THIS is a piece about a tragedy and I write it with sadness. My American friend, an anthropologist, uses a different word for it. He calls it nostalgia. Nostalgia tastes better. You can roll it around your tongue, invent a whole sensorium around the word. But nostalgia is a deceptive term. It dilutes life. It forces you to live paler shadows of the events you want to describe. Nostalgia has no sense of grief and mourning. No sense of the funeral. I need something between nostalgia and a pathologist’s report.

My story is a strange one. It is more sociology than storytelling. It is a futurist’s lament of a prediction that became true. The scale of violence of my story was epic. But unlike the Mahabharata, it was not built layer on layer, legend on legend, weaving character on character. You can call my story a sociological essay.

I am an anthropologist, actually an ex-anthropologist; frankly, an ex-everything. I am an ex-scholar, an ex-activist, ex-husband, ex-teacher, ex-citizen. An ex- is a litany of all my former selves, all my assorted archives of failure. My multiple pasts are the debris of my life. Today, I am what my adopted tribe calls ‘the forgotten one’, a leftover, a hand-me-down from another world. I was once a social science professional, an anthropologist of modernity and the millennium movements that exploded with modernity.

As usual, as social scientists, we got the story wrong. We read these tribal revolts as symptoms of underdevelopment, of defeated societies responding in frenzy to the pain of their situation. A bit like the Sundance, the Peyote cult, my old teacher, Weston Le-Barre, wrote about. But these new tribal dances were not self-obsessive. They were warning signals about our future, which we misread. A few who understood it fell silent. The stories of the beginning of the end always create a sense of depression.

The social science I know always predicts best when it is at a point of helplessness. It is not that our predictions did not come true, it is just that our predictions engulfed us. Sometimes there is nothing as embarrassing as a truth that comes true. But let me begin. Prefaces are a sociologist’s way of postponing the story.

 

What made India workable as a democracy and as a civilization was our sense of diversity. We were affable in our confusion. When you can cite chapter and verse from five different civilizations, life can be livable, and confusion becomes life-giving. Such anarchy has its own genomic sequence where things never get put together again.

We were muddlers, a civilization that tolerated confusion. As a society of foragers and scavengers, we lived a bit above subsistence. There were two Plimsoll lines of subsistence. There was the subsistence of the tribe or village, where one survived by starving 60 to 100 days a year. The Plimsoll line for the middle class was higher, but we lived at the edge of anxiety, just making do, just having enough. Our real surplus was boredom, the excessive time to wait and to see what others were doing. It was the socialism of gossip that held us together. Socialism counted because it made sure that our dreams were tailored with modest cloth. A movie, a meal, a visit to a relative was enough to add to our sense of the carnival. Between gossip, envy and the occasional feats of scandal, life felt reasonably full. The beauty of socialism lay in the fact that hope was always abstract. We were promised justice and liberty. But in the individual’s mind, desire was a local kirana store, a small-budget imagination.

Oddly, in those days, America was really far away. It was an affluent version of Siberia, where many went and few returned. America was not part of our imagination. It was part of our geography books, but definitely not part of our dreams. When desire came in licensed pipettes, the mind felt like a ration card. But we believed in our world, our heritage, our legacy, our leaders, our nation state. We were happy with out occasional victories in sport. Content in our being, blissful that God and Gandhi were in Heaven, Nehru in Delhi, and all was right in the Third World.

Our subsistence might not have been Gandhian, but it gave our imagination a sense of proportion. It did not valorize renunciation. Life was a kitchen garden of needs, and we lived within it. It was a limited world and operated within limits. Even greed sounded naïve and incremental. An occasional marriage erased whatever surplus we had. Actually, even envy was a bit repressed. All this changed in the late sixties.

 

The first epidemics were not medical. We did not have the plague to erase us, or AIDS to corrode us. Our epidemics were social. The first epidemic struck in the sixties, but it did not damage us. We sat in schools, nibbling at our illiteracy. The cult of the state was enacting itself far away. For us, bonded labour had no resonance, and pollution was unheard of. The epidemic that came was called development. It was a bit like sickle cell disease. It affected tribes and nomads in particular. It was a fatal disease where tribes which were displaced, and died of homelessness. Over 40 million succumbed to the illness. The symptoms were loss of ancestral land, loss of local wine, loss of music, loss of the entitlement to dance. The tribes died out of missingness. There were no songs of sadness. Only a strange silence. And silence was one dialect the modern media could not understand. Modern India full of itself as civilization and history was deaf to the silences of the tribe.

