather fitting question for our times, perhaps. I remember here the wonderful opening line of the play

Natasha Peer and the Great Comet of 1812, there's a war out there somewhere. Let me tweak it for my purposes. There are several wars out there, and it seems to be everywhere. And it's not just war, we seem to be living in a world of violence, the relentless killings of civilians, gun violence down south, the relentless killings of civilians, gun violence down south, killings of refugees, the forced travesty of civilian populations. And this is very much a world which is marked by the violence against minorities of all stripes and shapes. There are no easy answers to this question, of course. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno proclaimed that it is barbaric

to write poetry after Auschwitz. The poet Paul Celan, himself a Holocaust survivor, takes to poetry to think through the possibility of life and love in the dark times, after the dark times. Here are some of his lines. We gaze at each other. We speak of dark things. We love each other like poppy and memory, like the sea in the moon's blood beam. For Celan, language and especially poetry become vehicles to carry the weight of his experience of the trauma of history. Far afield in South Asia, writing in the context of a very different kind of trauma, of hunger and colonial famine, the Bengali poet Shukanto Bhattacharya seems more in agreement with Adorno. He bids farewell to poetry, and he says, No more poetry now. Bring out prose, hard, intense, austere.

Do away with feat, rhyme, and meter. In this realm of hunger, the world is prosaic. The full moon, a toasted flatbread. Moving closer to our times, the Palestinian-American poet Noor Hindi also seems to think that there's no place for poetry in dark times. Her title of the poem is pretty direct. Fuck your lecture on craft, my people are dying. She goes on to say, I want to be like those poets who care about the moon.

Palestinians don't see the moon from jail cells and prisons. It's so beautiful, the moon. But notice how Shukanto, Noor Hindi, they both write poems about their rejection of poetry. It is as if the only proper way to refuse poetry is through poetry itself. That there will be no singing in dark times. This message has to be rendered in and through song. Celan, Shukanto, and Noor Hindi can be seen in their own ways answering the question that opened Brecht's short poem. The poem gives us a short and hopeful answer to that question about whether there'll be singing in dark times. Yes, it tells us there will be singing.

The singing will be about dark times. But what does singing about dark times really mean? How is that singing done? What is it about? So we may want to ask, what does art do and how does it work in dark times? I should just also add that I'm thinking here when I say art, I'm thinking about art expansively. I don't mean any specific literary form like poetry or theater or painting. The word art for me is a shorthand for representation as such, for the human capacity to represent, to imagine different new worlds. And that is something that makes us, I think, fundamentally human. Today, I want to suggest that in the best of times, art relates to the world in two ways. It stands as a witness to the times and to history.

This is the witnessing function of art. In dark times, this shows a critical edge. It offers a critique of the times and tells us of human frailty and failed possibilities, of how in dark times human beings can so easily be less than human. On the other hand, quite paradoxically, art does not simply stand as witness to the times. It also says not this to the time it inhabits. In refusing this historical context, its historical moment, art negates the present and strives to imagine another world.

It is a resource of hope that tells us other, better, more just worlds are possible. Today, I will think about this witnessing and utopian functions of art, looking closely at how these work in times of crisis. And the two moments of crisis that I will focus on, one is war and the other is famine, which are, I think, quite relevant to our moment, the moment that we inhabit today. And war and famine are also something, despite the important discontinuities between the past and present, what links us, links our present moment to that past. Though things change, much remains the same. And war and famines are very much part of our contemporary global reality.

On to the witnessing function then. For centuries, poets, philosophers, and critics have spoken of art as a mirror to the world. This mirror, in fact, is one of, this idea of the mirror, is one of the most enduring metaphors of art in the Western critical tradition. And by extending this metaphor, we get to the point where we think of what art does in the world. It reflects the world around it. There is no better place to see the operations of the witnessing function of art than the depictions of war across generations and across cultures. Warfare is supposedly where boys supposedly become men. It's a heroic endeavor. But some of the best and the most moving depictions of war across cultures also show us how it brings forth the fragility of life. It brings forth failed possibilities and missed opportunities.

