Whether or not India’s Home Minister Amit Shah sat in Rabindranath Tagore’s chair—he says he did not but Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, the leader of the Congress Party in the Lok Sabha says he did—is tangential to the essential absurdity of such controversies.
When does an object, in this case a chair, associated with someone of historical consequence become out of bounds for the lesser mortals who follow? What is the waiting period? Is it while that person, having already become an icon or a legend or whatever other grand descriptor is used to for them, is alive that such objects acquire a touch of divinity and out-of-boundness? Or is there a passage certain passage of time before they become “sacred”?
I don’t know the answer to such risible questions. I am merely raising them.
What I do know is that such human folly to iconize objects is global. People go weirdly and reverentially quiet in the presence of such objects as if the ones who possessed them or sat on them or slept in it or whatever may suddenly come alive and object. If it is a chair, it is quite conceivable that the person who used it may have farted on it at least once. Does that befoul the sanctity of that chair?
I don’t the answer to that either. I am merely raising it.
No one can tell what Tagore himself would have thought of someone else sitting in his chair. Would he have considered it a trespass or sacrilege?
I don’t the answer to that question. I am merely raising it.
The point is….well I don’t know what the point is but just wanted to put it out there.
