When people dress up plain facts in fancy verbiage, I cannot help but wonder if it’s a legacy of Victorian prudery inherited from our colonial masters or a perverse function of the caste hierarchy. Perhaps both, I mused, when some readers objected to Baburao Hazare being called “a former army truck driver” in my last column (“By the elite, for the elite,” November 8).
I would have thought it a compliment to a man of the masses since drivers are Class IV employees in the bureaucratic pecking order and trucks don’t smoothly whisk aristocrats from five-star hotel to cocktail party. But I’d forgotten about caste, which cropped up during the Emergency when I interviewed a Bihar politician who fancied himself Jagjivan Ram’s successor and called himself leader of the Chamars.
The censor in Calcutta, a well-meaning middle class bhadralok to his fingertips, was horrified. How could I call a person, an MLA to boot, a Chamar? I tried to explain that it seemed insulting only to someone like himself who looked down on Chamars. The man I had interviewed was proud of his identity, of solidarity with his peers and the votes they brought him. It made no dent in the armour of the censor’s smug complacency. Many journalists would have screamed of Emergency repression but the Emergency could only be blamed for enabling the censor to impose his will on me. So far as his will went, he was exactly like the colleague who wrote coyly of “a certain caste” to mean those who today call themselves Dalit. Mahatma Gandhi’s similar high-mindedness provoked their anger.
The colloquial English word for this kind of counter-productive delicacy – refained – mocks those who are desperately anxious to be refined and their pronunciation. It was said the refained thought it refined to stick out the little finger when lifting a cup of tea. It’s also refained to look down on commerce. Kamal Nath tells of a meeting with the European Union petering out in 15 minutes because the Indian side refused to descend from the lofty heights of Iraq and Afghanistan while the Europeans wanted to discuss the nitty-gritty of trade and investment. Shivers must have gone up genteel South Block spines when Manmohan Singh told an Asia Society conference in Bombay that “India is a vibrant marketplace”. The man was reducing our great and glorious nation to a bazaar!
I sensed that horror at a seminar on Indo-US relations. The audience of high-powered scholars and diplomats squirmed in indignant embarrassment when I cited George W Bush’s speech, also to the Asia Society, about the glorious opportunities for selling India’s rising middle class air-conditioners, kitchen appliances, and washing machines. Casting to the winds what refained Indians would call presidential dignity, Bush even indulged in some hard-sell for particular brands — GE, Whirlpool and Westinghouse. “Younger Indians are acquiring a taste for pizzas from Domino’s and Pizza Hut,” he added. My listeners were aghast. Failing to see the compliment Bush was paying to India’s upward mobility, they much preferred to believe he was courting India because of her ancient civilisation and robust democracy. It hurt their fragile izzat even to think of the motive Bush himself, being a realist, had no qualm mentioning.
This sensitivity goes back a long way and many tales are told of the touchiness Jawaharlal Nehru displayed on his first visit to the US. The Americans put it down then to the inferiority complex of a proud man who needed help for his country but thought it demeaning to say so. Genteel obfuscation extends all down the line. Far from calling a spade a bloody shovel, it’s elevated into an agricultural implement for excavation. Perhaps our semantic revolution with the starving promoted to scarcity-hit, rebels neutralised as extremists and Muslims camouflaged as the minority has its roots in this prudery.
Pernickety readers would undoubtedly have felt less anguished if Hazare were promoted to vehicular operative like status-conscious Labour politicians transformed Britain’s municipal ratcatchers into rodent officers. But that would defeat the purpose of the description. Team Anna’s high-powered solidly upper middle class Indian Revenue Service and Indian Police Service officers and the distinguished father and son legal team need someone closer to Mother Earth to cast his spell on hoi-polloi. Hazare’s strength lies in his modest origins, in not being of the IRS, IPS or the Bar, but a pleb, a man of the people. To deny him that for the sake of a demonstrably false prestige is like chopping off Samson’s seven locks.