Homer's Iliad very famously recounts the siege of Troy. It ends with the bloody death of Hector in the hands of Achilles. It ends with the bloody death of Hector in the hands of Achilles. Amidst its stories of gallantry and killings is the sixth book, with its brief interlude that tells us of Hector's meeting with his wife and son. Hector is dressed in battle gear. He has a helmet on, and he has this menacing plumage on it, and he reaches out in that book to greet his son.

But the child shrinks back. He's frightened by his father's helmet. Hector takes off this helmet. It is one of these brief moments where he sheds his heroic persona, warrior persona, and he kisses and cradles his son in his arms. This is also one of the rare moments that we see physical affection in this epic. As he cradles his son in his arms, Zeus is prayed to by Hector. He prays to Zeus and the other gods and says, like any parent today,

may my son outlive me, may my son be great, may he be a powerful ruler. This is not to be. As we know, as did Homer's audience, that with the sacking of Troy, the child would be thrown to its death from the city walls. But this scene of intimacy, that is often seen as a respite from the narration of battle and killings that marks the Greek epic, it is impossible not to see this fleeting moment of relief as being haunted by the specter of mortality. This is what reminds us of death, just lurking behind and carrying with it the horrors of war. Moving far afield again to South Asia, we see the two major Sanskrit epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, both culminate in war.

In both, war is presented as just and somewhat inevitable. But we find here too, the narrations offer not just testimonials, but also critiques, and it outlines the horrors of war. In a contemporary book-length reworking of the Ramayana in English, cryptically titled After, we have the poet Vivek Narayan crafting a poem where the original Sanskrit epic acquires a modern resonance. It was published just a couple of years ago now, 2022.

Resonance. It was published just a couple of years ago now, 2022. And I want to draw your attention to one brief section of this long poem. It's called Notes on the Burning of Lanka. Some of you may be aware of the original context in the epic, but I'm going to just recount it here as it might be helpful. So this is a moment in the narrative when Sita has been abducted by the king of Lanka, Ravan. Her husband Ram, who's the hero of the epic, is distraught because he does not know where his wife is. Hanuman, who's a simian warrior and devotee of Ram, reaches the island of Lanka, finds Sita, and then allows himself to be captured by Ravan's men. And now Ravan decides, we're going to make an example of this guy. And what does he do?

He catches hold of this monkey and sets his tail on fire. Hanuman goes about setting the city on fire. This is a moment of strife before the battle actually even begins. And it is an image of rampant destruction, even in the original Sanskrit epic, which gets reformulated quite powerfully, I think, in Vivek Narayan's retelling. And I'm going to read a bit out from there, where Narayan recounts in this modern retelling the horrors of the city being burnt and its residents being burnt alive. Skyrocketed fury, time obliterating, messaged by the wind, piercing itself on the horses and the houses. Minerals were melted. The stone of the grander houses baked the wood of the pagodas.

Split jaws that fell apart. And the shouts of Lankans rushing to rescue, with looks of hopelessness, their belongings. In Narayan's rendition, the words are scattered across the page, mimicking people running helter-skelter to save themselves and their belongings and their houses and their loved ones. Bodies dropped in that black smoke, fled like commons come to ground. A woman fell, holding her baby clothes. Enveloped by glow, disheveled hair.

With sullen explosions, the city of Lanka thus zapped even before the fact of war. explosions the city of Lanka thus zapped even before the fact of war. And as I was saying, Narayan's poetic retelling makes this ancient epic wildly contemporary. It underlines the horrors of war, of murdering a civilian population unarmed and uninvolved in the stakes of a supposed heroic struggle between their king and Ram. It also undermines the claims of a just war, showing instead the strife to be just what it is, a dance of death and destruction visited on an innocent population. When I read it, this particular section,

it made me think of modern forms of war, of human beings raining fire from the sky, of aerial bombing and drone attacks, but also particularly of the 1972 iconic photograph by Niccute of the nine-year-old Vietnamese child running naked on a road after being severely burned on her back by a South Vietnamese napalm attack. Narayan's retelling of the scene highlights what the English poet writing in the context of the First World War called the pity of war.

