Orhan Pamuk describes Istanbul as a city of Huzun, melancholy. Huzun as spiritual agony envelops Pamuk’s Istanbul; it hangs thick on Bosphorous. The city itself becomes in Pamuk’s invocation the very illustration, the very essence of Huzun.

Many people across the country have waited with anticipation, hope and perhaps trepidation for some such Huzun to envelop Ahmedabad. We Gujaratis are asked often, earlier with anger and now with exasperation, if we feel remorse, regret and if we seek forgiveness for the violence and vivisection that we did onto ourselves. Some of us gave muted responses about Gandhi, his memory, his institutions, our re-enactments of his deeds as also about the deep-rooted Jain tradition and the pragmatic and enterprising Gujarati. We spoke of our anguish as individuals, of our loss of speech, but did not speak of collective remorse, regret or repentance. We spoke of clouds lifting, of simmering discontent, of deep divisions and personal animosity within the ruling BJP.

Repentance requires capacity and possibility for reflection and recognition of a moral space within each one of us, howsoever fragile. Gujarat has been narrowing the very possibility of this inward gaze and recognition. University as an institution represents one such possibility. University, which seeks to bring the universe within a city, cannot be anything but a deeply dialogic space. The MS University was the only university in the state that aspired to and attained a national character. The sealing of the Faculty of Fine Arts closed this possibility. It closed the possibility of a debate about the self-regulating nature of contemporary cultural expression. More fundamentally, it restricted the very idea of a university as a space that is grounded in dialogue and conversation. It also signifies the unwillingness of Gujarat to look within. Simultaneously, we were confronted with images of D.G. Vanjara being showered with flower petals in the court compound. With it the hopes of repentance receded further in the dark recesses of our collective amnesia. We can no longer take solace that those who celebrate Vanjara and his associates represent a lunatic fringe of an otherwise sane and pragmatic society. That we are deeply divided and unable and unwilling to look at our own visage came out clearly in the sharply polarised responses that the literary and academic community of Gujarat gave to literary critic and cultural activist Ganesh Devy’s remark that the Gujarati mind harboured deep animus towards the Muslims.

... contd.