An earthquake is among the most terrifying of events. Rumbling and shifting of the ground beneath one’s feet impacts the lives of witnesses and survivors like hardly anything else. Earthquakes, says Edward Simpson, “are capable of rubbishing the best achievements of humanity and levelling the vainest cultural ambition.” Following widespread havoc wrought by the Gujarat earthquake of 2001, those affected had to cope with the trauma of death and destruction all around them and salvage the remnants of their lives for reconstruction of a future that might possibly include recurrence of a similar event.
In The Political Biography of an Earthquake, Simpson portrays with deep sympathy and humane concern how the survivors and the affected region experienced the aftermath of the calamity. A professor of social anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, he describes himself on the website of the School as being interested in “boats, buildings, villages and roads of South Asia” and particularly in “how abstract ideas are made to appear real in the lives of ordinary people”.
His association with Gujarat, on which he has authored or edited several works, began in the decade before the earthquake. After the disaster, he spent varying periods between 2001 and 2012 in Kutch, the region that bore the brunt of the earthquake, observing the interface between the lives of ordinary people and the processes of reconstruction.
The ‘second quake’ Offering a novel perspective that looks out of the ruins of the catastrophe at the faces and ideas of those who came to help, Simpson concludes that the aftermath had greater consequences for life in the region than the earthquake itself. The chaotic war of ideas reflected a number of emergent trends in Indian political thought and practice that were pushed onto a population in a state of shock. Simpson says: “The longer I watched and listened, the more it was obvious that it was not the disaster itself but the doctrines of the interveners that were truly shocking”. The psychological and moral connotations of the new ideas and technologies were so intense that the aftermath is likened to a “second earthquake”.
The outsiders came with the self-confidence that they knew what was best for the victims. Those who came to Kutch from the east brought with them the authority of state power and a greater sense of ‘Gujarati culture’. The first to make an impression were Hindu nationalist organisations like RSS and VHP, who provided cremation and ritual services that were so important for the survivors.
The head-start enabled them to consolidate and expand their presence. Simpson observes that in the language of service, intervening agencies, including international organisations and institutions of the Indian diaspora, made attempts to alter pre-existing gods, traditions and structures. Communal riots in the state less than a year after the earthquake led to discriminatory ideas against Muslims and a deepening of the divisions between religious communities.
State re-imagined The primary objective of post-quake reconstruction, led by the government with massive encouragement of international financing institutions, was to be restoration and development of property and infrastructure. Out of the shock of the earthquake emerged a “hyperbolic capitalism” – the kernel of the so-called ‘Gujarat model’ of development. As the “restructuration” (as Simpson puts it) was rendered ‘bankable’ from the outset, funding was readily at hand, but “the shape of the government was transformed overnight with new offices and bureaucrats… (which)…the population did not generally understand”.
On the one hand, the reconstruction exercise brought new forms and layers of officialdom that the survivors had to negotiate with and, on the other hand, the public-private partnership model and introduction of new types of service providers dramatically redefined the relationship of the citizenry with government. The partnership scheme allowed private organisations to take on functions resembling those of the state and in the process, Simpson asserts, “the state was re-imagined at the grass roots.”
The reconstruction of rural Kutch, through the ‘village adoption scheme’, opened the way for a range of interest groups to re-build villages largely as they saw fit. Parochial divisions sharpened, inequalities were perpetuated and polarisation increased: some settlements became segregated anew on the basis of castes and sects, some on wealth or religion. Reconstruction of towns, which was rather more protracted, threw up similar dissonance. Angered at the opaque processes and perceived callousness of the state government, and at the planners’ lack of knowledge of local culture and unconcern for regional sensitivities, protesters in Bhuj agitated for separate administrative status for Kutch.
In turn they were accused of ingratitude in the face of the state’s generosity. Public engagement with restoration plans was primarily concerned with maximising compensation for property losses, and was largely uninvolved with plans for the overall layout and ethos of the town. Mistrust among neighbours competing for reparations caused increasing atomisation of communities; the notable absence of public memorials and urban expressions of nostalgia reflects the limited involvement of citizens in the renewal process.
The contestation and fragmentation that occurred on the political and social plane were equally pronounced at the level of the individual. With empathy and warmth, Simpson recounts how friends and acquaintances dealt with earthquake memory and coped through the aftermath. The earthquake killed the sociality that marked Bhuj: it seemed to become a harder and less friendly place, where it was preferable to stay at home in a family space. Survivors came to terms with death in varying and sometimes peculiar ways. As the knowledge of death of individuals sometimes took years to reach all who had known them, “long after the disaster the dead continued to die”. Explanations and causes for the event were sought; justifications and blame were attributed. Anjar settlement was reconstructed at the same site that had been devastated by quakes twice before, possibly in the belief that the power of the earthquake would be diminished by the healing routine of daily life. Cultivated amnesia enabled survivors to carry on.
This is much more than a political ethnography of an earthquake. In evocative prose Simpson presents a sensitive perspective on events following the Gujarat earthquake from the viewpoint of the bewildered survivor, and makes a fervent case for greater mindfulness among interveners so as to make for nicer and kinder aftermaths to future calamities.
THE POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY OF AN EARTHQUAKE — Aftermath and Amnesia in Gujarat, India: Edward Simpson;
Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, 1, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001.
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