A recent discussion about a book, a novel, with Mahatma Gandhi’s eldest son as the protagonist, set me thinking on why we are so fascinated by the behaviour and stories of some people, either from history or from legends or from myths or even from old works of fiction. We keep revisiting them, whether it be characters from the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, from the Greek theatre (not so much the epics as the plays), Shakespeare, so on and of course our own past. I don’t mean using the name of the character as a sort of short hand to describe some quality or the other. But reimagining some part of the character’s history or that of other characters in the play. There may be a play called Kanchana Sita with Urmila as the main character or a play called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. There was a time when one could write a Ravanayana or a Jesus Christ, Superstar, but now that would be too foolhardy to say the least. Now it is safer to stick to the theatre and leave any text where there is the mention of some divine character or even a historic character.
However old they are, however passé you think they are, the hold these characters who we can’t leave alone, have on the imagination of the public is beyond analysis. Why does one remember a particular personage from history or myth and not another? The creative minds do not usually go to people like Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin to reimagine their lives or the lives of people around them. Surely they would be dramatic enough considering the impact they had on the world in their times. We do not explore these personalities with much interest. They are so monochrome. As for our own myths and legends, why does Ahalya retain her hold on our psyches whereas more virtuous or clever women do not? Or Draupadi with her wounded feminity and her cry of vengeance? Why does Gandhi remain a topic of discussion still while other towering figures in the formation of the nation like Jawaharlal Nehru or Sardar Patel or even Netaji or Bhagat Singh, romantic enough characters, remain on the periphery of our imagination? Yes, we do clebrate the anniversaries of their birth and death but they do not tease our creativity.
Perhaps it is the ambiguity of the persona that tempts us to go closer, to try to understand. You can’t just admire them, worship them or hate them. You have to think about them, try to find out what made them behave as they did. There are gaps in our picture of them that can be filled only by guessing, by imagining the circumstances that made them act as they did. We ask why did they do that and how did it affect the people around? Gandhiji was a man who lived up to his convictions and his words, who believed in the gospel of turning the other cheek in the face of aggression. He did not believe in violence. And yet, he turned his own son away from his home, surely an act of violence. It may have caused him grief, it certainly grieved his wife a lot. It also destroyed the life of his son when forgiveness might have redeemed him from the faults that caused the split. Rama of Kanchana Sita is not the self-assured keeper of Dharma, but a man torn apart by his decisions and the impact they have on people dear to him. It is this very ambiguity, this lack of certainty that makes these characters interesting, perhaps the reason why Hamlet is the most talked about play of Shakespeare.
But in a world where everyone is sure of their own truths, and hold them against the truths of others, a world that is trying to remake everything in one image or the other, these characters give us the comfort of believing that nothing need be black and white, that there are colours in between, that choosing one truth is not necessarily condemning other truths there is comfort in seeing that men thought of as great too had their doubts and their uncertainties. While they acted as they thought right at that time, they too were riven by doubts and regrets.
A world where people lived according to their consciences, paid the price for it and allowed others to live according to theirs would be so wonderful, these characters who come up again and again, remind us.