The semiotics of a modern yatra

The stated intention of the Bharat Jodo Yatra is to unite a nation that is being broken apart. How can a yatra perform this task? Traditionally, the yatra has been a spiritual journey to a religious shrine. The Congress’ Bharat Jodo Yatra, in contrast, is a modern, political yatra. Its route has been mapped to trace the geography of a nation.

This is a yatra that is attempting to generate alternative semiotics of the nation, the national leader, and national belonging. Through this yatra and through its chief yatri, Rahul Gandhi, an idea of the national leader is emerging which is difficult to emulate. The yatra has generated a model of the political leader as a traveller who is intimately accessible to all whom he meets and who meet him in the course of his yatra. As he strides relentlessly along the path of his yatra, he embodies a regimen of physical discipline and maintenance that needs a rigorous and regular regimentation of the body. The striding athletic body symbolises an austere control and restraint as against the corpulent excesses of overfed and overindulged bodies that instantiate the excesses of power. It is a body readied for walking the long and difficult distances mapped out for the yatra.

The yatri is cordoned off by a circle of security guards and circled by the limelight of the camera that never shifts from him. But his fellow yatris and those who have come to view the yatra break through this cordon. They enter the theatrical space of the limelight. Children, women, the old, the poor, the ordinary, the weak — all of them display themselves and participate in the theatrics of the yatra with their leader, within the arc of the limelight. They hug him, take selfies with him, talk to him, touch him, feed him and laugh with him.

They come out of the routine of their quotidian lives, break through the layers of barricaded separation between the leader and the people and enter the glare of the limelight that relentlessly theatricalises the leader for the public gaze. And through their entry into that space, they humanise the leader, they show up his common humanity which he shares with them through enfolding them into him.

The yatri connects and communicates with those who line his path and live alongside that path. He touches and is touched by the many and varied practices of quotidian life that forms the patchwork of living traditions of the land across which he journeys.

The regional spectators of the yatra converge around the yatri, walk with him and share with him the road that is familiar to them, the school where their children study, the shade of the trees that line their roads, the food that is familiar to their tongue. Breaking the cordon of surveillance, they meet the leader who connects with them through the words that he speaks to them and through his listening of their words. The spectacle of this communication and communion, through the protocols of friendship and love, is the most powerful image of a national community constituted through the links of fraternity, friendship and affection.

As against the corpulent bodies of political leaders who are shielded from the anonymous groupings of people into crowds, who are visible only as an arm waving from a window of a cavalcade of armoured cars, who are absorbed in the rhetorical flourishes of their monologues, this yatra is marked by the absence of distance and the presence of conversations. Different people, an eclectic and motley group come close to their leader.

They come and go, they wait and meet, they hug and laugh with him, they throw flower petals on him and carry the flag that marks out their citizenship of a shared nation. They are intertwined with each other through the journey of the yatri; they meet each other through their meeting with him.

We do not know if the Congress party will be revived by this yatra. We do not know if it will help the Congress in the coming elections. But what is important is that it has given us a new template of the political leader.

It has created an alternative imagination of national belonging and the sacral journey.

It has reminded us that a certain austerity and discipline of the body, an openness to other bodies, is the precondition to the formation of inclusive communities.

It has shown us that such communities can be formed only when we travel away from the familiar and that a yatra is mapped through the sacral sites of human convergence at the signposts of love and friendship and belonging.

(The writer is Professor, Dept of English, Mangalore University)