Essay
The cartoon controversy: crafty politicos, impatient pedagogues
Hegel, said the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, had the makings of one of the greatest humourists among the philosophers. He had such a sense of humour that he could not think, for example, of order without disorder. For Brecht, no one without an appreciation of humour can understand dialectics. But what kind of dialectical grasp over the nature of things would it require, one wonders, to appreciate that what seems an ‘innocuous’ object of humour to someone might not seem exactly so to someone else of a different history and location – as a matter of fact, it might even seem a pugnacious continuation of old social wounds, now picked up from the archival past and given a fresh lease of life? What kind of dialectics can convert my obduracy into someone else’s intolerance? Commitment to what politics can make the country’s well-known academics ignore charges of cultural insensitivity and community resentment against a schoolbook cartoon in the name of pedagogic advances?
In the way the so-called cartoon controversy has shaped up over the past weeks, what was not all that surprising is the bonhomie of players in the Parliament across party lines in support of a Dalit cause. For anyone with some idea of how our Parliament works in this era of allies and identity politics, it was the all too familiar repetition of transforming a socially contentious issue into a filmy item number. What was genuinely surprising though is the resolute support the country’s learned class, some of its best known academics, showed in defence of the inclusion of a cartoon in an NCERT class XI political science textbook on the Constitution and how it works. They had reasons for their anger, their repugnance mixed with a degree of helplessness as a protest against a particular cartoon was allowed to snowball over the next few days into a downright demand for exclusion of any cartoon involving political figures and more: criminal prosecution for those responsible for putting this cartoon in the textbook. This was bizarre. But the height of the show was left for Ram Vilas Paswan of the Lok Janshakti Party who wanted the government to disband the NCERT itself!
There can be little doubt that over the years NCERT has done a commendable job and some of its textbooks are very good, lucid and clear, certainly much better than the average textbook of the past or those available even today through other channels. Politically speaking, they also represent a necessary corrective to the ones brought out during the earlier NDA regimes. But this does not mean whatever gets included in any of those books need to be defended, that the commendable efforts of the academics responsible for producing them are above any blemish, and that the controversy over the particular cartoon was either motivated or the result of not being trained in the politics of reading a visual – in other words, poor reading skills. I get the feeling, what hurt this class of committed intellectuals the most is what they see as Dalit injudiciousness (if not impudence) – people to whom they provided the language to understand themselves and to demand their rightful place in the world, are now pointing their fingers at them! Even if for one cartoon, this cannot be tolerated. The Dalits should know that they are ‘pulling up the ladder’ that helped them to climb in the first place.
What was surprising also, and sad, is to find the famed academics in their defence of the cartoon going back on some of the recent advances of social-human studies. After all these years with Foucault, after all this talk about the imbrication of power-knowledge, our faith in the sacrosanct nature of ‘experts’ knowledge’ – and of committees, institutions, adornments and affiliations – seemed to have remained intact. It was interesting also to see how after all that was written on the volatile, fissiparous nature of representation and the inevitable spilling over constructed boundaries, on the unruly truth of image that respects no guarded separations and constituencies, commentator after commentator kept asserting that the Ambedkar present in the cartoon was not the Ambedkar the Dalit leader but Ambedkar the law minister and framer of our Constitution.
Pressure group politics, the ruling party bending over backwards to woo one vote bank or other (even if at times notional), the culture of ban: with increasing rapidity these now have become the order of the day. The determined ruthlessness with which A.K. Ramanujan’s essay on the Ramayana was taken out last year from the Delhi University undergraduate syllabus under Hindutva pressure is an instance. It was like pulling out a steadfast screw with pliers alone, ignoring the recommendations of the committee set up by the Supreme Court, and the protests of the students and the teaching community nationwide. The frequency of such happenings is making them seem banal. If not from the same book then at least of the same genre is another recent episode of alleged textual blasphemy – the one involving Mamata Banerjee. The other day our Mother Courage of a different era defended her decision to arrest a university professor for circulating in the net-land a cartoon on her. She sees in it an assassination threat – otherwise, she wondered, why ‘vanish’? Her life being so precious, it has been targeted innumerable times; one hopes (against hope) that the trend is coming to an end.
But closer to the interest of this article is the question: Can the furore over the cartoon on her be conflated with the one on Ambedkar? Can one instance of protest be seen as equal to another? What is lost in such conflation, all the drama of the parliamentarians over a ‘sarkari kitab’ and the threat on freedom of intellection that looms large, regardless.
