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Cloning gods, reading bar codes: Discontinuity in India today
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India today is a series of paradoxes — a discontinuous system, yet complex; a country on the edge of being dysfunctional, but one that functions nevertheless; an entity on the verge of being incomprehensible but which still defines and refinesits identity every day. From all this emerges the central issue of discontinuity, highlighted in public discourse and in political combat, and instrumentalised by people with an archaic mindset ... ILIJA TROJANOW on the reality that is modern India.
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KUMBHA Mela 2001. It is a cold morning, yet undiscovered by the resilient winter sun. A pit littered with chai cups, some made of plastic, now crushed and crumpled, others made of clay, already dissolving under the dew. Old and new lie next to one another, mixed and intermingled; the ancient is about to pass away, while the modern is geared for eternity, or at least for a kalpa which seems to us eternal. Plastic is of a pure impurity. Before use it looks as clean as it can get, but a heap of plastic by the side of the path seems like eternal pollution, without hope of a redeeming purification. The introduction of plastic cups at the Kumbh Mela, or for that matter at nearly every railway station in the country, is radical discontinuity.
Today's India (Asia, the world) is a discontinuous system, as complex as the latest Microsoft operational software, on the verge of the dysfunctional with any given combination of commands and processes, but functioning nevertheless. On the verge of the incomprehensible. Defining and refining identity on a daily basis. Discontinuity is a central issue in public discourse, in political combat, instrumentalised by people with a 19th Century mindset, who believe that the continuous is still an option for us to choose. They — be it Hindutva propagandists, Shiv Sena warriors, vernacular language ideologues or Marxist backwaterists — demonise discontinuity in order to put the blame on an enemy with an invented and projected homogenic identity, be it Islam, the Western world, the English language or globalisation. The parameters of this combat are one-dimensional and linear, but the combat is held in a system of discontinuity. It is as if you are introducing an abacus into MS-DOS.
Maha Kumbh Mela January 2001. The confluence of the Ganga and the Jamuna. Brown waters, blue waters have mixed for a very long time, as have beliefs, songs, stories. Every 12 years, spirituality meets reality on a massive scale, and by now reality means commerce means technology. Huge video screens welcome the kalpvasi to the land of Amul and Rexona (imagine the two million assembled sadhus all using deodorants). The ongoing ads are the undercurrent to the orgiastic frenzy of ritual, of pooja, yagna and snaan. They play the role of the underscored information on the news channels, be it CNN or CNBC. While an NGO-activist is being interviewed, the undercurrent draws your attention to the NASDAQ and the DAX and the NIKKEI and the BSE. Asian Paints 295.30 Madras Cements. The flow is determined by the undercurrent, as we all know. 4350 Punjab Tractors 170.85 Castrol India 199.90.
This undercurrent is global. Philips 98.30. A pure import, in earlier days called colonialism. Cadbury 491.90. The BSE is a mechanism of international efficiency. Gillette 365.75. Throw a trader from Hong Kong onto the floor, give him an hour or so to set his sights and he will be dealing with homely delight. Procter & Gamble 475.95. No cultural bias here, no traditions, no elements of the village market or the city bazaar. With one exception. Trading on the BSE is 90 per cent day trading and day trading is purely speculative. Infosys 3790.15. It is prone to collusion, manipulation and front-running. Rayban 54.55. A few people can control the trading and the trading is in a state of nearly perfect lawlessness. No one gets caught, no one gets punished, a case or two aside. Kodak 207.05. This system of easy gratification needs to be preserved. It might be defined as TRADITION, as CORE VALUES, as OURS. It cannot be opposed. Nestle 504.25. Even 10 years after the beginning of liberalisation it is extremely cumbersome for a foreigner to enter the BSE and the Indian stock market. It might take you two days to get accredited in Taiwan and a week in South Korea, but in India you will struggle for anything between six weeks and six months. But the international investors are knocking at the gates, the last fortress of purely indigenous power will soon fall. Siemens 257.75.
Trends determined by a global undercurrent.
