In Times of Siege

by Githa Hariharan

  The modules and lessons that were the stuff of Shiv’s normal life are now replaced by newspapers. He subscribes to five newspapers instead of his usual two; he feels compelled to read every inch of them, as if they will tell him exactly what to expect next. And Current continues to send him relevant little bits to remind him that they have not forgotten him. He would like to throw these sickeningly familiar red-marked “news items” in the garbage without reading them. But in fact he reads them so carefully that the newsprint leaves dirty smudges on his hands. Who else but Current can tell him, for instance, that the Children of Saints Society in Guntur, Andhra Pradesh, have an exclusive hotline to the past? With a confidence that would be the envy of any historian, their press release says: Our Basavanna was a great man sent to earth by Siva himself to do his work among men. There was no question of whether he would succeed or fail, so where is the question of his dying alone in exile? Anyone who refuses to see this must be punished.

  “I suppose I should read the famous lesson,” Meena says to Shiv, grinning mischievously. “I will, but will you give me a quick précis for now so I know what’s making the children of saints froth at the mouth?”

  Is there a single image, a simple one that will hold his knowledge of Basava? Shiv imagines a hospitable tree, the kind that attracts all sorts of vines and creepers. It is impossible to look at this tree, visualize it in all its wealth of detail, if the vines and creepers are cut out of the picture. But what happens when the parasites grow too thick and lush, when they rob the tree of all nourishment? The tree sickens; it dies a lingering death. The hagiographies—the creepers—are an inevitable part of any reconstruction, historical or literary, of Basava’s life. But—and Shiv pulls himself back from his verdant fantasy to the waiting Meena—the Aryas and Atres and all their thought-shrinking police pretend the parasite is the tree. They use the creepers to prettify the picture; whitewash it; or even better, use them like brushes dipped in magic paint. It’s safer that way.

  “You want Basava nugget-size,” says Shiv to Meena. “I don’t know if that’s possible. Let’s stick to the problem instead—why it is difficult to remember a man like Basava.” Shiv would like to match Meena’s light tone, but his words sound pedantic even to himself. “Let me put it this way: take a man who asked uncomfortable questions, a man who challenged the caste-ridden ground you walk on. Luckily the man cannot come back and snap his fingers at you when you speak on his behalf. So turn him into a saint-poet, into someone floating in a heavenly limbo. Turn a leader into a minor god; the man into a saint. That’s the only way to make him safely untouchable. Then his ideas and politics need not be understood; they won’t make your life uncomfortable. The lessons his life holds—what he saw then and what we see now in hindsight—no longer have to be recalled. Or put into practice.”

  Academics protest withdrawal of history lesson

  New Delhi, September 13: The decision to withdraw a lesson on the medieval reformer Basavanna by KGU professor Shiv Murthy has sparked a round of sharp criticism in academic circles.

  The lesson, part of the B.A. History program, has been used by the correspondence university’s students for the last five years as part of a paper on medieval Indian history. The official statement is that the lesson has been temporarily withdrawn for review by an expert committee, and makes no mention of the protests the lesson has drawn from the Itihas Suraksha Manch. But academic circles are abuzz with speculation that “orders from above” may be the reason for the unprecedented university decision to review the lesson.

  On Wednesday, a large number of academics, including eminent historians Amit Kumar Mookherjee, N. A. Parthasarathy and Amir Qureishi, deplored this action.

  They said it was “clear this was a response to the demands of the Manch. These demands actually add up to a plan to perpetrate a fictitious and homogenous ‘golden Hindu history’ that will legitimize their program of one language, one religion, one nation. We condemn the University’s failure to take a firm stand against this kind of blatant intellectual censorship, which can only lead to further targeting of secular historians.”

  “I never thought my little lesson on Basava would grow to such epic proportions,” Shiv says to Meena.

  “Lesson? Who’s worrying about a single lesson,” she says.

