Exile and Travel in the Films of Ritwik Ghatak

Edward Said writes in his essay ‘Reflections on Exile’: “Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. […] The achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind forever. “ [1] He goes on to quote George Steiner who writes about what he calls the ‘age of the refugee’:  “ It seems proper that those who create art in a civilization of quasi-barbarism, which has made so many homeless, should themselves be poets unhoused and wanderers across language. Eccentric, aloof, nostalgic, deliberately untimely…”[2]

It is this sense of deliberate untimeliness that we encounter again and again in Ritwik Ghatak’s films. Journeys are continually interrupted before completion. Plans of pleasurable travel inevitably fall through or are blighted in some way when they ultimately happen. Long, unedited, lyrical sequences set in expansive open landscapes are suddenly ruptured by the arrival of the barbaric, the historical, the cruelly fragmentary.  Brief, playful encounters with freedom are followed by an inevitable return to the cyclical, relentless whiplashes of memory[3] that both imprison and enthrall Ghatak’s protagonists.

Ritwik Ghatak’s cinema, especially in the 50s and early 60s, seems to be laden with visions of competing, contradictory, intersecting and impossible journeys. ‘Travel’ in his films seems to be caught between contrary notions desire and force, dreams and possibility, memory and legality. ‘Berano’ (traveling for pleasure) is set against ‘nirbashon’ (‘exile’ or forced removal from the homeland).

For Ghatak’s protagonists, citizenship in the new land is almost always a condition of exile – a constant reminder of a political history where travel has not been a matter of choice and a place from where return is not a possibility. Talk of journeys seems to hark inevitably back to memories of the Partition – irrevocably tied up with a schism in the soul that cannot be healed. Berano is therefore often figured through abortive and temporary escapes to pristine and idyllic mountain landscapes (as in Komal Gandhar and Meghe Dhaka Tara), or rambling journeys through the countryside built around an impossible attachment (of a man to a machine, as in Ajantrik) or walking (flâneur-like) in, through and out of the city of Kolkata (simultaneously aimless and looking for history, as in Jukti Takko Aar Gappo). In this paper, I will try to explore the repeated occurrence of interrupted travel and compulsive/ compulsory vagrancy, along with their relationship to narratives of nationalism and exile, through a close analysis of Ghatak’s Subarnarekha and briefly, Komal Gandhar. It is also possible to look at Ajantrik, Bari Theke Paliye, Nagarik, Meghe Dhaka Tara and Jukti Takko in the same vein. There are numerous instances of ruptured travel in each of Ghatak’s films, but to go through all of them would be beyond the scope of this paper.

Travelling is neither comfortable nor comforting in Ghatak’s films. The idea of a journey is continually interlaced with pain and frustrated desire. Desired or remembered journeys are woven into the films’ narrative through sounds which interrupt and inhabit the story like ghosts – for example, train whistles, absent airplanes and steamer/car horns. Disembodied and spectral vehicular sounds abound in the soundtracks of Ghatak’s films, both inside and outside the diegetic text. Actual physical journeys, when undertaken, often end abruptly with an articulation the impossible desire to go back in time to the erstwhile homeland which cannot be reached. The very idea of ‘travel’ in Ghatak’s films is continually discomfited and haunted by the ghost of ‘exile’, the memory of an irredeemable political and historical dislocation that cannot be left behind – so that no character in his films seems ever to be able to undertake a journey purely for pleasure or to successfully complete a journey without internal rupture.

It is this narrative of forced displacement that seems to be the Ur-text and the pretext for Ghatak’s films. Ghatak, like a true auteur, seems to keep trying to tell us the same story throughout his creative life; and by his own admission, it is not the ‘what’ but the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of this story that interest him and compel him to tell it again and again. He relates his style to what he calls the ‘epic attitude’ of his own people. In speaking of the use of music in Indian cinema, Ghatak writes:

Also, we are an epic people. We like to sprawl, we are not much involved in story-intrigues, we like to be re-told the same myths and legends again and again. We, as a people, are not much sold on the ‘what’ of the thing, but the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of it. This is the epic attitude. […] So, the basic folk-forms […] are always kaleidoscopic, pageant-like, relaxed, discursive, and their contents have been very well-known for thousands of years. […] But of course we must orientate our entire creative endeavour along the channel, the channel of epic mentality.[4]

In the repeated telling of and listening to the same story, there is also, of course, the dogged refusal to forget – a refusal that defines the modern exile’s sensibility. To quote Edward Said:

[…] exiles are always eccentrics who feel their difference (even as they frequently exploit it) as a kind of orphanhood.[…] Clutching difference like a weapon to be used with stiffened will, the exile jealously insists on his or her right to refuse to belong.

