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Meanderings
To a disgusted friend who mailed about a piece doubting the Indianness of an eminent naturalised Indian
-Abhijit Sarkar(abhijit.sircus2003@gmail.com), May 2004
I did not have the patience to even begin to it.
You might remember Krandan Sutra, the scribe, who in his undergrad avatar would have been delighted to be called Krandan the Red [like Danny the Red (Daniel Cohn-Bendit of Sorbonne 1968 fame)]. He is now, for quite sometime, the owner-editor of The Buccaneer. Damn good for him. Yesterday's Buccaneer carried a signed editorial by him on its first page about how the Indian electorate is immature to have voted out India shining. It immediately reminded me of a little poem by Brecht. He wrote it when the socialist government of East Germany, probably in the early 1950s, managed to nullify the polls when it emerged that most of the official candidates had lost. The sum and substance of the poem is, first the government lost the confidence of the people and now the government has lost confidence in the people.
It isn't just chauvinism. It is also the I-know-best syndrome that many adolescents, including grown-ups like myself, are full of. This, I think, is a paradox of democracy. But it's just as well because the moment you resort to repression or mind-policing, you are complicit in the murder of democracy. ["Practical" democrats will not agree with this view in its entirity because they have to work out a balance of convenience in order to run a system and also because they cannot ignore the constraints of the here and now. (For instance, look at how Prince-of-Kapilavastu's government gave in to the pressure of a coterie to ban Taslima Nasreen's 'Dwikhandita' just the other day.) I do not grudge them their limitation as long as they acknowledge the salience of dialectics — dialectics, not necessarily in any Marxist sense, but in the sense of continual and transparent reasoning as part of the larger project called democracy. But, I do grudge them the foreclosure of my and everyone else's option to read and love or detest 'Dwikhandita'. In point of fact, the initial order banning the book has been overturned by a court on technical grounds. It seems, the respondents have appealed the overturning and have also quickly issued a fresh ban order on some new grounds. I am sure literature scholars have a lot to say about the extraneous circs of literature including the state and law and order, as all this has been around since the dawn of time.]
Recently, in Calcutta, I was dusting some of my grandmother's collections. Among them I found an edition of Lord Alfred Tennyson's — I forget its name but possibly "In Memoriam", the elegy he composed over 17 years for his closest friend from his Trinity College days, Arthur Hallam who suddenly died in Vienna in 1933 — published sometime around 1907 and reprinted in 1912 or so. The title page bears the name of some Sengupta or Dasgupta, resident of Dehergoti, a village in Barishal. More interestingly it bears an official stamp saying it has been examined and passed. The stamping is initialed with date (only day and month, no year) by some official on behalf of DIG, IB, Bengal. [Friend Swapan Chakrabarty speculates that the book must have belonged to some detenue belonging to Ashwini Dutta's group. Ashwini Dutta used to insist on his boys being very well read. Any book going to a detenue had to go through the censors so that the calming influence of prison didn't get ruffled by ideas hazardous for the soul which, in its natural state, should be amenable to bullying and, above all, in a benign state of intellectual paralysis. Another reason for Swapan's guess is the owner came from a village in Barishal. It's amazing how India shining takes one all the way to Barishal and Ashwini Dutta who, I guess, was cremated, not buried, or else he would have started turning by now.]
Of course, it would have been wonderful if chauvinists et al were to metamorphose, democratically, magically, by force of realisation and not on account of impositions, with the onset of true democracy. But that is not to be. Not, at least, in the near future
Isn’t there a clear trace of intolerance in my doubt that chauvinism cannot metamorphose into a genuinely held attitude of tolerance except by magic? Isn’t there a sense of despair about the limited powers of reasoning? s that despair a vulnerability to the temptations of unreason and coercion? Isn’t limitation built into the very nature of reasoning as a self-preserving mechanism? Would reason and its use by all parties to a discourse not come to an end if a clinching act of reasoning were to kill all possibilities of any further doubt? Wouldn’t that constitute repression, gagging, violence. John Brown’s soul has to march on endlessly. If it rests, that will be THE END! |
