In a hundred years from now, when either our own future selves (if some of us arise from our cryogenically frozen sleeps) or those of our bemused descendants look back at times past, and more particularly, at our present, how will they interpret it? Will this moment — despite our political passions and protests — be a mere afterthought, a roadkill in their rear-view mirror as they race into the future?
Our self-importance may convince us that we live in important times, but it is likely that the very events that vividly occupy our present — like award vaapsi , kiss of love, beef lynchings and #notinmyname — will have none of the emotional resonance we ascribe to them today. In parts, this attenuation is inevitable, a function of time decay — the farther away we get from an event, the less it means to us — that afflicts all human memories. To fight this inevitable erosion of memory, we insist on documentation and historical records. And the further back we recede, the more dearly held facts become stories, and, even further back, stories become foundational mythologies. But more fundamentally, these protests of our present may end up being read in an altogether different light, yielding very different conclusions and different questions.
The present, as seen in future
These protests in the name of freedom — to eat what they wish, to love whom they choose, to be governed without corruption — might seem to be efforts by an emergent middle class which intuits two conflicting things. One, they recognise the inability of conventional democratic politics to speak up for their evolution from members of a farming society two generations ago into a member of a globalising hive with their own aesthetic lens to see the world. Two, despite this knowledge, there is still not a spur strong enough for many of them to abandon the quiet comforts of an urban life to make political interventions that demand sacrifices. The result is that a protest without a demonstrated commitment to bear even more pain in the future merely betrays what it really is: an act of expurgation, a form of catharsis, an exercise in simulated radicalism. Perhaps one story that will puzzle our future historian will be about why the middle class was unable to transmute disparate sources of public angst into a progressive ethos.
More unfortunately, our future historian will, with little effort, chronicle ours as an age when environmental neglect took a turn for the worse and irreversible environmental catastrophes — affecting the rivers, the oceans, the commons and the soil quality — became a staple feature of Indian life.
A more sociologically minded historian might look back at our present and read it as a great age of political revivalism among the Hindu middle class. This may seem as no more different than the years after the riots and free love of 1960s when America saw a consolidation of a ‘silent’ Christian majority led by the Goldwater-Nixon-Reagan trio (à la the Advani-Vajpayee-Modi trio in our times). But such readings are perilous for they overfit meagre data into a particular model of political consolidation that needn’t work anywhere else. That said, a more expansive sort of interpreter will probably see a more historically familiar play unfold.
A slow-moving revolution?
To this reader, the democratisation of the Indian polity and the social emancipation since 1947 will come across as a slow-moving revolution, which also birthed an inevitable and slow-moving counter-revolution. Similar to Europe in 19th and early 20th century and to Egypt during the Arab Spring, post-liberalisation India will come across as an interplay of an equilibrating set of countervailing pressures that struggle for short-lived phases of superiorities.
Another kind of historian, perhaps one with a greater sensitivity to individual lives amidst the churn of events, will see our present as an era when postcolonial mentalities yielded something new and as yet unnamed. To this historian, our age might seem as a period when some Indians — after many assorted efforts to imagine themselves as a member of Eurocentric modernity — began to recognise the need for a form of critical authenticity. Such quests to birth something new inevitably might lead to more divisions, perhaps violence, and demand new kinds of language to think of ourselves as a collective. Ultimately, when it emerges — much like ‘freedom’ did in 1947 — it may arrive in the form of a misshapen beauty that conceals as much as it reveals.
More fundamentally, an interpreter of Indian history might recognise that the real story of our age is not necessarily the story of its politics but something too visible to be seen: ours has become an age where ‘things’ proliferate. From teaspoons, shoelaces, computers, phones and so on, the things that make up the material world we live in are now produced with increasingly finer gradations that only a class of aesthetes can distinguish.
The result of this explosion of ‘things’ is that our economic arrangements, our ideas of self-worth, our taxation regimes, our private envies and public institutions — all scramble to keep pace with an increasing diversity of choices and objects. Ours may be the age known for embracing materialism without anxieties and, more strikingly, without guilt.