Of takes and mistakes: In a recent edit page essay in The Hindu, the veteran journalist Akhileswari observes that the cartoon pithily summarized the delay in Constitution-making but is now outdated.1 Her piece is excellent, one of the few that came out in mainstream newspapers in support of the withdrawal of the cartoon. However, I find it difficult to agree on either of the two points she makes here. First, I don’t think the cartoon summarizes the delay well, for it gives no idea of what primarily caused the delay. Ambedkar started with six other members nominated by the President to draft the Constitution. Soon it became a matter of his lone effort; others were not available due to a variety of reasons and one member had expired (and not replaced). It was a Herculean task but Ambedkar performed it meticulously, caringly. In retrospect, what seems more important than the delay in the making of the Constitution is the fact of its being at all completed and that too, so marvellously.
The delay was apparently due to Ambedkar’s fussy obsession with questions of social inclusion, or this is how the issue is made out to be by a few commentators on the ongoing controversy. The main source of delay very clearly, however, was not any fastidiousness on Ambedkar’s part but obstructions caused by retrograde social and political perspectives of those at the helm of affairs against which the Dalit leader took a firm stand. As Akhileshwari herself points out in that piece: ‘There are more important things that need to be foregrounded to understand the process of the making of the Constitution such as how the then President Rajendra Prasad, a confirmed conservative, opposed equal property rights for women, and how a modernist Nehru caved in to him and how when an outraged Ambedkar threatened to quit the team they agreed to it.’2 The textbook at best makes a vague gesture to such constitutive tensions of the politics of that time. I presume it chose to ignore such issues because it was written for students with an average age of sixteen and hence too young to be exposed to the power-play that politics is and also because as a (government sponsored) textbook, it had to operate within the zones of sanctioned freedom, never too large and always vulnerable.
Be it as it may, and this brings me to the second point, I don’t think the cartoon is by any means outdated, a spent-force piece of illustration dug out from dusty oblivion. It would have been so had there been a radical shift in the position of the Dalits in society at large in the last so many decades and a change in upper caste attitudes towards them or, to talk of the other side, had there happened no consolidation of the Dalits, politically. The intervening decades – especially from the late 1970s – have witnessed an emergence of Dalit power while the scenario of social ostracization and economic marginalization remain quite the same for the vast majority of them. Hence, it is quite logical that a visualization of the so-called ‘delay’ showing Nehru cracking his whip from behind as Ambedkar, hunched on an inflated snail, inertly holds on to something that looks more like a diminutive fishing stick than a whip proper, will cause consternation. Given the peculiar combination of continuing socio-economic marginalization and recent political consolidation in a multiparty polity, it is easy to see that even though the cartoon is about the Constitution in the offing, the figure sitting on the snail will be viewed by Dalits less as the framer of the Indian Constitution and more as their icon of liberation. Perhaps it is the nature of the political conjuncture we are in, far from being passé, the cartoon in its textbook life has quickly become the sign of what Benjamin once called (later Foucault would elaborate on it), the history of the present – not the sanitized idea of history written from the standpoint of the present, but history as the sudden constellation of a moment of the past and a moment of the present in a language of crisis.
So unanimous and overwhelming has been the defence of the cartoon among colleagues and friends in the academia that I too was initially mistaken, till I actually saw it with my eyes. Nehru’s overlordship is beyond question, irrespective of whether he is shown whipping Ambedkar (which, I think, may not be what it is). Irrespective of any variations, the fact that I consider the cartoon pejorative will be taken as part of the ‘mischievous’ attempts to present its content by ‘overlooking the positive symbolism (that Ambedkar holds the reins to the Constitution and holds a whip) and overplaying a possible negative symbolism (Nehru holding a whip behind Ambedkar has been presented as Nehru whipping Ambedkar)’.3 I also fail to read the whips as figures of art.4 Instead what comes across as more pertinent to me are the possible difficulties to accept the cartoon for someone who considers Ambedkar, and not Nehru, as the country’s best democratic icon. The load of memory and the charged nature of the present being what they are, the signs of the cartoon will far exceed the text-supplied guidelines for its reading (seldom a docile act). And once a controversy erupts, all the more so. No amount of talk about the games the ‘frothy’ mouthed parliamentarians play can hide the cultural and political insensitivity of the cartoon.