The protests came later. In the beginning was the silence. The silence of the forest added to the silencing of the tribes. It was a mutual muteness of mourning. Never was silence so pregnant, so brimful with the pain of the unsaid. But the nation state had its own forms of sacrilege, the rituals of obscenity called tableaus. The happy tribal as a statue, or as a costume ball was paraded, an annexe to the cult of sacrifice we called the Republic Day parade. But it was understandable. All through the twentieth century people died for words, words like nation, science, revolution, class, development. In fact the tribal stories say it was not the Bible but the history of the twentieth century that began ‘in the beginning was the word and each word was genocidal.’ A thesaurus of words became a blood count of the century. But the first epidemic was mild compared to the second. It was the second that spelt the sudden death of Modern India.

 

Wherever civilizations die or a nation state falls to pieces, the diagnosis always goes back to the diaspora. The diaspora is the mirror of the citizen. In fact it is a Janus-faced phenomena. It is the Indian part of the American dream. It is the ultimate embodiment of the middle class ambition. At home in America and yet homeless in the world, it feels a strange nostalgia for India. This nostalgia creates a new Orientalism. Here identity is based on civilizational memories, old school textbooks and childhood songs. The diaspora is always in need of a framework springing from the need for roots.

In a cultural sense the diaspora is fundamentalist. In terms of achievement, it is managerial and committed to the ideologies of science, technology and development. Philip Kotler and George Soros found as their bedfellows Swami Chinmayananda and the Art of Living. While the diaspora wants civilization as a backdrop, it wants development as the front piece. It wants India to be nuclear, progressive, innovative and youthful. It feels, a few tribes should not stand in the way of development. It asks, why keep in a museum what should be exterminated?

 

Diasporas are unsettling. They are more successful, more professional, more liberated than the urban Indian. Sexuality as competence is only an extension of its technocratic repertoire. The diaspora as a style destabilizes the old middle class – creating a range of desires and wants that the middle class never dreamt of. Now the Indian in San Francisco or New Jersey is the ideal citizen. The diaspora does not have to do anything. It just has to be. Its very existence turns India into a high calorie, high consumption society. Fed on the idea of progress as a high energy vision, the middle class turns ecologically cannibalistic. We consume nature with a vengeance believing consumption will atone for the injustices of history. Between diaspora and the middle class, we became more hawkish and more consumerist.

For all its consumption of myth, the diaspora lived on history. It was committed to the speeded up time of development, the cult of the professional and the fetish of finance capital. Earlier, India was happy if the diaspora won a spelling bee. Today the diaspora will not rest till our IT graduates catch up with China. So the middle class began a race with the future as diasporic and as a sibling threat to China. It is amazing how caricatures of the ‘self’ allow for the genocide of the ‘other’.

Sometimes the future comes when we don’t recognize it. Politics in India was changing. The Congress was now a regional party. The Right had dissolved into a number of parochial parties, more like the fascist Bajrang Dal than the old RSS. The latter at least knew what the nation was about. These new parties all sought quick-fixes. Actually death begins in small things. And what India lost was its celebration of politics. The art of patience. The thrill of negotiation. The sense of compromise. The skill of avoiding zero-sum games. In the old narratives the secessionist looked as legitimate as the Centre. Remember Laldenga. The old brigadier was Mizo one day and Indian the next. The old Congress wore khadi white, but it was a gathering of chameleons. You never lost face as long as you could change colour. What killed the old Congress was its obsession with youth. And what destroyed the politics of the young was an obsession with gizmos.

 

Politics is a language of the body. It is open to the sensorium. It understands cronies. Often it is the corrupt boss who is sympathetic to marginals. It is as if corruption allows you a sense of the human. It is a form of tolerance. Live and let live. Give and receive later. It is when these lily-white technocrats came that they ruined the country. There is nothing as punctual and fundamentalist as a technocrat. Corruption, decadence allows for the humus of life but technology, as the new piety, simplified things. Sometimes tragedies need the arrogance of mediocrity. As my old friend Ramu said, all genocide needs is the arrogance of a few MBAs.

