Indian Instincts

by Miniya Chatterji

  Manish, Sai. 2016. 86 per cent of currency by value in India are of Rs 500 & Rs 1,000 denominations. Business Standard, 8 November.

  News World India. 2016. The demonetisation, a crippled economy and the mayhem! 14 December.

  Pring, C. 2017. Global corruption barometer 2016. Global Corruption Report 2017.

  Times of India. 2007. Majority of Indians wish to be reborn in motherland: Survey. 14 August.

  Times of India. 2017. India’s rising income inequality: Richest 1 per cent own 58 per cent of total wealth. 16 January.

  World Population Review. 2017. Delhi Population. http://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/delhi-population.

  Worstall, Tim. 2016. India’s demonetisation kills 100 people apparently—this is not an important number. Forbes, 8 December.

  13

  Decibels

  The avant-garde building sits on the banks of a lake on the posh outskirts of Geneva, surrounded by the Swiss Alps. A curved linearity connects its various sections, with ascetic minimalism in glass and stone, green proselytism and postmodern interiors. Probably the most unlikely not-for-profit one could come across, the character of the World Economic Forum headquarters building is an apt reflection of the abstraction in the world today. On the other hand, the organization’s humble mission statement—‘improving the state of the world’—is hardly representative of the power it wields on the most influential individuals across politics, business, arts and the sciences.

  Essentially, this is what the World Economic Forum does: it chooses the most powerful people in the world for attending various confidential meetings all around the year. These individuals—partly because they consider it a status symbol to be among the ‘chosen ones’—pay hefty sums of money as registration fees to come together and talk to each other about solving crucial world issues. It is like an elite restaurant with restricted entry that everyone wants to go to. The business model is brilliant and unfailing, its success unparalleled thus far. For three years, my job at the World Economic Forum was to bring together these individuals’ diverse ideas and opinions to a single discussion table.

  I felt that in many ways the success of the World Economic Forum was also a consequence of the failure of traditional channels of formal consultation and discussion, which international organizations like the United Nations, and various regional and bilateral political alliances, were expected to facilitate. Instead, the informal systems created by the World Economic Forum had attracted influential stakeholders and ensured that serious issues could be dealt with head-on during spontaneous and uninhibited conversations in confidential surroundings. These conversations brought to the table many new ideas. More often than not, these ideas then self-organized themselves into the mental schematics of the participants, who would return from these meetings, go back to their local ecosystems, and apply what they had learnt there.

  Such was the power of conversations that I had experienced and learnt to appreciate.

  After leaving the World Economic Forum, when I moved to Delhi, I was therefore excited about the noisy enthusiasm to express views and opinions here. One of the first things that I noticed was that everyone I met in Delhi had something to say about the state of affairs in the country, their own lives . . . and even my life. The people here, both rich and poor, laughed unrestrainedly. They were quick to fight as well, and brawls were not uncommon. Tears of joy and sorrow fell easily. People were not shy about calling out to each other loudly in public, neither were they embarrassed if their child bawled and screamed in public spaces.

  Travelling in and out of Delhi, it also seemed to me that India’s diversity needed no eyes. Climb a terrace in any neighbourhood, and you hear a unique medley of sounds, each exposing the locality’s distinctive features. We are presented with a mix of dialects, languages, religious calls, cowbells and factory sirens which together tell us the state of affairs in the area. The music—impromptu creations, improvisations on the spot, not sets of Western-style rigid symphonies —can reveal the heritage of the land. The voices of the people, their different intonations, and what they laugh about, offer a glimpse of the region’s character.

  India is a unique case in auditory prowess. At 1.3 billion,1 there are so many of us that our voices cross over each other’s. Yet, we love to talk, argue, express our opinions, anger and joy in varying degrees across regions. We are not an intrinsically mellow society, nor disciplined and well-behaved in matters of expression. There is no other country in the world that has twenty-two constitutionally recognized languages! Besides, Census 2011 counted 122 major languages spoken in the country. Many of these belong to different language families—Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic, Sino-Tibetan, Tai-Kadai and others—each distinct in its sound. We are the chaos.