The cartoons of Shankar (and, subsequently, Laxman) – along with that missing element in today’s visual culture: the newsreel – were among those that made up for a pedagogic exercise in developing the right democratic comportment of the fledging nation state. They tried to train the citizen in different liberal verities and thus performed an important function of governmentality. Unlike the newsreel (a wholly government sponsored medium), Shankar placed special importance on being vigilant about the politicians, their indifference, frailties and corruption, their mendacity and cunning, thus offering, in each instance, an advice or two for the new government and the imagined community of citizens. Nehru adored Shankar. He defined a time, a texture of civil life, a climate of rule, the dreams of the urban middle class in an era marked by boom in salaried jobs, particularly sarkari. Shankar in all his mellow humanism did not think it necessary to have a cartoon or two against casteism. His was the theatre of urban upper castes – those present as peons, khansamas, chaprasis, safai karamcharis and the like were there merely as sideshows. No one cared, no one so much noticed – such were the days of halcyon hegemony of the upper castes. Shankar had no intention of being a casteist. Casteism was too pervasive, too insidious to be in any need of intention.
The other day I suggested to an anthropologist friend a thought experiment. Let’s try to visualize, I told her, the cartoon with Nehru replaced by Lord Mountbatten and Ambedkar by Gandhi, and see what it does to us. The proposal must seem patently absurd to us because by no stretch of imagination can these two figures be placed on the same side of the divide. If that is true, then going by the same argument, the sanity or otherwise of the cartoon would depend on whether its two characters – Nehru and Ambedkar – can be seen as part of the same social-political bloc. As the law minister and the person responsible for the writing of the Constitution, and a law graduate of Columbia, Ambedkar was for all practical purposes included in the same cultural-social bloc as Nehru’s. But as himself a Dalit and a champion of the Dalit cause, in the perception of fellow Dalits, this other identity of his is primordial, now or then. To the extent real participation of the Dalits has been achieved in society, the aesthetic luxury of having a laugh at oneself was open to us. But is there a ‘one-self’, an ‘us’? It seems to me, sadly but surely, we are still laughing at them.
If we are interested in the social cartography of this primordiality, as an example let us ask: What was the ratio of Dalits and non-Dalits doing manual scavenging jobs in the Indian Railways in 1949 – that is, the year the cartoon was done – and what is that ratio today, that is, after years of Dalit power (and when in its new life in the textbook, the cartoon is taken as an archival witness to time past)? There would hardly be any change, for such jobs, now as then, are meant almost exclusively for the so-called designated ‘scavenger castes’. Manual scavenging, we are told, is the only option for the railways since there is not enough money available to modernise the trains and stations. Yet as then Railways Minister, Laloo Prasad Yadav had announced plans to smarten up 18 railway stations for the 2010 Commonwealth Games with budgetary allocations from the Prime Minister’s Committee on Infrastructure in the vicinity of Rs 4000 crore (he is so good with huge funds!). For the decent class, as long as the quotas are in place and as long as homage to the contributions of Ambedkar in the life of the nation is regularly and uninhibitedly paid, it need not be anything else than Business as Usual.
Obdurate Solidarity: The position of the HRD minister that ‘cartoons on the political class should not find a place in textbooks’ is a demand that needs to be contested by all means. I hope the panel of academics set up to examine the new NCERT textbooks will not bow down to such draconian and palpably motivated demands. The issue therefore is not that certain prominent members of the country’s academic community are protesting the intervention of the government in the writing of textbooks. The issue is the (almost obligatory) way the concerns about a particular cartoon are translated into a lack of appreciation of humorous visuals and – taking an unbelievably huge leap – of the productive power of laughter as such in ‘movements for social justice’. Additionally, it is charged that given the context, to create consternation about a particular inclusion is a wilful ignorance of the pioneering role the NCERT textbooks (especially in their new version) have been playing in school pedagogy (this second aspect, in combination with the wiliness of politicians, manages to give the demand for abolition of the cartoon a dangerous hue).
At issue also is the attitude displayed by the protesting academics – a kind of holier-than-thou infallibility working in tandem with a governmentalized defence of the visual which would suggest that nothing could be wrong in its inclusion because the text has gone through all the prescribed bureaucratic procedures: the different committees through which it had to pass, the different authorities in the those committees with venerable track records, ‘the extensive consultations’, ‘the leading political scientists and educationists’ involved, ‘the collective wisdom’, ‘the best known academics’, and so on. I presume, it is part of the governmentalized mode to draw anyone who participates in it, however tangentially, into its groove of language and mode of justification. This, however, is not an argument favouring hermetic non-participation.
