The end
is in the beginning and yet you go on.
Samuel Beckett, Endgame
1. Introduction:
Cinematic Transposition and Theological Recontextualization
This paper undertakes an
examination of the cinematic transposition inherent in Ashish Avikunthak’s Kalkimanthankatha (The Churning of
Kalki, 2015), a filmic endeavor that engages in an intriguing
and idiosyncratic adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s formative theatrical work, Waiting for Godot (published 1952). The
intention of this paper is to elucidate how Avikunthak’s film not only
endeavors to encapsulate the quintessence of Beckett’s absurdist universe but
also functions as a prismatic lens through which the multifaceted entanglements
of temporality, faith, and the dialectic between tradition and modernity are
interrogated. This paper attempts to show that this cinematic intervention
metamorphoses into an aesthetic inquiry into the paradigm of divine absence—God
as a conspicuous void—and the profound boredom that suffuses the act of
interminable waiting, a boredom inextricably entwined with the anticipation of
a not-yet-materialized but ostensibly inexorable future that simultaneously
implicates the subsumption of the present.
In the realm of intercultural dialogue and artistic
recontextualization, Beckett’s Waiting
for Godot manifests a unique potential for transgeographical,
translinguistic, and transcultural resonance. The play’s sparse
mise-en-scène—an old country road and an almost barren tree—its fundamental
premise of two men navigating an apparent desolation in perpetual expectation
of the elusive Godot, and its distinct yet amorphous dialogue, all contribute
to its universal pertinence. The seventy-nine-minute film attempts a compelling
metamorphosis of Beckett’s postwar ‘tragicomic’ ‘theatre of the absurd’[1]
into a postcolonial meditation on the inexorable arrival of future events, the phenomenology
of waiting, and the inherent tedium that saturates this condition. Avikunthak,
a filmmaker with a background in archaeology and social anthropology,
accomplishes this transformation by interweaving ancient Indian philosophical
and theological treatises—such as akarma (inaction),
anitya (impermanence), anirvachaniyata (indeterminability), and
sunyata (emptiness)—with Beckett’s
textual fabric and his broader philosophical, political, and often neglected
theological oeuvre. The theological transfer, from Beckett to Avikunthak, as
this paper opines, occurs through the prism of boredom with waiting as the main
character of the play, the primary object and very principle dictating the
tramps’ lives.
Avikunthak’s
avant-garde cinematic approach offers an expansive scope to comprehend the two
‘tramp’-protagonists, who embark upon a search for the elusive messianic figure
Kalki —the tenth and ultimate avatar of Vishnu, a
figure whose advent heralds the dissolution of one temporal epoch [yuga] and the resurgence of the next.
This exploration necessitates grappling with the a priori recognition of
cyclical temporality—an intellectual acknowledgment that venerates the motif of
interminable, cyclical recurrence, emblematic of Beckett’s absurdist ethos,
which decisively interrogates the question of linear teleology of (certain)
eschatological progression. The comparative study of religions, born in the
crucible of colonial hegemony and Christian missionary undertakings (Chidester,
2003, 2013, 2019; Klostermaier, 1989; Webster, 1997) has been instrumental in unveiling the diverse
modalities through which different cultures conceptualize history and
temporality. Mircea Eliade’s (1959) examination of the spiritual convictions and
practices of ‘archaic man’ elucidates the profound divergence between ancient
and contemporary worldviews, demonstrating how the degree of adherence to
either linear or cyclical temporal frameworks shapes a community's eschatology;
humanity’s relationship to time and history; and (an) understanding of the end
of the world based on the differentiations between the conceptualisations of
sacred and profane. Generally, this entails either a radical cessation of the
world or a rebirth that continues the cosmic narrative. Constant
‘de-contextualization’ is identifiably a persuasive quality of Beckett’s play
(Taylor-Batty and Taylor-Batty, 2013). The elusive and persistent presence of the
divine, as well, presents an intriguing aspect, noticeable rather explicitly in
the clever phonetic resemblance between ‘Godot’ and ‘God,’ blending elements
from both French and English to create the word. D. Z. Phillips (1986) points out that the Beckettian text embodies a suspended Christian
narrative where the struggle to recount the story of redemption in an era
denuded of its apposite language ascertains that there’s a clinching to the
debris and refuge at hand as an infractible deportment against the prevalent
authority of Gnostic modernity that leads to both the securing and undermining
of its theological significance. Beckett’s work often emplaces God conceptually
within the masked theological processes of existentialism and
poststructuralism. It can be said that the vacuum portrayed in Beckett’s play
—God as absence—is not a novel notion but one that is deeply rooted in
theological traditions (Eagleton, 2012). In this context, the paper will also attempt
to navigate the intricate dynamics of a cyclical promise of a regenerative
future, considering its inevitable tethering to an interminable realm of
boredom. The paper also contemplates and considers whether the linear
eschatological framework, interwoven with cyclical motifs such as the ‘return’
of the messiah, creates an inescapable, labyrinthine structure where waiting
and boredom become irrevocably intertwined. The analysis also attempts to
unravel the foundational threads of waiting and boredom as essential components
of eschatological thought transcending the boundaries of Eastern and Western
ontological paradigms oscillating between cyclical and linear conceptions of
time.
