But there are also forays into the past, triggered by play in the present, which leave a comet tail of additional information. I was ‘there’, for instance, when in the 1988 Euro final, Dutch midfielder Arnold Muhren’s cross was snipered into the Soviet net by glorious Marco van Basten volley.
That moment is forever conjoined in my head with being at an upanayan (sacred thread) ceremony, sipping on Campa Cola in a mansion called Khalil Manzil opposite ‘Mouchak’, a small mithai outlet in southern Kolkata. I was 17, and had just discovered the lines of Arthur Rimbaud’s 1870 poem ‘Novel’: ‘No one’s serious at seventeen./ – On beautiful nights when beer and lemonade/ And loud, blinding cafes are the last thing you need/ – You stroll beneath green lindens on the promenade.’
Van Basten in Nataraj pose, Campa Cola, Khalil Manzil, and the French poet have since been tightly bound in one memory ball, which I savour every World Cup or Euro tournament when someone scores a goal off a volley. Like Turkey’s Mert Muldur did during these Euros against Georgia last month.
Nostalgia of this kind is a lipsmacking, oversweet indulgence. But as William Kurlinkus writes in his 2018 book, Nostalgic Design: Rhetoric, Memory, and Democratising Technology, for ‘nostalgic others’ – people who are trapped in nostalgic stories of themselves without having the wherewithal and/or inclination to change in the present – ‘the real past is replaced by a consumerist pastness’.
‘We were so advanced’ has become one important strand of GoI goading for a techno future. Unfortunately, the harking back exercise of using ‘We invented the zero,’ ‘Our ancient sciences’, ‘Make Nalanda Great Again,’ etc has turned a catalysing plan into a regressive civilisational nostalfest. In the Conradian ‘Heart of Bengal’, the proverbial wood of any measurable advancement is ‘proudly’ missed for the lotos-bearing trees. Registering the greatness of Rabindranath Tagore, recalling the lost greatness of Calcutta’s ‘legacy’ football clubs, and extolling the immeasurable cache of ‘culture‘ – with increasingly diminishing returns – becomes a great defence mechanism for failure. Originally coined by physician Johannes Hofer in 1688 as an extreme form of homesickness – an English loan word from the Greek words ‘nostos’ (return home) and ‘algia’ (longing) – shown by Swiss mercenaries, nostalgia was first identified as a sickness in individuals. Down the line, it became a pleasant form of individual and collective time travel – Doordarshan, 1983 Kapil’s Devils, old ad jingles, Phantom comics, cassettes (see Sanjoy Narayan’s column below) Manmohan Desai films, Manmohan Singh government…
But the corrosive element of nostalgia rears its atavistic head also as a collective sickness. This isn’t just about what crime fiction writer Tana French describes nostalgia as ‘laziness with prettier accessories’. It’s also about collectively wallowing in a past when the present is sputtering, shuttering out the future.
Last month, youth wing members of Italy’s ruling party were exposed making fascist salutes and using racist and antisemitic language. Last week, prime minister Giorgio Meloni stated that ‘there is no room [in the Brothers of Italy party] for nostalgia for the totalitarian systems of the 20th century, or for any other display of foolish folklore.’ Coming from a person herself accused of ‘neo-fascist tendencies’, Meloni’s statement was an attempt to stop being outed as a political ‘nostalgist’ herself.
In Frank Herbert’s SF classic, Dune, the litany of the Bene Gesserit – the powerful social, religious and political force ‘serving’ the Empire – starts with, ‘I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.’
Even as individuals are most welcome to savour nostalgia like a morsel of cake soaked in a spoonful of tea, for a collective, a population, or a country to advance, the Bene Gesserit litany could well be amended to: ‘We must not nostalgise. Nostalgia is the mind-killer…’