There is something incestuous in writing about one’s own profession. Quite a few of the participants in the debate are friends, academic colleagues, people one meets from time to time in different academic gatherings; with some, one is in regular email correspondence. All that I can say is that the critique intended here is partly also a self-critique. The issue is not of intention but of collective silence, in which I too could be a party in another instance. Call it silence, call it blindness: naming does not matter here – basically, it is a sign of belonging, even if loosely (and flexibly), to the wide ruling class hegemony.
The sanctimonious tone displayed by some commentators is well-nigh disturbing. As a commentator puts it forcefully: ‘Is it even thinkable that these two individuals, Yadav and Palshikar, who have spent their entire lives studying and teaching about democracy, elections, affirmative action, state, society, politics and nation in India, would want to desecrate the legacy of B.R. Ambedkar through some insidious form of insult and mockery? That they deliberately chose an offensive cartoon and slipped it into schoolbooks decades after the fact, just to put Ambedkar down?’5 Does it have to be deliberate? What basically is being said is this: how can you have problems about a cartoon the authors chose to include when they are very much part of us? Some of us have written pioneeringly against casteism, how could we possibly have gone wrong?
‘In the on-going Shankar cartoon controversy,’ says Ananya Vajpeyi, ‘the real issue is not whether Ambedkar or Nehru are mocked in this particular case, but what kind of understanding of social inequality we want our children to have; what history of India’s founding principles, efforts at nation-building and Constitutional democracy we want to impart to the younger generation.’6 I am generally appreciative of Vajpeyi’s writings; they seem to carry a sense of conviction. Nonetheless, in this instance I cannot help thinking that only those whose own participation in the societal process is beyond doubt can display such evangelical urgency. It is the cosmopolitan, imperative voice of the nation-builder. (Incidentally, has anyone even by default suggested that Nehru has been mocked in this particular case? Or is it a case of easy equivalence?).
‘The argument that the cartoon could be misconstrued by the 11th standard schoolchildren who read the textbook is bogus and an insult to their intelligence’, opines a newspaper editorial.7 What it perhaps overlooks is that casteism is not about lack of intelligence (which would have made rectification, if that is the word, much easier) but wilful (willed?) suspension of intelligence. It is a matter of culturally facilitated cognition. The argument that the cartoon in question – a student, Ishaan Sharma, puts it cogently and with a great deal of honesty – hurts Dalits is neither true or false. He wrote the Class XII CBSE Board exam this year, with political science as one of his subjects. The cartoons in the textbook used to provide him with comic relief in the grinding drudgery of exam preparation. His take on the controversy is somewhat like this: India is a vast smorgasbord of ideas and opinion. Some will hurt one section of people, some others might hurt another. It is all about the relative strength of an argument; and about commitment to democratic values and respect for diversity.8 So much for preparing students ‘to enter into a complex world with multiple received and achieved hierarchies.’9 Pedagogues, interested as they are in the public life of ideas and lessons, should take such readings seriously, indicative as these are of politics of culture and vice versa, of sanctioned amnesia and knowledge that guide the process of meaning making. More than any sui generis of whether or not – or, to what extent – high school students have impressionable, vulnerable minds, it is about the truths that operate in society to which adults and adolescents alike, those with impressionable minds and those presumably otherwise, are equally game.
Going by the writings or comments that appeared in the newspapers, circulated on the Internet and broadcast on television – from promising historians, high profile academics to a young student just out of school, one senses a reverberative continuity. This is the advanced, positive class that seeks to eradicate poverty and inequality, establish effective rule of law and make Dalits (particularly, Dalit children) part of this drive. This also implies a reciprocal obligation on the part of Dalits: They on their part should not scout around for signs of insult and humiliation. In the cartoon, we are told affirmatively, Ambedkar has not been mocked; to protest in this context necessarily has to mean exercising the most frequently asserted of rights: ‘the right to be offended’. In other words, if Dalit children hear in the cartoon resonances of the snickers, spits and yells they confront everyday, they should learn to ignore such distractions and keep the bigger picture intact. Whatever causes unease from a lingering past will be eradicated, as long as we fight unitedly and do not get unnecessarily distracted. Conviction is temporality – a certain temporality, that is. I cannot help thinking that this is one India talking to another. It is an India that is global, thoroughly professional, networked, confident and has no room for opacities. These qualities are not necessarily bad on their own (and their opposites surely do not deserve valorization), but they do indicate a certain location and comportment.
