Revisiting the tumultuous 1960s

For the generation which came of age in the 1960s, the times were interesting, indeed riveting. It is a thought which has been re-emphasised by the American historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in her work, ‘An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s’. Back in the 1980s (he passed away in 2018), her husband Richard Goodwin, who had served as a young advisor to President Kennedy and President Johnson, wrote ‘Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties’, his analysis of some of the events that characterised the 1960s.

How do we, in diverse regions of the globe, recall the decade? In plain terms, it was an exciting era to be part of, though there were the many downsides to it. The 1960s were a period of intense ferment almost everywhere. Individuals, and not just the prominent ones among them, were speaking up everywhere on the issues of the day. Politics and culture came in tandem with each other. There were the assertive men who made it obvious that they were not beholden to convention, to the powers that be.

Here's one instance. Jean-Paul Sartre lost little time in declining to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964. He was unwilling to be remembered, by accepting the award, as a man ennobled as a Nobel laureate. That was courage in him, a trait that was much admired around the world. In the 1960s, the Beatles electrified audiences in the West with their new, lilting melodies. Cliff Richard gave us ‘Summer Holiday’. Suddenly the young of the world found new cultural icons to emulate. That was the beauty of the 1960s, a decade that would in future be recalled as a defining age in the history of humankind.

Recall the enthusiasm with which Bengalis in the state of Pakistan went cheerfully in rekindling their cultural legacy through a determined observance of the birth centenary of Rabindranath Tagore in 1961. Nothing, not even a harsh martial law regime lording it over the country at the time, could intimidate them. It was a principled chief justice of the East Pakistan High Court, Syed Mahbub Murshed, who defied the authorities to preside over the ceremonies. And into the picture stepped Chhayanaut, with its repertory of music and poetry which had unified Bengalis for ages.

Aesthetics underpinned the 1960s. When on an intensely cold morning Robert Frost, his hair blowing in the wind, recited his verses at the Kennedy inaugural, it was an early sign of the new President and his spouse planning to turn the White House into a living commentary on American arts and letters. In Senegal, poetry linked up with politics to enrich life through the literary works of Leopold Sedar Senghor. Away in France, that respected man of culture Andre Malraux served in the government of Charles de Gaulle, the statesman intent on ensuring French grandeur as a definition of his country. All across Europe, Asia and North America, movies demonstrating realism and romance swept the landscape. Artistes turned into heroic figures. Boris Pasternak’s ‘Dr Zhivago’ was turned into a remarkable film with Omar Sharif and Julie Christie playing the lead roles.

In India and in the two wings of Pakistan, the movie industry scaled new heights, with celluloid tales in Urdu, Hindi and Bengali providing audiences rich entertainment to chew on. Lyricists came forth with songs which are sung even in these present days of mediocrity, with 2020s’ artistes presenting the songs before audiences around South Asia. Sean Connery as James Bond left people impressed with spy tales, even though the series contained large dollops of anti-communist propaganda. But Moscow offered us its own version of culture and the arts through Sputnik. We read the weeklies Time and Newsweek as also Life and Reader’s Digest.

The 1960s were times of discovery. American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts flew out to outer space in their multiple spacecraft, named Soyuz, Voskhod, Gemini and Apollo. In the race for the moon, the Americans beat the Soviets, who then gave up the struggle. In the competition for the conquest of space, astronauts and cosmonauts, a good number of them, perished. But the exploration of space went on. It is that 1960s’ endeavour which is today being carried forward by the two unmanned Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977, and the James Webb Space Telescope, sent out to explore the universe a few years ago.

In the 1960s statesmen or individuals striving for statesmanship were part of politics. Andrei Gromyko was Moscow’s global spokesperson, with Zhou En-lai, before and through the Cultural Revolution, reassuring the world that China was on firm ground despite the upheavals it was caught in. Lal Bahadur Shastri led India briefly after Jawaharlal Nehru’s passing, met the challenge of war head-on in 1965, travelled to Tashkent to negotiate peace with Pakistan’s Ayub Khan and then died. In the 1960s, Bengali political aspirations in Pakistan came encapsulated in the Six Points publicly announced by a rising Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the future Bangabandhu, in Lahore.

There were the long periods of darkness which had the 1960s lurch from crisis to crisis. In America, segregation marred life, until Martin Luther King Jr and Lyndon Johnson came together to enact legislation on civil rights. In Africa, coups d’etat sent national aspirations spinning to the ground in Algeria, Ghana and Nigeria. Odumegwu Ojukwu created Biafra, which soon was engaged in war with the country it had broken away from. In Brazil, a military coup dislodged Joao Goulart from power. The Vietnam War went on apace, with South Vietnam turning into infamous for coups staged by mediocre generals. Greece, that citadel of democracy dating back to ancient times, was commandeered by a bunch of colonels in 1967.

Svetlana Stalin defected from the Soviet Union to find refuge in India. The Ayub Khan military regime clamped a ban on Tagore in 1967. Liu Shaoqi, a longtime Mao comrade and President of China, died in prison. The voluble Nikita Khrushchev was pushed out of power in 1964, while Washington remained busy in trying to assassinate Fidel Castro by various means. Ahmed Sukarno’s politics was brought to an end by the Indonesian army. Israel militarily crushed three Arab nations in June 1967.

Students revolted in France in May 1968, almost bringing down De Gaulle. The Warsaw Pact nations crushed Prague Spring that same year in Czechoslovakia. In the 1960s, Lee Kwan Yew pulled Singapore out of the Malaysian federation and led his city-state to impressive heights of prosperity through his no-nonsense statesmanship. Nations in Africa came by independence. In apartheid South Africa, the first human heart transplant offered hope to the world.

There is much more of the 1960s to write home about. Hardly any decade before or after it has matched it in its intensity, in its moments of light and spots of darkness.

ahsan.syedbadrul@gmail.com