Typically overshadowed in public memory by the events of the Second World War, it is easy to forget that the First was the first instance of mechanized warfare and mass killing in the history of humanity. It was the first time in human history that people deployed armored vehicles, engaged in aerial bombing, and chemical warfare to kill and maim each other. In light of this, it is hardly surprising to read Owen Say in what was to become the preface to his posthumously published poems, that his poems are not about heroes, not about deeds or lands, nor anything about glory, honor, might, majesty, dominion, or power. My subject, he writes, is the war and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity. poetry is in the pity. He also reminds us in that preface, all a poet can do is warn. That is why true poets must always be truthful. And if you've read his poems, you can see that they could well

be about our present. Calling out the idea that it is glorious to die for one's motherland as nothing but an old lie, his poem Dulce Decorum Est gives us a realistic portrayal of life in the battlefield. The poem begins with a description of tired soldiers trudging through sludge, bent double like old beggars under sacks. Many had lost their boots but limped on bloodshed. And then readers are presented with soldiers being attacked with chemical weapons, chlorine, phosgene, and mustard gas. These were the things typically used in that war. And here is another section from that poem.

We're presented with an image of a sudden gas attack with some soldiers putting on their helmets and one person not managing to get this out on time. And it provides us one of the most powerful images, to my mind, of modern war in English literature. Someone still was yelling out and stumbling and floundering like a man in fire. Dimmed through the misty panes and green thick light,

as under a green sea I saw him drowning. In all my dreams before my helpless sight, he plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. You will notice that this poem is providing us with an image of what we now call PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. It's also one of the first historical moments when people encountered this in war. In poetic form, but also with documentary precision, Owen shows us not just the horror of war in an abstract manner, but actually draws it out in the most embodied of ways, tracing out the experience of living through war, even as this warfare gets etched onto the bodies of those who live through it.

If you could see, he writes, if you could watch the white eyes, his hanging face like a devil sick of sin. If you could hear the blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud, of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues. Notice just how embodied that scene is, how visceral the image is. There is perhaps no better illustration of what I've been calling the witnessing function of art. No better example of what Owen means by the pity of war. And this is a warning. But this is a warning that has perhaps fallen on deaf ears.

But art is not only or simply a mirror to the world. It seeks to move beyond the here and the now and imagine how other ways of being and living are possible. And this is why art has always been associated with the transformative. Art does things in the world, and one of the things that it does is it transforms things. This is what connects it to its older forms, to the forms that it descends from, ritual and magic.

Several critics and philosophers have written about this aspect of art. One of the earliest figures in England, Philip Sidney, one of the earliest figures to think critically about poetry, he tells us that poets simply refuse to be tied to nature owing to the power of their imagination. The poet makes things either better than nature or simply produces things that don't exist in nature. Nature's world, in its very famous formulation, is of bronze. Poets produce a golden world. It is an improvement of what nature produces. It is an improvement on reality.

It is both fantastic and it is transformative. This is the other way, then, art works, and this is what I've been thinking about as the utopian function of art. This is heightened in dark times. Because of its relation to the transformative, art is always a resource of hope. The job of the poet or the artist is therefore to remind us that there is more to the world than the present makes evident. We find this idea scattered across the literary monuments of the world. We find this particularly in the words of the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore in his long poem

E Bar Pirao More, which would be Now Bring Me Back in English. Here is what the poet has to say in my translation. Arise, poet, if you have the spirit, bring it along, make that your gift. Much sorrow, much pain, a world of suffering lies ahead. Amidst this want of poet, bring from heaven hope's portrait. of poet, bring from heaven, hope's portrait. Art can be understood, then, as the spirit of hope that is marshaled against the solidity of the real. And this spirit of hope is especially

needed in dark times to show human beings the possibility of a world beyond the present. Now, let me look at this idea of art as a resource of hope in the context of colonial Bengal, in the context of the famines, and by looking at the genre of ghost stories. Now ghosts are commonplace in the folktales of Bengal, but in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, a very specific modern literary form emerged in Bengal. And this is the Bhuter Golpo, the ghost story. As is evident from the name, ghosts are quite central to this irrealist genre of Bengali literature that remains popular even today amongst both children and adults.

