Kindle Notes & Highlights
Liberty, equality, fraternity were supposed to be gifts. I took those words for granted through most of my adult life, assuming that the country would always have the first, would continue to strive for the second and would never completely abandon the third. And here we are, with all three of these extraordinary, moving promises made by the country’s founders to their people in jeopardy at this juncture in the nation’s history. How daring their dreams seem now – and how much trust they placed in the generations ahead, the leaders who held power over their country’s fate, and were free to
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Freedom is not simple. To claim it, you must know what came before. Every so often, the powerful forget this. A regime, a political movement, a strongman can briefly or not so briefly create a history shaped to their satisfaction, and that history can be dominant, for a while. But what really happened cannot be changed; the lives that people lived, the causes they believed in, what they fought for, what they yearned for, have a reality to them, and it keeps breaking through. Sometimes dormant for decades, the past can surface in the most unexpected ways.
The Indian Constitution was born encoding that simple wisdom: that no matter how benign or well intentioned those who held the reins of power might be, and no matter how convinced they might be that their actions were for the benefit of Indians, freedom was too important – and too precious – to be left only in their hands.
At the end of the day, a constitution is, of course, a document – nothing more. It is neither self-enforcing nor self-executing. If freedom is not practised in society – in our structures and our institutions – the Constitution’s promises will remain promises only. But even in such times, words matter: they matter because they reflect an alternative vision of society, and tell us that the reality need not be a permanent one. If an alternative can be imagined – with words – then it is an alternative that can be created. And also – as I have tried to show in this essay – these words anchor us to
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Most Dalit women, rural or urban, educated or not, with resources or without, carry these traumas in their bodies. The body retains the memories of these battles and transactions, losses and small, hard-wrested gains, carried out for generations when their mothers, grandmothers, sisters, female relatives or themselves had to physically wrestle with this society that only allows them to exist as examples of exploitation to seize their dignity as fully realized humans. It’s not romantic, heroic or valorous, these freedom exchanges. It’s the price we pay to live. But should we have to?
‘You must fall in love. Or the world will never appear differently to you. Without it you will never desire revolution.’ I
It bore out the millennial credo that the elite will not save democracy for the marginalized, but the other way around.
The argument of Shaheen Bagh was never defeated though, and the love – that is one word for it – which bound its participants was not found wanting. And the 2020 movement for India’s Constitution, even in abeyance, resembles the original struggle that brought about that Constitution. Those freedom fighters also rose, were suppressed, and regrouped in new forms years later, guided by the certain thread of justice. Most historic movements have lost ground, then returned even stronger, in cycles
At the end of a hundred days, Indians went from radical gathering to radical distancing – from physically converging as a public to lay claim to their republic to waking up isolated in a world of private boxes barred from touch. But the two are not opposite. A spirit of collective action and care, of protecting one another, drove them both – the danger of the time in lockdown was that India would spend the time only thinking about its solitude, and forgetting its solidarity. But social distancing does not need to mean the loss of political togetherness – the gift to India from the garden of
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I asked a student who is now behind bars on charges of terrorism for his speech during the citizenship protest, a speech that spoke of pluralism and humanity, ‘Why do you do what you do?’ He answered, ‘Do we have a choice?’ Given a choice this student activist would yet again risk his comfortable life for the cause of freedom and justice. Each day in India is a slide into majoritarianism; each day in the country is an attack on our personal liberty. Each day in this country is an attack on the believers of love targeted through vile allegations of love jihad. Each day is an assault on our
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‘The situation at present is grim. But it is for our youth to accept the challenge and go ahead . . . I have faith in my people and hope that our struggle will not go in vain, and India will once again emerge as a country to be proud of.’17
We had grown up in those nineteen months, and we had become acutely conscious of what freedom meant. The country was forced to grow up, to not take for granted the freedoms for which Gandhi, Nehru and many others had fought for many decades.
Emergencies do not occur in an identical fashion; history never repeats itself exactly as in the past. It returns in newer, different forms. But recognizing those forms is the first step. Challenging arbitrariness is the next step. The worst outcome of the Emergency was the grievous harm done to India’s institutions. The press, the Parliament, the judiciary – every one of the institutions intended to protect citizens buckled under pressure.
