Sruti, Smriti, And The Individual

We live in smriti-less times. They offer unhampered freedom to each individual without offering guidelines for the best use of this freedom.

- Makarand R Paranjape

IN THE FIRST part of this series, “Tradition And Modernity (Swarajya, May 2017)”, I illustrated the difficulties in reconciling or harmonising tradition and modernity in Indian creative arts. In literature, this was especially the case, because the break between the two was most definite and far-reaching. Perhaps, the colonial intervention severed forever our tenuous ties with the older sacred literature of India as, indeed, it shattered the society which supported it. In its place, secular modernity, aided by the printing press and the invention of prose, gave rise to a new wave of creativity in what the British called our vernaculars. The literature written in these new languages was usually modelled on European works and its content quite different from traditional compositions. Writing in a purely traditional manner was now impossible.

Yet, the question remains: how are we to engage with contemporary reality in a purely contemporary idiom? This is a question that exercised all major modern writers from Bankimchandra to Ananthamurthy. Without parampara, aren’t we lost, cut off from our nourishing roots, floundering in a world which is not of our making and in which we find ourselves as interlopers, not full citizens? The issue at the heart of Part II of this series is the relationship between the individual and tradition. Is tradition a source of knowledge or is it a source of oppression? Does the individual, in his or her creative journey, discover new truths or merely reaffirm old ones? Finally, how can the individual benefit from the wisdom of the past without being stifled by it?

Immediately, we notice that our answers to such questions depend on how we view tradition, how we define it.