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Magazine
The state of India
RUKUN ADVANI
CENTENARIES, anniversaries, and other such round dates are seen by the media as acceptable pegs on which to hang a story, a feature essay, a column. Because he died in 1916 instead of 1903, I would, for example, need to wait another 13 years to write on the Spanish composer Enrique Granados, despite being reminded right now of the ridiculous manner of his end by similar absurd deaths which give life to our media — burning stove incinerates half a running train; elevator crushes bureaucrat; escalator swallows child; wrestler accidentally stabs fellow-wrestler in the heart with scissors while forcing him to submit to a haircut. Is any of this believable? It is easier to blank out on such things, or else to view them as newspulp fiction.
Indian sensibilities have been so bludgeoned by these disaster images, which flash for a moment and then disappear into some eternal black hole, that even the capacity to respond to them in some sanely human way has gone forever down the same black hole. Capacities for feeling have diminshed, sensibilities have altered, and the only way of responding to calamity now is to giggle and invent even more catastrophic scenarios in one's mind — which is probably what railway ministers secretly do. Given the absolute absence of accountability among Indian ministers in relation to citizens the contemporary Indian state is in this sense not democratic but a monarchic continuation of princely India, why not just be bleakly, blackly humorous? Why not see life in the way G.V. Desani saw it in All About H. Haterr, or as J.R. Ackerley saw it in the equally hilarious Hindoo Holiday? To understand India, fold up the TV, switch off the newspapers, and wear a literary lens. Go looking through glass. Try seeing life not as the media projects it, but in the Swiftian manner, as the great literary satirists show it. Indian `reality' and the life we all live will then look truer because a lot of it will look like a parody of itself.
Which is what it is. It's just that accepting this literary truth as the truth about India's social life i.e. that `reality' in India is frequently a parody of itself, and that Indian life is therefore more truly represented by satiric fiction than by the hollow piety of newsmagazines makes us uneasy and insecure. We aren't used to the idea. It sounds too outlandish. But think about it with the help of two examples: first, what if we had a second `Emergency' whereby all our media personnel were locked up (most should be, in any case), and the only representation of social reality available to us were through reading not newspapers but fine fiction? We would then, fairly soon, begin to perceive the world around us through the prism of writers of fiction such as Rushdie, Ghosh, and so on. Our eyes would then be far more clearly open to India as, in some fundamental ways, the bizarre Kafkaesque hell that the Indian state and political class has made it.
The second example is an extension of the first: if you're living in India, does it not seem plausible to suggest that a hypothetical railway minister might, for example, be thinking what fun it would have been if a couple of gas cylinders had exploded in the Frontier Mail instead of just a primus stove? Or, better still, if the train's whole pantry car had detonated? Or how about if two pantry cars had blown up simultaneously when two trains were passing each other? Maybe, thinks such a minister, this can be organised to happen on Diwali to make the festival a bigger fireworks disaster than it has become already?
He thinks with glee of the scenario, then is plagued by archaic qualms: isn't it politically incorrect for a minister to think such darkly Upamanyu Chatterjee-ish thoughts? More to the point, might he have to resign if he blew up two trains for a lark? Then he chuckles and reassures himself: an Indian minister can't really prove he's authentic unless he thinks politically incorrect thoughts and performs a few criminal deeds. And moreover, even if he personally supervises a mega-event whereby two trains create another Hiroshima on Diwali day, the only thing that's absolutely certain, the minister tells himself, is that he'll still remain a minister. This is India, after all — a slowly bloating version of Bihar — not some awful democratic European country.
This variety of speculation seems to me to get far nearer the truth about the real self, the inner life, of the typical Indian minister than the media garbage which propagates the laughable idea that he is a human being and not a gargoyle or some higher form of bacterial scum. Which is why it makes a lot more sense to accept the fact that life in India is more and more the reality shown to us in good satiric fiction think of Midnight's Children, of Kafka's The Trial and The Castle than the reality we're shown by an increasingly frivolous media and the felonious Indian state.
Somewhere deep within, like Agastya Sen, we are being silently forced (`hegemonised' is the academic word) by the Indian state and bureaucracy to become completely oblivious to India, specially to areas of countrywide degeneration such as air pollution, soil contamination, urban hygiene, travel safety, university education, public health — all evidence of the massive criminality of the Indian state. Paradoxically, even as this social anti-nationalism goes on more and more brazenly, this same state forces us to be more and more publicly nationalistic and patriotic, to stand up for the national anthem when it says stand, to hate Pakistan when it wants war and befriend Pakistan when it finds it expedient to crawl before American pressure.
A graffiti I read recently says simply: BUSH IS A PLANT. Bush is also a growing plant. From Iraq he seems headed in our direction, and the only consolation of his creeping neo-imperialism is that not even rule over us by America can get much worse than by the variety of Indians who are now in power. Deep within every Indian is the clear emotional knowledge that much of this country is actually a disaster zone temporarily alleviated by Aishwarya Rai and Sachin Tendulkar, and that we're all living on borrowed time until the next train or bus we catch proves our coffin.
So, never mind that Enrique Granados died in 1916 instead of a hundred years ago. The more important thing is that his coffin was, ironically a lifeboat. This writer of some of the most exquisite piano music — his Twelve Spanish Dances are in the Beethoven and Chopin league had, like sane Indians today, a great fear of travel. Against his inclination, he was persuaded to visit the U.S. to put up his opera, Goyescas. That done, he had a ticket to get back home on a ship and was about to sail when Woodrow Wilson persuaded him to play music in the White House. Granados agreed, postponed his departure, and sailed on a later ship. In March 1916 this ship, the S.S. Sussex, was torpedoed by the Germans in the English Channel. Granados was safe on a lifeboat but saw his wife struggling in the water. He jumped off to save her and they both drowned. There seems only one problem with this seemingly tangential disaster story: it must have happened somewhere in India.
Rukun Advani is the author of Beethoven Among the Cows and runs Permanent Black, a publishing house based in Ranikhet.
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