  He pulls a wry face but he too sees that the lesson has been submerged in the meeting rivers. So has Basava, one more time. Now the case—or the cause—has grown like a spider’s web. Its sticky spittle has moved on to new threads.

  Now it’s no longer caste and temple, or even contesting narratives of an enigmatic historical figure. Now the stage is littered with Muslim invaders, Christian missionaries, sons of the soil, and foreigners. The stage has grown and grown till it is a battlefield big enough for the new patriots and their wild and warped nationalistic dreams.

  Their dream sequences scorn the banal existence of well-known facts. Their imaginations work overtime concocting febrile memories: horsedrawn chariots thousands of years before their invention. Hymns packed with occult allusions to high-energy physics and calculations of the speed of light. All part of a hoary, unashamedly golden past. A past past-er than anybody else’s, so how can it not be the cradle of all civilization?

  …

  Shiv’s own battlefield has its moments of grandeur.

  He hears the doorbell. A few minutes later, Kamla comes rushing upstairs. Her pale, flu-ravaged face is suddenly colored with animation. “TV people, Sahib,” she announces in an excited whisper. “They have come to take your interview.”

  “I’ll be there in a while,” he tells her. “Will you give them something to drink?”

  “Of course,” she says, her voice filled with injured reproach. “Do you need to tell me something like that? And Sahib, your shirt, it’s not—it hasn’t been ironed properly. Let me take another one for you from the cupboard.”

  The camera downstairs has finally proved his worth to Kamla. If the TV people want him, he must be a truly desirable sahib, the kind you can work for head held high. Poor Babli, away at school, will be heartbroken when she hears what she has missed.

  “My shirt’s alright, Kamla. They said they’ll be here for just five minutes.” She purses her mouth disapprovingly as if to say, If you miss your big chance, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

  Downstairs, the living room is transformed. The curtains are drawn; there is a spotlight on a chair, all the light in the room sucked into that one dusty white beam. The floor is crisscrossed with thick snaky wires and cables. Shiv steps over them carefully, dodges batteries, lights, camera and assistants.

  A young woman gets up from the chair and shakes his hand. “Professor Murthy? I am Priya. I spoke to you on the phone about a short interview for our program.” She hands over a card that Shiv puts in his pocket. He looks at her and the strangely lit room about him with hesitation.

  “Where would you be comfortable? This is just an informal interview. How about this chair?” Shiv sits down obediently. One of the men clips a little beetle-like mike on his shirt.

  “I will ask you two or three questions which will then be edited out. Please speak to me—I’ll sit here—and not to the camera.” She indicates where she will sit, outside the camera’s field of vision.

  For the next half-hour Shiv sits frozen on the chair while the cameraman fiddles with his lens and the girl discusses the shot with him. Shiv hears snatches of their conversation as the lightman and his assistant try an assortment of beams on his face. “No, leave that shadow, open the screen. Jasjit, check the background.”

  “Sir, can we move the chair a little, just in front of the bookshelf?”

  The mike-man hurries forward to help Shiv hold on to the wire that leashes him to the man’s machine. Now Shiv is a professor in front of his bookshelf. A man wearing his appropriate suit of armor. He smiles at the thought and the girl catches his eye. “It looks very good now,” she assures him. “Jasjit, bring that gamla here.” Jasjit, his feet caged in s
neakers of an impressive size, sets down one of Rekha’s plants next to Shiv’s chair. A nice touch: now he is a man wearing his bookish armor, let loose in a leafy jungle.

  All the lights are on. A cool stream of sweat rolls down the back of Shiv’s neck. He pulls out his handkerchief and mops his face.

  “We’ll begin then, sir.”

  “Yes,” says Shiv, having lost faith by now. But a man switches off the fan, all the lights in the world seek out Shiv’s chair before the bookshelf, and the girl sits across from him, smiling reassuringly as she says, “Professor Murthy, welcome to Newslight. Could you introduce yourself in a few words?”