The arrogance of the middle class was amazing. Its new technocrats thought they were revolutionaries. You see when ideology fails, it is technology that enters. Technology has no sense of sin. The internet began with little jokes. Like the year 2035, was called year five Nilekani. The old IT boss with his identity card project had become the new mnemonic. Nilekani’s ID card just erased the old surveys. There was no caste census. No language surveys, just the ID card. Everyone hailed it as a revolution. When identity is a collection of consumptions, culture loses out. When you are what you buy, governance becomes a set of shop windows. Land becomes real estate, livelihood becomes employment, politics is stripped down to problem solving and citizenship is a few indices on an ID card. The old slogan, ‘Don’t fold or mutilate’ becomes literally real.

 

The second sign was so irrelevant that few read any meaning into it. The National Knowledge Commission recommended the closure of humanities departments. It followed what Chandrababu Naidu, another techno-idolater, had done earlier. He felt there was no need for history, unless it was an applied science. He advocated that history be taught by the department of tourism. The disappearance of humanities departments was seen as a step in the right direction. Of the social sciences, only economics and management survived. When tourism displaces a theory of culture, commerce becomes a way of life. History is no longer a source of discomfort. When it is regimented, the nation can goose-step towards the future. The new NCERT books now became graphic novels, but built on ethnic stereotypes. When you suppress fantasy, it creates its own underground.

The third sign was the most startling one. For the tourism department, the ideal citizen is an investor. He is the twice-born consumer. He consumes twice. He consumes first the landscape and then the resources. The tourist was the new cannibal. The ministry took a radical decision. Since tourism was the only ministry not under environmental clearance, discussions were quicker. All our islands were hypothecated to investors. Each island, once a green zone, was now an SEZ. The tribes and the Ridley turtles disappeared together. The joke at the Anthropology Congress was: ‘Which died more slowly – the turtle or the Onge?’

 

Industry loved these new company towns. Now they were private, secure and sovereign. It was beyond the dreams of the old robber barons. Instead of aeroplanes, our new corporates collected islands. They became the new zamindars of the mind, seeding cottage industries of depredations, where ecologies disappear in a few days. Imagine losing a Galapagos a week. A Darwin might have mourned it, but our new technocrats loved it. The slogan, illiterate in its arrogance, swept our population. A thousand Shanghais around India. A nation tired of being second or third smelt the sweetness of victory. Industrial indices rose almost sexually, gorging themselves on timber, soils, micro climates that had taken aeons to evolve.

I guess madness before it explodes operates through rhizomes. For years, all our middle class saw in Indians abroad only the certificates of success. But equally, for many years, Indians abroad longed to rule India. And India is always a hospitable place for those who want to rule it. We love the East India companies of the mind. The first signs were seen as a coming home, when rich Gujarati businessmen came home to campaign during elections. They felt doubly pious, both as Americans and as Indians coming home to a new politics. The law of dual citizenship paved the way for this politics of sabbaticals. What was once a contempt for politics now became a ritual of homecoming. It had the envelopes of tourism, the signals of culture, and yet there was blurring of sites. New Jersey and Anand were now twin sites. They hybridized in the Indian mind.

When Gujarat is seen as a Super Singapore, a mindset changes. Tyranny becomes more seductive and yet it appears like hygiene. The virtues are old-fashioned – hygiene, piety, patriarchy, punctuality. Indians began moving on a new timetable. A little footnote. The former Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi was elected to the governing board of Davos in 2020. His contributions to Indian governance earned him the Pompidou Award of the European Union. Now all he wanted was to create a Kennedy School for Government in India. Every swadeshi politician suppresses an American dream. For Modi it was a place in the annals of Ivy League. Who thought one could lose a state for a few honorary degrees? Spurned by them, he now dreamt of a Kellog School in India. Kellog sounds so native. It smells of a globalism with roots. Crisp, crunchy and technocratic. ‘Take a bite of the future’, as the advertisements then said.

 

In 2020, India elected its first diasporic PM, Nandan Patel, a Colombia University PhD in International Relations, who had done his Masters in agriculture at Cornell. Patel was a man driven by history. Only the history he read was textual, unharmonized by folktales, untouched by the moss of fables, or the sweat of re-telling. We never realized our packaged histories would be more destructive than our silly superstitions. Our superstitions are seasonal. They blossom and whither with equal happiness. They are affable about other weeds, but history is unforgiving. It has a Jesuit-like clarity and a Savarnorola’s obsessiveness. A date with history makes no concessions. To be fair, Patel looked like the NRI next door – a cross between Rajiv Gandhi and Omar Abdullah. The same age perhaps. The same Ipods. The same need for clarity. He thought of himself as an avatar of an old home minister; but an avatar with a PhD.

