A wounded Civilization

My book notes from "A wounded civilization" by V.S. Naipaul.

To this...he aspired with despair, and despairing, seek to ridicule.

When we go to Switzerland, can we ignore the greenery? Is it possible not to savor the serene, cool, soothing air? Can we forget to move eyes over the spiraling meadows? Can the bells of the grazing cows be muted? What about the endless mountains? What about the stupefying lakes?

Seldom has a man gone to Switzerland and ignored the Alps, a woman almost never.

It is the backdrop, the background which is impossible to ignore. It would be cruel, nay insensitive, to pass by without looking at it or to tell the mind to not think about it.

Same is with India, it is impossible to ignore the squalor, the filth, the disorder and the congestion around you. It is the background, a forever persisting visual that refuses to vanish. How can one imagine the lakes of Kashmir without cleaning the rubbish that is washed off the river banks? How can one enjoy the shaadis in Farmhouses without thinking of the starving children?

Positivity? Is it to ignore the obvious? If there is dirt, there would be insects, and diseases and dying, hungry humans; if there is incompetence, there would be slowdown, waste of resources, if there is shortage, there would be greed, if greed, then corruption, which would certainly spread and swallow someone somewhere.

Then how can one come to India and ignore the background? How can movie makers make love stories only? How can they hope to wipe the quivering poverty by with glossy, snow covered mountains?

Indians do not observe the defecating people around railway tracks. They just do not notice. It is a forgotten detail. It is all been regulated and purified. It is unclean to clean; it is unclean to even notice excrement and filth lying on Indian roads, by lanes, pavements anywhere in India.

In India, a visitor is better off ignoring the filth, muddy roads, unclean excreta, slimy gutters, grime covered kids on junctions if they wish to go about their business. It is the only way to breathe in India. If you start noticing, you can't help thinking about it. This is the Hindu living way in certain terms, which has the society divided into castes, and the most down trodden of these castes, will always be unclean, unfed and undernourished. People at these lowest rung of the caste-ladder will have no choice but to resort to do labor. An upper caste Hindu will have no hesitation in leaving these cleaning jobs to a lower caste. For him or her, it is normal. If a street is not clean, he'll wait for the sweepers to come.

Question: Why is the street unclean?

Answer: Sweepers have not come.

It is enough in India that sweepers attend a place. They are not required to clean.

They squat and bend and stop to clean. They keep looking down until their job is finished. They have a role to play- the role of a sweeper. We need them as we need a driver, a chowkidar and a cook. Did they clean anything? Was the toilet sparkling and germ free after their visit? Nobody bothers. Did our exterior of the house became filth free? Don't know. No one comments. Perhaps people gain comfort from the sweeping done by the sweeper, forget if it is clean or not.

It is unclean to notice. If the sweepers had not come, people were content to live in the state of filth and their own excrement.

In the household I grew up, a lean, emaciated, malnourished woman visited every day I believe, though I noticed her on Sundays only - to clean the pavement up to the house and to clean one of the loos. She was prohibited to enter beyond a certain section of the house. She could not cook or enter the kitchen though an equally underfed, poverty-stricken woman could.

Did anyone ask her why she cleans toilets for a living? Do you have any plans of growing up to take the next role? What will she do of her children? How can she uplift herself to walk into our kitchen to wash utensils? No one bothered. Not even the English medium educated author of this post.

While watching the TV serial on the epic Ramayana (1988), she would sit in the gallery which provided an unrestricted, though distant, view of the TV screen. And benevolent people in front recognized that an audience is behind. What she would have thought during the episode when Lord Rama accepts fruits from an untouchable woman? What would have gone through her mind? Our minds- if we had any?

Mahatma Gandhi

His name given to parks and streets and buildings.

As a visitor from outside India, Mahatma Gandhi saw the obvious as any visitor to India sees. Perhaps that is where de decided to take a full tour of India.

Gandhiji has not said anything about paying taxes uncomplainingly, so Indians never cared. In fact, he said that don’t pay taxes to the British government, perhaps Indians followed that even after 1947.

Mahatma Gandhi s fight was for the truth. This is how he united the Hindus who had this quietism and religious self-cherishing while Bose tried the political fight.

1919 to 1930 were the 11 years of non-violence, an eternal source of Hindu action.

People of India have become stoics; anything might happen, they have history and culture to tell them that no harm will come to them. They will not be wiped off come whatever may. Indian societies have survived the Moghuls, the British and Hindu-Muslim rivalry but since it has survived so it will survive forever. Similarly, whatever can be thought, proposed, planned is useless. Since nothing has changed so far, nothing will.

Rajasthan

People of Rajasthan were equipped only to serve royalty. Mediocrity reigned at every level. People found glory only in their rulers.

Here I recall the Manager in the Shyam Benegal's movie Zubeida. The manager had spent his life as PA to the King and later to his widow, the Rajmata. His life was defined by his loyalty to the King and later to his survivors!

I went to Udaipur in 2011 where. I saw the collection of Rajah Arvind’s (The same Rajah who appeared on Akshay Kumar’s show on cooking challenge episode) car collection- chargeable at Rs. 150 per person (Too high?). One of his loyal men showed us the collection, with the pride of an ecstatic father whose daughter has recently become a doctor. Which Mercedes was purchased in which year, which car is the Rajah’s favorite, which one is used for what procession, he related effortlessly. It was all he knew it seemed. Over years he had forgotten his life; the palace and the cars were his life - a ritual that had gone into his blood and would come out only by his death.

I noticed a similar person in Kensington Palace who told the story of Queen Victoria with similar zeal. The difference however, was that he represented the royalty, a tradition and the state while the Indian comrade was only Rajah’s loyal.

