Special issue with the Sunday Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

TRANSITIONS : September 12, 1999

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Looking back

T.G.Vaidyanathan

When asked what he thought of the French Revolution, Zhou Enlai said, "it's too soon to tell".
David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, (1993).

IN his reflections on ageing, the psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar discusses a short story, "Silver Wedding," by the well-known Hindi writer Manohar Shyam Joshi from his 1990 collection Mandir ke Ghat ki Paudhian (Delhi: Saroj Prakashan, pp.23-40.) The "hero" of the story, Yasodhar Pant - Head of a small section in the Home Ministry - is a man of set habits who dislikes any change in his daily routine, his life virtually dictated by his old-fashioned watch. When his colleagues at the office request a treat on the occasion of his silver wedding anniversary, he refuses because he finds it (in his favourite English phrase) "somehow improper." He is not in sync with life at home, either, where he is increasingly alienated. His eldest son works in an ad agency and earns a salary so high that Yasodhar finds it "somehow improper." His second son, refusing a job in the lower rungs of the bureaucracy, is aspiring for the Civil Services. A third son is in the U.S. on a scholarship while his grown-up daughter who wears jeans and sleeveless tops - and this is the clincher - is refusing all marriage proposals and threatening to scoot to the U.S. No one will listen to Yasodhar, not even his long-wedded wife who has suddenly taken to wearing sleeveless blouses, high heels and eating outside the kitchen - all three of which Yasodhar finds "somehow improper." His wife and children, in turn, strongly disapprove of his recently acquired habit of stopping by the Birla temple on his way home from office - much in the manner of his now dead mentor. Returning home to the bustle of the wedding anniversary party to which his children's friends have also been invited, Yasodhar feels ill at ease, particularly with the cake and whisky which, predictably, Yasodhar finds "somehow improper."

Escaping to his room, he carries on an imaginary conversation with his dead mentor who, quoting Yuddhistra in the Mahabharata, says: "In the beginning and at the end you are all alone. You cannot call anyone in this world your own." Time passes and by now the guests are leaving and the presents must be opened. One of the presents is a woollen dressing gown from the eldest son to be worn "when you go to fetch milk in the morning" says the son. Yasodhar's eyes moisten with unshed tears. Is it because his son has not offered to get the milk himself or is it that Yasodhar is reminded of his mentor who, too, used to wear a dressing gown on his morning walks?

The story is replete with contemporary social observation. Particularly fascinating is the portrait of Yasodhar's wife who has become with age - as we have noted - increasingly self-willed and independent. She not only defends her daughter's lifestyle on the grounds that she herself "did all that covering of my head with my sari on your say-so" but also brings up old buried resentments. She now complains that when she came into his extended family as a bride there were many restrictions placed on her behaviour by his mother and sister-in-law and that Yasodhar never stood up for her: "I was young but lived the life of an old woman. The children are quite right in not following your old fashioned ways and neither will I ... Why have you become so serious? You saw two movies a week when you were young, cooked meat on Sundays and sang ghazals and film songs."

Change, come to think of it, has always been with us. S. Radhakrishnan in his 1943 Kamala Lectures "Religion and Society" (which I devoured avidly in an otherwise misspent youth) wittily observes that even Adam must have felt that he was living in an age of transition, although the learned author doesn't hazard any guesses about what Eve might have felt. I suspect that men generally do not take too kindly to change (as my epigraph wittily testifies to), but women gleefully do as we saw in the Manohar Shyam Joshi story. The reasons for this are various and have mainly got to do with the fact that the modern world has provided women with a wider set of options than ever before. It is hard to believe, for instance, that except from the forward-looking Anglo-Indian community, respectable girls in India could not appear on the stage, let alone films, not so long ago. Even Ray had trouble persuading the parents of the lovely Alokananda Roy to permit her to act in his "Kanchenjunga" (1962). She never appeared in films again! And, today, acting in movies is a serious career option for young women in India: they are rushing to the studios in droves.

Higher education was another field in which our women were slow to enter - particularly engineering. And anyone who has lived in Madras in the early part of this century knows how the late Rukmini Devi Arundale transformed the lowly sadir into the resplendent art form - Bharata Natyam - that it is today. And who could have imagined an Usha or a Shiny - let alone a Malleswari - some fifty years back! Make no mistake. The 20th century has been extremely kind to women all over the world.

Prakesh Israni/Fotomedia

If women have been the chief beneficiaries of change in this century, it is ironically the men who have brought about the big changes - including a few revolutions - that have shaken the very foundations of life. The sole exception here is the sexual revolution ushered in by Freud nearly a hundred years back. The new breed of feminists have not taken kindly to Herr Freud, finding him too phallocentric for their taste. They apparently haven't forgiven him for completely misrepresenting both the site and nature of female sexuality. Anyone who has the slightest doubts about this should forthwith get hold of Anne Voedt's path-breaking essay "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm" (1970) included in nearly every contemporary feminist collection. Marx, too, has fared no better. Feminists find him far too preoccupied with the forces of production to bother with the even greater forces of reproduction!

