One of the familiar tropes of a nightmare is to find friends and allies transformed into unrecognisable enemies. We are in danger, but each anxious face that swims into view turns out be a laughing dacoit. Visions like these vanish when we wake, but it is in our waking reality that these deceptions are actually practised on us and in the broad daylight that we fail to unmask them.
And in time we are barely able to distinguish friend from foe, or a helping hand from an exploiting one, and we become fair game for the oppressor’s most sadistic pleasure—which is to tear off his mask in front of our eyes. At such times, as Chesterton’s Father Brown tells us, “It is a joy in the very heart of hell to tell the truth.” But I am not speaking in the abstract.
Precisely such a horrible joy animated a recent essay by Manu Joseph, which was revelatory of the true spirit in which the Indian English community is treated by those it considers its leading voices.
In his essay, Joseph mocks who he calls ‘amateur Indians’ for their sense of homelessness, for losing heart in an illiberal environment; he mocks, further, their desperate attempts at political retaliation, recommending instead (in an off-hand way, for he must not be seen to care) his own private pact with despair, which he labels peace.
Scoffing at the audience
Here is the spectacle of a writer who owes all his talent, his livelihood, his readership and his reputation to the Indian English community, but who has seen so much advantage in scoffing at it that he now does so openly—confident that his star will only rise further. How can this happen? It can, when a community steps apart from itself, in self-loathing, to throw stones at itself, each member (apparently) empowering himself or herself at the expense of the rest. In reality, each one bleeding to death.
Joseph is a brazen instance, but so beneficial does this suicide appear that it waylays even more conscientious thinkers.
In the wake of the U.P. election results, it became finally clear that for our public intellectuals absolutely nothing is more to be admired than a successful career. “We can discuss criticisms of Modi to death,” wrote an entranced Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “but one thing is clear—whatever validity they might have, they do not have any legitimacy.” So his reverence was all towards legitimacy, the question of what passes in public, while towards validity, the question of what stands in truth, he was full of impatience.
Centred to the self
Here, indeed, we have the key to unlocking the prevailing attitude, in our intellectual circles, to the troubles that cry out for their attention. They do not set about helping, instead they set about calculating what will best promote their own standing. So, whether they are praising or lamenting, they are essentially always despairing of the situation, and exploiting it for their own benefit.
In Mehta’s very next essay, he grieved the elevation of Yogi Adityanath with a passion that no doubt embellished his liberal credentials, but which we are compelled to recognise as insincere and brandished for that very purpose. For if the Yogi were only to bide his time, and pass muster in public polling, the same writer, by his own lights, would be bound to start praising him.
It is not that this calculating spirit is always consciously chosen. But it is compulsively adhered to, not only when confronted with powerful opponents, but even when dealing with one’s own.
In recent times, we have had many high-profile cases, from Tarun Tejpal to R.K. Pachauri to Mahmood Farooqui to Arunabh Kumar, of apparent exemplars of liberal values alleged to have committed molestation or worse.
In each case, the introspection one would expect to follow, at the fall from grace of an idolised figure, has been entirely missing. Instead, an avalanche of judgements has at once descended on the situation, one taking one side, and one the other, all animated by furious calculations of self-interest and the desire to justify their own position and then further capitalise.
Power frenzy
The scenes have been reminiscent of the kind of frenzy for power that may erupt within a gang after a don is brought down. None of those vying for power notices that crime itself is wrong—that there is no acceptable procedure to indulging one’s lust—for this would bring guilt upon themselves too. Rather, each lays out his or her own road-map of how to be a more successful criminal than the fallen one.
All this is done in the language of values. But values are not stones to throw at people.
What could be a greater—yet more obvious—deception than that we promote our values by getting rid of them? In fact, these are the habits of exploiters, which are also characterised by haste, for the exploiter is always looking to move on from a situation.
Those who help, however, are characterised by their abiding. They resist the urge to mock a wounded community, but stay alongside, submitting in humility to grief or wonder, realising also their own guilt and woundedness, and deepening their relationship with their people, and in unseen ways they heal. We must ask the same of our writers, pundits and intellectuals, and meanwhile treat their chatter like the unreal cachinnations of a nightmare we just woke up from.
The writer has spent the last decade writing novels and wrestling with the things described over the course of this monthly column.