Nandan Patel was desperate to enter history. Unfortunately, unlike Rahul Gandhi, an earlier premier, he did not belong to history. Those who are outside history often tend to gatecrash into it. Patel charged into history like a happy rhinoceros. To be fair, several things added to the effect. One was his sense of solving problems.

 

Technology creates a sense of speeded time. It homogenizes spaces. Take agriculture. One sustained diversity of crops to minimize pests. Then up pops a genetic engineer who claims all solutions belong to a laboratory. Farmers’ wisdom loses out to the speed of the technocratic imperative. Sometimes speed becomes the problem as it escalates people into history.

Three things happened, which people did not connect at first. The government policy of discouraging small holdings made farming unsustainable. Second, as a way of life, farming became unbearable. Out of choice, or compulsion, people were fleeing to the city. The old kind of farming was dying, and corporations were buying it, converting huge tracts of land into real estate. One could smell the dyingness of agriculture.

It was then that the salesmen of disaster swooped in. The multinationals, defeated in the earlier attempt to introduce Bt. Brinjal, returned with a vengeance. Thousands of acres of crop fell under Monsanto and Unilever control. For a moment, the report cards looked good. But life has a way of playing spoilsport. The worst spoilsports of agriculture are insects. The locust and the bollworm might have epic status, but the new caterpillars that devoured the plants were also ruthless. Plants wilted quickly when the insects took over. Crops looked emasculated under the regime of the new pests. Agriculture now suffered not from an absentee landlord, but from an absentee farmer. The noted sociologist, Sudhir Reddy, had already announced the demise of traditional farming, predicting that the last farmer seen would be a museum product.

The incompetence of agriculture was understandable, but the anarchy of the cities was what unsettled the regime. The target for criminals was no longer land. It was water that attracted the mafia. The macabre civil wars for water that broke out, the violence that ensued was frightening. It was a split-level violence. Our paramilitary forces fought the migrants as city people fought each other. Millions died in the two battles. It was like a systematic Rawanda.

 

Death is something strange. A murder might disturb people. A thousand murders feels logical, inevitable, like the weather report. One would have expected the old unconscious of urban neighbourhoods to surface – the mohalla and the nukkad – but what one saw was a Hobbesian world of each against all. Mob lynchings of water thieves almost became a much awaited spectacle. The city became a cordon sanitaire, refusing entry to new waves of hungry migrants. The hungry flooded the city, desperate to eat, ready to work. But there was nothing. Vigilante squads shot them happily. The initial slaughters were so barbaric that the city smelled like a charnel house. It was a bit like the Partition violence, but without its helpful stereotypes. The myth of water as life giving became ironic. Today, it confronted its own necrophilia as rivers went dry. Cities changed, becoming enclosed worlds of their own. Sewage, drainage, drinking water became empires to a mafia that we had not dreamt of.

 

Sometimes ironies come when you mix subjects. It is like a crossing of two bad metaphors. In this case it was Patel embodying the crossing of Agriculture and International Relations. He defined the whole problem as a security issue. The concept of security sanitizes a problem. When the victim is seen as a law and order problem, he is easier to shoot. When cities become lawless, deaths are inevitable. But it is the quality of dying that broke India. In the villages people died of suicides, starvation. It was as if the peasantry had all become lemmings. Those who raced to the city were shot as Naxals. It was an enclosure movement unheard of in history. Town and country became separate domains. The border was around the city. As a territorial space, the city shot outsiders. Patel created the new gated cities with huge rolls of barbed wire. Sadly it was not like the old dictatorships where tyranny was porous, or negotiable, even bribable. The executions were industrial. The disposals were industrial. And silence was industrialized.

State governments collapsed. Regions began seceding from Delhi, but Delhi was too tired to know. India was becoming a collection of principalities, little feudal or criminal domains, organized around old wells and tanks. Kashmir had already become autonomous a decade ago. The North East had become a neutral bulwark, a no man’s land between India and China. One day, it was a bit like the old stories one read in the historian Dharampal’s book.

