The Indian is no longer alone

If grief and anger unite us, so does, when such occasion arises, relief 

Why did Mahatma Gandhi make non-violence a non-negotiable requirement of the mass movement that won us our freedom? You don’t demand non-violence from non-violent people; there is no need to. Did he see behind the seeming docility of the “meek Indian” caricature and much-derided stupor a streak of latent violence that would rip Indians apart along the fissures of caste, creed and gender long before it became a threat to any empire? He witnessed the lava that blew up when chaos erupted; he became a martyr to violence.

No saint can eliminate crime from human behaviour; that is the original sin of existence. But how does one explain the unthinkable, unspeakable and unbelievable depths of depravity that accompany the rape of a Dalit woman in Kerala by “normal” men who have led “normal” lives? How many psychopaths lurk beneath the banal? Why does an instrument of state, the police force, refuse to register an FIR for five days? Can a crime be more brutal, more heinous? Such questions leave me helpless.

Our nation remains a vast collage swirling through a restless kaleidoscope. Blood in one corner, dust and drought in another, elections in a third, corruption in a fourth, and always a sense that more storms are waiting to break any moment. But below this trembling surface is a powerful new fact: The Indian is no longer alone. Anger against barbaric rape-murder spreads from mother to neighbour, neighbour to state, state to country. Indians rise against injustice from every point. If grief unites Indians, so does, when such occasion arrives, relief. I was in Ranchi last weekend when early clouds, always ready to flatter only to deceive, nevertheless broke the morbid, dry grip of an oven-hot summer. A wind from heaven whipped through the city. As I stepped out of the hotel to enjoy the weather, a beaming doorman told me with festive sparkle, “There has been rain. In Latur.”

I have had the curious experience of reading the censored sections of a book long before the authorised version. Hector Bolitho’s Jinnah: Creator of Pakistan first appeared in 1954, commissioned by the Pakistan government. As history, the book is nonsense; as biography it is warped. But as an anthology of anecdotes picked up from about 50 people who knew Muhammad Ali Jinnah it makes for good entertainment. The trouble was that the real Jinnah had eating and drinking habits that were not quite Islamic; and political views that did not suit the new narrative being developed by the Pakistan state. So all such bits were censored by a certain Majid Malik, Principal Information Officer, Government of Pakistan. Bolitho, of course, was not allowed to mention that the book had been sanitised but an enterprising Pakistani publisher five decades later managed to filch these bits from the archives and put them into print. Obviously, the censored bits are far more interesting, evidence as they are of a life replete with contradictions.

Bolitho records this image of Jinnah as a young barrister in Mumbai: “…an El Greco look, with grey, cold depths — lean, pale hands, which he washed almost every hour…” Bolitho is not sharp enough to pause and ask why he washed his hands every hour. There can be only two reasons, vanity or guilt. Pride in one’s hands is a bit odd; but what on earth could Jinnah feel guilty about? One can only conjecture: Was he too cold to the teenage-wife he was forced to marry as per custom before he left for England? She died before he returned.

Jinnah’s winter-summer romance and elopement-marriage with the vivacious Parsi beauty of her time, Ruttie, has been well documented. Ruttie was half his age, and for a while he was completely entranced. Perhaps inevitably, it was all too good to last; they quarrelled, they drifted and began to live apart. Ruttie fell seriously ill, and went to Paris for treatment. Jinnah rushed to her bedside, and for a brief while friends thought their relationship had revived. It did not. Jinnah was not at her side when Ruttie relapsed. Her last epistle to Jinnah is one of the most moving love letters I have read (it is not in Bolitho’s book). Jinnah, famously, broke down and wept when she was buried, at just 29, in Mumbai. And yet when he returned to the home they had shared, Jinnah removed every photograph, every souvenir, every art object associated with her. What manner of man was this?

Source: Indian Express, 6-05-2016