FILM AS A CONTEMPORARY ART 35 We can acknowledge in him, what we would rarely do with anyone else, his claim that 'there is truly sufficient Art in my life, though you might not see what you can call works of art about me. . .'. For, as he says, and rightly so, 'Jesus was to my mind a supreme artist because he saw and expressed Truth'. And so was Mohammad. . . They strove for truth, the grace of expression naturally came in. Lest we forget these are the extensions of art in life, where beauty and truth are simultaneous with socialised virtue. From practice, we return to practice. Art can make this possible only if we allow it to be free of the diagnosis and prescription of practice. Even for someone who identified himself with the prophets, it was necessary to say that 'it would be a impertinence on my part to hold forth on Art. . . my functions are different'. This, from a man who has shaped our crooked destinies, and to whom writers from Gujarat accord the mastery of simple discourse, in a language seeking to be close to speech and experience. In the tradition of the Bible. Of Jesus and Mohammad. The prophet is of necessity a poet. The poet, however, is often frightened of the future (with good reason) that he foresees. If we, following Lenin, would defend Tolstoy, in spite of his aristocratic ideology, his blissful ignorance of the sciences of psychology and society, it is because he was able to contain the contradiction of his times in his own subjectivity, finding his truthful objective practice in literature. Strangely, the very sciences that he ignored have acknowledged him as the great master, giving birth to an ethics diametrically opposed to it. Simone de Beauvoir, the doyenne of feminist writing, sees in Natasha's growth the truth of feminine being, as she examines herself before the mirror, revealing and hiding the 'second' sex as it bursts forth in the life of every young girl through a subtle subterfuge of etiquette, sensations and emotions. We who share the belief that we can live in dignity only if we know and act upon the historical process, have to embrace that very work that rejects meaning in history; to find significance, both individual and collective (for the absence in the other ensures the absence in one) where apparently no purpose exists. It is for these reasons that art which proposes itself either as purely political or as 'mass-communication' can neither achieve its own purpose, declared or otherwise, nor perform that function which it has acquired (through history) by its autonomy, its judgement upon itself inherent in the individual work of art. To give back to those people what we have learnt from them requires an internalisation whereby their spiritual aspirations become social habit and1 customs, open-ended forms that contain ever-changing thought and feeling, so that we may truly speak of a tradition. Culture cannot be put to use by intention, except for short-term goals, either of an immediate practical nature (as in ritual-based mythology) or in such configurations as arise out of an epic