2. Adapting Beckett: Narrating
by Way of Non-narration
Beckett’s texts, particularly Waiting for Godot had from its earliest
day struck a chord within Bengali as well as with the larger Indian cultural
scene (Chakraborty, 2021; Chatterjee, 2017), capturing the attention of numerous playwrights
and actors like Badal Sircar, Mohit Chattopadhyay, Girish Karnad, Dipak
Majumdar, and Naseeruddin Shah to name a few. The ambiguity of the Beckettian
text facilitates experimental re-imaginings without forcing the audience with
specific contexts. The question of what/who is supposed to or going to come,
for which the waiting is taking place, is deliberately left unresolved in the
text/language, refusing to exchange the impossibly absurd moments portrayed in
place of the comforts of deducible narrative while also questioning the very
act of meaning-making. The absence of meaning here is particularly not
meaninglessness but the absurd, it’s a deferral towards an interminable future
that any endeavor to illustrate it frequently reveals the meaning proffered by
the audience, critic, or adapter. The axial issue remains in the realm of
understanding itself where the crisis of meaning emerges as a quandary
regarding the facade, instead of a representation of a particular condition.
Eric Levy (2001, 2003), in his analysis of Beckett’s larger aesthetic
oeuvre, articulates that it is pain that transcends the excess of meaning while
seeking self-origination, specifically ‘asiety,’ a virtue fundamentally
associated with God, which was also ascribed by Kant to the individual. The
deliberate ambiguity of the text thus becomes the transformative formal scope
of the Beckettian aesthetic text.
The
mechanisms that shape aesthetic hierarchies, especially the global influences
that affect the reception and adaptation of Beckett’s texts in specific
temporal and geographic contexts underscore the profound adaptability of his
works. In Avikunthak’s cinematic intervention, this resonance is magnified,
revealing a broad spectrum of formalistic possibilities. Kalkimanthankatha does not merely offer a direct transliteration of
Beckett’s dialogic lexicon; instead, it embarks upon a cerebral expedition,
stitched with esoteric dialogues of sprawling profundities that traverse the
labyrinthine corridors of complex philosophical quandaries. The director not
only transposes Beckett’s narrative into a distinct cultural milieu but also
infuses it with layers of meaning drawn from within the postcolonial experience
and its historical antecedents. In the age of skepticism, it is especially
observable that a correspondence between the tenuity and a range of works of
fiction to the reclusion and apprehension towards ends and origins do take
place (Kermode, 2020).
The Beckettian stage doesn’t forbid anything because its fundamental ideal is
to disintegrate the boundaries of discourse and therefore, the tramps navigate
a spectrum of emotions, realisations, concerns, and wonderings while parleying
through spiteful jibes to expressions of care, (almost) conjugal intimacy and
eccentric farces as they play out the ‘theater
of absurd’ while a constant meaning deficit takes on its deliberate
nature, going as far as recommending suicide as a way to pass/kill time. Hemmed
within an existence bereft of profundity and meaningfulness and lodged within
the sphere of only existence instead of an enclosing world, there is an
underlining of abject futility which effectively depicts their lives, such
lives, and the lives of those who wait (and search).
The
perpetual anticipation of an awaited messiah or savior that has permeated
collective imaginations across various religions and cultures throughout the
breadth of history (App, 2011) can be located as Godot in Beckett or as Kalki in the film and the larger Hindu theological context. Kalki, the tenth and final
incarnation of Vishnu, is
believed to herald the end of the current yuga cycle, Kali Yuga[2]
and initiate the resurgence of the next, Satya
Yuga,[3]
marking the conclusion of one time cycle and the beginning of the next.
