The violence Indian media dare not speak of

I think its time someone wrote a guide to India for the benefit of a group of people whose idea of it seems to have come right out of a book, and not a very accurate one at that.

There is an India that is apparent to most of us though, a teeming, exciting, energised, and hopeful one. Driving this energy is a passion for knowledge, improvement and growth. For at least twenty years, since liberalisation, India has been dreaming of something more. In the first few years of liberalisation, it seemed like just commerce and material growth. But now, what we see is something more. There is a relentless thirst for knowledge about our civilisation and philosophies, about who we are, and about breaking free from the blinders that our schools and our leaders left us with in the past. It is mostly on the internet, and it has its rough edges, but make no mistake. This sort of energy will have to be called one day as nothing less than a renaissance.

Sadly, though, this is not some utopian awakening of art and spirit. It is taking place in the context of a postcolonial reality, of a nation systemically divided against its own self for too long now. I do not mean the thousand year phase or even the 500 phase of colonialism. I just mean these last few decades of independent India. Our institutions, our discourses, our schools, our politics, everything carried over into our lives an ignorance that dulled our senses and hearts, even as they expressed lofty ideals borrowed from another land and time. On the face of it they were noble ideals, elevated precepts of modern nationhood and citizenship. But in practice, what did they do? In politics, they divided us along lines of identity not rooted in nature. In culture and thought, they strained at our deepest beliefs and sensibilities about who we were. If it wasn’t for our grandmothers, our old movies, our popular notions of identity and coexistence, we would have been seeing far more and far worse than the four murders everyone has been returning awards over these last few days.

I do not make light of violence at all, even the supposedly non-violent kind some are claiming it was. It is the core problem that everything in this civilisation has struggled with, in ways so deep and complex that even those who live it don’t realise it. In these thousands of years, we have confronted not just violence, but deep-rooted beliefs and ideologies about it that we have barely even started to recognise. It is a long journey we must make now against it, and we will.

But there is another kind of violence too that we must confront. It is the violence of a system of misrepresentation and deceit that somehow makes the enormity of violence seem less important than the identities of who is doing it and who it is being done to. It is the violence of a way of knowing the world that has become deeply entrenched in our official and privileged circles, in our education, in our media, and in our most privileged strata, among people who we expect to provide cultural, intellectual, and indeed moral leadership too. It is a form of violence that makes many angry today, because they lack the words often to even describe how wrong this discourse is. They can see it plainly for what it is.

No amount of denial or spin or “don’t shoot the messenger” excuses will distract from the truth. In this country, in this privileged world of media and intellect, we have elevated the calculus of identity far above the horror of violence. And that is why I view this phenomenon as a form of violence too. If the media does not reflect the horror of violence uniformly, and if cultural and intellectual leaders speak about one act of violence among many that they have noticed in the language of even more violence through displays of their violence-based dinner plates, there is very little we would have done, even with all this outrage and anger.

For my part, I view this ignorance not with anger but with pity. And I know that might well get some readers angry with me from both sides, but I will say it. There is a pitiable little bubble that is starting to burst in India today. Why do I call it pitiable, and not rage against it? It is because this was the bubble that was meant to nurture a genuineness of feeling, a spirit of conscience and fearlessness, so the rest of the country, busy with working and earning, could be inspired by it, grow with its words and art and become something more than a peg in the world economic order. It was the gift of this world that made many like me love the written word, worship its beauty, wonder at its mystery and power and dream, even as we did not become engineers or doctors, that we would be useful too, we would offer mirrors to our souls and lives.

But the pity of it is that this world of the book does not lead anything real today. We have to ask ourselves why is it that it is our gurus and spiritual figures who have remained the most influential interpreters of world, body, and spirit than the writers and artists? Why is it that a politician, that most looked down upon of beings in India, is today filling stadiums with rock-star adulation around the world? Why is his credibility, after all, driving a sense of hope and belonging once again for so many Indians—despite, as an honestly self-reflexive elite bubble op-ed put it recently, his “knowing so little”?

The truth is that a vast new world has emerged today that this little bubble has no clue about. It struggles for clichés and explanations. You tell it about the civilisational yearning that is going on in thousands of blogs and websites writing about the Upanishads, Sanskrit, astronomy, Ayurveda, yoga, history, the world we didn’t get in Class 10 of our history books at all - and it thinks you are talking about beef ban and ghar wapsi, not one thing more.

You tell it about the systemic media bias that has blinded it to the suffering of more than just one group of people who live in India, and it says you are condoning crime using the past as an excuse. You tell it about the global danger of organised terror and it says you are an 80 per cent majority and you are paranoid and shouldn’t complain. And you see a Prime Minister whose biggest boast about his childhood was how his laundry and folding techniques got the village out to watch how he did it, and they see a "man who knew so little".

It’s the men and women “who knew so little”, frankly, who kept this civilisation alive. I do not say this as an excuse for anti-intellectualism, for there is much that the nascent world of the organic intellectuals of the new middle classes has to learn. But these past few days of violence upon violence should not lead us to a position where the whole intellectual leadership of a country gets carried off in a wave of self-righteous denial of reality. That reality, frankly, is not the end of the world.

Someone did not know where a kind-hearted saying about not throwing the first stone came from. But this is someone who knows the profoundly deep ways in which many in this ancient civilisation are feeling today; of wanting to put divide and rule politics behind them, of wanting to find an end to poverty and degradation of body and soul; of wanting a cultural reawakening that tells our own stories now, and not some clichés we had to learn because we were colonised. I don’t think there’s anything quite as liberating as realising that someone you thought knew so little, knew a lot more than you.