Why do so many Indians go to the religion at old age? They fail to come to terms with the change around them. Frustrated, they dream of their childhood, what they did with friends, love life and isolate themselves into that world. To the outer world, it seems they are into religion, in reality they are afraid of settling into the change and are running away.

Hindu equilibrium requires a world smaller as a small town where men would never grow, talk much and do little, are fundamentally obedient and continue to be ruled by others.

Indians, particularly Hindus want their world to become smaller.

When their world shatters, a lot of Indians cannot fight back. They have nothing to offer.

Hinduism has not given any idea of a contract with other men, no idea of state. Most Indians cannot live together. Either they scatter in pairs or troikas on regional lines or simply start ignoring or worse, hating each other.

The inward looking, oblivious of the surrounding world, is a traditional limitation of Hindu wisdom. The priests find it necessary to meditate and espouse the world as illusion. In reality, a traditional inability to notice (sometimes not noticing is circumventing evils) is boasted as strength. In the Bollywood movie Cheeni Kum Hai, Actor Paresh Rawal, father of the girl (36 year old), who decides to marry a 64-year-old man (6 years older than her father), shuns the world. He proudly proclaims that after 58, the only activities left for a man are prayers, watching cricket and eating. 58? He refuses to see, listen or notice, he has simply pulled the shutter on his faculties. His would-be son-in-law, an egotistical chef, scratches him with a vitriolic diatribe, but only succeeds in bleeding him.

Cities of India expanded every day. There wasn't space for them, but people kept coming, found little space wherever they could and settled. After decades, someone achieved something, attributed his success to his hard work and published the story of a great life. People around him cited his example with pride and aspiration. A classic case of the law of large numbers.

Bombay, the city of gothic architecture, filled with people mainly because upper classes needed servants, textile mills in the center of the city polluting the air, needed workers and society needed hands. Prosperous Indian women of the last few decades of twentieth century, lived lives like Rajranis (Queens) with fleet of servants from drivers to cooks. A new social class grew within a few decades.

In India, the villages could not thrive because everyone was limited to their caste and land. Those who did not have had to move out to cities. To some extent, smaller towns had the same predicament. Why did I move out? Simply put, there was no means of applying my education in my hometown. It is a place which would never grow.

Buses in Indian town come in a hot brown fog whose metals sides are oily and dust blown with deep, horizontal scratches. Window panes are battered like aluminum foil which had been crumpled and straightened.

Old India required few machinery; it mainly needed hands for labor. Industrial revolution came after independence only.

Naxalism was an intellectual tragedy, a tragedy of idealism, ignorance and mimicry. Middle class India after Gandhian upheaval, was bereft of ideas and institutions of its own, was forced to be inducted in art and science, to follow ideas of other civilizations, borrowed this time a deadly revolution, again not their own idea.

Imperfectly understood idea within imperfectly understood idea. The tools or technology Indians try to improve was designed by a person who had no idea of the anguish of Indian countryside. A place full of landless, undernourished men or child labors. A motor of the spraying machine can kill an Indian peasant by its weight while a European or American can easily handle it. I have seen a US technician lifting the whole equipment with bare hands, an equipment which is lifted by a crane by Asians in Singapore.

Therefore, a technology to be used in India must be perfected with rural and middle class India in mind.

Facebook may be fine with open American culture but with Indian women? No doubt they can wear what they wish to but posting it on Face book doesn’t go down well with the idea of majority in India. I had seen pictures of a woman relative in shorts before I met her in person where she would be in her Indian Avatar. An imperfectly understood idea imperfectly employed by India. China for the right reasons has no Face book. Same as Japan or Korea - the developed nations of Asia.

Do faults lie in the Indian civilization? Maybe. Will someone come up and say this; will someone convince people to do self-examination?

Gandhiji lived 20 years in South Africa in a community of subcontinent. Perhaps he couldn't figure out how it would be to unite the nation made up of so many different castes and religions. Living abroad within community is one thing living in community in free nation is quite another.

Racial law united Indians in south Africa - both rich and poor.

When Gandhiji returned to India he was a racial leader.

Vinoba Bhave once said, "Untouchables do what human beings don't do, so they must be given land." The message however Gandhian it seems, also means that latrine cleaners are latrine cleaners, untouchables are untouchables.

Violence against the untouchables remained even after centuries; Aryans called them walking carrion.

The freedom came to India with foreign institutions, better suited to other civilizations. It was alien freedom.

Every man has the old idea of glorious Indian past and continues to swallow it, regurgitate it, but it cannot offer any answers to India's poverty.

India, with centuries of conquests, became a land of survival, for which men had to be diminished otherwise how they can survive.

Individuality is what I lose if I go back to India and especially in place like UP. I must become attached to my caste, a sub caste or a samaaj (social group).I'll have to be contended with whatever can happen without hopes of trying to surpass targets which I set for myself.

In India, renaissance is still to recover suppressed or dishonored.

The temple's sculptures had weathered into unrecognizable knobs and indentations.

An Indian’s marriage to a foreigner is usually an act of despair or confusion, the loss of community, the loss of place in the world and few Indians are equipped to cope with it.

The middle-aged India people who travel outside aren't shocked. I met a few senior Indians, who instead of going out in the snow at Jungfrau, preferred to sit inside the atrium. When asked, they smiled, reflecting contentment most Indians experience after reaching a renowned temple, especially if it is in snow-capped hills. Why not a fight in the snow? Why are you so aged so quickly?

This observation is purely about India of the Seventies and the Eighties.

In India, people seem to enjoy being ill-treated by others. It becomes an emotional luxury for them to dwell and speak about their grievances and wallow in self-pity. Conversation for such people means relating what they suffer at the hands of the official superiors or inferiors, relatives near or distant.

Women would talk about mothers in law and naughty children, men about office and work issues. All talk would be grievance.