This usually translates into an intransigence that is not easily ignored. Willfulness, exaggeration, overstatement: these are characteristic styles of being an exile, methods for compelling the world to accept your vision – which you make more unacceptable because you are in fact unwilling to have it accepted. It is yours, after all. Artists in exile are decidedly unpleasant, and their stubbornness insinuates itself even into their exalted works.[5]

Ghatak places his nomadic, doomed epic of Partition against the sitedness and sturdy optimism of nationalism’s dominant narrative and refuses to submit his memory to its forgetfulness. Forgetfulness to him is the criminal act of history that has enabled the erasure of the moment of rupture that lies at the heart of the nation’s narrative of ‘progress’ and sovereignty. He writes:

Being a Bengali from East Bengal, I have seen the untold miseries inflicted on my people in the name of independence—which is a fake and a sham. I have reacted violently towards this and I have tried to portray different aspects of this [in my films].[6]

In a later interview, on being asked how important the Partition was to his films, Ghatak said:

I have always been extremely against it. Even in my last film I think I have attacked it. […] The point is – and I have said it in my films – what provoked the strife between two Bengals is a great betrayal. There is only one Bengal. […] And that has been partitioned in a completely despicable way. This is something very artificial and no one has the right to forgive it.[7]

The narrative of Indian nationalism and its celebration of ‘freedom’ obviously make no sense to Ghatak, who, as an exile, feels himself  trapped, frozen at the very moment of rupture that the nation represses.  He writes of a pre-history of wholeness, integrity and blissful comfort in his Bengal:

We were born into a critical age. In our boyhood we have seen a Bengal, whole and glorious [……] Rural Bengal, still revelling in its fairy tales, panchalis, and its thirteen festivals in twelve months, throbbed with the hope of a new spurt of life. This was the world that was shattered by the War, the Famine, and when the Congress and the Muslim League brought disaster to the country and tore it into two to snatch for it a fragmented independence. Communal riots engulfed the country. The waters of the Ganga and the Padma flowed crimson with the blood of warring brothers. All this was part of the experience that happened around us. Our dreams faded away. We crashed on our faces, clinging to a crumbling Bengal, divested of all its glory. What a Bengal remained, with poverty and immorality as our daily companions, with blackmarketeers and dishonest politicians ruling the roost, and men doomed to horror and misery! I have not been able to break loose from this theme in all the films that I have made recently.[8]

Hence, his narratives are always characterized by a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. We catch his characters as if in the aftermath of the event that defines their existence and everything that happens in the course of the film is an afterward, the events of which seems to be inevitable, almost ritualistic. Ghatak, like Anasuya in Komal Gandhar, mourns the loss of ‘nischindi’ – an almost prelapsarian peace and contentment that comes of unruptured belonging. This prehistory of nischindi is both a nostalgic obsession and a uniquely stable marker that frames almost all of Ghatak’s narratives. In witnessing this compulsively repetitive enactment of nostalgia and impossible desire for the past as a resistance to the forward-looking linear narrative of nationalism, we are reminded of Said who writes:

Nationalism is an assertion of belonging in and to a place […] Indeed, the interplay between nationalism and exile is like Hegel’s dialectic of servant and master, opposites informing and constituting each other. […] This collective ethos (of nationalism) forms what Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist, calls the habitus, the coherent amalgam of practices linking habit with inhabitance. In time, successful nationalisms consign truth exclusively to themselves and relegate falsehood and inferiority to outsiders.[9]

Kumar Shahni, Ghatak’s student, wrote of him: “He was extremely disenchanted with those of his colleagues who wanted to maintain a false unity and were not, implicitly, pained enough by the splintering of every form of social and cultural values and movement.”[10]

If nationalism’s assertion is belonging, the exile’s assertion is exactly its opposite – the refusal to belong, the refusal to stay put in its assigned place in the dominant narrative, the stubborn refusal to forget and assimilate. As Moinak Biswas writes,

Ghatak took one rupture in the history he witnessed as central – the partition of Bengal. As he went on extending that event into a metaphor for everything that was alienating and destructive in the experience of his community, and talked about the pervasive degeneration of his country sometimes solely in terms of it, he faced puzzlement and even incomprehension from his contemporaries. Wasn’t he being obsessed with a single event? Wasn’t he living in the past, cutting himself off from the contemporary? […] But in the face of historical denial Ghatak would also resort to a drama where a few hapless characters would say just that – ‘we deny it’.[11]

In Ghatak’s Komal Gandhar, for example, young men and women of a theatre group in the first generation of independence try to build a commonality that will heal the memory of the split nation that haunts them. The protagonist Anasuya’s consciousness becomes the metaphoric site for this split. She is caught between her love for two men, as well as between homeland and a strange foreign land that she is unable to imagine or realise. This land is ‘France’, metaphorically represented through linguistic love-games as Prospero’s fantastic and illusory isle (where Ferdinand and Miranda meet in Shakespeare’s The Tempest).

The journey on which Samar and Anasuya meet is the journey by a steamer across the river Padma from the homeland that has been left behind (East Bengal, now East Pakistan)  to the new homeland perforce (independent India). But this journey, which is represented as painful uprooting, is proleptic for Anasuya in that it looks forward to another journey that she will have to make soon in order to join her new husband abroad.

Standing against this future family to which she is betrothed, is the present and ostensibly radical space of the theatre group where she works. Here, familial relations are seemingly formed outside the traditional family. The prologue to the film states this in no uncertain terms: “From many places young boys and girls come together to share their passion for the theatre. They make a group together. In this group, their family is built amidst love, affection, jealousy and envy. They do not have a family life to speak of in the ordinary sense. This film only tries to tell the story of a chapter in one such family’s history.” These, then, are the group of individuals who say ‘we deny it’.

The theatre group itself is both a microcosm and an affective denial of the outer world of the nation. It both mirrors and rejects a network of dominant political relationships always figured in familial terms. In this case of course, the symbolic meaning of the explicit parallel points towards a broken family that represents the nation’s memory of a split homeland. They travel from place to place performing narratives of exile – stories that hark back to the partition-era and their first play as a combined troupe is Shakuntala. In the first play we see her perform in she is the daughter of an old man (played by Bhrigu) who is in the throes of being uprooted – the dominant melody is the man’s trauma of having to betray and leave his motherland. The daughter adds a high-pitched harmony. Next, Anasuya plays Shakuntala (the mother of Bharat, the mythical king after whom the nation is named). Here Ghatak creates a conscious parallel between Anasuya’s own life (waiting for Dushmanta/Samar, being uprooted from the homeland) and Shakuntala’s narrative.

When they perform successfully in a village (in order to collect money for people afflicted by floods), a very poor old woman comes up to Bhrigu, the director, to give him a medal. This medal is her only memory of her son who was killed years ago during the Partition, just as Anasuya’s mother was killed at Noakhali. She tells Bhrigu to perform more, to perform and travel all over the country, because it is her son’s story they are telling through their play. In the end the woman leaves (having shared the story of the absent mother and the absent son) saying: ‘Baba, tomra amar Mukunda Das’. Mukunda Das was, of course, the legendary travelling and revolutionary poet-performer of pre-Independence times in India.

In a climactic scene in this film, while the group of travelling actors is enjoying itself on a part pleasure-trip, Anasuya and Bhrigu stand on broken railway tracks on the river Padma and look over to the other side. They look at the homeland that is physically present but cannot be reached, because it is, in reality, a breach in time as well as space. The open choric songs of joyous return begun by male voices, as the boats begin to sail on the river Padma, are juxtaposed with a melancholic song in female voices that mourn the daughter’s loss of her parental home in marriage – a song of exile.

Anasuya and Bhrigu’s desire for each other is, for all practical purposes, a product of memory. On the margins of this memory is the desire for the thing which cannot be had or returned – the lost homeland. The camera seems to try to heal a breach it cannot bridge, to travel where the characters cannot possibly go. At the end of the very scene where the two central characters realise that they have fallen in love with each other, the camera runs hopelessly along the railway tracks (accompanied by the sounds of a ghostly, absent train) towards an invisible barrier on the connecting river that it cannot possibly cross. Hopeless desire and impossible memory come together irrevocably in this scene.

Compulsive nomadism and vagrancy is often a result of this denial of desire. But nomadism is never a journey towards anything in particular, it is aimless and sprawling, an end in itself, a journey with no end – hence, necessarily cyclical. Desire is constantly negated in such journeys as desire moves inevitably towards an object and the exile’s object of desire is necessarily unattainable, since the separation is not just one occasioned by distance but also time. Ghatak says:

Against my intention the films Meghe Dhaka Tara, Komal Gandhar, and Subarnarekha formed my trilogy. When I started Meghe Dhaka Tara, I never spoke of political unification. Even now I don’t think of it because history will not alter and I won’t venture to do this impossible task. But the cultural segregation caused by politics and economics was a thing to which I never reconciled myself as I always thought in terms of cultural integration. This very theme of cultural integration forms the theme in all three films.[12]

The sense of being compelled to return to the same story almost against one’s wishes is in evidence here. The obsession with divided Bengal and the impossibility of reunification becomes a compulsion that seems difficult to avoid in Ghatak’s films. Hence, they resist the linear narratives of realist history by coming back again and again to the same point after journeys that span the breadth of the nation (as in Subarnarekha), by cyclically asserting the power of those journeys whose outcomes are already known and that are undertaken as rituals for their own sake (as in Jukti Takko and Gappo), by driving his characters forward against apparent rationality and good sense almost as people possessed (as in Ajantrik).

Like all good epics, almost all his films begin in medias res. Something has always-already happened before the formal beginning we encounter in the film, something is always-already ruptured and broken – something that like a ghost haunts the freedom of  the narrative to follow.

Thus, like the readers of epics, Ghatak’s audience often knows the end of his narratives. The end is predetermined, the Oracle already uttered, the hero/ heroine always-already doomed. Yet the narrative moves forward as if driven forward by a passion for inevitable suffering – it is a spiraling descent into an eternal, inescapable in-betweenness and non-belonging, one that is nonetheless compelling to watch.

This is especially true of the last film of Ghatak’s trilogy – Subarnarekha, where exile, vagrancy and homelessness become the defining elements of a modern tragedy, where an attempted escape from the state of homelessness is an act of running away from history. It is a criminal desertion by the exilic hero. This act is punished at the end by his fatal return to the same moment of rupture and non-belonging where the story began.

In the film, the hero Ishwar, a refugee, begins his onward journey towards security and a new home when he meets his wealthy friend on the streets of Calcutta. He is offered a job and joins as a cashier in a mill owned by his classmate in a place called Chhatimpur near Ghatshila. In order to do this, he has to leave behind his work as a schoolteacher in the refugee colony where he had first re-settled after coming into West Bengal. Haraprasad, his friend in the Nabajibon Colony (‘New Life Colony’) accuses him of being a deserter, of escaping the struggling community of the homeless – his own people – who need his help. But Ishwar sees it as his primary duty to secure the future of his little sister Seeta, who must at all costs be saved from travails of the exilic life of an outsider. He refuses to throw in his lot with the rest of the refugees and seeks instead to participate in the new nation’s narrative of individual progress. He then undertakes what he sees as an escape from the condition of exile into prosperity and belongingness. In short, he wishes to assimilate. He wishes not to remember. Haraprasad, who is the dogged-remember, cries: “Shame on you!” Ishwar ignores him.

The so-far homeless Ishwar has adopted another vagrant child, a little boy named Abhiram, who has lost his mother in one of the eviction drives inflicted on the colony by the authorities. So the exile takes the vagrant orphan and his own sister towards the new home, where he may forget his past and begin again. But this forgetting also includes a reconstruction of the life that is lost, a reclaiming of the prelapsarian nischindi. Ishwar believes this is possible. And this, according to Ghatak, the auteur of his story, is his tragic error. As in a classical tragedy, the film abounds in numerous premonitions of doom and even as Ishwar refuses to participate in the narrative of relentless exilic suffering, his doom moves irrevocably towards him.

