Should we never speak ill of the dead?
The death of a public figure sparks a debate about legacy, art and morality. Perhaps there's a way we can celebrate their work while acknowledging their flaws
In the last few weeks, the deaths of two notable public figures—one a marketing maven who gave India some of its most memorable advertisements, and the other, an actor who was widely loved for his comic roles—have inspired a flurry of conversations on social media platforms. As is typical of such exchanges on the internet, the opinions have been divisive, each side going for the jugular, painting the legacies left behind by these men in stark black and white terms.
The bodies of work left behind by ad guru Piyush Pandey and actor Satish Shah speak volubly of their unique gifts without a doubt. But their afterlives have been sullied, at least for a section of their admirers, for the political line they had toed. Of the two, Pandey was perhaps the less culpable. As a professional whose job was to make his clients successful, irrespective of the ideologies they stood for, he didn’t let scruples get in the way of achieving business goals. In contrast to Pandey, Shah wore his biases brazenly on his sleeves. His views didn’t seem to be framed by any overt professional agenda. He was his prejudices.
The death of a well-known figure, especially someone who had a controversial career, inspires three types of reactions in the public. An overwhelming number of fans remain unshakeable in their admiration for the immutable genius of the departed person. For these ardent devotees, legacy lies in the work alone and art equals identity. Any attempt to complicate either by pointing out an unsavoury track record is slammed as being in poor taste. They may have been aware of the deceased person’s bad karma, but their lives were not directly affected by it—so, it is easier for them to dissociate the art from the artist. Shortly after Shah’s death, actor Naseeruddin Shah, his friend of over 50 years, wrote a moving piece reminiscing about his colleague and his many shining qualities in a national daily. Everything he wrote was true—but it was not the entire truth.
On the other end of the spectrum from the faithful fans are the detractors, who want nothing to do with eulogies that pour into the public domain for the dead person. They believe that the work and its maker are impossible to separate. Once a legacy is maligned by morally questionable acts, speech or choices, the person, who has built their career through a lifetime of hard work, loses their credibility and must be “cancelled". By not speaking against the actions of the dead, the living abjure their responsibility towards those who had been exploited, abused and harmed by these “geniuses".
Finally, there is a third school of people who are conflicted between these two extremes. They want to believe, and some indeed do, that it is possible to hold both these views at once. That the artist or actor or writer or musician who changed their lives for the better, comforted them in their hour of darkness, and helped them make sense of the world through their work was a “monster" to other people. If such a “hero" happens to be alive and active (Woody Allen or J.K. Rowling, for example), it becomes especially troubling to engage with their continuing output. The simple act of going to see their movies, or picking up their new book, can become loaded with conflicting meanings and feelings that the human mind, always eager to avoid uncertainties, finds hard to grapple with.
One of the most clear-eyed analyses of this dilemma is offered by Claire Dederer, culture writer and memoirist, in her 2023 book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. She begins her study with her uncomfortable relationship with the work of filmmaker Roman Polanski. As someone who has been profoundly moved by his movies, she is outraged by the man accused of raping a 13-year-old girl decades ago. Dederer refuses to accept the logic that the past is another country, where people operated under different norms and therefore deserve to be judged with more clemency. That is just a pernicious loophole used to give a free pass to rotten conduct. It’s a bit like saying that the brutality of the British Raj towards its subjects was par for the course during the colonial era. Hence, imperialist cruelty should be overlooked, if not justified, because those atrocities took place at a time when the standards of behaviour, between the ruler and the ruled, were different.
Instead, Dederer argues that the “stain" on the character of the once-revered celebrity “spreads" and blights their work, be it during their lifetime or after their death. The tendency to absolve a man of genius (from Picasso to V.S. Naipaul, the number of vile men far outweighs their counterparts) is just another name for justifying the adoration their fans feel for them. “Genius is the name we give our love when we don’t want to argue about it, when we want our opinion to become fact," she writes. In this context, Dederer also makes a persuasive case for using the first-person “I" to signal her full ownership of her feelings towards her fallen heroes instead of hiding behind the anonymity of the third-person pronoun as most of us are wont to do. It takes courage to remove the shield of collective ownership, especially in a morally charged public debate.
As Dederer argues, in the case of the “monsters", the most convincing arguments come not from a kangaroo court of justice but from individuals—from “moral feelings" rather than lofty “ethical thoughts". However, if pushed too far, the former can turn into a form of self-congratulation. This is one of the reasons why Dederer is against “cancel culture". Not because it is an offshoot of a certain “woke culture" but because “it is hopelessly non-useful, with its suggestion that the loss of status for the accused is somehow at par with the suffering endured by the victim."
The intent behind cancel culture is, ostensibly, to penalise the perpetrator but what it ends up doing, in the process of making demands for erasure, is decenter systemic problems and put the focus on the audience or the consumer. “Liberalism wants you to turn your gaze away from the system," she writes, “and focus instead on the importance of your choices."
So, what should we—or rather, you and I—do when faced with the “monster" dilemma? The book doesn’t offer a straight answer because there is no ‘one size fits all’ moral philosophy that can guide us along “the right path". The only demand that Dederer makes of her reader is to not close their minds off to the problems and paradoxes of genius—to take on board that part of their lives that is uplifting as well as the one that is unspeakably horrible.
Is it possible, even rational, to empirically start deploring a beautiful anthem about national unity one fine day, only because the man who composed it turned out to be the architect of a slogan that divided the country years later? Speaking for myself, I don’t think so. However, I do strongly believe that it is possible, indeed necessary, to never forget the creator he once was and what he became by the end of his life. In this act of remembering there is grief for the values, ethos and feelings that eroded during the course of a shining, successful career.
To take stock of a legacy is to not only celebrate the peaks of achievement but also mourn the passing of time—the end of an era of civility, harmony and values that once made us human.
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