In a gripping scene in Mirza Waheed’s achingly beautiful novel The Collaborator, set in the 1990s in a Kashmir ravaged by insurgency and army deployment, Captain Kadian returns to his home after a blood-fuelled day at office. As he prepares for bed, he switches on his cassette player to listen to a Mohammed Rafi song, Din dhal jaaye, raat na jaaye, a song of melancholic longing for the beloved who has left. The mellifluous, haunting melody stops the young unnamed narrator and protagonist from carrying out his plot to kill Kadian who makes him undergo the daily indignity and trauma of searching the bodies of young men killed in encounters for evidence of their identity. Each day brings the disturbing thought that his four missing friends may be among the corpses. But just when he thinks he is ready to pull the trigger, Rafi’s voice on Kadian’s cassette player pierces the eerie quiet of the terror-soaked night in the Valley. In that moment not only does “that melancholy song of angst and love” expose the incommensurable gap between love and hate, it also overwhelms the narrator with what could only be called nostalgia, for Rafi was, after all, his now disappeared friend Hussain’s idol. But what is also implied by that moment is that even such a crude and violent man as Kadian could harbour love for Rafi’s song. We never learn what his inner thoughts are, but we can surmise perhaps that Rafi’s song enables him to glimpse an inner life, however momentarily. It certainly fills the narrator “with overwhelming pity”.
Aesthetics Of Nostalgia: The Past Is Not Just Sounds And Symbols But The Distance From Them
Nostalgia is now widely commoditised and its political potential is sought to be neutralised into the service of a politics of belonging over that of longing.
Mohammed Rafi’s songs render nostalgia as the reigning affect in the novel. The Rafi playlist in the narrative features songs such as Tum mujhe yun bhula na paayoge, Chalo dildar chalo and Yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaaye toh kya hai from the 1957 Guru Dutt classic Pyaasa. But precisely in the ways that the human voice which can be mediated by the clunky cassette player and radio (now in themselves collectible objects of the past) but cannot be materialised as an object that it both mirrors and embodies the structure of nostalgia itself. For it is the vulnerability both in the voice and of the voice of the famous playback singer from the Bombay film industry that heightens the sense of longing for an older, more syncretic age that makes the present so damnable. Today we have to remind ourselves that Rafi was a Muslim and a popular and much-admired singer, noted for the emotional tenor of his voice that could variously evoke melancholia, longing, and even patriotism towards a nation recently emerged from colonial oppression. When broadcast over radio (in programmes on the Vividh Bharati dedicated to Indian soldiers on borders), his voice helped secure the nation across space and time, mixing melancholy and longing for the beloved with love for the country whose utopian dimensions have now been extinguished or at least have receded too far back into history.
Vignette A Delhi street in 1973
But nationalism and patriotic sentiment are the very opposite of longing for lost homelands and thus of nostalgia. For nostalgia dwells in the recognition of impossible returns. Nostalgia’s object is not the fixed place of origin nor the lost symbol or object, but the spatio-temporal distance from it. It is the quintessential sentiment of exile. However much we ring-fence it as a pure sentiment, nostalgia is not apolitical. As Waheed’s novel unfolds, it comes to signify the loss of Kashmiriyat and its idea of a syncretic, secular culture that had drawn upon intertwined traces of Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh and Islamic histories. Against these lost histories, the novel tracks the growing Islamisation of the Kashmir movement, and the Hinduisation of the Indian colonial project. The novel braids together memories of the loss of an earlier syncretic culture with passionate, melancholic remembrance of the protagonist’s now lost friendships, and thereby unsettles the public-private struggles and claims over nostalgia.
The novel’s use of nostalgia as holding a utopian promise rests precisely on the irrecoverability of it. So it is that feelings of sorrow, desire and betrayal expressed through Rafi’s songs come to signify that which cannot be recreated or recuperated. But it is precisely that sense of loss and irreversibility that on reflection can become the ground from where something new and emancipatory must be imagined. In the end Waheed does not provide any blueprint for that, because that is not the work of novelists. But the nostalgic mode of the novel provides us with a critical and reflective framework that only a recognition of spatio-temporal distance can provide.
