The Words’ Worth

To make one’s own what was previously foreign remains the ultimate aim of all hermeneutics. Interpretation in its last stage wants to equalize, to render contemporaneous, to assimilate in the sense of making similar. The goal is achieved insofar as interpretation actualizes the meaning of the text for the present reader.” – Paul Ricoeur

Dada Amir Haider Khan’s enrolment in the University of the Peoples of the East was more than an avenue of his formal education and literacy. It was a “break with the old world”. The subsequent new world was to be characterized by an understanding of a future that was different from the past, and of being that was other than European. A monumental break, it was enabled by the fact that socialism was carried out on people’s own term. At Dada’s university, “all nationalities received instruction in their own languages”, which granted them the liberty to create their own spatial and temporal imaginations and freely inhabit them as per their will. Soviet Russia paid enormous emphasis to orthography and lexicon. When communist parties took to the streets with red flags, and asked the workers of the world to unite, while referring to each other as comrades, they presented the possibility of existing; even if it was in a revolution; that was different from that of the West. Language was an essential component in constructing identities, so it was the words they spoke and thought in which created the New Soviet Man and the New Soviet Woman.

I have chosen the posters below because they show the emphasis on education in the soviet revolution, but more than that, I will also read them into Dada’s account of self-actualization. The first image is a Red Army propaganda poster in the new orthography; 1921 in Moscow. It shows an open book which reads “From Darkness into Light; From Battle to Books; From Misery to Happiness.” In other words, it is an illustration of a “break with the old world”, the former of which constitutes darkness, battle and misery, whereas the latter is a world of light, books, and happiness. The book is placed between the revolutionaries and their new communist world, hinting at the significance of education in achieving the transition from the old world to the new. 

But it was not education alone that made Dada feel recognized as a man with self-worth, respect, and dignity as he stepped on the Soviet soil. The acknowledgement of individual diversity within literacy so it could be united into a collective literacy was also important. The second Soviet poster is from 1927 in Uzbekistan, and reads “Workers and Peasants, Don’t let them destroy what was created over 10 years.” It consists of script that is written in more than one language, and confirms Dada’s claim of how “all nationalities had been collectively struggling to rebuild their motherland.” 

Although Soviet Russia placed the collective over the individual, however, in no way was the latter rejected during the process. When Dada “felt in the red flag a symbol of victory over the exploiting system”, he looked forward to an inversion into Sukharoff that would teach him words of worth; not some European’s worth, but for the first time, Dada’s worth. It happened. He lived the journey of his sacrifice and patience in the land of the Americans, and self-transformation and worth in the land of the Soviets. The words’ worth was not limited to Dada’s self but extended beyond geographical boundaries, and when Dada took upon the mission to spread the word to his birth land, the cycle had begun wherein oppressed Indians would emerge out of the exploitative system and find their worth through the Soviet education that stood for unity in diversity.