Call of the Sea

Few days ago, a friend put a little pouch in the palm of my hand, telling me that it’s a gift. I opened that shiny little purse with all eagerness for nothing excites my heart more than a beautifully presented gift. When I opened it, I found scores of tiny sea shells.  I broke into a dazzling smile (I am never judicious with my smile, in any case!) as it was one of the most thoughtful gifts that I have ever received. They were beautiful: tiny, elegant, patterned and mostly brown. They say that shells carry the sound of ocean, and that if you listen hard, you’d be able to hear it. I tried but found no truth in that widely circulated charming story. I look at them several times a day, and as I am writing this post, I am casting a glance on them every now and then. She said that she collected them from a beach on her visit to Mumbai. I was immediately transported to that scene where against a timid sun of the evening and audacious waves clashing against the surface, one walks on sand and hears the silence of the seas despite of its seemingly noisy waters. My heart picked up a pulse but just a moment later dropped two for though the image catered to my love for seas, it also brought alive that familiar yearning to see one---this yearning took hold of me and wrung peace out of my passionate heart. I kept imagining that scene, and the many colours of a moonlit night on loose sands…

My favourite poem is ODE TO THE WEST WIND. It is a beautiful lyric, and many critics call it to be the greatest of the English language. I may be blinded by the personal connotations that I have attached to the poem and therefore extol its beauty, but this can be said with objective certainty that not even the severest critic of Shelley can deny his genius of myth making. Shelley was a rebel and that too in every sense of the word! That powerful imagery of the childhood freedom, and instinctive joy that characterised that stage, I have felt all this (like you too must have had!). But you know how that childhood zeal and quest for freedom, and that belief that the world is your play field are presented? They are presented by drawing an analogy between them and sense of expansiveness that the powerful zephyr of the West Wind creates in the Mediterranean… How Shelley provides you with that overwhelming sensation of getting consumed by a superior force by using images of sky, wind, clouds and above all SEA… How he makes you uneasy by awakening those existential questions which lie dormant in your heart—that’s Poetic Genius!

Somehow sea has always proved to be a source for poetic inspiration.  Perhaps, because it is endless for the human eye!  No matter how hard you try to see, you’d never see the complete picture. There will always be something left for your imagination to work upon. Who likes a complete story? There must always be something left for you to brood upon and interpret. For so is our human existence. We live in a void and yet aren’t hollow. So beyond that horizon is a world for you to imagine, fantasise, conjecture and dare. And that’s where the beauty of the sea lies.

On some extremely sad yet captivating night I read David Copperfield’s Chapter 55 entitled ‘Tempest’ which had fantastic description of the sea as a destroyer. For hours I was consumed by the sensation that it created and kept on thinking again and again about those masses of water in that great water mass which carried everything away. Looking at waters into which you wish to drench in while being enveloped with gusts of moist wind, as roaring waves that dash against the coast blast your ears, while some unseen but potent energy makes sweeps over your body… and for one moment, just a brief moment, you forget everything but remember what is around and yet can’t recognize any of it… I do not know what it was, that I had imagined that night, and I can’t even tell how it felt. It comes back to me at some rare moments by some stimulation, as certain smell that I feel in my palate. That night my love for the seas was solemnised.

At some eternal moment during our evolutionary history, we became ‘self-aware’. We live in groups but love and mourn for the individual. We hunted in numbers but were artists in caves. Our questions are as much as external as internal. Literature is nothing but testimony of the ages of our self-awareness (as specie as well as an individual) and that’s the definition of literature that I believe in. It contains not only what we know but want to know. So we read about our achievements and celebrate our hopes and aspirations.  Indian literature is full of rivers and rains. It is a testimony of our self-sufficiency i.e., that we never needed to look beyond our subcontinent. We sang about monsoon and rivers, but never yearned for the sea. That ‘call of the sea’ that is a part of the earliest of the Anglo-Saxon poetry and which came down in English, and remained as a clarion call up till the nineteenth century, was never a part of our literature. India is a peninsular nation and therefore, this absence of sea as a force, a destroyer or a hope is quite surprising. We were a fortunate group for the nature provided us with the most fertile of lands on Earth, and therefore, we unlike Europe, never had pressing needs to make us desperately look for the ‘beyond’. So we never became raiders or in present context sailors. The closest that we came to sea was in the songs of the fishermen. Even the phenomenon of monsoon was discovered by the Arabs. If we had had bad soils with open seas around us, we would have definitely ventured into them (or crossed the Himalayas). Even our scholars never went outside India. Our sufficiency made us close and in long run a sick society. How else can you explain casteism , a system that is unique to India?