Nostalgia is then very different from the objects and landscapes from Kashmir that have been commoditised in popular cinema and in projects of cultural preservation. Both seem to render nostalgia itself as a commodity that can be bought and sold. Kashmir’s distinctive arts and crafts traditions, and its verdant landscapes, are often mistaken as nostalgia’s physical materialisation that seeks to extract value from dying traditions in a last desperate bid before its vanishing—a vanishing that has been engineered in the first place.
Longing A still from the movie Guide
Nostalgia has an aesthetic that is deeply political, then. When the protagonist in Waheed’s novel muses, “I remember the day like an affecting Balraj Sahni black and white film”, I am reminded of the same kind of effect that a film like Garm Hawa had on me, in which Balraj Sahni stages the ethical dilemmas of living as a minority in post-Partition India. If patriotic sentiment attempts to narrate the past as a lost golden era that must be and can be recuperated, nostalgia does not render the past as available in a continuum, but in jagged series of imagistic flashes. And remembered melodies such that the qawwali, that quintessential form of a now fading syncretic and mystic culture, constitutes the soundtrack for the flashing images in the film from Partition’s grisly archive.
Nostalgia refuses the resolution of narrative itself. Edward Said’s writings on the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, Palestinian poet of exile and homelessness, point out that it had a “strained and deliberately unresolved quality” such that “the historical and the transcendently aesthetic” merged in a state of restlessness and incompleteness. Nostalgia does not let us reconcile ourselves to the past as a template for the future.
Literary theorist Svetlana Boym has argued that nostalgia has become a “symptom of our age”. She distinguishes between two types—the restorative and the reflective—arguing that “restorative nostalgia stresses nóstos (home) and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home”, while “reflective nostalgia thrives in álgos, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming—wistfully, ironically, desperately”. I would say that what Boym calls “restorative nostalgia” is not nostalgia since nostalgia is predicated on unbelonging, on ambivalence and estrangement, aspects that give it its critical function. Nostalgia surrenders to the irreversibility of distance of time and space, emerging in the interstices of “longing” and “belonging”.
Nostalgia is, of course, widely commoditised and its political potential is sought to be neutralised into the service of a politics of belonging over that of longing. The revival of the Raj in Thatcher’s Britain that would put the “great” back into Great Britain or the summoning up of Vedic history as ahead of our times can be easily seen as crude attempts to instrumentalise and commodify nostalgia. In a different vein, the sociologist Primož Krašovec has pointed to the ways in which memories of socialism are depoliticised in the former communist countries. Those are now replaced with collectible memorabilia of red star pins and posters with revolutionary slogans. These, he argues, become “nostalgic collectors’ items precisely when and if they no longer signify anything socialist”. In India, the remnant old middle classes hankering after heirloom handloom textiles, antique furniture, collections of Begum Akhtar on vinyl and tribal art might think of taste as an arbiter of politics, different from those upstarts who like shiny temples and raucous Bollywood music, but their objectified nostalgia has effectively frozen politics out of the everyday.
We miss the very idea of nostalgia by projecting it on to objects, events, places and structures that can and must be recovered. Nostalgia is none of these things. Rather, nostalgia is about the distance from those objects, events and structures, and is most crucially about loss and estrangement. It is imbued with the impossibility of return as well as a persistent absence. Its aesthetic is thus an aesthetic of absence, recoiling from symbols and certitudes. If we are still nostalgic for a more secular time of the past, we cannot reconcile ourselves to its pastness that is only recoverable through symbols.
(This appeared in the print edition as "Jaane Kahan Gaye Woh Din: The Past Futures of Nostalgia")
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Rashmi Varma teaches English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick in the UK.