amongst both children and adults. The most striking example of these stories is that the ghosts we encounter here can be classified according to, you know, gender, religion, caste, eating habits, and so on. And there's a whole classificatory regime, terms that actually describe these specific ghosts. So you can come across a petni, which is the ghost of an unmarried woman,

or the shakchuni, which is the ghost of an unmarried woman, or the shakchunni, which is the ghost of a married woman. The Muslim ghost is a mamdo, and a Brahmin ghost is a brahmadoito, and so on and so forth. Now, this list is by no means exhaustive. But even from here, what I'm trying to get you to get a sense of is really that these ghosts seem to be a way of mapping the social world of this region onto the domain of spirits. It's kind of a spectral projection, if you will. Now, this Brahmin ghost, the Brahmadito, is often depicted as pot-bellied and sporting the sacred thread as a cast marker. He's repeatedly depicted in these stories as benevolent towards the people he likes, which takes the form of him granting boons.

If you annoy him, of course, he can be less than friendly. That is a different story, and for perhaps another day. One of the classic children's stories of this genre is the Jola Ashad Bhutirgalpa, the story of a weaver and seven ghosts by Upendra Krishore Rai Chaudhary. It's a fairly straightforward story, but I just want to give you a sense of it so that you see where I'm going with this. It tells a tale of a simple-minded weaver who encounters these seven ghosts.

They're pleased with him and they gift him a pot that fills up with whatever food he desires. He takes this pot to a friend's house who cheats him of this pot. The ghosts learn of this and, you know, they come to his rescue. They give him a magical stick. When the friend steals that as well, this kind of comes out and beats him until he returns the magical pot. It's a very, very simple children's story, but it captures something I think that is significant, the granting of boons by these ghosts. And we might want to ask ourselves, what is the relationship of the granting of boons, and especially the boons of an endless supply of food,

to the historical moment of late 19th century Bengal. Let me say a few things about this trope of granting of boons before I go forward. The granting of boons is an enduring trope of wish fulfillment, a kind of basic utopianism, if you will, that can be found in South Asian literature, spanning genres, languages, and periods. If it is there in the earliest myths and classical epics to the legends of Indo-Islamic prominence, as well as fairy tales and folk tales, all of which constitute the literary multiverse of South Asia. And at the same time, we should also remember that famines were an existing reality of 19th century Bengal and India. So one of the historians, B.M. Bhatia, notes that under British East India Company rule, between roughly 1765 to 1858, India experienced 12 famines and four severe scarcities.

In the first 40 years of direct rule of the crown, that's 1860 to 1908, there was famine or scarcity continuously in some part of British India or the other. The colonial famines necessarily at a human cost, the first major famine which was in Bengal between 1769 and 73 killed 10 million people. Ira Klein, another historian, also tells us about life expectancy at this time. The life expectancy of Indians never exceeded 25 in the decade between 1871 and 81, dipping as low as 20.1 between 1911 and 21. So these were dark times indeed. And you can also see why ghosts would be such an important figure for a society that's grappling with this relentless death. So the predominance of death becomes, unsurprisingly,

the condition of possibility, as we call it, the enabling mechanism, the enabling condition for the emergence of the ghost story in Bengal. The figure of the ghost is not simply a way for these stories to register this time of darkness and death, but also to imagine a better life. By imagining these ghosts as boon givers, these stories signal them as active agents who have the power to shape and transform the here and now of colonial history. In the story that I just outlined, the pot that

provides an endless supply of food could be seen as an attempt to imagine a way for the weaver to move beyond the limitations of his historical moment. By refusing to be tied to the constraints of history, the story negates the world of the present and imagines a fantastical possibility. This is the utopian impulse of art at work. Another of Upendra Kishore's short stories, Gupi Gai in Bhagavain, was turned into a children's film by the author's grandson, Satyajit Ray. You may have come across some of his films. It tells the story of two musicians. One of the musicians, I should say, because at the start of the story and at the start of the film, they're really terrible at their craft. And they're so terrible that they're kicked out of their villages. They spend the night at a forest where they actually meet each other,

