Let’s Talk: Dilip Menon on Thinking that Leads to, Away from the End Times

KOCHI:
Contending that humanity stands at a precipice – confronted by the choice to retreat or over the edge, eminent historian Prof Dilip Menon said spaces like the Kochi-Muziris Biennale offer time and space for reflection and a resurfacing of the imagination.
“We tend to think of art as an excess – something that stands beside and above the urgency of the present and the contemporary. But the Biennale is a space that is very engaged with the idea that we live in the end times. That we stand on the edge of an abyss,” said Menon, the Director of the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa.
He was delivering a seminar titled ‘At the End of Time: Thinking the World from Kochi’ at the Pavilion in Cabral Yard on Saturday. The lecture – the latest in the Kochi Biennale Foundation’s popular ‘Let’s Talk’ series – followed and built upon Kesari, an ‘intellectual biography’ of iconic thinker Kesari Balakrishna Pillai screened as part of an ‘Artists’ Cinema’ package.
The discussion incorporated such diverse, yet connected topics as climate change, lessons from history, the diminishing importance and role of art and culture and situated Kochi’s role in shaping conversations and discourse on these issues.
“Kochi is literally at the edge of the Indian Ocean world at one end of India, at a place where the land becomes the ocean. It finds an apt metaphor in the ‘edge of discovery’, which represents the willful closure of the mind – the twin ills of ignorance and hubris – that always impedes imagination,” Menon said, noting that to think on Kochi means thinking in millennia.
“Kochi gets its ‘portness’, its place in history through the ocean and the river reclaiming the land. According to myth, Kerala is a gift of the ocean, given by the sea recoiling in horror of Parasurama’s sin. The flood that reclaimed a portion of this land gave Kochi its port,” he said.
Its cosmopolitan legacy allows for exploration of its past – “the detritus of human hubris” – and its relationship between its present and future, Menon noted.
“When I look at the KMB – with past, present and future built into the walls, it’s important to think about why imaginations of kinship and affinity are resurfacing because the next time it will be thought that will prevent the flood,” he said.
Noting that there was a clear sense of gathering crisis around the world, Menon wondered is the resultant urgency is a “conceit or something to propel ourselves in a new direction”. “If choosing not to know is the greatest crime of all, can we afford ignorance? What does it mean to deny climate change? That ignorance is deeply ingrained in the imagination,” he said.
Terming the present as the “age of the great derangement” where art and literature act toward “concealment not illumination”, he said, “Artificial entities like nationality and the idea of svayambhu (self-generated identities) don’t allow us to think out of this common predicament. We have to dwell on affinity and kinship because, in the end, it is we who will create the flood.”
Menon said works from the Biennale show how to think outside of these ideas of empire, nation, “of narrow entities in which we bind ourselves” and instead engage with the “imagi
nations that have we lost” and the concept of a “simultaneity of identities, not contending, but co-present”.
“As you move between rooms juxtaposing an Iranian artist with a Chinese artist at the Biennale, you are summoning up spirits of kinship that used to exist in the forgotten world. This is the image of the urgency that we need to have,” he said.