Avikunthak combines the cyclical expectation associated with Kalki’s
eventuality and the fortitude of awaiting Godot. The profundity of Beckett’s
‘epistemological inquiries’ (Hoffman, 1964), wherein the future is repetitious, eventual, and
fundamentally not final is resurfaced in this adaptation and is contextualised
against questions about violence, sexuality, caste, race, sexual violence,
perversion, rape, communal violence, revolution, morality, ethics, thought,
nationhood, prophecy, and love.
The
film starts initially through direct translations of the text only to veer off
course, constructing an idiosyncratic cinematic world by locating it within the
mist-filled mythical off-stage of the Maha
Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, a
vast premodern spiritual confluence. By going to a specific location there is a
definite presentation of a geographical backdrop which deviates from Beckett’s
deliberately vague setting but the different locations enframed in the film deliberately
wear a mythical non-place like hue overlaid on it. As Kalkimanthankatha politicizes the wait and search for Kalki by lining it with a Maoist-Naxalite thesis, it wittingly or
unwittingly engages with the many political readings of Godot as a play that
reacts against the World Wars (Brereton, 1968). Following the prodigious outpouring of creative
energy in the post-War period, which Beckett had referred to as the “siege in
the room,” (quoted in Gontarski, 2010, p. 135) his work underwent a conspicuous move
“towards the apocalyptic and the eschatological” (quoted in Gontarski, 2010, p. 136). As Gontarski (2010) points out, throughout his body of work Beckett’s
sensibilities developed a trajectory which was shadowed by a fundamentally
classical disposition that permeated the realm of High Modernism during the
earlier half of the twentieth century and the prevailing spirit of post-war
doom that marked the century since as well as his subsequent oeuvre.
Transcendence and linear progression were eschewed, giving way instead to
residual remnants, inherent limitations, and the essential incoherence and
fragmentation that Beckett felt compelled to navigate in the post-War era. This
finds resonance in Avikunthak as a fertile point to base his artistic
reflection on and respond to the contemporary, through the medium of cinema and
through adaptation as method where, in the opinion of this paper, the presence,
role, and fact of boredom and waiting become irreducible though not necessarily
apparent in their profundity.
Waiting
lingers like a constant shadow in our lives, whether it’s for the monsoons to
break, a bus to appear, a salary to clear, a place in line at the bank, an
appointment to commence, a lover to return, or even the end of days and the
promise of the future. The act and experience of waiting is the condemned fate
that is defined by endless labor, and a persistent bid to ‘kill time’ wherein
actions are rendered lacking any purpose, resembling, almost in toto,
Nietzsche’s ‘last man’: a manifestation of the acme of existentialist traces
that have allegedly absorbed Western eschatological thought (Valentine, 2009). It wouldn’t be amiss to opine that with respect
to the formulation of the characters’ being(s)-as-waiting there is next to no
opportunity for any authentic individuality and is instead marked by a complete
indolence, embroiled in a barren life that still bears boredom as a
Tolstoyesque ‘desire for a desire.’ There is thus a life-negating kind of
brutality, reminiscent of that often found in Western eschatology and is also
central to the larger Beckettian aesthetic text. This does indeed breed a kind of
universalism. Regardless of the recursively benumbed and vacuous essence of
their lives, the characters nevertheless retain a logic of purpose, despite how
elusory or abstract it may be i.e. a search. There is a transpiration within
their existence only through the certitude that there is something that is
being waited for —an incarnation; a promise; a war; a calamity; a future; an
arrival; a destruction; another recreation. This underlines the fact that there
is a resoluteness with respect to the questions of meaning and meaningfulness
as fundamental, even within the scope of apparently meaningless circumstances.
And it is within the creation of such an implicit feeling, experience, and
understanding of boredom in waiting, as is the opinion of this paper, which
echoes across this specific adaptation, in terms of both content and form.
