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Karnataka
To cease upon the midnight with no pain words and ideas
Attempt to commit suicide, though an offence, is seldom followed by the prescribed punishment
The crucial part of this wish is ‘with no pain’. Only then can one be half in love with easeful death. While Keats’s reflections on death are charged with high lyrical romanticism, belying the reality that no death is without pain, the recent recommendation by Kerala’s Law Reforms Commission headed by former Supreme Court judge V.R. Krishna Iyer, for decriminalisation of attempt to commit suicide, and legalising euthanasia, marks an important practi cal advance in humanising the criminal justice system in respect of suicide and ‘assisted suicide’, otherwise euthanasia.
Attempt to commit suicide, though a criminal offence under Section 309 of IPC, is nowadays seldom followed by the prescribed punishment, a year’s simple imprisonment. Prosecuting a person for this offence is a contradiction in terms, for only when the crime is not successful can the accused be prosecuted. Quite rightly, unlike attempt to commit suicide, abetment to suicide (Section 305 of the IPC), not very different from ‘assisted suicide’ with its obvious implications of dowry murder, attracts the harshest of penalties. While some European countries have legalised euthanasia, the moral and ethical dilemmas that will confront an Indian medical practitioner were she or he by law required to assist suicide seem irresolvable.
Grim and full of moral ambiguities as the subject is, the incomparable Evelyn Waugh has exercised his sardonic and deeply pessimistic sensibility in a novella, Love among the Ruins (1953), whose theme is euthanasia. Even aficionados of Waugh are embarrassed over this ‘slight work’, and dismiss it as a mere bagatelle. Waugh however did not think so, for this ‘slight work’ is embellished by grimly minimalist line drawings by Waugh and some of his friends, underlining the farce and tragedy of this morality tale.
Waugh loved to play to the hilt the image he had built of himself over the years as the crotchety right-winger whose “idiosyncratic toryism … was regarded by his neighbours as being almost as sinister as socialism”, Waugh’s description of the political opinions of the eponymous protagonist of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957). This self-parody he carried through in real life as well.
In this futuristic tale of the ‘womb-to-tomb’ welfare state profoundly informed by such ‘idiosyncratic toryism’, moral relativism has finally triumphed. There are no criminals but only socially maladjusted persons. The protagonist, Miles Plastic, convicted of arson and rehabilitated (“an element of incendiarism is inescapable from adolescence… and if checked might produce morbid neuroses” the Station Psychologist had argued in his defence), is now a sub-official at the Ministry of Welfare in the ‘key department’ of euthanasia, “a Tory measure to attract votes from the aged and mortally sick”.
His duties required no special skill. Daily at ten, the Service opened its doors to welfare-weary citizens. Miles was the man who opened them, stemmed the too eager rush, and admitted the first half dozen; then he closed the doors on the waiting multitude until a Higher Official gave the signal for the admission of another bunch.
Into this funereal world arrives Clara, a dancer, young, beautiful and bearded, the last the consequence of cosmetic surgery gone wrong. Clara however makes clear she is not there to be ‘put down’, which annoys the doctor in charge no end, and Miles is asked to escort her out. Love naturally follows. Unlike Miles, Child of the State, who had mastered all the ‘antics of procreation’, for sex was part of the curriculum, Clara’s devotion to dancing had kept her body and soul unencumbered. In order to please one who had given her so much joy, though Miles loves the beard, Clara decides to have another surgery to remove the beard and have a fresh skin graft. The surgery is successful; the loved face is now a ghastly mask, inhuman, a tight, slippery mask, salmon pink.
Like generations of Englishmen before him who have had a shock, Miles ‘goes out for a walk’, commits another act of arson, and returns to be promoted as an official of the Ministry of Rest and Culture, “the irrefutable evidence of the triumph of our system”, in the words of the Minister. He marries an official of the department, fidgeting during the ceremony with his cigarette lighter, “a most uncertain apparatus”.
One remembers being disgusted and outraged on reading the novel, for it was a sustained attack on everything one had trained oneself to consider progressive legislation. After the hypocrisies of Harold Wilson and the despicable New Labour, one’s outrage is mitigated. Farce, even as a macabre comedy of manners, is a necessary corrective to illusions.
M.S. PRABHAKARA
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