For a technology that is expected to enslave humanity, the AI algorithm — the elixir of social media platforms — can be touchingly predictable. Each year, around Dashami — the day fell earlier this month — Facebook and Instagram dutifully churn out versions of Gaganendranath Tagore’s iconic Visarjan: a little more enterprise and inventiveness — are these traits not supposed to be the algorithm’s forte? — could have led the technology to resurrect other vintage artworks exploring a similar theme; The Durga Puja Being Celebrated on the River Hugli, George Gidley Palmer’s equally engrossing depiction of a visarjan, perhaps demands a similar afterlife on social media.
The algorithm’s dumbness does not deserve commentary. But a shared — fascinating — detail in the paintings of Gaganendranath and Palmer merits introspection. Even a cursory look at the two artworks will reveal the hypnotic appeal of luminescence to the human eye. In each painting, the deity gets transformed, literally and metaphorically, into an orb of light that seems to keep at bay the gathering, inky gloom. The symbolic message is clear: divine light holding out hope amidst the dark.
This positing of light as adversarial to darkness — the supposed realm of all that is evil, sinister; a shadow land that eludes reason and understanding — can, of course, be traced back to a much older evolutionary and theological arc — anxiety — whose imprint remains deeply etched in not only humanity’s creative pursuits but also social order. The discomfiture with Othello and Caliban, the horrors associated with the dark, brooding woods in Gothic fairy tales and with that bloodthirsty Transylvanian Count, Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff — his eyes like “black fiends” — Charlotte Brontë’s Mrs Rochester, of Creole blood, whose majesty gives way to madness, Goya’s depiction of the dark as the sphere of primordial fear and, of course, Charles Marlow’s reminiscences of and struggles — physical and spiritual — with the Heart of Darkness find their perfect echoes, on the other side of the cultural sphere, in the Oriental world, in the yakshis and rakshasas of Indian myth as well as in the leyak of Bali’s fables, a practitioner of the dark arts that flies with its entrails tailing it — these and many other elements in literature, art and folklore embody an instinctive, collective inclination to demonise darkness.
It would be a travesty to frame the human predisposition towards light — and all that is not dark — as innocent. As Nina Edwards writes in her book, Darkness: A Cultural History, race and gender have been the principal social registers of the prejudice against the constituency of the dark. The stubborn malaise of looking down on those with a dark countenance — be it in a supposedly decolonised East, including India, or in America, where Black people continue to suffer the most egregious forms of social, economic and cultural violence — throws light upon this dark truth.
Given this history, the tendency to view light and darkness as conflicting binaries may appear to be natural and, thus, universal. Yet, the ideas of light and darkness are not always immutable; their supposed animosity has, at times, given way to intriguing alliances, responding to shifts in the intellectual and the cultural milieu. Consider the delicious irony in the shakto tradition of Bengal, where deepavali, the festival of lights to ward off darkness, has, at its centre, the worship of a fierce, ebony woman. Italy, during the Renaissance, mesmerised the world by developing the artistic technique called chiaroscuro — light-dark — that enabled artists to create three-dimensional forms by employing sharp contrasts between light and dark.
Indeed, modern scholarship and intellectual thought, responding to questions of racial bigotry, have, in defiance, claimed that the much-reviled trope of darkness, in fact, contains an emancipatory blaze. In a piece for The New York Times Magazine, Teju Cole mentions the reflections on the word, ‘opacity’, by Édouard Glissant, a French philosopher, one of the canons in Caribbean thought and literature. The opaque, being resistant to illumination, transparency, has linguistic and moral associations with concealment, furtiveness. But Glissant locates in opacity — the state of being unlit, a kind of darkness — the right of the marginalised — Black, Creole, Coloured and perhaps even indentured people — to not be understood, simplified, catalogued, explained.
Nina Edwards, too, provides a unique example from mundane, everyday objects of the dark being an embodiment of righteous resistance. The dark tint of the sunglass, integral to fashion and a marker of social status, she writes, serves, for the wearer, a dual function: it protects the user from scrutiny, thereby becoming an appendage to secure anonymity, privacy, in a heavily surveilled world without impeding the user’s ability — the right — to look back at, confront, scrutinise the world outside. Edwards thus argues that the sunglass is an ally in the wearer’s subversive endeavour to be simultaneously anonymous and confrontational.
There is then darkness’s enduring aesthetic appeal — and not just in the world of fashion. Junichiro Tanizaki, a pre-eminent voice in modern Japanese literature, read in Japan’s enchantment — entrapment — with illumination its capitulation to a problematic Western modernity and affiliated consumption. He writes, poignantly, about once venturing out to witness the autumnal moon-viewing ceremony, only to discover that electric light in five colours had devoured the fainter, but far more beautiful, lunar lustre.
Today, Tanizaki’s beloved “pensive shadows” are in retreat all around the world. The World Bank and its partners have even begun to measure night-time light as an actual metric for development, leading to the metamorphosis of artificial light into a proxy for economic enlightenment. Never mind the consequences on worlds natural and human: migratory birds, sea turtles and insects veering off their course, blinded by the light; disruptions in sleep and reproductive cycles of both animals and humans; the crude flooding of the night sky with artifice that bedazzles, leading entire societies to lose their ability to appreciate, aesthetically, a nocturnal sky washed in the mellow light of stars and galaxies.
There is a peril in light continuing to devour the dark. The greatest ally of the modern tribe of the illusionist — statesmen, politicians, Wall Street wizards, Big Tech bosses, to name a few — is luminosity. Because light — not dark — helps dazzle the eyes, deflecting attention from this age’s great iniquities and injustices.
uddalak.mukherjee@abp.in