In this positive project of the nation, Ambedkar, understandably, has the presence of a luminary: ‘one of the greatest scholars, intellectuals and political thinkers that India produced in the 20th century, in addition to being the leader of the Dalits.’10 There is nothing that is not honest in such outpourings of admiration. Nonetheless, it would not be entirely cynical to take pause and ask (if not for anything else then for the sake of the nation’s political biography), when did this lionizing of Ambedkar begin, at least as widely as one finds now? When did the inclusion of his photograph, for instance, become a must in the galleries of the nation’s pantheon, even in the barest, trimmed down version of just a Gandhi and a Nehru (and, almost always, a Tagore)? Would it be too cynical to presume that once the man acquired a certain canonical status, one can endlessly bestow praise on him without causing any damage to the mushy continuation of casteism in our academic life (as in all other departments of life), even in the highest echelons? The clue to this lies perhaps in the secured duality we have attributed to his existence: the scholar-leader extraordinaire of modern India and also the leader of the Dalits.
Reading Lessons: It is so vastly wrong to hold that it is Ambedkar the lawmaker, and not Ambedkar the Dalit (the wretched of the law), who is represented in the cartoon. (For those in support of the cartoon, this division is absolutely central, the bulwark of their defence.) Even Nehru, dependent as he was on the Ambedkar’s chiselled knowledge of western law, wanted to make an announcement to the whole world by appointing a Dalit to write the Constitution of the independent country. For the Dalit, he has remained, then as now, someone their very own and also purely magical. For a myriad of reasons, he has to have an in-between existence, a contested location, irrespective of the context in which he is placed: a leader of the most oppressed sections of society as well as the nation’s hero (belatedly recognized and, for many even now, only formally, grudgingly). This fuzziness attributes the politics of reading the cartoon a particular tension – the aleatory nature that characterizes signs, their nefarious slippages and alliances come especially alive.
The German word for picture is Bild. It means fabrication. Fabrication is at the heart of the image. Cartoons exaggerate this basic trait of image-making. It is all about inhabiting the limits of verisimilitude. The cartoon is a political being. It violates to attain its truth. Therefore, its history is one of valorization and censorship. Janaki Nair uses contemporary insights about the prodigious nature of making meaning and how a text is caught in other larger texts to ultimately make an argument in favour of binding the text (an image, in this case) to its prescribed context – a necessary docility, I would presume, to avoid the otherwise ‘intolerable burden on the production of knowledge’. She seems to be suggesting two things together: (i) that the cartoons are there to give the students some idea of how they always exceed the text; and (ii) that the cartoon(s) should be read in terms of the text that has been provided for it. Such a position displays the historian’s at once excitement and anxiety of the manifold: the traces from which evidences are to be constructed are also caught in a multitude of other traces. I am not a historian, so undue speculation on my part won’t hurt the discipline. I wonder whether it would be much too wrong to presume that part of the joy of writing the past is to be telling stories about the difficulties of telling stories in the ruffled context of the past. A textbook on the Constitution – that too, for high school students – is not supposed to go into such issues. But alas this is no guarantee that such issues would not invade what gets written and represented there. And if that is the case, then one should be even more careful about what gets included (particularly, since as a state sponsored textbook, the space of freedom is never huge). Regarding whether more caution would reduce the whole exercise to banality, I am not convinced that the non-inclusion (and replacement) of one particular cartoon would have made learning a dull affair, any more than what it is in its present format.
The critical pedagogues compare their efforts with what used to be: ‘a sanitized, pious, celebratory account of our past and present.’11 While much better than what used to pass as textbooks for higher classes, the academics concerned might have awarded themselves a shade too radical self-portrait too easily. What has gone in the text is pretty useful stuff to produce a dutiful, rights-bearing hegemonic citizenry in keeping with the contemporary conjuncture of a globalized nation state, a training in the right political taste of the future urban middle class. Students of science at the Class XI level are challenged with really difficult conceptual problems. Why can’t students of humanities and social sciences be too?
The Constitution gives a collective identity to the people, says the textbook. But it is left as a statement, without any probing into its possible implications. What does the abstraction ‘we, the people’ – an ever-receding centre – have for the society that was achieved through the Constitution? Apart from the explication of the Constitution and the various ways in which it works, there is also the other aspect – in a way secondary but crucial: What kind of political imagination does the book invite the students to participate in? To give an elementary notion of the kind of dissonance that inheres modern law would have done no harm. The tension between legal determination and the broader issues of justice, the coded nature of law and the endlessness of context, or the fact that it is transgression that brings law into being (thus each owing its life to the other) and similar other issues could have made for an interesting read, provided explained in lucid language and enriched by innovative everyday examples (and cartoons). One of the primary distractions of school level human- social studies textbooks is that they offer so little as intellectual challenge to the students.
