Nilanjana S Roy: 'The one and only truth'

SPEAKING VOLUMES

, Eric Hoffer observed: "You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you."

Use Hoffer's aphorism as a yardstick and you'll reach the inescapable conclusion that what the advocates of fundamentalism fear most is the idea of history as a many-layered story that might yield different readings, versions and complexities.

It doesn't matter whether you're discussing Hindutva here or fundamentalist Islam or even the darkly rigid Christianity of the Inquisition; as Hoffer noted, all proselytising fanatics were engaged in "a search for a final and irrefutable demonstration that [their] absolute truth is indeed the one and only truth".

The only way for fanatics to accomplish their aims involves striking at the heart of reading. In order to justify their version of history, they must reduce it to the simplest kind of story, with good and evil defined in banal black-and-white terms, and the world divided into what is forbidden and what is sanctioned.

In Reading Lolita in Teheran Azar Nafisi recounts the experience of trying to teach books like The Great Gatsby and Lolita in revolutionary Iran. The Great Gatsby would become, in her class, the focus of a debate on "a whole way of looking at and appraising literature""and reality, for that matter".

Could art be inherently immoral? Could you denounce a novel because it was anti-Islamic, or because it might "corrupt" the youth?

"A novel is not an allegory, I said. It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing."

These few sentences, to me, are among the finest, most passionate explanations for why we read and for why reading and fanaticism must always be in conflict.

In order to be a true believer, a good fanatic, you must renounce empathy; there is no other way. If you read, you retain empathy, you open yourselves up to challenging points of view, and that way lies apostasy.

Fanaticism exacts its toll in blood and in the gradual bleeding of the imagination until it is rendered a hollow shell. In his novel Snow, Orhan Pamuk sends his poet-protagonist, Ka, into the small town of Kars in Turkey, where a growing movement towards radical Islam has sown a legacy of nervous energy, depression and suicide.

Sunay Zaim is a theatre activist who stages a performance at the National Theatre in Kars that ushers in a night of revolution.

Zaim offers burlesque comedy, bawdy sketches, the crudest and most meaningless forms of theatre. This is followed by a "desperately old-fashioned, primitive, twenty-minute" play called My Fatherland or My Head Scarf: when soldiers come into the auditorium and begin firing, the audience doesn't know what to make of it.

"A number of Kars residents""out of touch as they were with modern theatrical conventions""took it for yet another bit of experimental staging."

Later, once the bodies have been counted, Sunay Zaim tells Ka, "What a shame that audiences in our country are not sophisticated enough to understand modern art. This is why my shows always include belly dancing and the confessions of Vural the goalkeeper. I give the people what they want, and then I give them an unadulterated dose of real-life drama."

When you force people to stunt their imaginations, you can offer them nothing but the simplest, crudest forms of art; and on the back of this debased artistry, it's easy to usher in a revolution. Complexity and ambiguity, as Ka discovers in Kars, have no place in the grand design of fanaticism.

It is dangerous to assume, as we often do in India, that "art" and "literature" should have apostrophes around them, to keep them separate from our "real" lives; it is suicidal to assume that how we read history and the world has nothing to do with how we will live.

The recent controversies over Shivaji and over Veer Savarkar have been written about in detail elsewhere. What troubles me is the level of simplicity to which those most passionate about "safeguarding" their legacies seek to reduce their very complex lives.

The Shiv Sena and the VHP have demonstrated in Maharashtra that there can be only one reading of Shivaji, the authorised one. Anything that might question or add layers of complexity to the bare bones of the cartoonish tale of Shivaji as a courageous revolutionary is unwelcome.

The story of Veer Savarkar is on the verge of being set in stone, and if it does, we will be left with yet another comicstrip reading of a man who can be critiqued from several perspectives, including the feminist, the secularist and the plain vanilla pacifist.

Those who've read Savarkar's writings will be able to chart the hardening stance of his belief in a necessary violence and policies of retribution as the only way of strengthening Hindu identity.

In his book, Hindutva, Jyotirmaya Sharma writes: "While Savarkar would remain committed to a Hindu God or Dev, and a Hindu Rashtra or Desh, he greatly admired the political and religious fervour of Islam."

Savarkar's justification of the violence perpetrated against women and children in 1857, says Sharma, would "also suggest that Savarkar transformed Hindutva into the very image of the Islam he found so intolerably objectionable".

This is a more nuanced reading of Savarkar than the present debates over whether he kowtowed to the British by petitioning them to release him from jail.

In one letter, now notorious, he wrote: "Where else can the prodigal son return but to the parental doors of the Government?" Sharma comments: "While Savarkar was certainly part of the nationalist movement, his commitment to the creation of a Hindu Rashtra superseded the goal of political independence of India."

If we lived in a world where we could "inhale experience", we would see Savarkar as neither traitor nor freedom-fighter. He was no traitor because he remained faithful to the cause, however bigoted, however fanatic, of a Hindu nation all through his life.

But no freedom fighter could have gone so strongly against Gandhi's ideals, or been accused of conspiring to kill the Mahatma, or could have put his own dream of resurgent Hindutva ahead of the demands of the nationalist movement.

These are ambiguities, and ambiguities are not welcome in a world where you can't inhale. Instead, Savarkar's life is being reduced, as in Pamuk's vision of the world, to a desperately old-fashioned, primitive play, designed to capture the imaginations of those who have none left.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com