The
film’s aesthetic choices—particularly its use of 16mm film for daylight
sequences and digital media for nocturnal shots—serve as a formal manifestation
of its thematic concerns with the dialectic of presence and absence, being and
non-being. This hybrid visual language amplifies the film’s exploration of the
liminality inherent in the characters’ quest for meaning. Avikunthak’s anxiety
over the sufficiency of digital as a cinematic medium, finds expression in the
grainy texture that pervades the film, a deliberate choice that underscores the
inherent tension between the materiality of film and the ephemerality of
digital imagery. The film’s score, a fusion of Western classical
instrumentation and ragas from
Hindustani classical music, further exemplifies the film’s synthesis of diverse
cultural forms, while the narrative itself unfolds through a process of
spontaneous improvisation and painstaking, iterative editing over a span of two
years. The film’s visual language is crafted with distinctive signatures,
leitmotifs, intertextual references, and artistic allusions. It transits from
monochromatic depictions of desolate landscapes to vibrant bursts of color that
allude to political undertones. The visual representations of revolution evolve
into an almost hallucinatory reverie experienced solely by the tramps, who, as
instruments of the text, are trapped within a crystallized temporal unit—be it
the play, the film, the ages, or the yuga.
They remain fundamentally isolated from an indifferent world, a condition both
caused by and reflective of their own indifference. These interconnections
receive a contemplative academic and artistic treatment as Avikunthak tries to
employ “the sacred to arrive at the secular by profaning the religious
mythology embedded in its subject” (Chatterjee, 2017).
Recurrent
visual metaphors dislodged within Kalkimanthankatha
behave as sites of convergence for the film’s exploration of contemporary
political Hinduism and the existential dilemmas of Beckettian absurdity—barren
landscapes, unpopulated places, and water behave as spectral presences lodged
within a continuum of ambiguity and disconsolateness (Figure 1). This, at once,
simplifies and complicates the very expectations around the logics of grand
narratives of political and spiritual search as culminatory. Such duality
encapsulates broader tension between the tangible and the transcendental, the
imminent and the elusive, that defines the film’s engagement with the mythos of
Kalki and the perpetual deferral of eschatological fulfillment. Boredom,
in the way that it can be located in this adaptation may stem as much from that
which is interesting, assuming, stimulating, or felicitous, to that which is
distracting, disrupting, or amusing. The wait for the future, the end, the
redemption, and the resurgence, intensifies the emptiness of boredom. Even the
spiritual, political wait that the text alludes to does not relieve boredom but
instead it populates the present as a device. This is manifest acutely in the
formal realm of the text of the play and the adaptation in question. The boring
design of the film demands a demonstrative and contemplative attentiveness to
the visual regime that is being unraveled to the audience—the pacing, the set
up, the framing design and technique, the music, all create an atmosphere that
is also parallelly derived from aesthetic moments and movements. A certain kind
of boringness is demanded as a meditative, restorative, and contemplative
anchor. Where Beckett interspersed the central banality with uproariously
absurd humor, Avikunthak chooses to pierce it through deliberate techniques—linguistic
and cinematic. Linguistically, Avikunthak’s tramps grapple with the ineffable
nature of their search through the deployment of a highly stylized and poetic
register of Bangla which deliberately distances itself from colloquial speech that
could command active cognitive engagement from the audience, which inordinately
corresponds to Beckett’s preoccupation with the limitations of language as
stated above. On the level of cinematic technique this ranges rfrom a
deliberate nod to Ritwik Ghatak in the framing of the sprawling tree at the
center of the frame in the beginning of the film or a quote from the Bengali
poet Nabarun Bhattacharya’s famous political poem এই মৃত্যু উপত্যকা আমার দেশ না (This
Valley of Death Is Not My Land) to the stilled long shots of expansive landscapes
or the empty excesses of an abandoned fairground or the shifting soundscapes
which accompany the expansive landscapes or the jolt-like appearance of the
tramps into the open landscapes as if teleported from somewhere else or the
dead space and dead time which mark each frame.
Figure
1: The two tramps at the fairground of Kumbh at
night
Source:
film Kalkimanthankatha.
Avikunthak
manages to tranquil the space and the time within his frames, even during the Kumbh Mela—one
of the largest known gatherings of devotees that takes place every 12 years.
