Huzun is spiritual longing. Melancholy is both a literary and a cultural category despite its increasing absorption in the domain of psychoanalysis. What kind of a category is repentance? Despite the image at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial of a penitent Willy Brandt kneeling in prayer seeking forgiveness or admission of Gunter Grass of his Nazi association, repentance remains a personal moral category. It is a personal virtue. We have politics of hatred, of memories, of historic injustices but not of repentance. But is it necessary, we may ask, that repentance too becomes a political category? Should repentance like truth in our times also be cast as political?

Picture this. A lonely pilgrim. Age seventy-eight. Barefoot. He walked in penance through 49 villages of Noakhali and 7 in Tipperah. His was an act of repentance, of seeking forgiveness and awakening the humanity that lay latent in people. He prayed, recited the Al-Fateha and walked with bleeding feet; he ate one meal as repentance for the killing fields of Bihar. His bamboo stick was taller than him. Ramchandra Gandhi would tell us that it was a reminder to himself and all others that measures of Truth and human worth were higher than him, than all of us. His pilgrimage was an attempt to make penance and forgiveness central to the moral polity of India. So was Bibi Amtus Salam’s fast in Sirandi village. The malady was deep, but the method was strikingly beautiful in its simplicity. All that was required of him and us was to repent. He showed us that in a country divided and prone to frenzied violence repentance and forgiveness could not be merely personal virtue or a moral aspiration. Remorse, penance and seeking and granting forgiveness had to be brought to the very centre of the public and political domain. It was not surrender to the political. It was a plea to make the political a moral space. It is the loss of this desire we mourn. Despite our lamentations we have cast the political as an amoral, if not entirely immoral, space.

... contd.