If the demand for the withdrawal of the cartoon ‘spell long-term danger to the processes of reflection on and critique of the past, and even the present’,12 then what sort of opening (or otherwise) does the smug assertion that the cartoon does not mock the Dalit sentiment create for these Enlightenment values? Isn’t the complete refusal to reconsider the question of social justice (which one might not have happened to see earlier) also a danger to the process of reflection and critique? That there could be any life to this protest outside the parliamentary drama, that there could be individuals and constituencies genuinely hurt, is squarely denied. What makes this situation at all possible, we are told, is the lack of proper citizenship training that disables the protesting Dalits from seeing beyond their own community. The extent of narcissistic endorsement of one’s own community by the group of committed scholars is truly remarkable. Therefore such protest, we are reminded, ‘produces a great vulnerability among those engaged in such knowledge production, who may find it impossible to anticipate which future (politicised) group or community will object to representations in visual or linguistic forms.’13 To maintain that any ‘dissidence and dissonance’ to any inclusion that I/we might have decided on will necessarily ‘fatally damage’ ‘the possibility of generating critical knowledge’, is to define oneself a priori as the fountainhead of critical knowledge. While everybody else has a determined location, the small community of scholars engaged in such knowledge production is truly a community of free-floating intellectuals. Their commitment is their location; they are the realization of critique itself.
Critical Pedagogy: For Satish Deshpande, one of the most revered sociologists of the country with a rich record of research and writing on democracy and the caste system, the real issue is not the cartoon in question and the controversy it has caused, but something that is much larger in scope – namely, the reality of Dalit assertion. His resort to the language of assertion and ‘veto power’ manages to give a special spin to the whole issue, as the question of pejorative representation of a specific visual is transformed into a tussle, a tug-of-war of sorts, between rival interest groups in a fractious liberal polity – and not so much whether it has hurt and offended Dalit sensibility.
In a remarkable display of fairness, he says that the Dalit community has a ‘strong entitlement’ to demand a presumptive ban on the cartoon and stall debate. But it soon turns out to be a heuristic pronouncement in an argument aimed basically to make the Dalits understand the importance of critical pedagogy in their fight for justice and how mistaken they are in taking position against their genuine allies, the initiators of that pedagogy, which has over the years served as ‘the very conditions of a possibility’ of Dalit power.
In the ongoing controversy, what troubles and pains the critical pedagogues is how to create the right space for a critical and engaged pedagogy in a system prone to craven conformity and how to make the textbooks and the years of collective labour that has gone into their making safe from the wielders of power bent on reaping gains by exploiting vulnerable Dalit sentiments. The prospect is magnanimous as is the picture it evokes: in the face of Dalit clamour, the calm of committed wisdom. Such stance also puts the class of critical pedagogues above flaws, especially political flaws.
The conclusion is nothing much short of a giveaway: let the Dalits, says Deshpande, not make the mistake of pulling up the ladders of social mobility provided by critical pedagogy. The concern for the plight of the Dalit is unmistakable and genuine. But so is another concern: the prospect of a rupture with the order of filiation, and a streak of (uncharacteristic) conceit. And it is such gesture that makes room for a Hindutva ideologue, used to viewing Dalit power as how far India has moved away from its ideals of equality, to read the whole issue as the result of left-secular scholars’ long history of Dalit appeasement and gross self-aggrandizement.14 The fact of the matter is, the easy alliance of left-liberal intellectuals with the Dalit cause is in crisis today as Dalits have started questioning the right of these intellectuals to decide on their own matters that affect the interest of their community. I am bent on reading the course of events optimistically, since such alliances in future will not be with the political idea of the Dalit but with Dalits as political partners of equal rights and say, and both of whom have means of knowing each other in their respective ways.
With casteism being under attack in academic discourse, there are attempts to formalize Dalit hurt and desensitize one to what it means to be a Dalit by constructing spurious equivalences. For instance, in Maharashtra where the desecration of Ambedkar’s statue is even now a regular practice (leading both to cloistered silences from the community and also different forms of resistances), it is claimed – even by left-liberal academics with broad anti-casteist pronouncements – that the narratives of pride around Shivaji and of Ambedkar are, though not identical, similar in nature and certainly of the same genre, thus brushing away their vastly dissimilar histories and presents (especially, of affect) simply on the operative category of assertion. The broader question is: Can assertion take care of humiliation and pain? Are they indicative of the same trajectory? Can statuaries speak the silences of the tears?