and they encounter this ghost king who, pleased with their singing, for reasons best known to the ghost king, grant them a boon, which make them really great musicians. Gupi becomes a fantastic singer and Bagha a fantastic drummer. In Ray's filmic retelling of the story, Gupi and Bagha receive two other boons. The first allows them to call for food and clothing whenever they want. The second allows them to travel wherever they want. And this business of traveling wherever they want might seem not a very important boon, but just think about refugees today and you can see just how important and wishful this boon is. The trope of wish fulfillment, again, access to food, clothing,

travel, and expertise in art. Expertise in art also very important in Ray's expansive vision of a fulfilling and good life. Now, some of you may have come across Haroon and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie. You're going to see Gupi and Baga reappear as plenty more fish, two minor characters in that story, trying to help Haroon clean up the ocean of stories. So that's kind of the way these ideas travel, if you will. So in the film, back to the film, in the film, the musician duo travels to the kingdom of Shundi where they win a musical competition organized by the king.

They hear the king's brother is planning to invade this kingdom and then they use their craft to do what they do, avert war, stop a fratricidal war. And how do they do it? They do it by calling down food from the heavens and feeding the malnourished and starving soldiers who give up war for food. Now, this movie was made in 1969. Now this movie was made in 1969 This is the same decade that India went to war with China in 1962 And Pakistan in 1965 So you can see right there this utopian impulse pushing against war Trying to mold minds and change the perspective on war and what have you.

So what these texts do, I think, and this is where I want to go with this, is that these texts re-enchant the dreary world of our present. It reminds us that another world is possible. And in dark times, especially in dark times, art makes hope practical when despair seems more convincing. In the film I just described, by the way, Gupi and Bhagat are liberated from the drudgery of work and the constraints of history with the boons.

But they do not use it, they do not use these boons to simply lead the good life, to simply make music for the sake of music, or just to live by themselves. The musicians commit their art to social change. It becomes a way and a means for imagining a more just world. This, to my mind, is the ethical imperative of the artist that engages the world in a spirit of renewal. There is a commitment to thinking about the world, to thinking about changing the world, to thinking about the world, transforming the world into a better place. We see this in the works of M.S. Césaire, in the paintings of Pablo Picasso. Think of Guernica,

of M.S. Césaire, in the paintings of Pablo Picasso. Think of Guernica, for instance. And in today's world, also in the poetry of people like Jericho Brown and Lilia Kaminsky, and of course Mahmoud Darwish. Let me then end with a few lines from Darwish, which may give us a sense of this ethical imperative that becomes the artist's task in dark times, the way an artist may want to channel transformation, may want to channel utopianism in their work. This is from Darwish's poem called Translated as Mural. I have work to do on the geography of volcanoes, from desolation to ruin. of volcanoes from desolation to ruin. I have worked till my end as if I won't see tomorrow. And I have worked for today who isn't here,

so I listen softly, softly to the ant beat of my heart. Thank you very much. Thank you. very much. On Ideas, you've been listening to Sandeep Banerjee's Singing in Dark Times, Art in Times of Distress, delivered live at Crow's Theatre in Toronto. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goldtar, and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know

more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is the first in a new series we've developed with Crow's Theatre, an opportunity to explore some of the ideas that animate great theater. This first play is in fact a musical based on one of the incidents in Tolstoy's novel War and Peace, and it explores love, art, and the corrosive effect of war on normal human relations. That's been the springboard for Sandeep's lecture to talk about the possibilities in what art can achieve in dark times.

So right now I've got a few questions for Sandeep, and then we're going to throw it to you, the audience. If you have a question, write it down on one of the cards that the ushers have either handed to you or put on your chairs right now in the next few minutes, and we'll try to get through as many as possible. But first, Sandeep, once again, thank you so much for such an inspiring talk. It's a pleasure. It's a delight to be here. We've all, Paul and I, talked about why we think this is a good forum to talk about the most

pressing issues of our times. I'm wondering, in your own words, why you think the thoughts that you presented today fit in this environment adjacent to the play that we're talking about today? Well, I think one of the things that is evident from the play, which my wife and I had the pleasure of watching last evening, is about failed possibilities and missed opportunities and misrecognition, largely, in the context of war and how war shapes human possibilities and human interactions. So that's one way of thinking about it. And I was really taken by some of the lines that, you know, the dialogues. One of the things that I mentioned, there's a war out there somewhere. Well, there's a war out there somewhere seems to be so apt.