  We thrive on this multiplicity of voices. Our celebrations are joyous and cacophonic. Even in some of our most popular religions, such as Hinduism, Sikhism and the Sufi strand within Islam,2 the celebration of God is noisy. Our entertainment—be it traditional forms from the Natya Shastra and puppetry or contemporary Bollywood—is designed to induce a grand stimulation of several senses at once. We often make the effort to verbally describe what we want others to believe we are—we are typically not ones to reveal ourselves slowly. Our voices are matched with sounds symbolic of our emotions, which we physically and deliberately create with material objects. We express our faith with the strength we invest in ringing temple bells, while on the roads, the amount and type of our frustration are duly conveyed in the manner and frequency of our car horns. The sounds of India are just as revealing of us as our words. So the ability to meditate—even though very much part of our heritage—is today considered awe-inspiring and viewed as an exceptional activity meant for spiritual people, because living amidst noise is accepted as the comfort zone.

  Even in the past, Eastern philosophies have embraced chaos—or abstraction, diversity, illusion, noise, unpredictability, even conflict—in the environment better than the ancient Greek philosophies.3 Let us take a few examples.

  First, the Hindu concept of maya: Hindu philosophies from the Rig Veda, dating back to around 1500 BC—therefore being the oldest extant texts in any Indo-European language—believe the world to be an illusion, or maya. Maya means magic in Sanskrit—that the world does not exist and yet does, that reality is amoebic and ever-shifting according to context. The Rig Veda does not describe maya as good or always bad, but recommends technique and means to separate what can be perceived from that which cannot be perceived. It tells us that there will always be illusion and abstraction around us, not everything will be laid out in black and white for us to perceive immaculately, and that instead of being afraid of illusion, we must learn how to deal with it. Maya does not denigrate chaos and illusion, or try to bring order.

  Another example is yoga, which helps develop our physical, mental and spiritual capabilities so that we can cope with the abstraction surrounding us. The origin of yoga can be traced back to the pre-Vedic age. It was originally a meditative means of raising and expanding the consciousness from one’s self to being coextensive with everyone and everything around us. It has also been discussed in Vedic literature, the Mahabharata, the Prasamaratiprakarana of the Jains, and the Buddhist Nikaya texts. It was suggested as a path to enlightened consciousness that enabled one to comprehend the impermanent, illusive and delusive, and separate them from the reality that is true and transcendent. Yoga is a way to be grounded despite the chaos in our external surroundings or in the inner self.

  The Rig Veda, in its samgachchhadhvam and saṃvadadhvam verses, calls for people to come together and exchange their views and feelings freely, without inhibition.4 There was no fear of a pandemonium or of contradictory voices. In fact, the rise and success of competing schools of thought such as Jainism and Buddhism, besides others such as Pancharatra and Kapalika, which ebbed gradually, and their coexistence with the Vedic schools, points to a society that allowed diversity of thought and speech. It was an era
when intellectual freedom was encouraged.

  Going further east, the trend continues. The Chinese poet-philosopher Lao Tzu reminded us that the Tao represents the omnipresent, forever-changing complexities that are all around us, yet elusive and inaccessible. The Chinese Taoists developed the philosophy that the intuitive knowledge of life can never be fully grasped as a concept, but can be understood only through actual living. Essentially, it prescribes going with the flow in life, not clinging to idea structures but changing and evolving because chaos is good and it creates infinite possibilities. The details of these philosophies—especially the Chinese and Buddhist ones—are beyond the scope of this essay, but pointing these out suffices to show that Eastern philosophies did not staunchly oppose chaos. They did not attempt to subdue chaos into order. They accepted the complexities of the world as a given, and suggested techniques for us to manoeuvre through them.