Democracy and the Parliament: The fear that if the government can change the content of a textbook every time it is under pressure, then no self-respecting scholar will in future agree to write for NCERT is not unfounded, but the demand that the classroom must be insulated from the Parliament and that under no circumstance the government intervene into the autonomy of an organization like NCERT cannot be a valid one. Prabhat Patnaik is right in arguing that even though normally school textbooks, or curricula, are affairs of the academics in which the government should have only minimal say, if a strong objection is raised by certain sections of society – especially, the underprivileged – against the contents of a textbook (a public good), then the government is obliged to appoint a team of academics to look into the matter. The government’s commitment to principles of fairness is determined not by the fact that it appoints a committee but by the composition of the committee. I think it is important that the concerned authors are not left out of the process of deliberations. However, to suggest that the maximum that the committee set up by the government can do is to make recommendations for alterations to the authors and it is up to the authors to implement those is too patently Habermasian.
Thinking adventurously, I am suggesting that the cartoon in question should not be banished but made into an appendix – in this textbook or some other deemed more relevant – accompanied by a synopsis of the debates that took place around it. The two authors of the book will have the right to choose a particular member from the new committee set up by the government on whom would be vested the responsibility of writing the synopsis. The write-up needs to be endorsed by a majority of members (including the two authors). In its new life, the cartoon becomes a supplement and not part of the regular text from which questions are set. Its function would be to initiate a discussion on how a visual can give rise to sharply opposed readings in a politically divided community. Thus it serves as material for ‘compilation, critique and study’ and not simply as an illustration of the text. In other words, it would foreground its own life as a cartoon to be read in its relation with the text.
This said, I find Patnaik’s endorsement of the Parliament as having the last say in a democracy whose jurisdiction no one can cede – a kind of ‘determination in the last instance’ logic – even if not formally wrong, at best displays a rudimentary understanding of how a democratic system functions. Elected on the basis of one-person-one-vote, the MPs, he argues, are an embodiment of one aspect of the principle of equality. They enjoy the mandate of the people which no other institution in the country has. The fact that those who qualify through the process of one-person-one-vote ‘allegedly’ have ‘crooks, criminals and corrupt persons’ in their midst (by Patnaik’s own admission) does indicate that the kind of representation he valorizes as having the overriding power in democracy is premised on large and crucial alienations. Representational equality, French philosopher Jacques Ranciere has indicated in a number of places, is the equality already there at the core of inequality.
Rule by consent is a complex technology with a long history. But there are good democratic reasons for not equating parliamentary numbers with democracy. What happens if people consent to the demolition of democracy by voting away their own rights and their say, not an altogether unfamiliar phenomenon in history? At a much more quotidian level, and leaving out the predicament of the proverbial 49 per cent in the mandating process, minority groups are systematically defeated in the legislature, even in proportional representation. The reality of representation is that it is nothing more than a workaday approximation of democracy, while in actuality and in spirit as well as in its architectonics, democracy works in multiple sites, coeval and simultaneous: the Constitution, the Parliament, forms of government, institutions and different spheres of activities. It would be wrong to assume that they would all follow the same language game.
There are other problems in any easy to-and-fro between the MPs and the so-called ‘people out there’. Our commitment to democracy and equality must not make us oblivious to the metonymic role of ‘the people’ in a democratic state. The people, which comes into being only on its citing by the Constitution (‘In the name of the people …’) and which attributes a sacredness to the Parliament’s transactions, is a trope par excellence of modern polity. It is a crucial but unknown presence, for ever a possible impossibility, a complete subject of transcendence and autonomy, a quasideific centre of a professedly groundless, post-theocratic order. The members of the Parliament are at best ‘approximate successive representatives’ – equivocations – of the people, churned out by a particular machinery called the election. In a democracy, popular sovereignty and the government are held in a peculiar mesh, each having its own rationality and each undergoing its own mutations in its bid to articulate with the other.