There are a lot of war out there somewhere seems to be so apt there are a lot of wars out there these days and the other thing um i think pierce says it's somewhere in the play nothing matters but it matters something like that and that's what i think about uh art and largely the humanities which as a student of the humanities you, this is a question that we come up against all the time. What good is it? What does it do? It's not worth anything, but it's worth a lot. As you say, there's always a war out there somewhere.

And we're currently living at a time when mass death and violence are effectively normalized. I wonder what you think art can do to pierce that kind of normalization. I think art, again, as I was using art broadly, the project of representation, it's actually a fundamental way through which we encounter alterity, difference, different people, different ways of living, just different modes of being, really.

And oftentimes our world, our world of late capitalism, makes us instrumental subjects of this world. We want to do things because it gets us something, power, money, blah, blah, blah. Art tells us that there is a whole lot of point about, or two pointlessness, I think, to just be there, to watch something, to just experience alterity for its own sake,

not to kind of take command over it or to feel virtuous in relation to it, but just to be. And I think that's what, for me, is the single most important thing, and not to turn this into an instrumental exercise, but what art offers us. The purpose of art is to show us the point of being in a world of difference. I was really struck in particular by the line you say, art makes hope practical when despair seems more convincing.

Talk more about that because it, yeah, I'll just let you answer that. I should cite it like a good academic. It's a line from one of my favorite thinkers, Raymond Williams, Welsh Marxist, and that's his line, that the whole point of the struggle, intellectual struggle, material struggle, is to make hope practical. It's very easy to not believe that a better world is possible. That's what that tells us. It's easy to believe this is what we have. It's much more

difficult to believe that another world is possible. And that's what the struggle, this whole idea of struggling with art, with literature, with thought. That's the point of it. In your talk, you spoke admiringly about art that refuses to accept reality, that kind of imagines change, as you say, the utopian kind of task of art. What do you think, what do you see as the most powerful examples, even just one, of art as refusal today, art that refuses to accept present realities and pushes for new ones? I think, for instance, you know, the poetry of Ilya Kaminsky comes to mind my wife's a great fan she makes me read it and

Jericho Brown again something I have been pointed to by her both of these writers actually kind of show us a sense of a world beyond can you

can you do not to put you on the spot here and tell me if it's asking too much, but can you do a demonstration of why you think someone like Ilya Kaminsky is a great artist for this moment that we're in, this ability of art as refusal? Yes, I'm thinking about, what is that poem? We were happy and there was war. I mean, it pokes you, you know, that's what it does. It makes you think about the world as it is. And I can just have my, watch my Netflix and go to sleep, you know.

So it makes us think beyond that. And that's what the point of a poem like that is in my mind. It provokes. It provokes, yes. It provokes. But it does it also. There are different ways of provoking. It kind of gets under your skin, which is what I think is more powerful than poking something in the eye.

News, for instance. We see death and destruction all around. But after a point, it just kind of washes over us. And I speak as a former journalist, like you know you just see death and you're like yeah okay one more just sticks. But art has that ability to creep under the skin and I think that's where the power of it lies. So then if that's your sense about news, how do you think about, how receptive are you to art as witness? I mean, we've recently spoken to a poet who talks about her poetry about Iran, of her being a foreign correspondent in verse.

I think one has to contextualize what I just said. So we now live in a world where we are saturated. The world is hyper-saturated with images. And so the witnessing function may not be the most viable, if that's a word, or may not be the best way of doing things. I'll give you a different example. There was a time, for instance, in South Asia, where Soviet socialism was very

popular. It wouldn't fly now. And that's precisely it. It has to do very much with the historical moment. I read out these poems, for instance, by Owen. PTSD, when Owen is writing about it, is not just new, it actually shocks. It sadly stops shocking after a point. Adorno very famously said, how can someone rest at peace over whom the wheels of Kafka have passed? You read Kafka now and you're like, Kafka's quite beautiful. It's a very bizarre way of thinking about it.

