Since time encodes mortality, it is an enduring challenge to all forms of narcissism: Ranjit Hoskote

Ranjit Hoskote. Photo: Nancy Adajania

The New Year has just begun. Time is never too fast or too slow but proceeds at its own pace. Humans have explored several angles to time. But what is time for the poet, philosopher and writer? How do those who have compiled the compendium of human memory — literature — over the ages, view it?

Down to Earth spoke to poet, cultural theorist and curator Ranjit Hoskote. His latest collection of poems, Icelight, revolves around the themes of ecological meltdown and the human desire for survival. With the artist and activist Ravi Agarwal, Hoskote is co-curator of a cycle of environmentally oriented exhibition, conference and publication initiatives, State of Nature. Edited excerpts:

Rajat Ghai (RG): Why was (and is) Time important for poets and litterateurs — from Enheduanna of Akkad to those of today? Important enough for Time to be personified as ‘Old Father Time’?

Ranjit Hoskote (RH): Time is a reminder of our finitude in the face of an infinitely older and more expansive universe, but it also offers us a frame within which to leave behind a contribution that will live beyond us. Time is a lesson in humility, but it is also a medium that suggests pattern, rhythm, cycle, beat, cadence. Time, in effect, is the music that attends the choreography of deliberation and chance.

RG: One notable example of Time in literature that I personally like is HG Wells’ sci-fi work, ‘The Time Machine’. Wells’ interesting hypothesis of Time as the fourth dimension that humans live in — in addition of length, breadth and height — was later vindicated by Einstein’s work. Your thoughts?

RH: Time travel has long been a dream, and ‘The Time Machine’ conveys both the excitement of this possibility and the ethical and political questions that it involves. If the times we visit in the past or the future were places, how would we intervene in them? How would we establish a relationship with the denizens of these times, as though they were places? Time as the fourth dimension goes beyond spatial parameters because it brings in process, causality, chains of action and consequence, and therefore invites us to reflect philosophically on the nature of our being in the universe. Taken together, time and space propose occupancy but also provoke us to frame an ethic of belonging, of sharing these dimensions with others, whether of our own species or of other species.

RG: Sahir Ludhianvi’s lines for the 1965 Bollywood multi-starrer Waqt – Waqt ki Gardish se hai Chaand Taaron Ka Nizam; Waqt ki Thokar Main Hai Kya Hukumat Kya Samaj – it tells us about the inevitable fickleness of being human…and mortal, subservient to Time, doesn’t it?

RH: Since time encodes mortality, it is an enduring challenge to all forms of narcissism, such as that practiced by figures in authority, the custodians of oppressive political systems and the guardians of tyrannical social norms. All of these are eventually brought low by the action of time. So, yes, as Sahir writes, “waqt ki thokar mein kya hukumat kya samaj” indeed.

RG: Today, humankind, and along with it the rest of the planet, stand at a crossroads (some would call it a precipice). Wars and disease have been joined by Climate Change as a hastener towards end times. It is being termed by many as ‘eco-anxiety’. Your thoughts as another year rolls by and a new one begins on a very ominous note?

RH: The environmental catastrophe through which we are living was predicted as long ago as the early 1970s, in such documents as the very prescient Club of Rome report titled The Limits to Growth. As a species, we have been utterly irresponsible in our tenancy of this planet. We have mistaken ourselves for a sovereign species, when we are in fact the apex predators. The wars that we unleash, the plagues that we spread and the ceaseless structural violence that we enact in every society across the planet are all part of the same fundamental problem — the refusal of the human species to recognise that antagonism is not a productive or generative attitude, and that we, and the earth, would be far better off if the human species could learn to practice forms of cooperation, generosity, empathy and healing, at the individual, the social, and the planetary scale.