Of puja, politics and Bharat

With apologies to Margaret Thatcher, we are a grandfather. Dropping the Thatcherite affectation of first person plural like royalty, I cannot but wonder how different the India of Arkin Kisor Pierre Datta-Ray (Pierre after his French godfather), to lumber my tiny grandson with a name that seems longer than him, will be from the one I grew up in. The likely difference was rubbed in last Saturday, eight days after his birth, when Uttar Pradesh exploded in a frenzy of Holi-like celebrations. Simultaneously, Uday Shankar’s Kalpana revived the sad suspicion that some things don’t change in India that is Bharat.

Lok Sabha TV screened the film the very evening people were celebrating Narendra Modi’s spectacular sweep of the UP polls. So, while television news channels salivated over the victory and sought different ways of repeating that Mr Modi is the new Jawaharlal Nehru, I wallowed for 155 minutes in a film that Martin Scorsese called “a great work of hallucinatory, homemade expressionism and ecstatic beauty... whose primary physical vocabulary is dance”. It was seconds for me: I saw Kalpana on a rare visit to the cinema (almost an obscene word in my strait-laced family) when I was nearly 12.

I didn’t remember the film’s savage denunciation of social abuses. I thought of Uday Shankar (whom I had met in his old age) as an artiste, not a crusader. But from the opening shot of a signboard reading “Box Office is God” to the closing scene of a patriarch urging everyone to abjure slogans and act instead, Kalpana is profoundly evangelical. One misses this concern for fundamental values in the factional squabbling that passes for politics. Of course it’s also cause for concern that the BJP’s view of India is so obstinately monochromatic that it did not induct a single Muslim candidate although Muslims account for 20 per cent of UP’s population. Although a token Muslim might have been shrewd tactics, I wasn’t surprised. As I have recounted before, lunching once with Atal Behari Vajpayee and Sikander Bakht in Singapore, I asked Bakht why he was in the BJP. “The BJP is the only party for Muslims” he began when Mr Vajpayee shut him up.

My grandson won’t grow up with Muslims, Anglo-Indians, Jews, Armenians, Burmese, Chinese and Parsees as I did. That cosmopolitanism has gone. As for secularism, even Nehru’s India rested on a bedrock of orthodoxy that would have loved Mr Modi’s mix of puja and politics. Nehru’s tremendous prestige and what Lee Kuan Yew called “the charisma of the leader” enabled him to dominate the party, push through progressive legislation like the Hindu Code bills, and subordinate Hindu traditions to an enlightened superstructure of Western jurisprudence. His mass appeal helped. As Vallabhbhai Patel himself said of the mammoth crowd at a Congress rally: “They come for Jawahar, not for me.” Lee mused that not more than 40 per cent of listeners understood Nehru. But “they thought to be in his presence was to have been blessed”.

Mr Modi hasn’t yet achieved a similar state of divinity, despite Amit Shah’s sycophantic attempt to downgrade Nehru by asserting, “Modi has emerged as the most popular leader since Independence.” But there’s no denying he is far closer to peasant grassroots. So was Patel. Standing at a cultural distance from the multitude, Nehru could see the flaws and judge India by a modern yardstick. But, sadly, his modernity failed him at the end. Although Nehru worried about obscurantism, superstition and astrology, he ignored the corruption, dishonesty, nepotism, money-grabbing, bullying, obsequiousness and other character defects that are portrayed in Kalpana. Most Bengalis of a certain age know the names of the local hoarders who were largely responsible for cornering foodgrain in 1942 and pushing up prices although some pot-boilers have taken to blaming Winston Churchill for the Bengal Famine.

Nothing exposes the absence of genuine modernity more than parroting fashionable borrowed slogans like “Digital India” while ordinary services like the post are collapsing. The semi-educated everywhere tend to fasten on smart catchwords and repeat them ad infinitum like the mantras that primitive folk hope will bring them salvation. Marie Stopes, the British campaigner for eugenics and women’s rights, found that Indian women to whom she had given strings of beads to count the safe period as a birth control measure had instead hung them up in their puja rooms. The strings had become talismans. Uday Shankar’s film is a sombre reminder that the evils that assail India are not the prerogative of any party. Being part of the Indian way of life, they might prompt even fewer questions now that tradition has been enthroned politically.

The contours of the world in which my grandson will grow up are not specially comforting. Anglo-Indian schools will be less anglo, the English in daily use more Hinglish. British and North American NRIs will be much more extensions of domestic society. Politics will be more pujas, and pujas more political. Recognising that demonetisation served its purpose with the election, people will stop fantasising about preventing fake notes, starving terrorists of funding or cleansing black money. Cow protection vigilantes will continue to attack poor Muslims while smart restaurants and luxury hotels continue to serve steak. Fancy couture and foreign travel will be as commonplace as tilaks, tikkis and saffron.

But I will be well content if Arkin Kisor’s India boasts a few individuals like the old man who acts as chorus at the end of Kalpana to demand an end to slogans and positive action instead. That would offer hope of some respite from the corruption, dishonesty, nepotism, bullying, money-grabbing, obsequiousness and other character defects that the film highlights. They need not be eternal as the Ganga.