A DIFFERENT POLITICS
- Indian society can barely stand equality
Anuradha Roy
The Swedish writer, Henning Mankell, was in Delhi this January, doing
what he does very well, telling stories. One of the stories he told
was of a morning years ago, during the civil war in Mozambique, when
he was walking on a dirt path in the hinterland. Everything there had
been burnt and destroyed in the fighting and, as he walked through
that scorched wasteland, he saw a man approach from the other side.
The man was starvation-thin. Most poverty-stricken people Mankell had
seen were unshod and in rags, yet this man was wearing shoes.
It was only when the man came much closer that the writer realized
those were not shoes at all. The man was barefoot. To conceal his
wretchedness he had painted the shape of shoes onto his feet.
Writers write the stories they want to read, said Mankell, and he is
one with all writers in this. At the same time, whatever he is writing
— theatre or fiction — the singular image inspiring him on is those
painted shoes, the human need for dignity in the worst deprivation.
Writers who situate their work in war zones like 9/11 or the Holocaust
are revered as "political". Mankell writes crime fiction and his
novels are not concerned with apocalyptic, epochal violence. Because
people think in genres, he is not generally seen as a political
writer. But his books are deeply concerned with the role of society in
crime, about the violence people do to each other, the violence in the
home, the violence caused by bigotry or poverty. Others who write of
the violence of the everyday — the small, individual acts that corrode
our daily lives — are also seen as unpolitical; quiet, domestic,
feminine, and Jane Austenish are the usual labels with which to pat
down writings on the subdued savagery of mundane experience.
Best known as the writer of the Kurt Wallander series of Swedish
detective novels that are translated into 32 languages and sell
millions, Mankell could live on an island of his own. Instead, he
gives away half his income to charitable causes and spends half of
each year in Maputo, Mozambique, where he is artistic director of the
Teatro Avenida. His theatre, like his life, is immersed in social and
political issues; he was recently part of the Gaza flotilla attacked
by the Israeli army.
In my small Uttarakhand town there are also, surprisingly, several
Scandinavians — not of Mankell's eloquence or fame, but equally at
home in an alien culture. It began with one couple, who came many
years ago to set up a trekking company. (I will call them Eva and
Tor.) Now there are several from Norway and Denmark too.
I first encountered these Scandinavians when I was invited by Eva to
'open house' for Christmas. It was a brightly lit, cosy home, and was
quite literally open: for the first time I met — socially — the
neighbouring dhobi, the town's main electrician, and our plumber.
There was also a school principal, a retired civil servant, and a
doctor. We ate home-baked cookies and rice pudding and chatted. It
felt novel. It is almost inconceivable, given the extreme hierarchies
in our society, for middle-class Indians to spend an evening with
their plumber, however nice the plumber.
The unselfconscious egalitarianism of that evening seems evident in
everything the Scandinavians do. They are religious, and I went once
to a sort of bhajan-sandhya they organized in a hall where hymns to
Jesus were sung in Hindi to the twanging of a sitar. Again, they
invited the whole town, disregarding disparities in social status.
They live in humble houses in working-class neighbourhoods when they
can afford bungalows. Eva's children run wild with the local children,
always in and out of the home of the electrician who is their
next-door neighbour. Eva is a Viking-blonde woman who could be singing
German in Wagner's Rheingold but speaks a Hindi that is fluent, even
slangy. Her friends wear desi clothes, their daily food is daal-bhaat.
At Diwali time, they are enthusiastic and noisy with the fireworks.
Apart from the trekking, which provides their livelihood, the
Scandinavians run two small NGOs. One of these teaches rural youth
spoken English — the course is structured so they learn to cope with
social situations and handle job interviews. It is such a success they
hardly have enough room.
Their other NGO makes greeting cards. I visited their workshop one
afternoon, at the start of winter: three rented rooms in a ramshackle
building. The walls were painted a sparkling lemon and covered end to
end with durries and big heaters. The workers — all destitute or
widowed village women — sat cross-legged on mattresses, surrounded by
paper, beads, other tools of trade. There was an atmosphere of
camaraderie and hard work. They were being supervised both by the
Scandinavians and by Indian volunteers responsible for buying the
material to make the cards with, and for quality control. The cards
are eventually sold in Norway for a profit that is put back into the
NGO.
The NGO started small, just two women in Eva's living room. Now, in an
odd paradox, much as Gujjars agitate for low-caste status to be able
to get the benefit of reservations, women in our town clamour to be
seen as more deservingly wretched than the neighbour who has been
given a job by the NGO. The competition to outwail the employed is
serious, because it is not only the job. The NGO also pays for the
education of the women's children. Once a year, they take their
workers out of town for a day of pleasure — lunch at a fancy
restaurant, boat rides on the lake.
One of the old workers said to me, "This is the difference between
foreigners and Indians. If I was working for an Indian sanstha, they
would not heat the room, they would not cover the floors to make it
comfortable for us. They would never take us on an outing. Indian NGOs
would eat up all the extra money to buy themselves cars and new
buildings."
Of course this is not true, but it is the perception all the same.
There are many Indian NGOs equally committed, perhaps as egalitarian.
But Indian society is not. I have no way of knowing what society is
like in Scandinavia, but in our town Eva and Tor's lack of hierarchy
does not go down well with some of the middle class. There are
whisperings that it is not innocuous, their way of life; it is a
devious way of converting illiterate people to Christianity, by giving
them "ideas", by showing them a different way of life. The disaffected
women who are not given jobs at the NGOs add to the whisperings with
innuendoes about why some women get jobs and some don't.
It has never gone beyond speculation, though, in our town. Another
foreigner in a different part of the country was not so lucky. Graham
Staines in Orissa had done social work among its poor for 30 years.
Everyone knows what happened one day in 1999, while he slept in his
van with his two sons, aged six and ten. In one of Mankell's novels,
there is a vivid description of a woman set alight in a rapeseed
field. If Mankell's hands were not already full with Mozambique, he
would have felt at home in India.
Unlike our Scandinavians, Staines did missionary work too. Missionary
work is not illegal, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad makes determined
efforts to convert adivasis to Hinduism. But Staines's killer Dara
Singh, says our Supreme Court, was only trying to "teach Staines a
lesson about his religious activities, namely, converting poor tribals
to Christianity".
Inequality is woven into our social fabric. Khap panchayats encourage
the killing of people who marry out of caste. Missionaries are killed
for showing marginalized people a different life. The man in whose
honour Mankell was delivering his Delhi lecture was Safdar Hashmi,
killed exactly 10 years before Staines, on January 1, 1989, for acting
in a play that demanded rights for workers.
Everything said, Henning Mankell is safer and better off doing his
political theatre in Mozambique.
The author's second novel, The Folded Earth, will be published in February
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