As Umberto Eco said in his essay Ur-Fascism in 1995: ‘We must keep alert, so that the sense of these words will not be forgotten again. Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes . . . Freedom and liberation are an unending task.’ Authoritarianism is not the monopoly of one party. Power corrodes and corrupts. And tyranny returns in other forms. To stare back at power, to stand firm against onslaughts, to sway and bend if necessary but not to break and succumb, and to challenge falsehoods, is not easy. But Indians have done it in the past – before Independence, by marching with
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I was not Muslim, and not Pakistani, but, as the writer Saadat Hasan Manto once noted, I was Muslim enough to risk getting killed.
All over the old non-West, as well as in Western Europe and America, the symbols of belonging – race, religion, language – are being repurposed for a confrontation between what David Goodhart has referred to as the ‘somewheres’ and the ‘anywheres,’ the rooted and the rootless. I, with no tribe or caste, no religion or country, have had nowhere to go but to the cities of the West, where I hoped to wait out the storm. But, as my break with India acquired a cold new finality, exile turning into asylum, I could not help but ask whether any harbor would survive the destructive wrath of what may be
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Narsi was thrown out of his community, the Nagars, which is also my community, because he would sit down and eat with anyone, Dalits, Muslims. His Vaishnavism had room for all humanity; it was all about humanity. Narsi was the true Gujarati. His disciple Mohandas Gandhi was also a true Gujarati. But the tradition of Narsi is being perverted today, because there’s another image of Gujarat, and Gujaratis, that the world sees today. It’s the Gujarat of Narendra Modi, not Narsi Mehta. And I belong to the Gujarat of Narsi, not Naren.
The same people who would willingly throw kerosene on a man and burn him alive would then go home and eat a strictly vegetarian lunch. The Gujaratis who lead the country today are vegetarian, because they don’t want to hurt animals. I’m vegetarian too. So was Hitler. My vegetarianism is a very personal decision; it does not allow for lynching a man just because he doesn’t follow my religion, and eats beef. My Gujarati thali has room for all kinds of foods, all kinds of flavors: some sweet, some salty, some spicy. The BJP thali has only two flavors: sour and bitter. Where is the famous Gujarati
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One by two. Two by five. Three by eight. We Gujjus are used to sharing, economizing. We may not be inclined to spend, but we know how to share. But these new Gujjus don’t believe in one by two anymore. It’s all one by one, one for one, one and only one.
Indian philosophy is very different. The Jain system of logic has no fewer than seven possible states of being: something can be true, false, both, neither. It’s the most exquisitely developed system of conditional logic the world has ever known. And you know what it’s called? ‘Syadvada’ – the science of maybeness. The BJP is now saying, you are either Hindu, or you’re not. And if you’re not, you can’t be Indian. Let’s get back to syadvada. Let’s admit doubt. Let’s not be so damned sure about everything – who is an Indian and who’s not.
But Gujaratis also know what it feels like to be hated, hunted. During the 1960 riots in Bombay, when the state was being broken in two and Gujarat and Maharashtra were both claiming the city, Maharashtrian mobs ran after Gujaratis in the streets with sticks shouting, ‘Soo che, saaru che, danda le ke maru che!’ Yes, we too were called termites once: illegal immigrants, told to go back to where we came from.
What explains this anger, this insecurity, this hatred?
In recent times, there’s been a curious sexual insecurity, a crisis of masculinity, among Gujarati men. The whole ‘love jihad’ thing – what is it but a fear of Muslim men being more sexually attractive to our gullible women? And then along came Modi with his 56-inch chest, and all over Gujarat, and in New Jersey and in Wembley, Gujarati hearts started fluttering at the Gujarati Elvis. Here was Krishna, and here were his gopis, rescued from the lascivious topiwala. Modi, with his bombast, his aggression, reclaimed an idea of Gujarati virility. The RSS, the organization that he came from and
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Every Gujarati home I have gone to has been welcoming, with a glass of water first brought to you, then ganthia, farsan, and an invitation: come eat with us. When you part from a Gujarati, he will not say, ‘Goodbye.’ He will say, ‘Aavjo.’ Come again. That is the true spirit of Gujarat. We do not erect doors, fences, walls, detention camps. Our home is open to all. Aavjo. Ghare aavjo. Come home. Chokkas aavjo.
yahaan to umr hi shamsheer ke saaye mein guzri hai jo bhaagenge vo koi aur honge ham nahin honge
The idea of India has to address the citizens of the nation state, all those that create visible cultures and also those whose cultures we have treated as substratum but which have to be made visible in the shaping of this state. Citizens have rights and, as has been said, we have the right to have rights: rights that will bring some quality into the lives of all, and the guarantee of this has to come from the state and through the Constitution. We have the right to knowledge, and to alternative knowledge that may better answer our questions than the knowledge that is imposed on us. This
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We use the term caste blind when referring to people of caste privilege with no realization of caste. Caste was never an impediment to normal life. But maybe we should add that being blind to the complex traumas associated with caste, gender, race or colour actually means you are free. This sounds wrong, doesn’t it? Let us think about it. Every layer of privilege makes our lives that much more removed from dusty reality.