This demand for meditative intervention is visually iterated through the
particular scene of a haunting musical rendition of a raga that is inserted into the film as a deliberate aesthetic
technique to arrest time, to confine it with awe (Figure 2). A gradual yet
sudden shift in the screen occurs, from the grainy pockmarked gray of the
screen into a vivid blue, with the singing body of a saree-clad woman seated under the lush giant tree with a tamboura
in her hand as the tramps and the audience watch on. This tactic to make time
captive to ephemeral beauty by way of invoking the sound of singing and a
tamboura proceeds into an intensification within the realm of
spiritual/political boredom which inundates everything leaving nothing outside
of it. The song stays on screen for a whole five minutes in stilled frame and
then it jolts back to its gray and grainy texture as one tramp walks slowly
from the distant, arid hillocks while the other stares into the distance as the
song quietens and is replaced by unintelligible announcements floating in from
the distant background (Figure 3). This moment of stuplimity (Ngai, 2000) illustrates how all acts and attempts to resolve boredom are at their
core, fundamentally, boring, which also protracts and amplifies the feeling.
The fatal lassitude of boredom encloses actuality in a deep gloom, an encounter
with an emptiness that colonizes everything, every space, and every time.
Figure 2: The tramps
standing across the landscape of the heartland
Source:
film Kalkimanthankatha.
3. The Dynamics of Waiting: Boredom and Search in Kalkimanthankatha
To
Jack Barbalet (1999), boredom encompasses
more than the mere passage of time but involves a complete loss of meaning that
individuals experience, which can profoundly affect their sense of self; a
deprivation of meaning which has been observed to lead to disengagement (Kanevsky
and Keighley, 2003). Jacques Ellul’s
work, Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective (2012 [1969]), sees boredom as “gloomy, dull, and joyless” while
simultaneously being adjudged as one of the defining perversions of life (p.
121). This view is proximate to that of Karl Barth, who similarly described the
distinctive characteristic of contemporary humanity as neither serenity nor
rebellion, but simply an “utter weariness and boredom” (1960, p. 117). Not only is man “bored with himself” and burdened by
everything but boredom can lead one to assume “that all life is thus empty”
(Jameson, 1988, p. 187). Drawing on
Heidegger’s ideas (1995
[1938]), Elpidorou and Freeman (2015)
propose that boredom can be understood as a fundamental mode of existence,
referred to as ‘mood,’ which plays a constitutive and revelatory role in one’s
attunement to the world. This ‘fundamental’ human attunement encapsulates a
profoundly metaphysical and deeply religious implication (Raposa, 1985). And attunements such as this are not just subjectively tinted
experiences or otherwise epiphenomenal expression of internal life but also
elemental ways of being, configuring the ways the world gets perceived, lived
in and made sense of. Boredom can be deemed a seemingly trivial yet gnawingly
pervasive phenomenon that constitutes the everyday and everydayness of life. In
Agamben’s (2000) discussion on Martin
Heidegger’s 1929–1930 lecture course, he traces ‘this’ inherent incapability of humankind by
emphasizing that individuals cannot be defined solely by any particular
function i.e. human nature cannot be fully captured by any specific identity or
task, to which he further added the notion of humanity’s creative
‘semi-indifference’ towards assigned roles or responsibilities. This prompts us
to question whether this assertion holds true when applied to the act of
waiting and, consequently, the unique identity of the two tramps who are
defined by their state and act of waiting. So, if boredom reveals the essence
of a “purely living being” (Agamben, 2004,
p. 70) then waiting becomes the ideal plane of such a possibility as is true
for our protagonists, whose wait is depicted as search but the imagination of
searching as agencied disposition is rendered false as search ends in
non-arrival which implicates the act of searching to the fact of waiting.
Figure 3: The raga
performance as the tramps watch
on 
Source:
film Kalkimanthankatha.
In
his Phenomenological Analysis of Waiting (1972), Imad Shouery explores how the experience of waiting spans both
individual and collective realms of consciousness. He illustrates that, at the
individual level, waiting is experienced subjectively, while at the collective
level, it becomes a projected state that manifests across social, political,
theological, and historical dimensions. Shouery argues that, on a collective
scale, individual consciousness is objectified and integrates with the broader
collective experience, resulting in a shared encounter with waiting. This
collective waiting often lacks a sense of presence, as consciousness is driven
forward, fixating on the potentialities of the future rather than the immediacy
of the present. This state of anticipation fosters a sense of self-estrangement,
characterized by a detachment from one’s temporal possibilities. The
all-encompassing act of waiting takes place within the realm of what is
known-yet-unknown or what is known-as-unknown, where anticipation and
uncertainty encounter each other across the gray long shots of the bare
landscapes of the Indian heartland and the blurry carnivalesque of the
gathering in the background reverberating in the cacophony of the distant loud
noises of the crowd. Waiting implies the act of holding space for something’s
arrival, Kalki! as the tramps of Avikunthak’s rendition keep evoking; or Godot!