  Having spent the last sweaty half-hour wondering how to compress the writing of history and Basava’s life and ideas into five minutes, this beginning unsettles Shiv.

  “Yes, well, I am a historian,” he says. (His father lurks in the shadows by the curtains. Shiv sees him still and intent, his eyes never leaving his son’s face.) “I teach history at the Kasturba Gandhi Central University, which as you know is an open university. I am in charge of the B.A. program in history.” Shiv pauses.

  The girl gives him an encouraging nod. She looks at her notes, then asks, “Professor, what is your reaction to the charge that you have distorted historical facts?”

  “I need to answer two questions here. One is regarding the charge. Who are the people making it, and are they qualified to recognize accepted historical facts. Or understand the nature of historical interpretation. Also, why they are bringing such a—” and a volcano erupts in the kitchen. The whooshy sound of escaping steam drowns Shiv’s words.

  “Cut,” barks a man in the shadows. “Jasjit,” calls the girl. Jasjit goes to the kitchen and emerges with a contrite Kamla. Shiv notices that she is dressed up in a shiny red nylon sari with matching beads. “It was only the pressure cooker,” she explains. “I’ve switched off the stove now.”

  Back to the lights and camera. Shiv’s nose itches. “Could you just take it from the middle,” asks the girl. He doesn’t dare tell her he has forgotten what he said.

  “The important thing to remember,” he says instead, “is that history, like the human mind, is a complex body with many strands. Ours is a rich, plural history. Of course all these threads must be repeatedly re-examined.”

  The girl looks blank but nods gamely.

  Suddenly memory returns and Shiv locates some of the things he had planned to say. “But why this sudden anxiety about a historical figure we have safely consigned to textbooks till now? And from such unlikely quarters? I can only think of one answer—a fear of history. A fear that our history will force people to see that our past, like our present, has always had critics of social divisions that masquerade as religion and tradition. So what do these frightened people do? They whitewash historical figures, they seize history and restructure notions about—” and the lights go off. Someone in the darkness exhales with disgust.

  An hour later, they are finally through. Or so Shiv thinks, but he is told he should continue to sit on his chair for some “filler” shots. “But all this for just three minutes?” he asks the girl, who looks as fresh as if she is in an air-conditioned studio. “We’ll edit it,” she promises, and though this explains nothing to Shiv, he leans back, resigned.

  Meena emerges from her room and stands at the door, leaning on her crutch, watching. Shiv introduces the girl to her.

  “Hi,” the two of them say, each eyeing the other warily.

  The mike is off, but Shiv feels stiff and self-conscious because he has been asked to “act naturally” for the camera. Acting naturally (for a history professor) apparently means a book in his lap, pretending to read, turning pages. Looking up thoughtfully at the ceiling as if he is his absentminded colleague Menon’s clone. Though Shiv doesn’t look at Meena, he can sense her suppressed laughter make its way to him across the floodlit room.

  …

  A haze of smoke hangs in Meena’s room though Shiv has opened the windows and the door. He has a sense of having been here before: the smoky, dusty room, he on the periphery of the initiated circle, the selected few who can complete each other’s sentences because they speak an exclusive language. Their sense of belonging, their confidence in the familiar ritual that holds them together, remind Shiv of his mother’s marathon prayer sessions, the interminable pujas she held in her room to negotiate with the fates who were holding his father hostage. The same sense of expectation permeates the air now—that this time perhaps the tired old weapon may actually work.

  Luckily Meena and Amar cannot see the heretical associations Shiv’s memory is turning over. Amar’s young band of warriors is in conference in Meena’s room again, this time (in Amar’s words) “to finalize a hard-hitting leaflet.” This time Kamla is in the kitchen brewing tea, and Shiv is (as he was all those years ago in his mother’s room) onlooker to others’ campaign rituals.

