The enemy of silence is speech, but there can be no speech without words, and there can be no words without meanings — so it follows inexorably, in the manner of syllogisms, that when we try to speak of events of which we do not know the meaning, we must lose ourselves in the silence that lies in the gap between words and the world… where there is no meaning, there is banality, and that is what this silence consists in, that is why it cannot be defeated — because it is the silence of an absolute, impenetrable banality.
I can still feel the sorrow and outrage that provoked these words — emotions that owed much more to the events of 1984 than to my memories of 1964. Just as terrible as the violence itself was the thought that so many lives had been expended for nothing, that this terrible weight of suffering had created no discernibly new trajectory in the history or politics of the region. When we grieve for the appalling loss of life in World War II, our sorrow is not compounded by the thought that the war has changed nothing: we know that it has changed the world in very significant ways, has created a new epoch. But in the violence of 1984—to take just one example — it was impossible to see any such portents. It was hard to see how a further partitioning of the subcontinent could provide a solution; on the contrary, it would create only a new set of minorities and new oppressions. In effect, it would amount only to a recasting of the problem itself, in a different form. In the absence of such meanings, there seemed to be no means of representing these events except in outrage and in sorrow.
It follows then that the reason that I — and many others who have written of such events — are compelled to look back in sorrow is that we cannot look ahead. It is as though the events of the immediate past have made the future even more obscure than it is usually acknowledged to be. Now, close on two decades later, I find myself asking, Why is this so? Why was it that in the 1980s, history itself seemed to stumble and come to a standstill?
The past, as Faulkner famously said, is not over; in fact, the past is not even the past. One of the paradoxes of history is that it is impossible to draw a chart of the past without imagining a map of the present and the future. History, in other words, is never innocent of teleologies, implicit or otherwise. Ranajit Guha, in a recent lecture on Hegel and the writing of history in South Asia, says, "It is the state which first supplies a content, which not only lends itself to the prose of history but actually helps to produce it." In other words, the actions of the state provide that essential element of continuity that makes time, as a collective experience, thinkable, by linking the past, the present, and the future. The state as thus conceived is not merely an apparatus of rule but "a conscious, ethical institution," an instrument designed to conquer the "unhistorical power of time." That is, since the nineteenth century, and perhaps even earlier, it is the state that has provided the grid on which history is mapped.
It was perhaps this politically insignificant but epistemologically indispensable aspect of time's continuity that was most vitally damaged by the conflagrations of the 1980s. Even before then, it had often been suspected that elements of the state's machinery had been colluding in the production of communal violence; after the violence of the eighties, this became established as a fact. It became evident that certain parts of the state had been absorbed by — had indeed become sponsors of — criminal violence. No longer could the state be seen as a protagonist in its own right. It is for this reason that I have used the self-contradictory phrase "civil violence" here, in preference to other, more commonly used terms: because these events signaled the collapse of the familiar categories of "state" and "civil society."
The flames created by our recent past are so plentiful that only poets noticed the unsung death of a teleology. "Everything is finished, nothing remains," writes Agha Shahid Ali of a poet who returns to Kashmir in search of the keeper of a destroyed minaret.
"Nothing will remain, everything's finished,"
I see his voice again: "This is a shrine
of words. You'll find your letters to me. And mine
to you. Come soon and tear open these vanished
envelopes."…
This is an archive. I've found the remains
of his voice, that map of longings with no limit.
Buried within the poet's "shrine of words" lies a map: a chart "of longings without limit." It is not the fall of the minaret but the loss of the map that is the true catastrophe. It is this loss that evokes the words "Nothing will remain, everything's finished."
Shahid's is not the only lost map. In "The Story," Michael Ondaatje invokes another.
For his first forty days a child
is given dreams of previous lives,
journeys, winding paths,
a hundred small lessons
and then the past is erased.
Some are born screaming,
some full of introspective wandering
into the past — that bus ride in winter,
the sudden arrival within
a new city in the dark.
And those departures from family bonds
leaving what was lost and needed.
So the child's face is a lake
of fast moving clouds and emotions.
A last chance for the clear history of the self.
All our mothers and grandparents here,
our dismantled childhoods
in the buildings of the past.
Some great forty-day daydream
before we bury the maps.
The old maps are gone, and two of the finest poets of our time, Michael Ondaatje and Agha Shahid Ali, exiles from twinned Edens, have borne witness to their loss; gone are Michael's "forty-day daydream" and Shahid's "longings without limit." Writers who look back, in the wake of that loss, can only build shrines to that past. And yet the mystery of the sorrow entombed in their work is that their grief is not just for a time remembered: they grieve also for the loss of the map that made the future thinkable.
Is there then another map to replace those that have been buried in the rubble of our daydreams? Once, six years ago, I thought I had a glimpse of one: this is how it came about. I had spent a sleepless night at a guerrilla camp in the thickly forested mountains of the Burma-Thailand border. The Myanmar army was entrenched a few miles away, fighting a fierce engagement with Karenni insurgents. My hosts had handed me a makeshift pillow, of a book wrapped in a towel. The bundle came undone at some point during the night and I discovered, switching on my flashlight, that the book was called The Transformation of War. It was written by a military historian called Martin Van Creveld. I began to read and was still reading hours later. The next day, I wrote in my diary: