H. S. Shiva Prakash

1. Have you ever felt ‘terrorized’ by something? Have you ever told/described it to someone? Has it found an expression in your work?

Yes, I often feel terrorized by many things, not just by the things normally associated with terrorism. For example, I often dream of going bankrupt and orphaned in a strange land or of just missing a train or flight. It could also be just the inability to sleep at the end of a trying day..This is my personal paradigm for terror. It can be summed up as an unpredictable eruption of something we always tend to wish away. I thing this definition is broad enough to carry everybody’s paradigms of terror.

2. At a psychological / aesthetic / philosophical level, can terror be ‘represented’ in art? Would you like to name certain works (art/writing) in which it has been done effectively?

What else art except means to handle the terror that has already happened? It is not just the rituals which try to make friends with terror and violence in mythical time by reenacting deaths and rebirths of gods/goddesses, who are our atemporal ancestors. This is conspicuous in the case of tragedy. But the comical, satirical and farcical modes too do just this in different ways. The tragedy enters the eye of storm whereas other modes distance terror through their strategies so that we can convince ourselves that we have been able to handle and survive terror. The examples are abundant in the history of art. The Mahabharatha centres around fratricide and Shakuntalm with the terrible injustice done to the heroin who is more a companion of peacocks and creepers than of hunters and kings.

3. Which would you consider to be the most terrorizing moment / event / ideology you have known?

Refer to my response to question 1. Ideologies of every brand are attempts to explain away or rationalize terrorizing moments.

4. How do you respond to the rhetoric of terror(ism) in mainstream media and politics?

The in mainstream media and politics are always insincere. On the one hand they breed goody goody lies. On the other, they spice up terror for pelf and profit. This is what art industry, not just Mumbaiya cinema but also fund and gain-seeking commissioned artistic exercises, do. But a genuine artist does not cooperate with such stultifying pretensions to art.

5. Have the (serial) blasts around made you feel insecure?

Said my favourite poet Allama Prabhu:

I do not know
How many pralayas
Happened in the past
How many pralayas
Will happen in the past

He also said:

When it rains fire
Be like water
When in flood,
Be like air
When the world
Is destroyed,
Be like space…

This is my response too. I do not know if we can stop future terror. But terrors in the past have happened. Neither God nor man nor the wishy-washy post-colonial subject could stop it. What is the point in wishing it away? The challenge is how to survive terror. This is where art and spirituality can help us somewhat.