With the changing of dates and seasons, comes the temptation to slacken in one’s endeavours. But while the naive celebration of a new year will certainly rob us of many years, the passing of time, rightly considered, blesses us with fresh capacity to complete what lies before us.
So in our ongoing assessment of the Indian English-speaking community, let us not fall short of speaking the whole truth. It is one thing to identify our hypocrisy in various spheres, but we must press on to a knowledge of the underlying condition; and in light of this, look again at our deeds.
A year ago, in the first column of this series, I wrote of the conflict we face, being a highly Westernised people, in the midst of social and cultural mores that we are increasingly alienated from. This fact of ‘rootlessness’ is familiar, even banally familiar, to all of us — in theory. But mark those words, ‘in theory’, for now it is time to go deeper.
Under duress
What truly ails us, I now submit, is precisely this perversity: that we only ever experience this striking conflict as a matter of theory. In other words, it is not our inner conflict that makes us so maladjusted, but our inexplicable absence of inner conflict.
The analogy is with the body that hurts and writhes under duress, and the body that, under the same duress, freely destroys itself — because it cannot feel pain. In clinical psychology, the former is regarded as the case of every other psychological disorder, but the latter — in a class of its own — is the case of the psychopath.
Now, the term ‘psychopath’, means something quite specific, and while the condition (which comes in degrees) is startling, we must make bold to observe when the shoe fits. The psychopath is not essentially vicious or violent, but merely bereft of all deep attitudes and feelings — the ones that make human beings different from animals. Yet, he or she is endlessly capable of posturing, of verbalising and feigning with remarkable felicity, that which is not even begun to be experienced.
Therefore, the hypocrisy of such a person transcends ordinary hypocrisy, because it is entirely free from guilt or shame. The saying of one thing and the doing of exactly the opposite, are both acts performed with what (in light of the stark contradiction) is mind-boggling sincerity. Yet in the mind of the psychopath, there really is no contradiction, because the very notion that words are meant to carry a depth of reality is regarded as beside the point - an irrelevancy.
To the psychopath, the raison d’etre of a passionate speech bemoaning elitism and class disparity, is that it enables one to pass some interview or get some appointment; so that they make it, and by their lights, make it truthfully. Meanwhile, a tyrannical treatment of household staff is beneficial to extract more work at less cost.
So they carry it out. You could beat your head against a brick wall, but you will not get them to see the contradiction. For we are not dealing here with an actor but, as psychiatrist Hervey M. Cleckley has put it, with ‘a person who, in the most important matters, has no capacity of distinguishing between what is acting and what is not.’
Degenerate talent shows
It is easy to multiply examples of such drastically hypocritical behaviour, such drastic indifference to real matters. Among us are those who make whole careers out of preaching sexual freedom and openness, and yet immediately defend modesty and secrecy when the death of a wife or daughter is investigated.
Consider next our literary and artistic milieus: have they not degenerated into talent shows, wherein performances are conducted for a select group of judges, who are themselves on show, while the people from whom all art really derives, and for whose sake it exists, are consigned to darkness, to haplessly mill about the grounds of yet another literature festival?
Even the outrage that we manifest over harassment and rape palls when one sees in it no contact with reality, but only an excess of expression. For the real questions, which underlie real attitudes, are such: are sexual relations meaningful and deep to us?
If not, why are we so heated about their proprieties? Do I, in fact, see my maid as a human being, the same as myself — and if not, what is the motivation for my do-gooding NGO? Am I writing books to help anyone with anything?
But here I must, in a manner of speaking, lay aside my pen, and appeal to the reader’s own experience. I invite you to consider how much of this uniquely ‘sincere’ hypocrisy you can find in your own social circles, beginning with family and relatives.
As to what makes for such psychopathic behaviour, it is at least a good bet that a proud and perverse philosophy of life, entrenched over thousands of years, has contributed.
But it all amounts to this: that our task, as Westernised Indians, is not primarily to overcome our inner conflicts, but to awaken to them. This is the miracle of the raising of the dead, regarding which we can only say: “With man it is impossible, but not with God. For with God all things are possible.”
The writer has spent the last decade writing novels and wrestling with the things described over the course of this column.