I'm curious what your thoughts are given that you think that art encourages us to hold on to hope and not and that is it makes it practical what your thoughts are about accessibility i mean you have to be adjacent to art to be inspired by it don't you yes and um that's a very important question. But when I'm thinking about art, as I said, I'm not just simply thinking about, you know, art in its kind of capital A sense of it. even if one watches Netflix with an open eye, with an open mind, sorry, one could actually see that this is a world where, you know, difference exists in the world and people live differently. It's not just a way of, as I said, you know, exercising power or being instrumental about it. But I think one of the things that goes hand in hand with the question of access, I think, is the access to education. Especially the context I come from, that's not always a given.

People make art without having access to sort of formal education. But I'm here thinking about education in the sense of an instrumental or a non-instrumental education. That is what I think is crucial. That's the basis for the Charter of Hope that I'm trying to kind of draw out here. So you think about this, last question, you think about this very intellectually as a scholar. I wonder if you find refuge in art, and if you do, in dark times, and if you do, where do you go? I think, yes, I think about this a lot, given that we all inhabit dark times. It's not just an intellectual project. It's very much a lived project.

For me, Tagore is a very important resource. I think, yeah, that's where I go often enough. Why? What does Tagore do? What does Tagore do? Tagore reminds us about the humanity. It's like the common humanity of us all. It's not identitarian, which is quite fashionable in today's world. It's not instrumental.

And I read him in the original. The English translations, particularly of his poetry, are terrible. So the original is very, very different to what one gets from the English translation. It's bad for the rest of us. And the essays, the later essays. So, you know, again, when you think of Tagore, those who read Tagore, they'll be like, oh, his nationalism essays. They were written in his young age. But, you know, you see Tagore's late style, as Edward Syed famously calls it.

You see the late style of Tagore in his later essays. He's really an angry old man. And he's talking about the evils of colonialism, capitalism, war, and he's living and he dies in the Second World War, during the Second World War, it's quite incredible, actually. All right. Let me ask some of the audience questions here. I find I am uncomfortable with the notion of the artist, even in dark times, as having an ethical imperative. Can you say more about what you mean by imperative? Yeah, yeah.

I'm thinking about, so where I'm coming from with that question is that there is a general belief that, or the commonsensical belief about art is it's a kind of an individual project that one does, you know, on the side. That is itself a very modern conception of art. Art is very much historically understood to be engaged with the social. It's very much engaged, you know, with the world, you know, all the way back to the classical times, you know, I'm thinking here of the Western tradition. Think of art as being tasked to teach, to move, and to delight. So there is always a social function of art. And, again, I'm not suggesting that when an artist writes or, you know, represents in whichever form,

they set about saying, okay, I'm going to like, these are the step one towards changing the world. No, that's not what I mean. But there is also an ethical, what I mean by the ethical imperative is to bring an awareness of an individual's relationship to the wider world because what you often have these days and this is a tradition that I am very uncomfortable with which is you know you you talk about yourself your mind your loneliness and about you, really, where you perpetuate simply the isolation of late modernity at work.

Without relating to the wider picture. Why is art able to critique reality or imagine utopia in a way other forms of representation can't? As I said, when I'm thinking about art, I'm thinking about representation as such. What I'm trying to say is that art is probably, again, in that expansive sense, is one of probably the only non-instrumental ways of being in the world. only non-instrumental ways of being in the world. This, of course, you can critique this and you can say, you know, art is today a commodity and so on and so forth.

