On My Unhappy Consciousness

An old wise man called Hegel coined a phrase called the Unhappy Consciousness, which, he said, is a consciousness that knows itself to be one but is at the same time divided and is at variance with itself. For some years now, I have felt myself to be living with an internally contradictory Unhappy Consciousness with respect (at least) to two things : the British Empire and little children.

First, I have a great love and an incurable nostalgia for Victorian and Edwardian England, the vanished England of majestic castles, of dreaming spires, of the Queen's English, of English wit, and of the local pubs selling bitter ale. Indeed, sometimes I wonder if I would have cared at all for Gandhi, Tilak, and Nehru and that whole gang if I had been living in pre-Independence India : I might probably simply have gone off to Simla to drink high tea with the Company clerks; play tennis and polo with them; listen to Haydn, Mozart, Elgar, Purcell, and Vaughan Williams; and read my Byron, Keats, Spencer, and Mill, blissfully (or deliberately?) unaware of the horrors of Chauri-Chaura and Jalianwalla-Bagh. And yet, I suffer from a powerful Unhappy Consciousness : my socio-political views come closest to the movements that are encompassed by the umbrella term New Left which is one shoot of neo-Marxism that was developed in the 1960s by Marxist thinkers in opposition to Stalin. For a developing 'neo-Marxist' like me to confess to a love of Victorian England and its 'High Culture' would perhaps be the ultimate and the most unspeakable heresy, one for which Chairman Mao or Premier Kruschev would have had me shot without a second thought. Thus in my Victorian moods I am always aware that all the glories of England were built with native cheap labour ruthlessly expropriated from the colonies, and yet even after having digested all of this Marxist historiography, I still find myself yearning for the age of the Great Victorians, them in spite of their imperialism, stuffiness, near-misogyny, and high-handedness. (Perhaps I need to be sent to come 'Correction Centre' in the Siberian mines from which I shall emerge after five years thoroughly cleansed of my politically-incorrect hankering for the dead Victorians.)

Second, little children. This morning, I was walking through the market-square when I saw a little girl (probably around six years old) looking after her little brother in the pram while their mother was trying to buy something from a nearby stall. The boy started whimpering and the girl hurriedly tried to comfort him by giving him her gaily dressed pink doll. I watched mesmerised for about ten minutes, standing rooted to the spot. There was something, as divine as it was humane, about that scene in the centre of the noisy and crowded market-place under the hot noon sun, as if it were an enclave or an oasis of peace in the middle of a desert of mortal apathy. And yet, my Unhappy Consciousness will not allow me to wax eloquent in this manner on that scene, for I know only too well what I am going to say in another mood about that little girl and her brother. I will announce, from the ramparts of the Academy, that this is just how little girls are conditioned ('indoctrinated') from an early age to believe that it is their socially-sanctioned duty to grow up to become mothers and spend a life-time mothering their children. Thus I want to see the little girl just as one human being caring for and empathising with another human being in pain, but want as I might, I simply cannot bring myself to do so without the 'gender-issue' emerging into my mind. My consciousness breaks into two once again, and this internal division produces a deep lingering sense of unhappiness; I seek a soothing wholeness, even knowing that this completeness is not to be found in this divided world of ours.