How the right to walk is integral to modernity

That we would need a court of law to remind us that the Right to Walk should be a fundamental right at this moment in history when activists are trying to stop government-corporations from restricting the natural flow of rivers cannot be just a coincidence. The Right to Walk on footpaths, to be specific. There is a restriction on the freedom of nearly all parts of the human body imposed by the state — the hands cannot touch whatever they want to, one can’t spit or defecate wherever one might want to, one cannot rest one’s back against every available wall, and our legs are prevented from taking us to anywhere the mind wants to. 

Hence the unnoticed privilege of having a mind — “Kothao aamar hariye jawar nei mana monay monay” (I can get lost anywhere, in my mind), is a Rabindranath song sung as much with hope as with the intuitive acknowledgement that only the mind has that kind of unrestrictive freedom. At the other end of the head are our legs, and one would imagine that they would also like a similar degree of freedom as the mind has in the Tagore song. It must be in acknowledgement of this need that the Supreme Court has asked for the Right to Walk on footpaths to be included as a fundamental right.

Walking with(in) literature

It seems almost tautological — the need for such a right. However, under a Facebook post from a decade ago, which detailed the experience of being a pedestrian in India, among the many disrespectful and inhuman responses was one by a young engineer. The pedestrian does not pay road tax and therefore cannot make a claim on the road, he said. The abrasive character of new capitalist energy soon became visible; he insisted that like the poor, the pedestrian was a burden on the Indian economy. What would he then make of the recent Supreme Court ruling that declared the Right to Walk safely on footpaths a fundamental right under Article 19(1)(d) (freedom of movement) and Article 21 (right to life), a ruling that gives pedestrians a claim on public pathways over automobiles?

Editorial | Right of way: On the right to walk on demarcated footpaths

Five kilometres away from the Supreme Court, where this ruling was given, Gandhi was walking, his walk frozen into a statue along with others in the piece of sculpture called “Gyarah Murti”, built by Devi Prasad Roy Chowdhury. Could that have played a role in the ruling? Or, since they knew the Indian Constitution so well, could they have been unconsciously thinking of Nandalal Bose, whose art frames the words that guarantees our relationship with this country, and whose linocut from 1930, “Bapuji”, which showcases Gandhi standing with the most well-known walking stick in the world, has conditioned the way we imagine Gandhi? Or could they have been thinking of Rabindranath’s song “Aekla chalo re” (Walk alone), which sings of the conviction necessary to walk alone?

Nandalal Bose’s Dandi march linocut. Photo: Special Arrangement

The judges who had delivered this judgment, Justices P.S. Narasimha and A.S. Chandurkar, must have been raised by a literary consciousness that would have influenced such an outlook. To give an example, a poem such as Jibanananda Das’s Bonolata Sen, that begins, ‘For a thousand years I’ve been walking earth’s paths,/from Sinhala’s seas to the waters of Malaya in night’s darkness’. A poem like that was in the air, and influenced the way a community spoke and loved and laughed. There were bound to be equivalents of this trust placed in walking in all literary and artistic cultures of India.

Walking has been integral to the creation of a political instinct in India — from Subhash Chandra Bose’s ‘Delhi chalo’ to Gandhi’s Dandi March, various protest marches have marked resistance before and after 1947. These had been sharpened by a spiritual history that had been a harvest of walking — by figures such as Siddhartha, Nanak, Chaitanya, and other mendicant-seekers. Even the gods had a history of walking: the goddess Lakshmi’s footprints, drawn as part of folk rituals of worship, are evidence of that. As had ways of storing information or writing a poem or telling a story, for, ‘pada’ (foot), is a metric stanza and also a foundational group in Indic knowledge categories.

A symbol of modernity

At university, the author of this article had once told her teacher that modernity came to exist because Baudelaire — who coined the term in his 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life” — walked the streets of Paris. One wasn’t thinking specifically of the flaneur, but of walking without purpose, and what it does to our mind and its circulation of thoughts. We’ve all benefitted from walking unknotting the clots in our self-accusatory consciousness.

“The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organisations, no matter how panoptic they may be: it is neither foreign to them (it can take place only within them) nor in conformity with them (it does not receive its identity from them). It creates shadows and ambiguities within them. It inserts its multitudinous references and citations into them (social models, cultural mores, personal factors). Within them it is itself the effect of successive encounters and occasions that constantly alter it and make it the other’s blazon: in other words, it is like a peddler carrying something surprising, transverse or attractive compared with the usual choice. These diverse aspects provide the basis of a rhetoric. They can even be said to define it,” Michel de Certeau writes in The Practice of Everyday Life. The Supreme Court’s judgment, in rehabilitating the sense of life as a long poem, to “wander lonely as a cloud”, restores to Indians their quiet modernity.

Sumana Roy teaches at Ashoka University, Sonipat, and is the author of How I Became a Tree and Provincials