One such premonition appears in the film in the figure of the bahurupi dressed as Mahakali on the runway of the abandoned aerodrome where Seeta plays and sings. The visual expanse of the vast aerodrome lined on both sides by tall grass stalks and the aural beauty of Seeta’s singing are suddenly interrupted in the most merciless way by the arrival of this incongruous, horrifying figure. Seeta runs away in fear and collides with the eccentric manager of the mill, whom the people call mad. On being chided by the manager, the bahurupi says: “Bhoy dekhaini babu, shamne eshe porechilam” (“I did not scare the child on purpose, we accidentally came face to face”) – encapsulating at a stroke the impersonality and blind inevitability of the fate that awaits Seeta, which we will recognise in hindsight.

But examined more carefully, this scene of beauty, innocence and freedom is pervaded from the very beginning by a sense of doom. The children wander in pure pleasure in a vast open landscape that is nonetheless a site of a destructive history of war and aggression. It is an abandoned aerodrome built by the British during the Second World War. Signs of the war are strewn throughout this landscape and the children begin to recognise these signs from the stories they have heard from the elders. Abhiram pretends to be a fighter plane on the runway and the spectral presence of the same is registered as the camera imitates its movements and the soundtrack records what could not have been recorded within the space-time framework of the narrative.

The extra-diegetic sounds and the camera simulation of a ghostly vehicle (just as in Komal Gandhar) are ominous elements that run as a strong cross-current against the apparent innocence of the new home and the protagonists’ pleasure in its open landscape. The landscape is haunted by ghosts of the 1940s – the defining decade for Ghatak’s sensibility, as Moinak Biswas has pointed out – the decade of war, of dreams of revolution and the end of all those dreams in the event of Partition.

Closed and open spaces are juxtaposed continually in the film. The song about the open dhaner khet (rice-fields) sung in the aerodrome returns again when Seeta is back within the claustrophobic confines of a refugee colony where she lives with her now-husband Abhiram. This is the very space from which Ishwar had wished to remove her in childhood. But in disowning her and wishing for her death because she loves Abhiram, Ishwar effectively exiles her from the ‘new home’ on the banks of the Subarnarekha. Seeta, then, exits the narrative of progress and upward mobility that Ishwar inhabits and constructs, and moves back into the claustrophobic entrapment of the slums of Calcutta – the refugee colony that is the locus of exilic life on the margins of the nation.

When her son asks what rice-fields look like, she sings him the song she sang in her childhood. She says: “Just listen to me and you will see it!” She then tells him the story of her old ‘new home’, its vast open spaces, trees and butterflies – and promises that they will one day travel back to it. The boy does indeed travel to this landscape of his mother’s youth one day; but by then, his mother and father are both dead. He is assigned to the care of the old and almost insane Ishwar, who believes himself responsible for Seeta’s suicide. Here, at the fag-end of the narrative, in a strikingly poignant shot, there is a final juxtaposition of exile and the unquenched thirst for travel. At the same moment that Ishwar, standing in the station, reads a letter that tells him that he has lost both his job and his home of thirty years, the little boy realises that he has just seen a dhan khet (rice field) for the first time in his life. He sings his mother’s song. This, however, is not the end. It cannot be. Edward Said writes:

Exile is never the state of being satisfied, placid or secure […] Perhaps this is a different way of saying that a life of exile moves according to a different calendar […] Exile is life led outside the habitual order. It is nomadic, decentered, contrapuntal; but no sooner does one get accustomed to it than its unsettling force erupts again.[13]

The refugee-hero of Subarnarekha begins again at the end, Sisyphus-like, the same steep ascent towards an elusive belongingness that he had undertaken thirty years ago. This time, of course, he knows that this move towards ‘progress’ is doomed to fail. He finally recognises that he has been going round in circles around the same point of rupture all his life. Escape is impossible.

Yet it seems that this doomed journey must be undertaken relentlessly by the exilic hero, who once made homeless, will always inevitably remain so. Exile is irrevocable. Thus, even when return is achieved, it is a return to a blighted landscape, because the exilic sensibilities that encounter it are already split open, severed, ruptured at base. When Ishwar returns to his ‘new home’ a second time, he returns as a vagrant, not an insider. He is, ironically, not a step ahead in the line of advance towards belonging than he had been at the beginning of his life. The difference is crucial. To quote Susan Suleiman:

All travelers are outsiders somewhere (some may be so everywhere), but not all outsiders are travelers. Travelers, by definition, can go home, though they may choose not to […][14]

The same is true of Neeta in Meghe Dhaka Tara. At the end of the film, she finally manages to travel to the mountains she remembers from her childhood, the memory of which she clutches in the photograph she carries when she is thrown out of home. But when Neeta finally reaches the mountains, she makes the journey as an exile (with no option of return), not a traveller. Her’s is the ultimate exile; she is in a sanatorium waiting to die.