A very different kind of change in the last 20 or 30 years has come about not through the whirligig of time but through the cataclysmic upheavals brought about by enforced exile, stylishly referred to today as diaspora. Nobody has written more movingly about this condition than Salman Rushdie and the misunderstanding in India surrounding his latest offering - The Ground Beneath Her Feet (Jonathan Cape, 1999) - stems primarily from a failure to grasp the enormous burden that this imposes on the exilic intellectual. The choking pathos of that passage that brings Chapter 8 - "The Decisive Moment" (pp.209-249) - to a close can only be understood by someone who has been forced into a life of permanent exile. And hence the heartbreak of the lines "...farewell my country. Don't worry; I won't come knocking at your door. I won't phone you in the middle of the night and hang up when you reply... Those whom I love I must leave behind for good" (p.248). The speaker of these lines, Rai (Umeed) Merchant - clearly an author surrogate - settles down eventually in New York with a wife and child after all "the high drama's over." He, like so many others before him, finds "ordinary human love." This is "the ground beneath her feet" of the title. To mock this by cynically juxtaposing it with drinking orange juice and munching muffins is like mocking Bellow's Herzog for "listening to the steady scratching of Mrs. Tuttle's broom" after all his high jinks. It is mocking literature itself, calling it anti-literature.

Rushdie, of course, is one of Midnight's most celebrated children. What about people who had already reached the frontiers of middle age by 1947? Now Partition and its traumas are at the centre of two recent Indian autobiographies: Iqbal Masud's Dream Merchants, Politicians and Partition: Memoirs of an Indian Muslim (1997) and Amita Malik's Amita: No Holds Barred (1999), both well known film critics and both published by HarperCollins, India. Both Masud and Malik are in their seventies now and their lives have been literally riven in half by Partition and its aftermath. In Masud's case, being an Indian Muslim, Partition was literally a bombshell but Malik appears relatively unaffected although she married a Pakistani Muslim who, as a secularist, chose to live and work in India during those turbulent years, a difficult thing indeed. Masud's slim 152-page paperback brings a whole forgotten era to life (particularly Chapter IV, dealing with the crucial Partition years 1945-1947).

Haunted by the poetry of Ghalib and Iqbal ("my personal favourite," he tells us in the Preface), Masud seems as much an exile in today's Shiv Sena-ruled Mumbai as Rushdie was in Thatcher's London. Twice in the space of some 30 pages (p.7 and p.27), Masud invokes Hali's well-known lament - "Ai khasai-khasan-i-rusul waqt dua hai; qummat pe teri aake ajab waqt pada hai; jo din badi shaan se sikla tha watan se; pardes mein woh aaj garibul guruba hai" (O chosen of the Prophets, this is a time for prayer; the faith which started so gloriously from its homeland is the dust of the dust in a foreign land) which reduced him to tears in school in Cudappah in the old undivided Madras Presidency. The modern theme of exile appearing more than a thousand years ago in Hali's lament! For both Rushdie and Masud the past is more a country from which they have migrated. Rushdie went on to write The Satanic Verses, became an international celebrity and was the target of an Iranian "fatwa". The pre-Partition "secularist" and fellow traveller, Masud, who refused to migrate to Pakistan in 1947 from Hindu India, "because all my friends with whom I talked, argued most of the day, were Hindus, most of them Brahmins" (p.32), returned to the old faith eventually after the communal riots of 1993 in Bombay which, Masud informs us early on, even a leftist poet like Ali Sardar Jafri likened to the "Karbala" (the holy city of Shi'ite Muslims) - the site of the martyrdom of Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet in 680 AD. But Masud's "recovery of faith," it seems now, was never complete.

Let me explain. We learn he developed a heart problem the same year and needed the assistance of a pacemaker. During the crucial operation when the pacemaker temporarily failed to function, Masud began to recite the "Kalma" (a Muslim prayer of faith). Then ashamed of being so "scared", he switched to Philip Larkin's "Aubade," a confessional poem about age and death ("Courage is no good: /It means not scaring others. Being brave/ Lets no-one off the grave./ Death is no different whined at than withstood.") What would have come to Rushdie's mind, one wonders, under similar circumstances where, unlike a "fatwa", death looks imminent. After all, he too grew up on the Quran and received instructions in the "hadith" (traditions) like Masud as he tells us in his 1990 lecture "In Good Faith." It would seem, in retrospect, that the truest verdict on Masud was uttered by his childhood and Madras Christian College sweetheart, Gulnar - who gave him his first kiss in the MCC library - at Madras Central as she was leaving for Pakistan (which means, literally, Land of the Pure) in 1948-49: "Iqbalbhai, I know what you are. You are neither a Hindu nor a Muslim. You are a stoic Indian English."