Human kind has never seen happy ages in the past as we generally tend to believe. Each age had its pains born of material and moral conditions. The upside is that when we look at the past we can better understand its achievements and failures because the distance between it and our present moment can enable us to be objective i.e. to see it in a large measure for being what it was. But the downside is as real if not more.

The very distance - from the past - that helps us being objective is paradoxically most likely to make us more subjective in our view of what happened in our near and distant past because of our being away from it, being safe from its talons. Distance as much clarifies things as it mystifies by romanticising them.

Lack of threat from the things past makes them palatable and at times venerable for us. The entire myth of ‘golden past’ resurrected by religious revivalists, hate-filled nationalists, obnoxious racists and starry-eyed idealists bears irrefutable testimony to the fact of how the apparent detachment from the bygone can turn into a disconnect with historical realities. Take for instance religious history. A large number of holy men believe that at a particular point in time in the past a messiah, they follow, appeared and rid the word of evil that hitherto had ruled it. Thus the world was restored its purity. Why that pure, sinless paradise was lost forever is never explained. But still they feverishly insist that somehow they would continue in their zeal to try to graft this imagined and imaginary golden era of the past on their future through all and any means available.

Hindu revivalists brush aside the inhuman reality of caste system that imposed utterly cruel perennial apartheid regime on the subcontinental diverse society and the return of ‘Santana Dharma [eternal order]’ based on ‘Varna [colour /social classes based on colour distinctions]’.

Christian zealots overlook the fact that during the heyday of Church ascendancy how many innocent men and women were ex-communicated, tortured and burnt at stake for independence of mind. In a similar fashion, Muslim puritans instead of developing a critical view, glorify the Arab Muslim rulers’ invasions of foreign lands that caused immense sufferings to the vanquished peoples and want the repeat of the same.

In secular realm we encounter innumerable instances of how the periods of history we deem dreamlike were never so if we care to have a cursory look at the literature, folklore and oral traditions that reflect the zeitgeist of those times. This is how the Chinese sage Laozi who composed one of the most celebrated books of wisdom known as The Tao Te Ching is described by Bertolt Brecht: ‘Once he was seventy and getting brittle/ quiet retirement seemed the teacher’s due/ In his country good had been weakening a little and the wickedness was gaining ground anew/ so he buckled on his shoe…’. The sage in his bid to get away from the country afflicted with evil was stopped at the customs check post and persuaded to pen his thoughts. Remember it happened in the 6th century BC which is considered the time of great transformations.

Rumi declares: “Shaikh [the guide] trotted in the city with a lamp in hand with a cry; being sick of animals and beasts of prey, I yearn for the man”. It was the 13th century when he found it difficult to identify the real human being as most of the people were little more than quarries and predators. In the 14th century, Hafiz Shirazi decries the ravages of time when he sees ‘the donkey with marvelous trappings and the bruised Arabian horse groaning under the load’.

Guru Nanak in the 15th century declares with emotional ferocity that ‘the kings are tigers and the officials are dogs’. That’ why ‘modesty and order [Dharma] both have disappeared from view’. Bulleh Shah, an iconoclastic poet, talks of his times thus: ‘In a topsy-turvy world I saw the truth unroll/ crows peck at scarecrows, pigeons fell the hawk, and asses have assumed the horse’s role/ the old on bare boards sit while newness struts/ liars have mansions, truth has the begging bowl [trans: Taufiq Rafat]’. When the ‘12th century [Hijra] bared its teeth’ he saw ‘the daughter fleeing after having looted the mother’. Even after the advent of science and technology driven modern age we cannot forget what Dickens wrote in the 19th century in his ‘A Tale of Two Cities’: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness… it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…’.

In the 20th century, German poet Brecht wrote: ‘Truly, I live in dark times! /the guileless word is a folly/ a smooth forehead suggests insensitivity/ the man who laughs has simply not yet had the terrible news / what kind of times are they, when a talk about trees is almost a crime because it implies silence about so many horrors’?

Authors and sages from different historical times have been quoted just to drive the point home that no age in human history has been free of exploitation, sufferings, ordeals and anguish as later generations out of their socio-political and ideological motives tend to believe and at times foolishly try to replicate the imagined and imaginary past. ‘…Legitimacy of history is often sought for political ideologies and matters concerning contemporary society’, writes Romila Thapar in her book ‘The past as Present’. Nothing wrong with that. Problem arises when we deliberately or out of ignorance misread history making it a tool that serves our misconceived objectives. We, the humans, can be happier if we get out of the prison of the past and experience the present as what it is; richer than the past despite all its tribulations. If we take a look at the big picture the present is always better than the past. The present not only transcends the past but also makes realisable what remained unrealised in bygone days. So don’t be shy of snuggling closer to the wonders the present offers. — soofi01@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, February 11th, 2019