ISSN 1758-6488
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Understanding Cats Essay |
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In Indian modernity, this intermediary space has been kept alive, and even given a political function. Those great chroniclers of our emergent democracy, the Kalighat patuas, appeared to realise this, and, to commemorate and record the fact, painted full-length portraits of a cat with a stolen tiger-prawn in its mouth. It is a deeply political picture: it presages the fact that our democracy would be less about the politics of right and wrong, or of substance, than of survival; that the politician would be partly a parodic figure. Not the official, recognised, and educated figureheads and sources of politics, but the surreptitious snatching of the initiative by the parasitic that the cat with the tiger-prawn represents – this, the pat seems to say, is the form and shape of our democracy. The cat prowls about in the nation’s dream-consciousness as that elusive, partially shunned, but ever-present initiative to enfranchisement.