The tribes just left. They moved away, deep into the forest. It was like a millennial epidemic. Fragment after fragment just abandoned India. It was not a million mutinies, more a million secessions. The Centre could not hold. So India became a land of a million centres. There was something ramshackle to it. A country just came apart. Each group found its own little niche. People called it the new swadeshi movement, a swadeshi without a nation state, a phenomenon where the local was content to be local. Streets were ripped apart and trees planted. Parks were ploughed again. Suddenly, every traditional remedy, even primordial memory for water storage was valorized. Different neighbourhoods had their own water goddesses. We went back to our traditional skills as foragers and scavengers. Only this time it was both for firewood and water. Subsistence acquired the nuances of craftsmanship.

 

People forgot Delhi. They ignored the Cabinet. Politics became reduced to line of sight. The bare body was back in focus. The Body went back to the body politic. But the tribes never came back. In the years that followed, huge tracts of land returned to the forest, wavering between a rudimentary commons and a no man’s land of vagrants, poor, survivors of various development projects. Science cities and SEZs fell apart. As isolated systems, they could not sustain themselves. Most of the diaspora like Mr. Patel went back. India was seen as less than Africa, a failed state, a failed civilization, a failed promise.

But happiness is not measured in World Bank reports.

The tribes I roamed around with went back to hunting and shifting civilization. The land they worked on was poor but there was hope. The haats (the old markets) revived. Oddly along with it came a new cult. It was the strangest mimicry of modernity I had ever seen. It was a festival, but not on the seasonal calendar. It had no Gods from the tribal pantheon. I had seen the tribals of Bastar make Stalin a God. But this was different.

It was a literal dance of modernity. Beyond the madness of drums echoing in the background, the entire tableau was in mime. I then realized what it was. It was an imitation of the greatest state parade of our time. Republic Day. It was done in utter innocence, without critique, and almost no irony. As a genre, all I could call it was anti-epic.

 

There were no individual characters. Everyone was a persona, a mask. Every character was a role. Every event was personified as half god/half devil. There was no sense of horror. There was a goose-steeping precision to it, tribal drums creating the march of modernity. First came the Gods of the State, the file and cringing below it, figures of bonded labour. Next came the trinity of politics – the cop, the clerk and the contractor. Around them forests were neatly arranged as timber. Then a series of chimney stacks followed by a set of landscapes, wastelands bleak in their greyness. A skeletal tribal trembled bleakly in the next, portraying the sheer anatomy of starvation. There is something about the body that starvation sculpts. It was not like a Bastar statuette, more like something fashioned by a Giocometti from hell.

Then came a series of micro cities – the police station, the plantation, the mine, the science cities, dams and nuclear plants. All the horror of modernity antiseptically constructed. It was utterly stark like a surreal lego-set. They had the innocence of a child’s building blocks. Then a bazaar of certificates. Every examination certificate, every professional degree was there. Stuck like graffiti of death sentences. Then a child uttering in rote a glossary of terms, ululating it like a mad lullaby.

If one listened closely, one realized it was an old poem called Memories of Development. The distorted familiarity made it eerie like a multiplication table redone by Picasso or Magritte. Then a profusion of masks with ID card bodies, ration card bodies, bodies created out of a collage of files left to rot at some rag-pickers. The last scenario was a huge hoarding. The kind we used for film stars. Only it was a collection of statistics. It was a huge xerox of the United Nations Millennial project. A graveyard of numbers. It was oddly funny as if Kafka had become Alice, or Frankenstein, the Tin man in the Wizard of Oz. It alternated between a panchatantra story and a danse macabre, an epic of genocide caught in formulas, signs, symptoms, the symbolic footnotes, the trivia of an era.

It was the strangest spectacle I had ever seen. The tribals mimed every scene with Chaplinesque exactitude. Only there was no ‘little man’ smile. Every face was a death mask.

 

Every year on 26 January, the carnival of the Republic takes place. It is a myth in parallel time, of a world that is over. The tribes realized storytelling would not do for a world that is anti-story. So they created its symptoms, its signals, its icons as a last tribute.

There was a silence. Like a mourning, half relief, half goodbye. Then the bodies began to dance in drunken celebration. History was over. The time of the tribes had begun again. Even the Gods came out of the forest to dance with them.