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Last week, the Amar Jawan Jyoti was extinguished after lending its flame in December 2021 to India's new National War Memorial.
There are many points of view on this, broadly divided along predictable political lines.
To me, this underscores a change that has been creeping in on us, as a society, for many years. Simply put: We have now gone from remembering the unknown soldier--my son, your brother, her father, his uncle--who died in a war someone else decided to wage. The soldier, usually male, may have enlisted for any reason, making a commitment to take or give a life in the line of duty. We recognise that this is a sacrifice anyway, and we recognise that families suffer losses in the name of this duty.
Tombs to unknown soldiers, around the world, recognise the courage and sacrifice of the individual soldier. They mark what Rupert Brooke wrote about in "The Soldier":
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
We justify this dying and killing in the name of nations--"imagined communities," to use their most elegant definition--fictions we write ourselves for a host of reasons. Married to the legal entity of the state, the romantic ideal of a community of affect and aspiration becomes mired in the reality of monopolies of violence and turf-battles within and without states. Just as the individual soldier loses their name and identity in these battles and must be commemorated anonymously, so does their memory become subordinate to that of war itself.
It is telling that we have moved our commemorative flame from the tomb of the otherwise forgotten soldier to a monument that immortalises war. War is both a tragic, traumatic, human-made disaster as well as a lofty venture, ennobled by rhetoric and aggrandized by ceremony.
When states build war memorials, they celebrate themselves in their rawest expressions of power. They remind us of the resources they can command to wreak destruction. They remind us that once they fought and won--because which loser builds a monument to loss, right?--and that they can do so again. As the soldier is lost in the war, they are lost in these statist celebrations.
And while, when we revisit and rewrite history, the category of "unknown soldier" might expand to include many outside the state forces who also give their lives for a larger good (albeit still defined by others), official War Memorials are very clear about who the good guys were, and who, the bad.
I have been commenting for several years about the metamorphoses of our Independence and Republic Day celebrations. Where we would have folk dances, and skits about social reformers and freedom-fighters, it is now all about the military and the police. There seems to be nothing left for India to celebrate except the valour of soldiers (which is real but perhaps we should also ask, to what end?). In skits, speeches, songs and dances, we are always the virtuous "us" vis-a-vis undefined but obvious enemies. As we become more militaristic in our celebrations and assertions, ironically, our identity is defined less by who we are than who we are not.
The Amar Jawan Jyoti, which said to the deceased soldiers and their families, "Sorry, we decided and you died but we are so grateful to you for this sacrifice," is now replaced by "Behold, the grandeur and triumphs of this state!" This is who we now are. This is who we are choosing to be.
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