𝐂𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐚𝐥𝐰𝐚𝐲𝐬 𝐬𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 - 𝑨𝒊𝒋𝒂𝒛

𝐂𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐚𝐥𝐰𝐚𝐲𝐬 𝐬𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥

                                      - 𝑨𝒊𝒋𝒂𝒛 𝑨𝒉𝒎𝒂𝒅

The first and foremost creative activity of man is to learn language and to practice it. When a child feels hungry, he cries. When his hunger is satiated, he feels relaxed and smiles. A child cannot fulfil his needs on his own. It is his biological imperfection. The human existence begins from this biological imperfection only. His needs are fulfilled by others, i.e. mother or other members of family. It leads to the emergence of cognition in the child. His initial cognition is basically of three types. First, cognition of his need and its demand. Second, recognition of those who could fulfil his needs. And third, understanding the language and using it in his own way by learning it. In this process he begins to recognise faces, i.e. to differentiate between one face and another. A big moment in his life comes when he sees his face for the first time in mirror or in any other manner and he begins identifying himself by differentiating from others. Then he begins to understand his relationship with the people surrounding him. This is his first social cognition. But the biggest thing in his life which creates the fundamental difference in his cognition happens when he learns the language and uses it in his own way. This happens to be his first creative activity. And since language is fundamentally social, creativity is also fundamentally social in nature.

It is highly disputed as to how man learns language. Some people believe that it is a biological process while others believe it to be a social process. I believe that it is a social process. A child does not start speaking the moment he is born. It takes him about two years to learn to speak. From his birth he is surrounded by a language which people in his surrounding speak. He slowly understands it and starts speaking one word after another. Then he starts speaking sentences in bits and pieces and finally the entire sentence. This process takes about two years of time. The girls start speaking a month earlier than the boys, but whether it is a boy or a girl, its creativity begins by learning language and practicing it. 

It means that creativity is not confined to only poets, singers, painters and other kinds of artists, rather it exists in all humans and it is not an individual quality but the quality of mankind. It is immaterial whether you are white or black, Hindu or Muslim, upper caste or lower caste, speak this language or that. You take language from the society and use it in your own way, but you use it for talking to others and for communication. It is a social act and a very creative one at that. Hence the first and basic thing about creativity is that it is always social. It is through language that you establish your relation with the society – of love, of hate, within the home, outside, intellectual, emotional, physical and all kinds of relations – and making relation is a very creative act. If you love a person from your heart and don't convey it, you don't establish a relation with that person. That's why I ask my students to talk about what you have studied in books because if you cannot talk about a thing you cannot think over it. If you believe that you have thought over it but are not able to tell it properly, you are mistaken. In fact, you have not thought over it. Whatever you have studied in the book, you have not made relation with it. Meaning thereby that communication is fundamental aspect of creativity.

Yet another fundamental thing about creativity is that a man does not fulfil his needs the animals do, rather he does it in human manner. Every man wants that his basic needs are fulfilled. That he is appropriately qualified and the society gives him the scope for fulfilling his needs. But it is not sufficient that his needs are somehow fulfilled. It is the characteristics of man that he wants to fulfil his needs in an aesthetic manner. For instance, you don't need food just for filling your stomach and home just for living. You want that the food is tasty, it's not repeated daily and you want to eat in a clean place in a good ambience. You want that your home remains not just a place for living, but there is also a beauty in it. For this you cook the food in a variety of ways. In all the great civilisations cooking and culinary art is a basic art. You see in India, every state and in different regions of a state you will find different cuisines. For instance, Gujarat is a small state. Today there is a naked dance of barbarity there, but if you see its history, you fill find five different kinds of cuisines in such a small state. So, you don't just require nutrition or physical satisfaction from food, but a kind of aesthetic satisfaction as well. For that you cook in a variety of manner, prepare a variety of cuisine and your creativity is expressed in it. If you decorate your home, makes it beautiful, you express your creativity in it.

It is also an important need of man that he fulfills his basic needs in an aesthetic manner with maximum creativity. The biggest crime of the society over a poor person is that he does not get an opportunity to fulfil his needs in an aesthetic manner. The poor are deprived from the aesthetic dimension of life. Yet they strive to make their life beautiful somehow. I happened to go to Philippines once and there I saw the life of a tribe called Badjao. These people don't have the permission of building home on the earth, so they live in homes built on the platforms made by erecting long bamboo sticks in coastal sea water.  The water beneath their home is so dirty, there is so much filth in it that I cannot describe. If people like you and me pass through that water in a boat, we will close our eyes. Those people have to go upto two miles for fetching drinking water and they live in the homes made in the filthy water. But I noticed that they have grown flowers by putting soil in the small canisters in their home. Thus, they fulfil their aesthetic needs. It is also a form of creativity.