as Vladimir and Estragon often call out. Waiting is steered by the diktats of
expectation where the impossible must conditionally remain forever elusive to
anticipation, because waiting can only occur when it is moored to the realm of
possibility, and probability. Their wait, this way, takes place at the cusp
where anticipation, belief, and the act of searching interlace meticulously
within the being while it also casts its shadow constantly on existence (Figure
4). Waiting must indeed be studied as behavior or affective propensity, but
there’s a space to enquire about its tangled interconnections between intention
and attention; compulsion and freedom; experience and an inevitability that
haunts the entire being. Waiting is a device, a posturing, an approach where
one finds themselves stationed voluntarily or ambivalently, yet always bearing
with it the effect that it has on one’s embroilment to (the) future/s. It is a
preoccupation with the future in perpetual generation, a boring repetition of
inevitabilities which can potentially devour essence. While distractions often
try to supplant one away from stoical meditation or pernoctation, the fact that
diversions abound, waiting’s presence testifies as well to the capability to
wait which endures many if not constant resistances. The deportment, intended
for the future i.e that which will happen later, stitches together a montage of
apprehensions restive within the being, a persistent disquietude. Therefore,
‘waiting’ always bears the risk of becoming ‘boredom,’ a torpefying detachment
to the now. Waiting can collapse into boredom and ‘the boring.’ Waiting,
indeed, can happen exclusively in the scope of the future, the ‘after’ where
the authentic is suffused with contingent relevance. And within the realm of
eschatology, Paul Fiddes (2000)
through an instantiation of a parable of Luke’s Gospel, where faithful servants
earnestly await the return of Christ (their savior), brings out the Christian
concept of parousia, that, for the true believers, presages a jubilant climax
of this world not a boring or melancholic or a repetitive and blithe one. While
in Hinduism, the conclusion of the Kali Yuga leads to the Satya Yuga
with a fore-guaranteed triumph of good over evil and the culmination therefore
is not a culmination at all rather a cusp where the dissolution of the present
age and not the present itself meets the resurgence of the age of truth. In
this case, time transcends endurance and promises redemption only in its
regeneration, its resumption into the cycle again and again and then all over
again. Waiting necessitates non-arrival and that which happens in Waiting
for Godot, twice (Mercier, 1956),
happens in Kalkimanthankatha as well, i.e. nothing. This wait,
constricted and indefatigable, makes the present unintelligible and this is
where boredom festers; a deeply contemplative, spiritual and tragic boredom as
well as a trivial, lingering, and comical boredom.
Figure 4: The tramps
in conversation and contemplation 
Source:
film Kalkimanthankatha.
4. Boring Futures: Irresolvable Resolutions
To
Jean-Luc Marion, there exists a type of supernatural boredom that repels the
spiritual, leading to a disconnection not only from one’s essence of existence
but also leads to the negation of “the very name of being” (1991, p. 135). Across
various cultures and theological frameworks, the notion that God could evoke
any sense of boredom seems not only sacrilegious but sinful. However, Jean
Lacoste (2005) argues that
both theology and philosophy should approach boredom in a manner akin to how
other emotions and experiences such as sorrow and joy are considered. This
perspective also harkens back to Karl Barth’s formulation on theological
anthropology and the philosophy of religion, who, in the aftermath of World War
I, observed that man was consumed in a profound weariness and boredom,
disinterested in himself and the world, lacking the will to find fascination
within while failing to succumb to stimuli, distractions, or the
disillusionments of seeking transcendence. While to aver that human life and
transcendence are related, Barth (1960) would insist, there has to be a discernment
that man must indeed be interested in himself. The postcolonial condition
speaks to this feeling wherein there is an interest in the self that is haunted
by an acute experience of waiting—for resolutions and reparations; formations
and formulations; resolve and revolutions; reconciliations and reckonings;
future(s) and savior(s). The spiritual aspect of waiting also implicates, in
the case of the film, the ceaseless struggle against the many aftershocks of colonialism
which constantly and cumulatively plague everything, all the time, all at once.
