Reflections from Dover: Punjab’s cultural and moral decay

Visualising myself standing on the white cliffs of Dover, gazing across the turbulent waters of the English Channel, I am struck by a deep and unsettling thought — the deteriorating social, political and economic condition of my homeland, Punjab. At this moment, on this wind-swept edge between land and sea, I cannot help but think of Matthew Arnold, who stood here nearly 150 years ago and looked out across the same waters in a desperate engagement with the collapsing world of classical culture, a world bizarre, neurotic and overwrought.

Confronted by the turmoil of his own time, Arnold gave voice to his reflections in ‘Dover Beach’, a poem that meditates on the decline of faith and human connection. Arnold, witnessing the erosion of religious and cultural certainties in Victorian Europe, lamented the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of a civilisation with its patterns of myth, worship and traditions of high culture retreating into the shadows.

Like him, I find myself drawn to a philosophical contemplation of the world’s condition — his world then, and mine now — united by a shared sense of unease and a longing for something deeper amidst the noise of history, where coherence is wrecked and confidence sapped.

Standing at the crossroads of East and West, past and present, I’m struck by a parallel disquiet at the dark and ominous landscape of a land once anchored in faith, reason and moral certitude, now succumbing to doubt and confusion. Arnold’s lament goes beyond spiritual disillusionment, revealing a profound crisis: the disintegration of meaning, civilisation and shared values, plunging us into a ‘darkling plain’ devoid of direction.

Interestingly, his lyrics resound with a tantalising propinquity to the landscape of contemporary Punjab, particularly the emotional and spiritual bankruptcy of a generation and its plunge into the abyss of violence and drugs, their moral, sexual and spiritual existence overwhelmed by the sterility and intellectual uncertainty of the times. The poem’s emotional topography — marked by loss, fragmentation and longing — mirrors the psychological terrain of a generation caught between a fading past and a future yet unborn.

Arnold’s “Sea of Faith" once girdled the world “like the folds of a bright girdle furled", providing unity and comfort. In Punjab too, there was once a strong cultural and intellectual ethos — rooted in resistance, in literature and language and the pursuit of justice — that lent direction to student life underpinned by the realisation of the value of great works of literature and their importance not so much as a matter of dry academic inquiry as of urgent need.

Just as Arnold hears the retreating roar of the sea of faith, today’s students witness the slow dissolution of these ideals in a culturally transitional world, disjointed and beleaguered. They are confronted with an institutional framework that has been drained of its vitality by an overpowering bureaucratic apparatus, which, in tandem with corporatisation, has stifled critical inquiry and intellectual freedom.

This loss is not abstract. It is lived daily in classrooms where curiosity is discouraged, on campuses where surveillance replaces debate, and where futures increasingly depend on migration rather than meaningful engagement with one’s own culture.

The university — once a lighthouse in Arnold’s “darkling plain" — now resembles the plain itself, swept with “confused alarms", torrents of anguish and silences. At its core, the educational crisis represents a profound imaginative failure — an inability to envision and create spaces where young people can engage with nuance, critical thinking and aspirational values, and not rest tremulously on the brink of a dark neurosis.

Punjab, therefore, lies suspended in a crisis — neither fully belonging to its past nor confidently striding into the future. This dislocation is not merely political or economic; it is ontological. The cultural imagination of Punjab seems to have been colonised not only by neoliberal aspirations but also by a hollow modernity, where identity increasingly performs through the aggressive beats of hyper-masculine music, consumer excess and social media spectacle.

The once-vibrant language of resistance has given way to a lexicon of alienation. Punjab’s youth confront not only economic instability but also a profound existential disorientation, for which they tragically seek solace in the substance abuse that is ravaging the state.

The consequences of this decadence are visible everywhere. Unemployment gnaws at the economic foundations. Young people seek refuge in distant lands, their migration not simply a pursuit of opportunity but a quiet, unspoken surrender to despair. For instance, their music, marked by violence, materialism and performance, is a symptom of a deeper cultural void, reflecting a desperate cry for power and relevance. Nothing could be so profoundly disturbing and aesthetically unappealing.

Arnold’s poem, while despondent, does not surrender to nihilism. There is a quiet plea in its closing lines: “Ah, love, let us be true to one another!" — an appeal to tenderness, solidarity and authenticity in a world stripped of external certainties. It is here that a way forward might be glimpsed, even in Punjab.

In the face of disillusionment and false intellectual standards, a resilient spirit prevails, with youth seeking connection, purpose and meaning through art, activism and solidarity. It may not yet be a tide, but it is a hint — that even as the old world ebbs away, something else, quieter but no less vital, might be stirring.

For the youth of Punjab, caught in precisely such an in-between space, Dover Beach offers more than a parallel; it offers a vocabulary of a dirge, but with the subtext of a deeply envisaged reconstruction. In Punjab, we are standing on the shore, listening to the sound of what is receding, a layered history of syncretism, struggle and visionary wisdom. If we listen closely, we might also begin to hear the faint stirrings of struggles to be born and one day rise in a wave of rapture, commitment and fervour, ignited by a cultural renaissance of the spirit of Punjab’s history, rich with poets and warriors, whose lives and works have shaped its cultural, spiritual and martial legacy.

Bulleh Shah’s transcendent verses and rebellion against religious orthodoxy, Waris Shah’s timeless love story that also critiques the social order of his time; the lyrical defiance of Amrita Pritam and the indomitable courage of Guru Gobind Singh, Banda Bahadur and Bhagat Singh are striking embodiments of a cultural imagination deeply engrained in spiritual enquiry, moral simplicity and shared identity.

Thus, all is not lost. The positive metaphysical view of modern man is visible in the distant echoes of poetry, the histories of struggle, the memory of communal solidarity offering a counter-narrative to the decline. To remember our literary past is to resist the erasure of a deeper identity.

The question is whether we can re-engage our historical consciousness in a critical retrieval of tradition — an engagement with the past that is neither gushy nor intransigent. It is dialogical in our reading of the seminal classics not as distant vestiges, but as living resources in a new struggle for creative expression, that speaks to a lived experience in a world of love and harmony. Punjab longs for its youth to live deeply in their imaginations, yearning for liberation into a new consciousness.

Comments