But even so, there is always space, you know. Can you just explain that? What does that mean, non-instrumental way of being in the world? Just define that. Where you're not expecting something, quote-unquote, worthwhile to come out of it. You don't read a novel to, let's say, Heart of Darkness. You're not reading Heart of darkness to get a sense of

africa as a continent you're reading it for the specificity of that text it could be racist it could be terrible or not but if there is something specific that is absolutely specific to that individual art object it registers the world in its specificity. It could be, as I said, not in a kind of a progressive manner, but that's the point of it. There are different diverse ways of being in the world and that's what it tells us. Now, do some artworks come out of the colonial moment? Yes, they do. Are they implicated in that colonial moment? Yes, they do. But even so, it tells us even the most problematic of texts will have something non-instrumental to offer. And I'll give you an example. Kipling, Rudyard Kipling, who people are very embarrassed about. So Kipling's Kim, for instance, it's a story about an Irish

boy who grows up as basically a family and grows up in India. And much of the novel is invested in turning him into a white man because he can go native, literally. So he can be Irish. So he can be white, he can be non-white. And it's also interesting that the figure of the Irish is taken up, who's both white and non-white, depending on how you want to see it. And there's an Indian character there, Harimukhaji,

who's very colonized and he wants to be an FRGS, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and all the rest of it. It's set in the context of the great game. And Hari Mukherjee is part of this kind of spying scheme of British India. And he encounters these Russian and French spies. This is the context of the geopolitical rivalry between British India and the Russian Empire. And there it is I think the only place where you see Hari Mukherjee, the only place where you see in a Kipling text

where Indian nationalism figures. But how does it figure? Hari Mukherjee plays drunk and he's trying to fool the Russian spies into believing that he hates the British. He actually loves them. And there he's saying, you know, they're awful to us and they don't pay us as much for the work that we do. We do as much work as the white people, but we get paid less. the work that we do. We do as much work as the white people, but we get paid less. That's it. That's one little moment where this deeply problematic text, problematic writer, you still see a certain kind of non-instrumental, critical image of its historical situation. And I think

that's what makes art, as some of my students say, so cool. What makes art, as some of my students say, so cool. Cool indeed. Okay, next one. Sufi poets like Rumi talk about transcendence and love. How do you see Sufi poetry and dance connect to the spirit of hope in our times? That's a difficult question because I don't know very much about Sufi poetry. Okay, well, that's fair. But one of the things that sort of performance art, dance, for instance,

like the play that we watched last night here is brilliant, simply because it brings a certain exuberance. And it's even better at creating that utopian world because dance is not just non-instrumental it's also immaterial in in a kind of fundamental sense it's that moment like theater you can't capture it on i mean it's not the same as film it's not captured it's in that moment and it's you know i mentioned in passing that art is related to ritual and magic. And I think dance, theater, theater is very deeply connected to ritual. But this is precisely the way in which this immateriality of it connects to magic and this kind of, it transforms the moment. I'll say this is the magic of the stage.

You are awestruck. You look and you can't move. That's the power of it. Absolutely. How can art gain the attention to the inhabitants of both of our society's solitudes? Well, there's probably more than both, but the polarized sides of our society.

Have more humanities in the world. That's what I would say. It's not going to change the world, but it'll make the world slightly better. Get people to read for the sake of reading, not because they want to crack some, I don't know, entrance examination or earn a bunch of, you know.

And I say this, this is also something I think about a lot. We are in the dark times. We have, I think, the humanistic mode of thinking, the more humane letters and so on and so forth, could be a way for us to engage with this world. But this is also the moment, and this kind of underlines the darkness of it all, which kind of is shutting the doors on those ways of thinking. Okay. Sandeep, thank you so much for taking all our questions, and thank you for a really inspiring lecture. Thank you very much. This was a pleasure.

On Ideas, you've been listening to Singing in Dark Times, Art in Times of Distress, a talk by Sandeep Banerjee, the first of a series of talks inspired by great plays recorded live at Crow's Theatre in Toronto. Ideas at Crow's Theatre is produced by Philip Coulter and Pauline Holdsworth. Special thanks to Paolo Santalucia, Chris Abraham, Jeremy Hutton, and the entire Crow's Theater team. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast. If you like the program you just heard, check out our vast archive where you can hear more than 300 of our past episodes. Technical production, Danielle Duval.

Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Acting senior producer, Lisa Godfrey. Greg Kelly, who's in the audience, is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayuso. Acting Senior Producer, Lisa Godfrey. Greg Kelly, who's in the audience, is the Executive Producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayed. And I'm really grateful

to have all of you here tonight. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.