I would talk a little about caste and how absence of seas played a role in it. Caste is in the very fabric of the Hinduism, as we know it today. I am not here to debate on core principles of Hinduism and therefore defendants of the faith may rest in peace, for I am not listening to them. Hinduism as I know today, Hinduism at the time of what is called the Bengal Renaissance and Hinduism at the time of birth of our nationalist passions, was a religion structured on caste system. I have mentioned elsewhere too as to how stagnation breeds disease. We as people who didn’t move beyond our land for ages are bound to be chronically sick. People who do everything---from eating to sleeping, in strict accordance to caste dogmas, would not get into ships where the deck would force them to mingle with each other, and therefore, loose the sanctity of their caste. Therefore historians have identified specifically in Indian context a strange cultural phenomenon called, CROSSING THE SEAS. Some days back I read a text that said that ‘crossing the sea’ that embodied the fear of losing one’s caste and therefore, religion added significantly to dreadfulness of ‘kaala paani’ . In fact, our colonial masters played upon this fear of ours. While developing the penal settlements on Andaman and Nicobar Islands they banked on Indians’ fear of seas and sought to inspire such horror in us that would make disobeying them unthinkable for us.   I even read about a rebel king (who took part in the Revolt of 1857) who on learning that his death sentence had been commuted to deportation killed himself, for ‘crossing the seas’ inspired more fear in him than ‘crossing the bar’.  If you read about indentured labours you’d know about many who were duped into working overseas for even the most desperate of Indians would not agree to cross the sea and give up his caste. You might get some inkling about the role that this fear played in our society by reading about mathematician Ramanujan, who was denied a proper funeral because he had crossed the seas. Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy is based on ‘crossing the seas’ phenomenon. Read it and you’d understand what the absence of seas has done to our society.

Sea has lived in our collective human consciousness as a challenge which time and again we have tried to overcome. People have travelled such difficult waters and explored such far off lands with so limited resources that you are left in awe of our spirit. Read how humans spread to other land masses after the end of Ice Age and you’d understand what I am talking about. America was not exactly a new world but a lost one. People had known about it centuries before it was rediscovered but this knowledge was lost with passage of time. All this with just 10000 years of evolutionary history with us! Surely, what a piece of work is man!  Have you ever read any of the songs of sailors? That thirst for adventure… quest for liberty… hope for achievement and above all valiantly carrying your shroud as cloak over your shoulders … How beautiful and true to the nature of our specie! That challenge that those endless masses of water posed to us was just a minute fraction of the exponentially larger one that the immense unknown that still surrounds us does. That sense of littleness and extreme vulnerability in face of a Universe that seems to be bent on effacing us…  We still live with it. We have greatly overcome sea. But we have discovered space and sky and learnt how insignificant are we compared to their limitlessness. That explains why the terminology that was used in context of ocean navigation has been extended to that of sky and space.  We are still doing which we sought to do ages before when first of our vessels managed to cross a mass of water. Yes, it’s an eternal war that we are fighting: a never ending struggle with the nature that rejoices in killing us.

The reason why I am so attracted to sea is because it represents boundaries. Boundaries! Time and again we as humans living in this body of flesh and blood are reminded of them. How far can this physical self go?  A body isn’t just a vessel to contain you but often a cage to limit you. But then boundaries can be shifted or moved away, creating spaces where none were. We know there can be things beyond one’s body and therefore ‘transcendental’ exists in our vocabulary. I hope one day I’d experience something for which I would use this adjective. 

If you’ve something that inspires the same passions in you as sea does in me, tell me about it. If you do not have it, then search for it. Something that stimulates you to an extent that the senses fall short in number for truly capturing and taking in everything and, you desperately search for some other way to experience beyond what usually can be for you can’t let go even a minute part of it… Using your senses to the optimum level is a must for achieving knowledge about oneself.  They provide you with the best of moments to affirm to life which even a life time with metanarratives would not do.