This edition was born out of a spirit of collaboration with the community that Hakara has built over the last few years. As editors, we find that our ideas are limited by our experiences, which in turn are determined by our social and geographic locations, our political surroundings, our family lives, and the culture we are exposed to and seek out. To go beyond this narrow purview of ideas that we carry as editors, we invited suggestions for themes from our past contributors, and received thought provoking suggestions for the same. Harshita Bathwal’s suggestion of the theme of Secrecy stood out among these; it was wide enough to allow for nuanced and varied perspectives, but narrow enough to have a focus. It inspired contributions that were at once deeply personal and seethingly political, conceptually rich and firmly grounded in reality.
As reflected in the contributions we publish in this edition, the social context of an individual cannot be extricated from the act of secrecy. Secrets are not fixed entities that hold in all contexts, but evolve and change shape as we negotiate with our surroundings. We may, for example, be comfortable sharing something with our friends, but not our families, and vice versa. There may be things that we are comfortable sharing only with ourselves, and some things that we would rather keep hidden even from ourselves. Thus, it is our social contexts, and what these contexts deem as acceptable vs unacceptable, moral vs amoral, honourable vs shameful, that determine what we choose to keep a secret. Rakhi Dalal, for example, elucidates the relationship between secrecy and shame, guilt, and fear in her deeply poignant personal essay, Revisiting My Secret Shelf. Talking about the experience of being sexually harassed at age 5 or 6, she says,
I understood it was something wrong, something very terrible that had happened to me when I was sort of reprimanded or possibly given some stern instructions after my parents had somehow come to know about it…That sense of being afraid had stayed on. From then on probably, as far back as my memory goes, I had learnt to keep secrets. Not telling things that I thought might upset the elders.
Dalal holds on to the feelings that revealing a deeply personal experience gave her as her child; these feelings subconsciously shape the way she negotiates with her social surroundings today. Her negotiations involve the constant decision making about what and how much she should reveal about herself to people around her.
To conceal something, however, does not always stem from shame, guilt, or fear. It may be a result of wanting to shield yourself from the public eye and carve out a space for yourself to be left alone to reach the recesses of your intellectual and creative selves. For writers their diaries often provide them this private space for thought and exploration, devoid of outside disturbances. An excerpt from writer Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh’s diary, published as Ek Sāhityik Kī Diary (A Litterateur’s Diary) gives us a glimpse of his internal tussles about what constitutes personal integrity in poetry. He crafts a conversation (imagined, real, both?) with his friend on this subject, as they debate the role of the spontaneity of a poet’s feelings (the subjective truth) vs the necessity to represent their worldview (based around the objective aspects of reality) in poetry. The diary, translated from the Hindi into English by Dr Saumya Malviya, reveals Muktibodh’s tussles with the different shades of truth, and the difficulty of prioritising one over another.
To keep a secret requires the presence of a stable and fixed “truth”, that can then be concealed. However, what happens to our understanding of secrecy when truth itself becomes an unstable category with many possibilities of meaning making? Aparna Nori grapples with this destabilisation of the “truth” of her past in To Forget to Remember, as she goes through the archive of family photographs and state sponsored tourist booklets from Iraq that was recently handed down to her. The vantage point of the future, and the benefit of hindsight, now reveal the insidious propagandist messages coded into the content of these booklets. She places images from the booklets alongside photographs of treasured everyday moments of her childhood: her mother combing her hair, teaching Nori how to write, or Nori playing with her sister, to explore the picture of the past that is thus formed. What is the version of the past that reveals itself when we view a collection of these photographs with knowledge of the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq war? How does the “truth” about the past change shape in the current context, and what is the “truth” that is lost in the process?
As we witness a growing acceptance of a culture of hyper-surveillance, it becomes integral to interrogate what this watchful, all-seeing eye pushes to the corners of secrecy, and the narrative of “truth” it crafts as a result. What does it mean to shield yourself from its gaze, and demand the right to be left alone, unobserved? Can multiple narratives of “truth” about the past, present, and the future, co-exist under this all-seeing eye? If not, where do the shunned narratives go? Hakara’s current edition engages with these questions and more through its range of visual, literary, academic and journalistic work. We hope you find the contributions as thought provoking and insightful as we did.
