<B>Mihir S Sharma:</B> The purpose of satire

An odd madness has taken hold of well-meaning, literate people. It is being bandied about, even by good people with a sense of humour, that somehow political satire must be respectful.

To compound this vast error of judgment, a mistaken assumption is also being made: the belief that satire is somehow instantly comprehensible across cultures and traditions, and thus we can speedily and without context judge the moral content and humour of any cartoon from anywhere.

Both these things are, of course, untrue. Satire cannot be respectful. Indeed, its purpose is to render respect impossible; that is what ridicule is all about. Satire is not comfortable. It is often in poor taste. It is frequently disgusting. For those brought up in the genteel Anglo-American tradition of humour, where the coarsest thing imaginable was Benny Hill, the outright scatological vulgarity of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons led to nothing less than culture shock.
 

India, in many ways, is very like post-Victorian Britain and America in its attitude to satire. Mockery is not generally allowed to shade into outright rudeness. It is worth noting that this was a late development for the English-speaking world - the Georgian-era cartoons, especially, of the Cruikshanks and the Hogarths and the Gillrays and the Rowlandsons were far from polite. They were, in fact, as scatological as they come. Through the late 1700s, the city of London produced endless vicious satire, directed frequently at aristocrats and royalty; as Vic Gatrell details in the delightful City of Laughter, this was stifled by the rise of respectability around 1820.

In France, the Rowlandsons never went away. They were too important to the nation's self-conception; the power that they had to puncture the awe in which the ancien regime had been held prior to 1789 gave them, if not respectability, at least status as being part of a distinctive national character. Charlie Hebdo is inexplicable to well-meaning English-speakers, which causes many liberals to be outraged what appears to be obvious and unfunny viciousness; but to English-speakers before 1830, its sense of humour would not be unfamiliar.

The problem is, of course, that nothing translates as poorly across cultures (and centuries) as a sense of humour. German humour, which is scatological and physical, is viewed with puzzlement in many places outside that country. English television comedy is destroyed in American adaptation. Many of the depressed cartoons in Krokodil, the official Soviet humour magazine, were studied in the West alongside lengthy humourless explanatory captions from Sovietologists. Self-deprecating Eastern European Jewish humour looked erroneously to many observers like self-loathing. And I don't think anyone outside north India will think Navjot Singh Sidhu funny.

But if humour translates poorly, political humour is even more troublesome. Frequently it carries so many layers of meaning, and attacks so many targets simultaneously, that it is completely beyond the understanding of those not immersed in the culture that produces it. This appears to be the case in particular with many of Charlie Hebdo's "racist" cartoons. One, for example, apparently mocks the schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram - but, in fact, is actually an effective skewering of the anti-immigration demands and claims associated with France's extreme right.

Political satire reveals the nature of a society, I believe, more than any other form of writing. It can be obsessively polite and well-meaning, as is the mainstream American tradition, represented at the moment by Jon Stewart. Mr Stewart is brilliant, but never ever appears to be a bad guy; that would render him far less effective as a satirist there. He can cause viewers to do a lot of uncomfortable thinking - as long as he maintains this persona. This tells us a great deal about the United States.

In India, we have many, many different traditions of satire. There is the angry but erudite North Indian literary school, which had its highest point perhaps in Srilal Shukla's magnificent novel Raag Darbari. That novel describes the corruption of small-town politics in a manner that is both dispiriting and hilarious. But it would be a mistake to imagine that, even in the Hindi-speaking belt, Shukla's is the dominant form of political humour. Indeed, the comic poets who are immensely popular across the Hindi belt are less erudite, less pleasant, and far less progressive. Watch their meetings, their massively-attended "hasya-kavi sammelans" on YouTube and you realise that frequently (but not by any means always) they embed in their humour disquieting notions of caste and religious difference. Kumar Vishwas, the Aam Aadmi Party candidate from Amethi in the last general elections, was one such comic poet; and his poetry has been unkind, on many occasions, to Indian Muslims.

It is difficult not to see much of this sort of humour at directed at people, at finding a laugh in the mere existence of difference. There is a difference between something that discomforts, and something that is displeasing. Such humour is not uncomfortable listening, because it is not unfamiliar to anyone familiar with the prejudices of privileged North Indians; it is merely unpleasant.

Charlie Hebdo, to many outside eyes, appears to be guilty of something similar. The graphic novelist Joe Sacco, drawing in the New York Times, gestured at the iconic scenes of torture from Abu Ghraib and asked: will not Muslims be especially sensitive to images? Yet others have pointed out that, in France, North African Muslims form an economic and social underclass, and Charlie Hebdo was "punching down", which is not the "true" purpose of satire.

Mr Sacco is both right and wrong. He is right because it is easy to appreciate that any set of people will be sensitive to specific images that represent group pain. But he is more wrong, because the images from Charlie Hebdo being considered "offensive" did not reference that group pain; they did not generally seek to mock it, or find an easy laugh there. Indeed, they sought to puncture something else: the sanctity of religious iconography.

And in doing so, they were indeed being satirical. Satire should go after anything that is respected, including religion. It is, literally, profane.

There is one basic idea behind genuine political satire: that anything that is "beyond mockery" embeds some form of power, and must be ridiculed. And the truth is: punching any form of power is "punching up". Anything that is sacred becomes the subject of profanity.

And thus those attacking Charlie Hebdo are wrong on one basic point: it did not mock Muslims. It did not mock the difference in lived experience between French Muslims and other French citizens. It mocked - among many other things - the structures of power that are embedded in Islam, as they are in any religion. French Muslims may be powerless; but those who impose the silences that come with such structures, on Muslims and non-Muslims alike, are not powerless. Such mockery caused readers to be uncomfortable.

If satire causes us discomfort, then it is fulfilling its purpose.