🚨 A Nation's Dream Scattered Under the Cover of Devotion..
"...A Crowd That Forgets Pain, and Culture Turned into Intoxication.."When a people stand in the street carrying their pain and asking for justice, and at the same time spectacles appear that scatter that feeling, those spectacles are not mere festivals. They are politics. Not every event held in the name of devotion is sacred. Some events become instruments for making people forget pain. Certain scenes now appearing on the streets of the homeland belong to that kind.
We do not question a person's spiritual longing. We do not deny faith in God. We do not condemn people gathering to pull a temple car or to celebrate a temple festival. Temples and festivals have a long history in Tamil life. They have also been a source of consolation in times of struggle. But today, in some places, devotion is used as a cover. The question arises only when we look under that cover.
The question is not about faith. The question is about political purpose. A community is still asking for the disappeared. Bones rise from the soil of Chemmani. Land is seized. Military occupation continues. In the same street, on the path of the temple car, bringing in the descendants of those who inflicted the pain, staging display and dance, and calling it devotion is another matter. In a land of great pain, gathering the heirs of those who caused that pain and setting them to dance in scant clothing on the street where the temple car moves is not devotion. It is a form of cultural degradation that works like a drug.
A drug is not only liquor. Any spectacle that makes people forget feeling is a drug. Using carnival to divert the anger of an oppressed people and to blunt their demand for justice is an old method. Today that drug is set down in the street in the name of devotion. The hands that pull the temple car are hands of faith. But the spectacle staged in the same space carries the danger of turning that faith into political intoxication.
In an oppressed nation a festival has two faces. One is collective memory and consolation. The other is carnival that blunts the will to struggle. If we confuse the two, we are deceived. Pulling the temple car is the faith of the people. But bringing in alien spectacle in the same space and time, in a way that drowns the cry for justice, is not devotion. It is political theatre.
A crowd that forgets pain in a beaten nation is dangerous. When pain is forgotten, the demand also fades. When the demand fades, accountability fades. Then oppression begins to look normal. "Let life go on" sounds beautiful. But a life built on buried truth is not liberation. It is a softer form of subjugation. Carnival is the medicine that produces that softness. Cultural degradation is another name for that medicine.
Political leaders who pass this in silence accept it. Silence is not neutrality. Silence is permission. A leadership may respect faith. But if it does not name the politics that uses faith to break national feeling, that leadership has stepped away from the people's pain. The festival need not be condemned. The politics that uses the festival, and the spectacle that makes pain forgettable, must be condemned.
Philosophy insists on a distinction here. Faith is a person's inner world. Politics is a people's public world. Respecting faith is one thing. Accepting the conversion of faith into an instrument of carnival is another. In an oppressed nation, carnival politics is often the assistant of hegemony. It creates the illusion of "normal life." There is no normal life yet. Land is still taken. Truth is still hidden. Families still stand in the street.
So what we ask is not hatred. What we ask is vigilance. Keep faith. Pull the temple car. Celebrate the festival. But do not forget the pain. Do not close the demand for justice. Do not accept as devotion the act of setting the heirs of those who inflicted pain to dance on the street of the temple car. That is intoxication. That is cultural degradation. Name that intoxication as politics. If we fail to name it, we become a crowd that has forgotten pain. A crowd that has forgotten pain will not find liberation.
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