A reason why the recent student protests were a triumph is that they were highly entertaining, though not for everyone. And they were fun because India has become such a suffocating place that any lampooning of politicians and the judiciary is funny.
Some of the protestors were abusive, using language we have never heard in political analysis. They had more shock value than they deserved because we have become a stiff society. Given all that we have heard in the past few weeks, once again only the supernatural seems sacred in India.
The Prime Minister has forgiven abusers. Instead of sending the police after offending protestors, the government should learn to take some jokes.
Mainstream film, television and comedy in India have become so fearful of offending anyone, let alone the powerful, that there is almost no trace of society’s inner lives in them.
A lot of things that are worth watching are underground today. The protests were not only reels manifesting in real life, they were the surfacing of what stayed hidden.
When speaking one’s mind is risky, people shut up. Then someone who is not fully aware of the risks says stuff and the spirit of the times explodes in public consciousness. That is what happened last month.
It was also a reminder why the young pull off so many startups that once seemed ridiculous. They just don’t know enough to be afraid, and when you are not trying to be too sensible sometimes things just work. Often, experience is the enemy of instinct.
I recall a scene in a British film where a character lifts the cassock of the Archbishop of Canterbury, surely Britain’s most sacred man. I thought it wasn’t funny, and I wondered why. Because in the UK you can do almost anything; if you can do anything, you have to be truly funny to be funny.
But thin-skinned India is a great place for comedy.
We have always been a nation of humourless patriarchs. It is said that when someone asked Gandhi what he thought of Western civilisation, he said, “That would be a good idea.” It might be apocryphal, but that’s the only funny thing I know about him. Scholars may know more, but he mostly had a grave bearing.
Ambedkar, even more so. His very war was against ridicule, so he probably did not rate jokes or satire highly.
They emerged as leaders in tough times, and the Indian Constitution that they shaped does not safeguard freedom of expression as much as comedians who wave the book about think. It grants free speech with so many caveats that one can be harassed in court for merely saying obvious things.
But still, Indian law once had enough grey areas and artists did manage to say stuff hoping to get away. After all, in this country you can drive on the wrong side of the road for half your life and never get caught.
But in recent times, the suffocation of speech has intensified.
For all its limitations in guarding meaningful free speech, the Constitution does back the right to protest. After all, we are a nation that emerged from public demonstrations. And the patriarchs who led the country to freedom were all protestors. They were just not entertainers, sadly.
The virtual disappearance of political satire in Indian mainstream public spaces may have done the government some harm. Satire is information. It is intel. It reflects the mood of the people. It needs to entertain and it can only entertain with truths. So, if this channel of information from the public gets blocked by a shield of sycophancy, it’s a loss for those who need real data.
I do not say Indian public space is an information blackhole, but I do feel that information is degraded so much that the government has lost the pulse of the young. It misread the popularity and potency of the Cockroach Janta Party right from the start. A lot of what was said during the protest would have come up in mainstream media and cinema in a free society.
But is the government the only force to blame for the cultural suffocation? To an extent, Indians have muzzled themselves. I would argue they have capitulated too easily, surrendered whatever ambiguous freedoms we had without a fight.
There is too much practicality in India’s collective soul. A newly prosperous middleclass feels it has much to lose by being seen as dissenters. This could explain why few have cared to push back.
Many of those who did have found themselves pushed to the fringes of the national mainstream. Free speech was not just non-rewarding, it began to look increasingly like a liability. What the young protestors showed was the sheer joy of speaking out without worrying about the powerful people who decide so many aspects of our lives.
India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party itself grew in response to cultural suffocation, of a very different sort, in a world that was woke before it knew of such a word. Upper castes were sometimes taunted for their pride in Hindu beliefs and customs, and they were expected to take it on their chin. They felt suffocated by the Nehruvian order, where one had to hold a set of Western values.
Eventually, it led to a cultural resurgence that looked like a religious movement but was largely a revolution led by an elite that fought back by recruiting others. The Hindu movement was a serious force. It did not require satire. Satire is a weapon of those who fear they don’t have the strength of numbers. But the Hindu resurgence did emerge from suffocation.
So its leaders should know it is an unnatural human state. People will find a way to breathe a little.
The author is a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. His latest book is ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us.’