  Meena looks unbathed in the baggy gray T-shirt she wore to bed the night before. Her uncombed hair hangs in crazy rebellious curls to one side of her face. “Let me read out what we have so far,” she is saying. “The protection racket is not a new one in some parts of the country. Shops, restaurants, hotels, factories, have all been, in the recent past, at the receiving end of protection—protection for a price. These instances of protection have also familiarized us with the protectors’ preferred strategy. Convince people they are under attack. Then offer them protection.”

  Meena reads well. Despite the leg in the cast and her scruffy appearance today, her face glows in the smoky room, almost like an avenging angel’s. Shiv finds himself drawn in. He promises himself he will not let his thoughts stray again; he reminds himself sharply that the meeting is about him, that it is his world at stake. His eyes fix on Meena.

  “Consider the words of the Itihas Suraksha Manch leader who is offering to protect our history for us: ‘Texts which overemphasize caste divisions and project the Hindu religion and Hindu culture in a poor light should not be allowed. Such conspiracies to tarnish the image of the Indian past should be met with courage. People feel free to revile Hinduism with impunity, but they do not dare criticize Islam because then the swords would be out.’

  “Now consider the words written by a man who is the Manch’s theoretical inspiration, if such as the Manch can be coupled with theory. Though now disowned and out of print, We or the Nationhood Defined by Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar describes a past, a present and a future for India—a Hindu Rashtra: ‘Foreign races in Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, learn to respect and hold in reverence the Hindu religion and must entertain no ideas but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture … or may stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation.’ ”

  Meena looks around triumphantly. “Sounds quite good, doesn’t it? In the interest of peace and for the protection of … We need a few examples of all the times we have heard this in the last few years.”

  Amar immediately begins counting off on his fingers, “Campaigns against Christians, the murder of Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two children …”

  “The attacks on artist M. F. Husain for painting Hindu goddesses in the nude,” interrupts Meena, rolling her eyes to show what she thinks of both the goddesses and the attackers.

  “Teachers in Goa having their faces blackened for setting ‘politically incorrect’ exams and the recall of a volume on the freedom struggle,” adds Shiv, surprising them and himself. “The disruption of the shooting of a film on the plight of Hindu widows in Banaras.”

  “The list is endless,” says Amar, “I think you have enough now, Meena. How are we going to end it?”

  “I thought I’d use some of what you said on television,” Meena says to Shiv. “Something about history not yet being a protected, endangered species. And I think it would be good to bring in the German fascists again, considering how much Golwalkar admired them. Jyoti, pass me that paragraph we drafted together.”

  She takes the piece
of paper from Jyoti and reads to them: “One of the pictures history brings to mind at this juncture is that of a German town, storm troopers in brown shirts on the rampage. Perhaps we have not yet reached the pinnacle of atrocities committed during Kristallnacht, but it is impossible not to see a link. The link between fascism and the ugly faces of Hindutva unveiling themselves around us is the regimentation of thought and the brutal repression of culture.”

  Meena turns again to Shiv, a hundred-watt smile on her face. “What do you think? Does it sound alright?”

  “Wonderful,” says Shiv, meaning it. He has had a hard time recognizing his own words in what she read out, and there isn’t a single word on Basava, but all the same Shiv finds it moving and frightening in equal measure.

  “Well, that’s just the leaflet,” says Amar. “We have to come up with much more.”

  Meena turns back to him eagerly.

  “Think of them as an army,” Amar tells them. “The fundoo side has three regiments. The troops in front are the thugs. Lumpen types, rushing ahead with their prejudices like shields before them, waving hatred like angry lathis.” Amar pauses a beat, allowing his images to hit their mark. “Then behind these you have the ideawallas. The historians, the ideologues. A few politicians and pamphleteers on the make. Bringing up the distant rear is the pantheon of gods in power. These think they should run the government because they have a direct line to the mythical gods.”

  The fundoo army has yet another man on the run. This may be news to the gods, but word has already got through to Seattle. Rekha is on the phone again, but she no longer seems to remember the existence of her precious garden, or the household, or even Meena. Her low, cool voice is pitched at a higher note than usual.