As long as an individual is tainted by markers of discrimination, freedom is unattainable. And that taint, I must remember, is my work. Therefore, when I pontificate about freedom being this feeling, emotion, I am being disingenuous because I have never really felt free in all its glory, I have only always controlled it. When a Safai Karmachari is relieved of the torture of needing to sink himself into that deep dark hole of human excreta, he feels freedom – not me.
The Preamble never uses the word, but informs us that freedom will be archived in a society that enables the values that it extols.
But the Constitution is only words in a book. It comes to life when people act upon its advice, instructions and directions. The problem seems to come from the disconnect between the hopes and yearnings for our people as etched in our Constitution and the reality that surrounded us then and envelops us today. The Constitution is a letter of hope, an aspirational address to the people of India. But did the people of India believe in what it said? Were they even made aware of it?
Then with tears in my eyes, I wrote an email to a writer friend who has followed my work over the years. I repeated what I had told my mother. If I die due to a gender crime or any other crime, then please inform the courts that I would want forgiveness for my killers. Because as Oscar Schindler has said, the one who saves one life saves the entire world. I have burned myself for a decade on and off field to make myself think beyond my own immediate existence. Because I have learned that the moment you become willing to save another person’s life at the cost of your own, you internalize
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My liberation is not in rescuing the Self from the chain of causation. My freedom is that ‘I’ can insert myself as a cause in the world. We like doing things. We make a difference by acting. We make the world. We imagine it differently. Our freedom is the fact that we are agents. The world is different because we act. It is sometimes made beautiful because we create lovely things. It is sometimes more dangerous because we ruin it by our actions – our freedom gives us the power to put the whole of earth into peril.
So, you see, freedom has historically always come with hierarchy; it has legitimized it, reproduced it, and not negated it.
Freedom is not a philosophical idea. It is a social and political achievement. It has to be fought for daily. Power never yields freedom to others – it has to be snatched away from them.
The Indian Preamble is spare and elegant because it is, somewhat unusually for preambles, not burdened with God, history or identity. Its pulsating heart and unredeemed promise is liberty, equality, fraternity and justice. This is not because God and history are not important. But it is because our Constitution liberates us to imagine them in whichever way we choose.
The ties that bind us are not the ties of sameness but of reciprocity. It promised an India that would, to use Aurobindo’s phrase, not belong ‘to past dawns but noons of the future’.
The opposite of freedom is not, as philosophers like to think, determinism. It is necessity: being confined to an existence where there is literally no choice if one has to survive.
But it turned out that we acted as if we had more freedom over nature than we did over social arrangements.
Humans have always tried to master nature – we have exercised, as part of our freedoms, a species privilege. But in doing so we transformed it beyond recognition, as if it was not a fragile system with laws of its own, but a plaything in our hands. The pandemic and climate change are perhaps ways in which nature reminds us of where our freedom transgressed its boundaries.
It allows me to leave an ‘I’, only to lose myself in a ‘We’. Instead of the narcissism of the Self (not pretty but harmless), I am now part of a collective narcissism (thrilling but potentially deadly).
in very strong attachments to groups, individuals acquire abstract passions.
Freedom chafes at the limits of this prison. This prison has a name: identity. Identities matter to people. They have to be recognized because often people are targeted simply for being who they are. But identity is also a foe of freedom. The mere act of naming itself is a loss of freedom in two ways. On the one hand, it constricts us. It makes us one thing rather than another. On the other hand, in this world, the mere act of naming takes away the power of self-definition from you.
But each act of naming seems to bind me to a script. What behaviour will entitle me to use that name? As identities abound, so do scripts. Who is a good Indian? Who is a good Hindu? Who is a good Muslim? What set of expectations are associated with those terms? Our imagination creates these identities, and the identity in turn limits the reach of our imagination, and often our empathy.