  But societies in Europe have, instead, craved order. In the stories of Babylon and the ancient Hebrews, Apollo’s ascendance over Dionysus, the human role on Earth has been defined as building order out of chaos, needing to tame chaos to make us evolve from barbarism to civilization. Ironically, science has shown otherwise—that the universe actually evolved from an equilibrium state or order into chaos.5 In ancient Greece, the world was perceived as a fight or an agon between the two forces of reason or law, and chaos or nature. The Greeks called the first force nomos and the second force physis. Chaos is what there was before there were gods. For example, in his verses about the birth of the gods, the Greek poet Hesiod wrote in the eighth century BC that chaos was the divine primordial condition, which was the origin of the gods and of all things.6 The Greeks believed that the gods came to bring order to the world, and that the gods liked order and hated chaos.

  Hence, for the Greeks, the disciplines of mathematics, architecture and music—as examples of nomos—followed strict sets of rules to impose order upon nature. Mathematics brought the infinite under control, architecture brought space under control, while music brought noise under control with set symphonies (unlike the Indian tradition of spontaneous jugalbandi based on ragas). Many centuries later, this fascination for bringing order to chaos has persisted.

  As another example of nomos and the need for order, Europe created the concept of a modern nation and gifted it to the world. Nation states were presented (and still are) as a way of transforming societies from barbarism to civilization, from chaos to order. The English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes can be considered the first political philosopher to establish the idea of sovereign states in his work Leviathan, published in 1651, in which he wrote that the government should be established on an anti-religious basis. This was roughly at the same time the treaties of the Peace of Westphalia were signed, which decreed that the sovereign ruler of a state had power over religion as well.7 Hobbes’s absolute state was one based on fear—a fear of chaos and disorder. He advised that our only recourse was to surrender our natural rights to an absolute monarch who would protect us from chaos, but for that, we would have to obey him absolutely. Much later, after the French Revolution, the first modern nation state was created. Thereafter, most modern nations emerged after wars and struggles for freedom from tyrannical, colonial or dictatorial powers, with a seemingly missionary mandate for harmony. And so these modern nations—in the East and the West—have by definition taken on the goal of unifying the primordial mess.

  In a country as diverse as contemporary India, our ancient traditions of learning how to deal with chaos (instead of suppressing it into order) are tough to carry forward now. For example, in India today, there is a chance that every opinion on an issue may be equally legitimate depending on the sociocultural context it refers to. Unlike societies that are more homogeneous in socio-economic, anthropological and cultural matters, in India, we are increasingly surrounded by multiple truths. Several truths can coexist, depending on the perspective you see them from. Often, these opinions are magnified by the media or by locals themselves, and our country’s millions vociferously take different sides on the matter.

  Further, citizens with diverse backgrounds—and we have plenty of those in India—often have different individual preferences and beliefs. Lopsided development—which is the case in India8—has a compounding effect on the diversification of tastes, beliefs and opinions. For instance, the rich get richer, often with increasing levels of education and exposure to new ideas, whereas the poor have fewer chances to develop their full potential, thus broadening the socio-economic gap and at times the communication gap.

  A nation state, however, is based on an aspiration for collective equilibrium. In a collective equilibrium, not every disparate voice is part of the final decision. In a country as diverse as India, politicians have feared that the citizens’ increasingly divergent individual preferences and beliefs, if left uncontrolled, will create political chaos. They are afraid that unbridled freedom to express opinions will make it harder for voters to remain in harmony with each other, and to ultimately submit themselves to a single leader. Thus, freedom of speech in India has never been abundant. Curbing expression is nothing new.

  As I will explain now with a few examples, there were restrictions set by various governments in power—the Congress governments since the days of Nehru, as well as by the Left government in West Bengal, and continues even now.

