Some other aspects of the ‘image’ issue
READ in the light of Oscar Wilde’s A Portrait of Dorian Gray our present concern with the issue of image and reality appears in interesting shades that highlight the undercurrents of our national psyche. Whereas Dorian Gray, the handsome, charming hero of this brilliant work, wants the image to bear the burden of his misdeeds, we seem to want the image to remain untarnished by what we do. Ours is a difficult wish compared to Dorian Gray’s because he has his image locked up and curtained from public view while we stand in the spot light.
Dorian Gray’s likeness is painted by an artist who admired the young man’s physical charms. When the picture is complete and Dorian Gray sees it, he is stunned by the beauty of his own appearance. He is seized with a pang of jealousy when he ponders how the image would remain as it is — young, beautiful and innocent — while he would change, become old and wrinkled and ugly with the burdens and the wear and tear of life. This horrible realization makes him utter that “mad wish that he himself might remain young, and the portrait grow old; that his own beauty might be untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passion and his sins; that the painted image might be scarred with the lines of suffering and the thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness of his then just conscious boyhood.”
This wish Fate grants him but he only recalls it from memory when for the first time he sees the portrait marred by a cruel expression that reflected the heartless and harsh treatment he subjects his beloved Sybil Vane to. The change in the image horrifies him. “It held the secret of his life, and told his story. It had taught him to love his own beauty. Would it teach him to loathe his own soul?” Such were Dorian Gray’s thoughts upon seeing the disfigurement of his image corresponding to his deed. What is our reaction to the distortion of our national image?
Like him we too are in love with our self-image. Many illusions there are that we cherish fondly as a community — memories of the lost Muslim empire, of the glory, of our armies marching across continents, our idol-smashing Mujahids, our matchless bravery on the battlefield, our good governance: the lamb and the lion drinking from the same pond; our rulers forbidding evil and enforcing virtue, our supreme duty to set things right in God’s troubled world etc., — still haunt us. But the reality appears in stark images of shackled bearded countrymen in hideous orange jail outfits being walked like captive beasts by White guards in the narrow caged corridors of the Guantanamo Bay prison. This miniature of the demonized Muslim world is too appalling and degrading to accept as the reality which it purports to represent.
The target reality yearns to get up on its feet to erase this disfigured imagery, this sorcery of absolute power spelled through the jugglery of illusions. But it lacks the necessary tools. A repressive feudal society with its mediaeval outlook on life that refuses to accept change as the dynamics of progress; that insists on returning to and live in the past; with its unrepresentative state structures; lack of rule of law, justice and fair play; its rejection of merit in all walks of life; poverty, illiteracy, and the evil of bigotry and self- righteousness, does not provide the kind of moral muscle that one rises with to lay claim to one’s position. It hardly furnishes the reality pixels that project a good, well-defined robust image. So without Dorian Gray’s facility to hide his tarnished image and display only his imperishable beauty of appearance, all we can do is some cosmetic work on the image, the reality being too ugly a self-created mess to make it photogenic. We happen to be therefore in a double jeopardy. Cosmetic improvements need constant attention. They are temporary fixtures and their repeated application results in permanent disfigurement. It was probably in such a situation that the poet was inspired to make this callous comparison: aik who hain jinhain tasweer bana aati hai aik hum hain keh liya apni hi surat ko bigarr (how well there one shapes an image/and we, here, contort our own visage).
Having switched the reality with the image Dorian Gray persists in his career of depravity and degeneration. But there is an inward turmoil, a revulsion. He resents the maker of his portrait who has given him this licence to hurtle along unchecked on the road of self-destruction. In a final act of desperation he kills the artist who had given permanence to his apparent beauty. Returning that evening to his quarters he unveils his portrait and watches with unbelieving eyes the havoc his deeds had wrought on his image. In dreadful fright he takes a knife and slashes across the canvas. Next day the body of an ugly old man is found beside the portrait of a charming young man that Dorian Gray once was. Image and reality had become one at last.
One inescapable moral of the story is that we shouldn’t bother too much about what others think about us, the image that is. What is important and of essence is self-respect which guards our inner worth.