Work is important for a man, but sports is also important. Now this sport can be of two kinds. One is to play with the real material goods for fulfilling the needs of life, i.e. the food we eat can be prepared in many ways and we can do different kinds of experiments as well. Second is playing by going beyond the basic needs of life, i.e. freely playing with the words, chords, colours and lines. But sports is the basic need of human being because it is in this that his creativity lies. In a class differentiated society there are two forms of creativity – creativity of labour and creativity beyond labour. The aim of human life is to go from the realm of necessity to that of freedom. It is to go beyond the creativity of the labour. Man never wants to turn a blind eye to or curtail his freedom. He does not want to suspend it either. He wants to continuously move in its direction. Hence despite being compelled to do labour he as far as possible tries to be creative freely. His creativity is visible in the activities of recreating the creative life, i.e. in cooking, in washing clothes, in decorating the home, in giving birth to baby and rearing it to make a human being. To whatever extent the conditions of life give him the freedom he uses it to be creative. For instance, whatever a poor person eats for filling his stomach is not the same always, i.e. a pulse in the morning, another one in the evening; a vegetable on one day, another on the next day; or cooking meat or fish in one way on one day and in another way on the other day. The joy underlying this is actually the joy of utilising one's freedom and of being creative.

Freedom is not that lies in future and which no one knows when will it come. It is that for which you continuously strive. You take time off for this, put effort for this. You try that there is a beauty in whatever you do and make from what is available to you. This is precisely what creativity is and a man is always striving to achieve this. The reason is that he finds himself imperfect during this course and he strives to become a more perfect man to achieve his perfection. For this, sometimes he reads, sometimes he paints, sometimes he writes poetry, sometimes he sings while at other times he only walks in a forest. These activities which make man a more perfect man are not bound to labour, nor are they bound to the conditions of recreation of life. Hence the creativity underlying it is different from the creativity of labour and is the creativity beyond the labour.

In the capitalist system, a distinction is made between the time of work and that of leisure. The work and leisure are supposed to be different. Similarly different aspects of life are seen in isolation to each other. It is believed that during the work time you do work and it is during leisure time only that you can become creative. As if the system tells you that in lieu of these many hours of hard work you do you get these many hours of leisure time during which you can do something on your own. This happens to be the root of the class society, rather its soul and it is reflected in the ideology in the following manner: life is different, art is different. So, there is no creativity in life, the creativity lies in art. It follows from this that the person performing labour cannot be creative, only the one who has leisure time can be creative. Hence it is not the labour class but the exploitative class that can be creative. Further, it also leads to the conclusion that art is in no way linked to life, it exists not for the purposes such as reforming-shaping, changing or improving the life, but only for the entertainment of the class having leisure time. 

Therefore, the capitalist system is against creativity. It doesn't believe in the fact that creativity exists in every human being and a person is creative even in the labour which he performs for the recreation of his life. When does he not remain creative? Only when he has to do work forcibly and without his will, or when somebody tells him that you cannot do anything from your own will, you have to do the way we tell you to do; otherwise, your salary will be cut. Thus, by curtailing the creativity of others, limiting the potential, to demark separate arena for him – that you can be creative here and not there – all this is social division of labour, which leads to a situation in which the person starts doing many of the works like routine and without will or against the will, he has no freedom or joy in doing it. 

In a class divided society, creativity is seen from class perspective and it is considered as a special attribute of some specially talented persons. But where from this talent comes? It comes from society. For instance, poetry or storytelling is related to language and language is not developed by one individual. Man learns language to fulfill his needs. Then he sees that there is an etiquette or manner of speaking. For instance, that person speaks a language very well while the other person speaks casually. Thus, he refines his own language. What is poetry? It is nothing but speaking in a refined language. But there is an entire tradition behind it, which you have to imbibe and speak in a manner that it is called poetry and command recognition from people. What is recognition or literary assessment? It is to assess the literary value of your saying.  And the literary assessment is produced from the linguistic values which get accumulated over a period of time.  

Note: It is an excerpt of a speech which Aijaz Ahmad gave in 2002. It was published in Hindi in October-November 2002 issue of Hindi magazine 'Kathan' and republished in the form of a booklet by Gargi Prakashan. Hindi to English translation has been done by Anand Singh.

Image by: Glenyse Thompson