Knut Hamsun received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920, exactly a century ago. His best-known work to this day remains the starkly titled novel Hunger , an alarmingly accurate study of the physical and mental distress caused by extreme poverty in a Norwegian town sardonically named Christiania, towards the end of the 19th century. As Hamsun saw it, hunger broke the back of rational thought; it destroyed the body in a manner that the soul could not tolerate, leading to ‘immoral’ actions such as theft, corruption and the destruction of property.
Reading Hunger teaches us that great literature, like the most potent of viruses, does not recognise national boundaries. The harrowing scenes in current Indian media of daily-wage earners, informal workers and migrant labor wanting to return at all costs to their villages, reduced as they are to living in the unbearable conditions imposed on them without warning by the stringent lockdown measures in our cities, remind us that text of hunger is — and always has been — global. It is no accident that the Director of the UN Food Programme has just warned of a “hunger pandemic” also looming in 2020 that could kill as many as 300,000 every day for the next three months, in addition to the Covid-19 toll, unless quick action is taken.
If the world today collectively seeks to effect an enormous paradigm shift from the familiar competitive model of ‘the survival of the fittest’ to the compassionate one of ‘the survival of the weakest’ — the poor, the sick and the old — the deep probes of the human sciences could prove invaluable in this endeavour, since a post-coronavirus situation, like a post-truth one, will depend on a sophisticated skills-set that can separate fake data from real and derive qualitative empathy from quantitative graphs. Arguably then, Indians have as much to learn, in terms of our shared humanity, from Hamsun’s dark and complex portrayal of hunger as Norwegians from, say, Premchand’s descriptions of utter destitution in ‘Kafan’ or Godaan.
Literary scars
Here is a single extended passage from Hamsun’s text:
The pains of hunger were unbearable and never let me alone. I swallowed spit over and over to take the edge off, and I felt it did some good. I had had very little to eat generally for several weeks, even before this current trouble, and my strength now was falling off noticeably. Whenever I had been lucky and scraped up five kroner by some maneuver or other, the money never managed to last long enough to get me back on my feet before a new famine fell on me.
How could it be that nothing ever turned up for me! Didn't I have the same right to life as anybody else, Pascha, the rarebook seller, for example, or Hennechen, the steamship clerk? And didn't I have shoulders like a giant and two strong arms for work, and hadn't I in fact tried to get a job chopping wood on Møller Street to earn my bread? Was I lazy? Hadn't I applied for jobs… and worked night and day like a madman? And hadn't I lived like a miser, eaten bread and milk when I was rich, bread when I wasn't, and gone hungry when I had nothing? Did I live in a hotel, did I have a suite of rooms on the second floor? I lived in a shack, a loft, in a tinsmith's shop deserted by both God and man since last winter because snow came in.
Substitute the word ‘snow’ and you will recognise the unsentimental accuracy of this description in 21st century India. For all the well-intentioned talk of “we are in this together” we hear so frequently in these COVID-19 times, a novel like Hunger forces us to remember that although every society in the world struggles with the demeaning facts of inequality, it is invariably those citizens whose rights, even in the best of times, come last, who are the first to suffer when disaster hits. They may have done nothing in the least criminal but they are the ones most likely to be ‘criminalised’ for breaking the rules. Disasters throw into sharp relief the fissures that already exist within cultures: between those at the edge of poverty lines and those at the pinnacles of the social order.
Norway is one of the richest countries in the world, and ranks first on several global indices, such the Human Development Index, the Index of Public Integrity as well as the Democracy Index. In contrast, India stands at an unconscionable 102 in a list of 117 countries on the 2019 Global Hunger Index. This is not, however, an attempt at self-flagellation; it is simply to observe that, at first glance, there seem to be few points of comparison between these two vastly different countries. For starters, India’s size and diversity imply that its tryst with democracy and development has to be incommensurable with Norway’s, which has a population of just about 5.5 million.
Yet, the fact is that hunger and farmland poverty were a grim reality in Norway not all that long ago, leaving an indelible mark on the psyche of the nation. Hunger is a literary manifestation of that scar.
The fiction of the body
At a time when the pandemic appears to have presented India with disturbing choices between ‘lives and livelihoods’, between possible deaths from hunger versus probable deaths from an infectious disease, my suggestion is that we can maybe learn more than meets the eye from the unlikely juxtaposition of the Indian and Norwegian scenarios. Positing human vulnerability in terms of a face-off between ‘nature’ (the pandemic) and ‘nurture’ (the economics of making goods and services available to all) immediately comes under a scanner when we do this.
