Alchemy of silence

Years ago, my friend, philosopher Ramu Gandhi and I were walking through Kamla Nagar, an area at the outskirts of Delhi University. It was festival time and megaphones were rending the air. Ramu was extremely irritated with the noise and dubbed it “Ravana Electronics”. He longed for a bit of silence. Ever the teacher, Ramu reminded me “noise is not the opposite of silence. Silence is something more, it is a journey, a craft,” and then lapsed into silence himself.
The recent reports that Anna Hazare had taken maun vrat, a vow of silence, reminded me of the old story. I wished Ramu had been around. He would have produced a few exemplary performances around the event. I realise I am a poor surrogate for India’s most inventive philosopher.
Silence for Ramu, was a pilgrimage, a search groping into the very interiority of the self. Silence needed prayer but went beyond prayer. It was dialogue. Silence talked but in a different way and we misunderstand the power of silence.
The English language sees silence as passive. It talks of the silence of the grave, the silence of the weak. It does not see silence as spiritual humus for harmony, for recovery for a literal recollection of the self. One must see silence not as erasure but as an awakening of possibilities. One meditates in silence; one often prays in silence, one grieves in silence. There is an alchemy to it.
Ramu might have said we think of silence in the same way we confuse fasting and dieting. Dieting is a calorific idea, a search for physiological balance, or a technique of a fashion aesthetic. Fasting is an experiment with the self, a search for harmony, a fine-tuning of the spirit. When Gandhi fasted during his satyagraha, he sought a harmony. Fasting was a fine-tuning of the music of the self. Gandhi fasted as part of his quest for brahmacharya. Anna Hazare understood this when he explained in an interview that he could fast for so many days because of his celibacy.
There is a danger, however, in reading this simplistically. Silence is not a technique. One cannot take a vow of silence to avoid publicity or embarrassment. Silence cannot be tactical. It is a ritual and like most rituals demands that the body be home within itself and the cosmos. Silence is that real experiment with truth, the truth of the self. It is a demand on the self and cannot become as it does, occasionally, for Mr Hazare, an advertisement for the self. Then silence becomes philistine and a maun vrat, an inability to cope with the cacophony of the self.
Silence invites the mystical, the mysterious and the meditative. Silence in its singular fullness is different from the silences that history talks about. The metaphysics of each is different.
One author who understood silences was the great English novelist Virginia Woolf. Silence, for Woolf, was not just part of a woman’s statement of being; it was integral to her writing style. Silence provided the rhythms between language and space, sound and silence. Silence gave plasticity to a sentence made it elastic, energetic and diverse. It provided a beat to life and language.
The critic Ganesh Devy talked of silence in terms of a genocidal act of being silenced. He explains that the linguistic tragedy of India is that we officially recognise as languages only those that carry the appendage of script. Languages without scripts cease to be, officially, languages. Since tribal languages lack script, they are not, officially, languages. Devy argues that it is silencing of cultures, a muting of voices and truths that constitutes an Indian tragedy.
I have explored a variety of silences to ask where does maun vrat as an idea stand. The idea of vrat is a promise to a self and a cosmos. As a promise it is a sacrament not a contract. It becomes a sacramental rendering of the self through the ritual of silence.
It must be used frugally and not as a threat, to hammer home something. Silence cannot be a provocation, an act of thuggery where you bludgeon another into submission. It cannot be an act of trickery. It is ritual invitation to be true to oneself so one can be true to the integrity of a collective situation.
One hopes Mr Hazare’s silence is a prayer that his colleagues restrain their cacophony. It should be a signal that he is readying himself for a deeper struggle. Silence as a ritual has to be beyond threat and blackmail.
Unfortunately, the publicity around Mr Hazare misses this. Mr Hazare’s decision almost becomes an act of eccentricity or a spiritual spectacle. There is a sadness here that the media escalates by reading his silence as a timetable. This destroys the spiritual salience of the act. Instead of an epic of silence, it becomes a limerick and acquires a slapstick quality. Mr Hazare must use his silence to reflect on his movement and the sheer cacophony it has created in the later phases of the struggle. In fact, the silence of Mr Hazare brings out the circus like noise of Kiran Bedi. Her arguments sound like speeches of a sales woman selling patent medicines. Only the power of silence can turn the noise of protest into welcome music.
I keep wondering how Ramu Gandhi would read Mr Hazare. He would have joined the protest. I can imagine him watching quizzically, sympathetically, whimsically wondering whether Mr Hazare would ever have shades of the equanimity of Ramana (maharishi). The comedy of silence would have intrigued him.

The writer is a social science nomad