We live, it is said, in an age of anger. The world is teeming with dangerous and provocative ideologies—running the gamut from religious extremism to militant nationalism. Yet the only solutions that intellectuals offer us are the same old venerable Enlightenment ideals with a touch of modern sensitivity. How exactly these tweaks are to be made isn’t clear—presumably we await a messianic philosopher.
In fact, all such hopes are futile, because anger is not the product of ideologies, whether wonderful or terrible; it is a spirit, in which those ideologies are taken hold of. (A history of ‘spirits’ must run in tandem with the fashionable ‘histories of ideas’ if they are to enlighten us.) The most humane world views are capable of being enforced with terror and bullying. On the other hand, the most hateful ideas can be turned—if they are heard with humility. Though it sounds astonishing, anyone who truly understands the idea of brutalising another will be saved from doing so—because he will see the horror . Anger, therefore, sits holding hands with timidity. Ideologues are those who will do anything for an idea, except honestly look to obey it.
Raging fire
Now what about us—the Indian English-speaking community? Who can deny that we are an angry and bewildered people? This fire rages not only among our activists and artists, who might (arguably, hypothetically) turn it to good use, but in the everyday privacy of living rooms and on our blogs and social media accounts. The common refrain is that the country is a dark place, no place for women, no place for freedom, and growing more alien and atavistic all the time. ‘Whoever can get out, gets out,’ a writer-friend once said to me, though her language was harsher. The others scramble for refuge, the Internet being the number one destination of choice, partly to nurse their wounds, but mostly as a vantage point from which to pour out their rage. Tiredness is the other frequent complaint, because one wearies of outrage, but since anger itself breeds well in tiredness, this cycle has no end. And over all this churning runs the smooth pitter-patter of our intellectuals, still speaking of India with vague optimism—because they still speak from protected heights, while in this generation, the English-speaking community is on the ground and being jostled from every side.
Indeed, we are uniquely pressed in. Communities elsewhere in the world with a similar inheritance of ideas—of individual liberty, of self-expression—have their opponents as well. They are angry in the U.S. too, marching and rioting against perceived authoritarianism. They, however, can express their anger all too easily, because they make up at least half the country, and have great, even overweening confidence in their identity as freedom-loving Americans. Not so the Westernised Indian. Our numbers are few and scattered, and we are surrounded by more sizeable, more voluble communities, who for all their diversity bear a common allegiance to the ‘old world’ of status and hierarchy, the very notions we feel we differ with. So our anger is hemmed in from all around. This entails, in the personal sphere, outbreaks of rage and depression, and in the public sphere, a latent explosivity, biding its time in petty vindictiveness. So bleak is the scenario that the customary reaction is either to disbelieve it, or to cynically embrace it. But the good news is that neither being a minority, nor even a persecuted minority, would have any power to make us angry, if we only ceased being ideologues, and entered into our inheritance.
Speech culture
For why does this label, of ‘English-speaking Indians’, stick to us so well? It does, because that is what are known for. Not for nurturing the dignity of the individual, not for cherishing independent thought, not for digging deep, running risks, or speaking truth to power—but for speaking English. The whole implication is of superficiality, a parrot-like people, whose boast is confined to their speech. And it must be true, because what we have made haste to spread across the country is not our culture, but only English and other window-dressing. Indeed, when, as happens now and then, a politician protests the infliction of the English language in his or her region, we are invariably furious. But if we believed in the idea of personal growth—part of the actual content of our inheritance—we would be primarily concerned that children and young people should have fluency of thought and speech in a language they have grown up with.
“But what will happen to their careers,” it will be asked, “if they don’t know English?” Well, was the pursuit of career the great idea we had to offer as a free and enlightened people? No—our motive in all such matters has been selfishness, masquerading as concern for others. We are pleased to have created (as has rightly been termed) a nation of ‘linguistic half-castes’, just as a religious ideologue is pleased to convert a nation by force. But the ideologue is condemned to remain angry, as are we, until we realise that we have been doing things in the wrong spirit. It’s worth praying, therefore, that the dead letter of our beliefs may become for us living commandments, because ‘the letter kills, but the spirit gives life’.
The writer has spent the last decade writing novels and wrestling with the things described over the course of this column.
