Yesterday, I was listening to Venu (the cinematographer from Kerala) interviewed by a local TV channel. Talking about himself, Venu tells the interviewer something along the lines of “we are all vague people.” Compared to the clarity that he exhibits when asked about cinema, Venu takes all personal questions as answerable with this gesture towards the vague, often looking at the ground or the table separating him from the interviewer. When asked about what he desires in life, he answers, “[mental] Peace.” Most of his answers pertain to this territory of the vague and his desire for peace seems to have something to do with accepting this vague life. To most questions probing the reason he does what he does in his personal life—going on solo trips, his love of forests—his answer skirts the region of vagueness. On the other side of this orientation is his clarity about all things cinema, and interestingly, about life. This is probably what makes one want to listen to him; this mix of vagueness and clarity.

A hunch that the mix of clarity and vagueness, which draws me to Venu, is also present in thinking about unity, defined as the coming together of two or more discrete units, is perhaps what drew me to starting this piece with Venu and his vagueness.

Consider a bottle of water. Or juice. These are made of two parts—the screw-on top and the bottle. It is in closing the bottle again and again that it remains a functional bottle. A cap on its own or the container on its own goes to the dump. Some companies try to avoid this by attaching the cap to the bottle’s neck with a thin strap. It is this togetherness, this unity of cap and bottle that makes it an object that is worth something. Someone had to imagine the two parts coming together in a certain way, and then this imagination had to be realised, and then the users had to enliven this imagination every single time they used the bottle. If a user refuses to take part in this imagination and the performance, again and again, of the joining of the cap with the bottle, and keeps the cap away from the bottle, or discards one of the two components, then the water bottle ceases to exist as an object worth keeping.

Consider the nation. Made of different regions vying—at times—for independence. Group identities demarcating themselves as different from their neighbours. Events happening in one corner of the nation experienced as happening in an alien world. One end experiencing time in a way that cannot be dreamed of by another end of the national geography. And all of this imagined day after day by national anthem(s), school pledges, holidays. Performances imagining the same unity again and again, remembering every day the same imagination of the previous day and projected to the future through GDP and achievements. There is no state-sanctioned reimagination other than imagining the same way through state sponsored essay competitions in schools, painting competitions, portraits of the nation-as-god-ess hung on school office walls, homes. The image of the nation in the map. Top Level Domain names. ISD codes. The constitution of a nation.

Consider the couple, the bedrock of modern family and the ideal image of the active-but-docile, virile-yet-submissive, romantic-yet-dreary unit of togetherness. Two people imagined as constituting a togetherness. This togetherness sustained by daily performances of imagining themselves as together—in law, at home, in property. Holding hands, appearing together, the driver seat and the passenger seat, the driver and the pillion, the suit and the sari—or the suit and the suit and the sari and the sari and so on—remembered in cinemas, in songs, in books.

When the imagination fails to reproduce these units, when the practices that reinnervate the imagined thing stumble and stall, the imagined unit stops being imaginable. Nations face civil wars and secessionism, families disintegrate, things fall into disuse. Imagined entities are kept alive by repetition of imagination through active practices which are increasingly material and involved.

To place this in context: why should I care about imagined unit(ie)s? First, by default, most of us are already part of such imagined (imaginable) entities such as the nation and the family. Second, one should ask oneself, everyday, whether such repeated acts of imagining, which is to say material and other mental practices, matter to one. If not, why spend time and energy in inhabiting these practices? Third, why do people willingly put themselves in these activities? Why should one remember and re-enact these imaginations? What is at stake? The moral of the story is perhaps “always historicise.”