The Kumbh Mela is a gigantic web without a spider. Webs and nets are ancient concepts of inter-dependency, conceived well ahead of the chaos theory. The net of Indra, the world as a web, every being a knot therein, that was an early Buddhist idea. There was advaita and other similar philosophies. Spiritual concepts have materialised thanks to technology: the internet, the most obvious, but also the net of global economy, cyberspace and the deciphering of the DNA-structure, spiritually foretold by the Buddhist understanding that the individual is made up of non-individual elements. Networking is the new method of empowering. The bar code is the closest humanity has come to the net of Indra. 5dash099706dash568025dash. Esperanto was an artificial language developed by a Polish humanist to unite mankind by enabling communication between everyone. 9dash788190dash113205dash. In the 21st Century, Esperanto is a losing venture. The bar code is more efficient than Esperanto, the bar code is completely cultureless and timeless, and completely comprehensible. We guarantee there will be no misunderstandings. 4dash477739dash378409dash. Should the current 13 digits not suffice, the overpopulation of products will only be a mathematical challenge.
In the Europe of modernity, God was killed. In the India of post-liberalisation, the gods are cloned. Cloning is the ultimate preservation of the status quo. It is more effective than the caste system. God is de-contextualised, de-socialised, completely individualised, another victim of the manipulative powers of the privileged, who themselves prefer to follow the trinity of wrinkle-free, designer-styled religions. Connect to your spiritual energy, feng shui, art of living and reiki, rediscovered by a Japanese Christian minister, a melange of Jesus and Buddha, purified love — the perfume of the day. Aarti is celebrated every evening, at every Ghat and in every show. In "Khabhi Kushi Khabhi Gham", Kajol sways the lamp in every scene, over-pitching values and hierarchy. Aarti as light food, as airport art. Aarti as the vital symbol of the Hindutva forces, who have established themselves as lobbyists for the cloned gods, but who do not care about the living sacred. They do not clean Ganga Mataji (on the contrary: all the keepers and carers I met were open-minded, humane and anti-ideological people). But they protected the holy name of Varanasi by preventing Deepa Mehta's film "Water". Holiness is an image without a core, it is an axiom. It is the godfather of all cloned gods. It is celebrated through ... Aarti.
Kumbha Mela 2001. Every morning we wake up to the screech of 108 godly names, our alarm clock is a suffocating mist of song and sound, a dawn full of clanking crickets. Incantations, each prayer besieged by a multitude of competing prayers. No holiness, no solidarity, no inwardness, no mercy. Only noise and amidst the noise the loudest of all Mantras, the ultimate destroyer of sleep — "shanti ohm". One of the most successful American entrepreneurs of Indian origin is a man called Bose. His company produces loudspeakers — he holds a commanding presence at the Kumbh Mela. Bose is a true globalist, a believer in discontinuity, for he enforces every message, every point of view, and every Shloka. Bose enables the soundtrack for the Aarti to resonate along the river banks, to flood the Ghats. The sound cosmos is constantly changing: levels rising, volumes dropping, speakers faltering. This is a cultural reality of modern India, this seemingly chaotic installation, this synchronicity, every moment identity is made and unmade. Identities are exchanged, distinctions erased.
When MTV was introduced to India, the people in charge thought that pop music was like Coca-Cola — you only need to distribute the plastic cups to be successful. The international programme was screened in India, the local office was told to focus on marketing. MTV enjoy. But the young Indians didn't enjoy it. They found the programme uncouth and impolite. The music was too heavy and too black, too much grunge from Pearl Jam, too much rap from Puff Daddy. MTV was cornered in a niche of the market. The customer had passed judgment. MTV reacted quickly and boldly. The channel was draped in the tricolour, 90 per cent of the videos shown were Indian, the VJs were told to get rid of the English accent they cultivated so industriously and to get some bambaya masala into their speech. Chai boys started advertising for MTV, accompanied by the good old hit: Ye jawani, hai diwani. But the Mantra remained: MTV enjoy. And on February 14 the programme is dedicated to Valentine's Day. And Madhu, a peon in an office, a neo-buddhist, buys his MTV-enjoying wife some flowers. And the good Indian music is composed and played on synthesisers, and the musicians can't get enough volume on the monitors and the loudspeakers. So while we are swaying to the Aarti let us mutter: ohm MTV-enjoy ohm. One hundred and eight and 1,001 times. Why not delegate this task. Let's have a software take care of it, or a robot. Let our computers seek darshan on the internet, there are enough cyber mandirs and cloned gods to choose from.
Ilija Trojanow is a German novelist. He is the founder of Marino Verlag, a publishing company for African and East European fiction and non-fiction. He is currently based in Mumbai, working as a freelance journalist. The winner of numerous literary awards and prizes, he is now working on a collection of articles on India called Der Sadhu an der Teufelswand. Reportagen aus einem an deren Indien and his second novel dealing with the life of British historian and explorer Sir Richard Burton.
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