Lockdown Diaries: Abounding with revelations by Tripurdaman Singh - Hindustan Times
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Lockdown Diaries: Abounding with revelations by Tripurdaman Singh

Hindustan Times | ByTripurdaman Singh
Apr 10, 2020 05:05 PM IST

Pandemics, like wars, are engines of history, whose aftershocks linger for years, driving socio-economic changes that define generations


A low, rumbling, guttural grunt caught me in the midst of a morning reverie as I aimlessly wandered in the garden. Whirling around, I noticed my father’s pet emu tilting its head and looking quizzically in my direction, probably wondering what I was doing on what it considered to be its turf. A legitimate question I think, and probably one that I should be asking myself!

During the plague, Newton quarantined himself and used the time to develop calculus, analyse optics, and study gravity. An engraving and colourized print of Newton dispersing light with a glass prism.(Getty Images)
During the plague, Newton quarantined himself and used the time to develop calculus, analyse optics, and study gravity. An engraving and colourized print of Newton dispersing light with a glass prism.(Getty Images)

As a historian, reading about and trying to make sense of epoch changing - or in some cases epoch defining - events is challenging enough. Trying to make sense of an epoch defining event while living through it is a whole different ball game. What kind of brave new world awaits us on the other side? How different will things be? These are questions I seem to have been preoccupied by since the lockdown began; although I seem to have come up with few answers! I do however fear the day when we will take stock of the economic and humanitarian toll the pandemic will exact.

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To be in a position to shut oneself off from the world and spend time pondering these questions is in itself an extraordinary privilege – as is the ability to work from home, amuse oneself with books, have access to green space. I am extremely fortunate in all those measures. Nevertheless, it has been hard to shake off a profound sense of ennui, or develop a new sense of normality and routine.

Three weeks ago, spurred by memes about Newton’s annus mirabilis – ‘the year of wonders’ where he quarantined himself from the plague and developed calculus, analysed optics and studied gravity – and the soaring prose of Nehru’s Discovery of India, written while he was in prison, I had imagined such enforced seclusion to be the perfect opportunity to finish a piece of writing I had been working on for the past month. I could not have been more off the mark. Productivity has been as elusive as ever, but I do have a renewed sense of respect for both Newton and Nehru! Tolstoy considered the state of enforced and irreproachable idleness to be the chief attraction of military service. Perhaps I might be able to come to a similar conclusion about the pandemic!

288pp, Rs 599; Penguin
288pp, Rs 599; Penguin

Having found the prodigious feats of the two great men much beyond me, I have instead embraced my natural indolence and found refuge in the old Granada adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, one of my favourite books. Brideshead – both the book and the miniseries – is an ode to lost youth and improbable love, pervaded by a gentle nostalgia for a world on which the sun was setting and a persistent apprehension about the world being born. As each languid afternoon has seamlessly melded into the next blurring any real sense of time, Brideshead Revisited – accompanied by Geoffrey Burgon’s haunting, elegiac music – has provided an apt dramatic backdrop to my experience of the pandemic outside.

“Sometimes,” as Julia Flyte, one of the characters in the book, confesses to the narrator Charles Ryder, “I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.” A character I once detested, I have now come to revisit and sympathise with Julia’s words. It has now been over three weeks since I saw the world beyond the comfortable, bucolic confines of home – and the present, pressed hard between the past and the future, does seem to exist in some form of suspended animation. It is a surreal feeling. When the normality of the past and the possibilities of the future both seem so close, I for one, am finding it hard to fully inhabit the present.

The world, however, is rarely in suspended animation for long. Pandemics, crises, wars are engines of history, whose aftershocks and after effects linger for years, driving socio-economic changes that define generations. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (another prolific prison writer) wrote in 1930: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Gramsci of course was talking of something very different to a pandemic – but housebound and isolated, the feeling that we are living through just such an interregnum has become unshakeable and pervasive. What kind of world is being born? I keep steering round to the same question, and it evokes optimism and foreboding in equal measure.

Author Tripurdaman Singh
Author Tripurdaman Singh

But curiosity about the world and the future, I have found, is a potent antidote to all forms of nihilism. The last few weeks have abounded with revelations, especially about the privileges and pleasures that I, like many others, have taken for granted for so long. Walking outdoors. Visiting a bookstore. Meeting friends. Going to a café. Venturing to distant places. Poking around archives – something I do relatively often. The comfort of routine and the security of the familiar. Many of these will acquire new meanings, indeed many of them already have – probably for the better. Some of these pleasures will return sooner than others, but all, I hope, will be keenly felt.

My experience of the lockdown has been far less disruptive than it is for many others. Being unable to access the library is, after all, nothing like being unable to access food. As a homeboy, the inability to leave is also, in the end, only an occasional annoyance. But even the knowledge that a jaunt to the bookstore is not an option forces one to confront just how fragile and delicate the threads of our lives are. How many of these threads we pick up again remains to be seen – the future is pregnant with many possibilities. Writers, historians and theorists will dissect the outcomes for years to come. But I do fervently hope that we get the opportunity to pick them up very soon.

Tripurdaman Singh is an elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, and is with the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. He is the author of Sixteen Stormy Days: The Story of the First Amendment to the Constitution of India (Penguin Vintage, 2020) and Imperial Sovereignty and Local Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

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