More and more in modern democracy, popular sovereignty’s ‘self-generating supremacy’ hinges on its ability to incorporate and put to its advantage ‘the multitude of disparate forces’ that the fractured polity keeps generating.15 In other words, sovereignty is crucially dependent on the art of the government. A neat compartment between decisions in the Parliament and protests on the streets not only allows a limited conception of how a democratic polity works, it is erroneous too. Democracy is at once all and nothing, full and empty, grounded and groundless – a restlessness, an alterity, that actually helps in its ceaseless renewal. The reality of democracy is the phenomenology of a promise of democracy to come. If democracy seems an ‘unsurpassable principle or horizon’ of political formations, observes the French historian and philosopher of democracy, Pierre Rosanvallon, it is because it manages even now to retain its early poser of an experiment.16 In other words, its strength lies in offering solutions that are provisional, opening spaces for agonistic contest. In the process, democracy becomes even more embedded and inevitable.
Ambedkar’s immaculate training in liberal law came in handy for Nehru. On his part, Ambedkar made strategic use of liberalism’s promises and cherished virtues and initiated the first effective moves towards the equality of the Dalits, people absurdly wronged. Over the years, the legacy acquired its own dynamics. As a creature of power, politics of identity quite often tends to get entangled in the logic of rule, not all the results of which would have gratified Ambedkar, the great visionary and equity seeker of Indian politics. In electoral democracy with a large Dalit constituency, establishing real equalities had always to be far more difficult than achieving the reservations. In moments of despondency, Ambedkar looks like a Sisyphus in our tryst with democracy.
Regardless of what hullabaloo the parliamentarians are engaged in, let us not give up on the best that such a conflict of perspectives can offer: its agonal quality, the dialogical encounters as part of the broader struggle over citizenship. Is it possible that in the process of such encounters, identities, instead of becoming more cocooned, actually start waking up to their heterogeneities? Is it possible to imagine a politics where, in the very process of taking up positions, inventing and assembling strategies in a field necessarily fractured, one also strives, perhaps absurdly, for a certain kind of recognition of others that comes from waking up to one’s own opacity to oneself? The understanding of suffering from the standpoint of a subject of self-presence and autonomy can seek solution only in a politics of assertion and rights, and express itself in the changing distribution of space in a liberal polity. While this mode of negotiation cannot be denied, we need to think beyond the psychological subject of interest and create within the political (and as part of the political) a space for disinterested compassion, and an attachment to the ‘quiddity of suffering’ (Levinas) as a mode of being.
Why do the Dalits have to claim monopoly over Ambedkar, it has been asked, when he belongs to every Indian? Perhaps there is a point in remembering the terrible insularity that violence creates through its excess. Violence knows nothing of what it violates, while it makes the violated recognize its essence only as a being violated.17 To maintain that the cartoon causes no insult to Dalit psyche is to occasion interpretative violence. People who are praising the Ambedkar cartoon would not have possibly praised the Muhammad cartoons that caused protest from Islamic people in Denmark and Europe at large. To resemble, a cartoon assembles itself from a singular perspective. But this singularity is a strange one, since it is also an invocation to the restless multitude of disparate forces. The tussle between these two registers is a cartoon’s opening to the real. Let this not be read as an argument against the inclusion of cartoons in school textbooks. By all means, they should be included. But with a keener eye and, when a controversy breaks out, patient ears to listen.
Manas Ray
1. R. Akhileswari, ‘Hardly Funny’, The Hindu, 15 May 2012.
2. Ibid.
3. Yogendra Yadav, ‘Dangers of Deletion’, The Indian Express, 14 May 2012.
4. See petition submitted to Prof Sukhadeo Thorat, Chairperson, NCERT textbooks review committee for a discussion on the significance of the whip in history of marginalized groups (reproduced in The Hindu, 8 June 2012).
5. Ananya Vajpeyi: ‘Critical Struggle’, The Telegraph, 16 May 2012.
6. Ibid.
7. ‘The Comic Republic’, The Hindu, 14 May 2012.
8. Ishaan Sharma, ‘Lesson for Life: Shankar made me smile as I slogged’, The Hindu, 18 May 2012.
9. Janaki Nair, ‘Reading Politics, and the Politics of Reading’, The Hindu, 15 May 2012.
10. Vajpeyi, op. cit. (emphasis mine).
11. Nair, op. cit.
12. Nair, op. cit.
13. Nair, ibid.
14 Swapan Dasgupta, ‘Unfunny, Literally’, The Times of India, 20 May 2012.
15. See Peter Fitzpatrick, Law as Resistance: Modernism, Imperialism, Legalism, Ashgate, 2008, pp. 21-22.
16. See Pierre Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and Future, Columbia University Press, 2007, pp. 36-37.
17. See, Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, Fordham University Press, 2005, pp. 16-17.