Here then, the Sanskrit shloka from the Upanishad quoted at the end of Subarnarekha takes on a near-horrifying inflection:

“Charana Vai Madhuvindute, Charana Hrimadhuswaram.
Suryasya Pashya Premanam Yotendrayete Charana.
Charaiveti Charaiveti”[15]

Mobility, as it appears in Subarnarekha, belies the resilient optimism of the original verse that urges one to keep moving tirelessly, to keep striving. Even as the aged hero falters and stumbles with fatigue, he is pulled forward towards a non-existent ‘new home’ by his little orphaned nephew, who wishes not to go forward but to return where his dead mother and father began their lives. Hence, the new home is really the old home on the banks of the Subarnarekha and moving towards it would only mean one more failure, another tragic disappointment. Mobility is entrapment and walking on is not a choice but a cursed compulsion, where the end is known but stopping impossible. Linear narratives of national or revolutionary scientific progress[16] fall apart in the face of this cyclical ritual of doomed journeys. Through them, Ghatak doggedly asserts his resistance to the idea of nation as home and family as happiness. Nowhere in his narratives is this haunting more in evidence than in the spectacles of apparent mobility, of travel by choice, of ostensibly achieved journeys towards desire.

Notes:

[1] Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and other Literary and Cultural Essays, (Penguin, 2001), 173-174
[2] George Steiner, Introduction to Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution: (New York: Atheneum, 1976)
[3] Whiplashes are actually heard in the sound track of Meghe Dhaka Tara, as a disembodied aural marker of the pain that the heroine Neeta cannot herself articulate.
[4] Ritwik Ghatak, ‘Music in Indian Cinema and the Epic Approach’ in Rows and Rows of Fences: Ritwik Ghatak on Cinema (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2000), 21-22.
[5] Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and other Literary and Cultural Essays, (London: Penguin, 2001), 182.
[6] Ghatak, Rows and Rows of Fences, 92.
[7] Prabir Sen: “An Interview with Ritwik Kumar Ghatak (1975)”. In Ritwik Kumar Ghatak ed. Atanu Pal (Kolkata: Banishilpa, 1988)
[8] Ritwik Ghatak: “My Films”. In Rows and Rows of Fences (Calcutta: Seagull, 2000), 49. This was originally published in Bengali as “Aamar Chhabi” in Film, Autumn Issue, (Kolkata, 1966).
[9] Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and other Literary and Cultural Essays, (London: Penguin, 2001), 176.
[10] Kumar Shahani cited in Paul Willemen, ed., Indian Cinema, (London: BFI Dossier No. 5, 1982), 41.
[11] Moinak Biswas, “Her Mother’s Son: Kinship and History in Ritwik Ghatak”, Rouge, Issue 3 (2004), http://www.rouge.com.au/3/ghatak.html
[12] From an interview with Ghatak in Chitrabikshan Annual, (1975), as reprinted and translated in Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Amrit Gangar, eds., Ghatak: Arguments and Stories (Bombay: Screen Unit, 1987), 92. Also found in Bhattacharya and Dasgupta, eds., Ritwik Ghatak: Face to Face, 67.
[13] Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and other Literary and Cultural Essays, (London: Penguin, 2001), 186.
[14] Susan Rubin Suleiman, introduction to Exile and creativity: signposts, travelers, outsiders, backward glances, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 3.
[15] “The honey bee, by its motion, collects honey, and birds enjoy tasty fruits by constant movement. The sun is revered, by virtue of its constant shining movement; therefore, one should be constantly in motion. Keep moving, keep moving on”, Aitareya Upanishad, 7.15.
[16] When a newspaper published news of man’s landing on the moon, it is torn apart angrily by Ishwar, who, having lost everything, cannot abide the notion of ‘progress’.