  In 1950, a leftist weekly journal in English, Cross Roads, started by journalist Romesh Thapar, published views critical of Nehruvian policy. The journal was banned by the Madras state, and the following year the Nehru administration made an amendment to Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution against ‘abuse of freedom of speech and expression’.9 This was the very first amendment made to the Constitution of India, and it included the provision to restrict absolute freedom of speech and expression in the country.

  Later, this amendment was used by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi during the Emergency in 1975 to cripple the freedom of the press. Few periods in India’s history can ever be as dark as the years of Emergency, and its abject disrespect for our freedom of expression.

  The trend continued. The Congress government under Rajiv Gandhi was quick to ban Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses even before Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against it in Iran.10

  The Hindutva extremists have been notorious in this regard too—in 2006, M.F. Husain was forced into exile by a series of court cases filed against him by them.11 Ultimately, the greatest Indian artist of our times relinquished his Indian citizenship to become a citizen of Qatar.

  The eastern part of India has suffered the same fate. The Communist government in West Bengal banned Taslima Nasrin’s novel Dwikhondito in 2003. In the south, politicians J. Jayalalithaa and M. Karunanidhi did not protect the novelist Perumal Murugan when he was coerced in 2014 by a group of caste vigilantes in Tamil Nadu to stop writing.12

  In India, the worlds of Bollywood and the press enjoy the same legal status and rights as far as constitutional freedom related to the expression of ideas is concerned. This is contrary to, say, the United States, where a 1915 Supreme Court decision established that the legal status of cinema was not a part of the press of the country or an organ of public opinion. Films in the United States are, therefore, not protected by the US constitutional guarantee to free speech, as is the case in India. Yet, Indian films have been far more liable than American ones to prior censorship. In the United States and also in the United Kingdom, an independent film classification body made up of industry committees with little official government status decides movie ratings. In India, however, the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) is a government body, which, for the past seven decades now—no matter which political party has been in power—has been known to cut up movies or ban them.13

  Just a few of the many examples of this: the plot of Aandhi (1975) seemed to be loosely based on the life of Indira Gandhi, and the film was banned when the Congress government, led by Indira Gandhi, was in power.14 In the recent docum
entary Argumentative Indian (2017), based on conversations with Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, the CBFC asked for four words or phrases—‘cow’, ‘Gujarat’, ‘Hindutva view of India’ and ‘Hindu India’—to be bleeped out.15 The reasons for film censorship in India—ranging from being prudish to obtusely ideological—can be astounding.

  Successive governments in India have sought to restrict freedom of expression in varying degrees. The Modi government reimagines India as an ancient territory having a homogeneous Hindutva identity. This specific form of nationalism was, as I have mentioned earlier in this book,16 posited by pro-Independence activist Savarkar in the early years of the twentieth century, developed further in free India, and often used to deal with dissenting voices.

  For instance, in February 2016, Kanhaiya Kumar, the former president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union was arrested by the Delhi Police and charged with sedition for allegedly raising anti-national slogans in a student rally. The rally was actually organized to protest the 2013 hanging of Mohammed Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri separatist convicted for the 2001 Indian Parliament attack. Elsewhere, the state government of Uttar Pradesh set up ‘anti-Romeo’ squads in 2017 to keep a check on any public display of affection.

  In the World Press Freedom Index, India has consistently been ranked abysmally low. In the first year of the publication of the index in 2002, India was placed at eighty out of 139 countries. Since then, its performance seems to have only worsened. India’s latest move in 2017 has been a slide to three ranks lower from the previous year, to be placed at 136 out of 180 countries.17

  Ramachandra Guha, in his book Democrats and Dissenters, deplores the loss of the freedom to express ourselves in India. He points to the rise of identity politics and the ease with which any group of people can complain that its sentiments have been hurt or offended by a statement or product. Guha writes that freedom of expression is threatened also by the disinterest of politicians—no major or minor Indian politician or political party has ever supported writers, artists or film-makers against thugs and bigots.18