This is because vulnerabilities vary. Norway was once a conservative and relatively stressed country; it is now a very wealthy one, partly because of its large reserve of oil deposits, but equally because it has a highly progressive democracy and an educated electorate. The huge hit that oil prices have taken during the present crisis might affect Norway’s economy but we can safely bet that its longstanding social investments will stand it in good stead. Ironically, Norway still imports basic items such as cereals, whereas India possesses huge buffer stocks of grains that, for some unfathomable reason, it has as yet failed to distribute freely and without question among its hungry — and increasingly angry — population.
But can fictional texts possibly contribute to a debate on such basic social questions? I believe that they do so by revealing a fundamental flaw in most top-down policy recommendations concerning the amelioration of distress. In our straightjacketed bureaucratic imaginations, the poor are often conceptualised as mere bodies. These ‘masses’ must be fed, clothed and kept healthy but their individuality is less than important in a developing society. This is a cardinal error. All humans, including the children most likely to suffer the lifelong effects of malnutrition, are perpetual thinking machines, fuelled by endless desires, intentions and emotions. It is exactly these mental resources that give the ‘common man’ the uncommon resilience to resist the good advice of ‘the authorities’ and proceed on long marches without any support from the state, risking death along the way.
The production of mind
Disciplines like literature, philosophy and psychology are critical because they typically view civilisation and its discontents in terms of insubordinate minds rather than as passive bodies — they show that minds are idea factories that can produce either horror or healing, fake news or true insight.
Consider a chilling illustration: both Knut Hamsun and the infamous Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in Oslo and Utoya in 2011, were Norwegians with explicit Nazi and fascist sympathies. Both were subjected to significant cruelty as children, leading to psychological problems in adulthood. Despite being born 120 years apart, both were obsessed with Christendom, subscribed to cultural nationalism and celebrated nativist ‘son of the soil’ ideologies. It is the differences, though, that are crucial.
Every page of Hunger offers a compellingly honest, excruciatingly self-aware text that transcends its author’s faux beliefs. In contrast, Breivik’s e-compilation ‘2083: A European Declaration of Independence’ is a shallow and silly ‘manifesto’ where one is hard put to find a single original observation. Breivik believed Muslims were being encouraged to immigrate to Norway because of the government’s liberal policies. Hence, supporters of that view deserved to die.
In Hamsun’s fiction, one can literally hear the birdsong amid the silences; genuine empathy pervades his narratives. But in Breivik’s global social media echo chamber, all you hear is endless chatter. Empathy is crowded out. This could be why Breivik was oblivious to a stunning social detail that I feel sure Hamsun would not have missed.
Indian newspapers back in 2011 reported that Breivik “was wearing a uniform with an embroidered insignia. The insignia, ordered online by Breivik for his militant outfit Justiciar Knight, was embroidered by Mohammad Aslam Ansari.” So absorbed was Breivik with his own narcissistic image that he did not notice that one of its backend producers happened to be a Muslim weaver from the holy Hindu city of Varanasi!
Square one, two square meals
In its report, The Hindu noted a further irony. In an interview published on July 26, 2011, Ansari said he had no idea who had ordered the badges and was horrified when he found out. Ansari had not made much money out of his transaction: “I am back to square one, doing jobs on my family loom for others. Generally, we are paid Rs. 150 per metre, of which half goes to the weaver who is working on the loom. It is too meagre to meet even our daily needs.”
If the pandemic has brought one truth home to us, it is that going “back to square one” is not an option. Independent India has managed to wipe out the famines of the colonial period and eradicate dreaded diseases like smallpox. Visionary leaders such as Gandhi developed the fast or ‘hunger strike’ as a highly effective political tool. Post-coronavirus, India has to find the same willpower to eliminate hunger and strengthen its rickety healthcare system. This goal is eminently achievable — but only if India simultaneously undertakes the cognitive challenge of training its youthful, mobile-savvy citizenry to distinguish between the real voices of Ansari and Hamsun and the false ventriloquisms of a Breivik. For this to happen, we must lift the prolonged lockdown to which our education systems have been subject over the years.
The hunger for knowledge or ‘epistemic hunger’ has been an evolutionary constant in human societies. Like viruses, like food-hunger, it has lived within humans for millennia. Each of these forces shares in the neurochemical design of human warning systems. What we need today is a deeper understanding of the phenomenology of these intimate enemies. The nameless narrator in Hunger in fact invents a whole new word for his hunger experiences: Kuboaa. This word, as it first enters the character’s consciousness, could signify anything: padlock or sunrise or even god. It is precisely this destabilisation of a normative semantics that presages coronavirus times. As the narrator comments: “My thoughts took amazing leaps as I tried to establish the meaning of my new word”. Our shaken world is now ready — even hungry — for precisely such ‘amazing leaps’ of thought.
The writer is critical theorist, writer, poet, and Professor Emerita of Linguistics and English at IIT Delhi.