The degradations and dilemmas that the tramps deliberate and debate in the film
carry on under colonialism’s shadow, implicated in being on the outside (of the
Empire). Their repetitive musings on nothing, their expressions of inactivity
and inaction speak to boredom as “an experience of meaningless agency”
(Kustermans and Ringmar, 2011, p. 1778) wherein the future is not salvageable
but just where salvation promises to be.
John P. Manoussakis, in his book Phenomenology and Eschatology: Not Yet in
the Now (2016), makes a remarkable point about how there has always been this implicit
risk of conflating the eschaton with
the telos which occurs when the eschaton
is erroneously linked to the end of the world or the culmination of history.
Eschatology and teleology are distinct concepts. Eschatology activates “a
relation with being beyond the totality or beyond history” (Levinas, 1969, p. 22). Hence,
attempting to determine the precise arrival of the future, the next Yuga, or the resurgence of another Yuga, becomes an impossibility not
due to lack of knowledge, but due to the inherent unknowability of its
imminence. The question of ‘when’ holds no meaning because the arrival of the
future must transcend time and history rather than coinciding with ‘a’ collapse
or culmination of history. By avoiding a definitive placement of the
culmination of waiting for Godot or ‘searching’ for Kalki within, before, or after history, there emerges a
resistance to being identified solely with history. This is similar to the
ontotheological eschatologies present in the grand projects of Hegel and Marx,
which, Manoussakis points out, allows history to unfold autonomously, not
predetermined courses leading back to predetermined outcomes for that “would
condemn God to boredom and humanity to a fatalistic passivity” (2016, p. 73). It is
the envisioning of such a condition where both God and humanity are consigned
to impassivity that thrusts eschatological idea into a horrifying scenario,
where there is a droning threat of “theocratic or secular totalitarianism”
(Manoussakis, 2016, p. 73) which comes to the fore when the tramps
recite names of the avatars of Vishnu and in the same chant they add Gaip,
Bukharin, Trotsky, Kamenev, and Ceaușescu, which along with the quoted and
debated portions of Mao’s Red Book in the film comically and tragically
enough, become a nothingness when recited to the vacant landscape bereft of any
masses to mobilize. And if incarnations have any akinnes to the eschaton,
it would be conceivable to anticipate a time when a direct and immediate
apprehension of the future (as promise, inevitability, and promised
inevitability) becomes possible, feasible and of course acutely and
inexplicably desirable for and by virtue of its abject abstractness. However,
engaging in prognostication for this future event initiates a process of
reactivation when it is put through disclosure within the present. Therefore,
an eschaton, which succeeds an incarnation, also has a latent potential
to facilitate an ineffable pretext to bypass events (of the now) as non-events
into an anticipatory formulation of awaiting the authentic future, which must
be located at the end of History or at the cusp of end and regeneration. In
this respect, the future is condemned to boredom.
5. Conclusions
Kalkimanthankatha foregrounds the
dissonance between premodern spiritual revivalism and postmodern urbanity,
particularly within the spatial and temporal context of the Kumbh Mela grounds in Allahabad. This disjunction serves as a critical lens
through which the film interrogates the inevitability of metaphysical failure
in efforts to reconcile disparate temporalities highlighting the contradictions
and complexities inherent to contemporary Indian political discourse. Through
the film’s layered design, Avikunthak displays the volatile interplay between
revolutionary and traditional narratives, mapping the fraught terrain of modern
Indian identity and its ongoing negotiations with history and future. The
director navigates towards a revelation that ultimately emerges as hollow and
devoid of meaning—a non-arrival or, conversely, an interminable ‘arriving.’
This represents the fundamentally cruel joke of both waiting and searching. The
concept of non-arrival here is final in the sense that a text is final: films
must end, plays conclude, and books come to a close. Yet, the continuum of
non-arrival that both the play and the film inhabit is a network of
intersecting ideas—dialogues between notions of God and worldliness, sacred and
profane, and aesthetic, political, and philosophical concerns. Avikunthak
refrains from outrightly undermining religious foundations or blindly
celebrating revolution. Instead, he engages in an examination of doctrinal
notions of salvation and the idolization of a grand divine savior, juxtaposed
with the materialistic politics advocated by Mao, the realities of the Naxalite
revolution in Bengal, and the potential future transformation of India into a
Hindu Rashtra. In doing so, he reflects on the haunting presence of promise
sustained only by its absence—a non-fulfillment that engenders an absolute
boredom.
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