Let no one sing again of love and war…

The universe, blind, violent and strange assails us.

The sky is strewn with horrible dead suns,

dense sediments of mangled atoms;

only desperate heaviness emanates from them,

not energy, not messages, not particles of light.

Light itself falls back down, broken by its own weight.

And all of us, human seed, we live and die for nothing.

The skies perpetually revolve in vain.

--Primo Levi, The Black Stars

The convulsions of the 20th century have ripped apart all pretensions to innocence; we know too much, and it is not innocent knowledge. We have allowed the glittering prism of ideas to control us, and it is other people’s Utopias that have brought us to this pass. That despairing cry above, by a survivor of Auschwitz, was the consequence of a mad vision by one Adolf Hitler. Other names, other times have their own searing images of reality: Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Milosevic. They were all driven by visions, and acquired the power to make them come true. No doubt Osama bin Laden has his own vision of a perfect world and millions will die if he is ever successful in realising his dream.

Once, not long ago, poets were regarded as visionaries who could change the world; Poetry, Literature, Art were seen as ways to heighten culture and civilisation, to hold up a mirror, perhaps as a means of replacing the implausibilities of religion, to ward off the brooding inevitability of death. Joseph Brodsky, in his marvellous acceptance of the 1987 Nobel Prize for Literature, said, “If art teaches anything to the artist, it is the privateness of the human condition; it fosters in a man knowingly or unwittingly, a sense of his uniqueness, of individuality, of separateness—thus turning him from a social animal into an autonomous ‘I’.” “Lots of things,” Brodsky said, “can be shared, a bed, a piece of bread, convictions, a mistress, but not a poem by, say, Rainer Maria Rilke.” It is for this reason, he believes that art in general, literature especially, and poetry in particular, is not favoured by the champions of the common good, masters of the masses, heralds of historical necessity. Because where a poem or a novel has been read, instead of the expected consensus, “there is indifference and polyphony.” But in the Age of AIDS and the Internet, do art and literature still have that power, can they still be claimed to be bulwarks against ideologues and the forces of control? Visions can be dangerous things. Whole societies can be swayed and beguiled by the images and language of visionaries; but when societies are controlled by apprehension and fear, when the threat of barbarians at the gate is used to stoke those fears, then people become easy prey to visionaries.They are then blind to all self-knowledge, that in fact, the barbarians are within the gates, that they are Us.

Here in India we know something about ideologies, barbarism and control by the State. In the last fifty years of post-independent India, all kinds of people who claimed to speak to the very soul of India, who spoke and still speak in the overwrought accents of demagoguery, have brought us that much nearer the precipice. We have fought several wars, we have come close to civil war, the country was and still is threatened with disintegration, and yet, we continue to divide and exclude vast portions of our people from the benefits of literacy and employment, and just ordinary self-respect.

There has been through the millennia of invasion and tyranny, in India, a luminous world of intellect and spirit to live by, harking back to an ancient ethos, which was like a spreading banyan tree. It offered shelter to many creeds and beliefs, sustenance for the soul, so to speak.

But that ethos has been dammed and damned on its own native soil, by the violence and rage that has overtaken this society. For anyone who has grown up in post-1947 India, the dissonances between this age-old idea of ourselves as a dharmic society, interdependent, unselfish, dynamic and joyful and the reality of being Indian today, are a cause of extreme discomfort.

It did not need the Dalai Lama in his ’98 speech at the Nehru Centre, New Delhi, to tell us of our sickness; everyone is agreed that the sickness is pathological, we just cannot agree on the right cure.

Neither was it necessary for Mr. Amartya Sen in his speech at Harvard University, also in 1998, to tell us of the dismal failure of successive Indian governments in the areas of education and social welfare.

These are things we are all aware of, and have remained silent about, because we are not selfless; we do not care to look beyond our immediate and extended families, or community or, oh yes, caste. We know that food and child care and health and education and jobs and clean water and electricity and life insurance and property rights cannot be stretched to cover one billion-plus people; so we look after ourselves and our friends and friends of friends. That’s how the middle-class network works, isn’t it? It is for the young, however, that one trembles. What moral and ethical order can they build their lives on? When they have watched religion destroy the social fabric of India, how can one offer them religion as a force in their lives? When lies and half-truths shape the world around them,how can one ask them to base their lives on truth? When greed and violence shape even family relationships, how can one preach austerity and social awareness as relevant moral disciplines?

Would an inspired study of history make a difference? Most young people find the rote-learning of dates and dynasties distasteful and irrelevant to their lives. But if the subaltern point of view were stressed, the tides of human experience, the enormous achievements of science and philosophy, of the enormous struggle of humanity as a whole rather than as partisan groups, could there be a radical change in perception?

To take just one example, of an idea that was so far ahead of its time that it has always seemed like just one man’s aberrant behaviour, almost kinky… I speak of the Emperor Ashoka’s tremendous gesture after the Kalinga war, of renouncing war and all the paraphernalia of war, the dismantling of his huge armies, the putting away of weapons and the martial mode of thought. An end to conquest, the right to step into someone else’s territory, merely by force of arms. An end to aggressive postures, to historical enmity. Until that time he was perhaps, like any other prince of his time and after his time; he is said to have come to the throne unfairly, after having killed his older brother who had a better right, and about a hundred other claimants. Yet, this was the man who had this huge revelation….a dynamic awakening!

Consider what an impact such an idea would have, at this present time or fifty years hence, an idea to which we are the natural heirs. Consider how we could begin to evolve as a people.

If a country as proud of its heritage and martial tradition as Japan, could after the 2nd World War, disband its highly disciplined and motivated army, albeit as a condition imposed by the victors, after the terrible reality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surely we can do the same after our repeated failure to live at peace with Pakistan.

We began a new era in 1947 awash with blood, not just from the partition of the country, but from the first Indo-Pak war. In the year 2002, we are still at war with this neighbour with whom we have all kinds of historical and geographical and even familial ties. Between wars with Pakistan, we have stained ourselves in wars with China, and in Sri Lanka. At various times the army has been brought in to quell riots, turning on our own people, in the North-East, in Kashmir, in the Punjab, in Hyderabad, in Bombay, in Delhi and Madras…we have paid a terrible price and have reaped a devastating emptiness of spirit.

There is therefore something terribly spurious in the Indian Army’s attempts to recruit young men to its ranks. On the one hand we read about the growing malaise in the army, the discontent, indiscipline and low morale, while on the other respected columnists bemoan the Army’s plight: “Where have all the young captains gone?” In a perhaps unintentional reference to the anti-war hit song of the sixties, “Where have all the flowers gone?” there is a reference to an increasing absence of that vital link in military hierarchy, of captains and of the lack of their much-needed energy and elan in cantonment towns, “Nobody raising hell, in mess bars and clubs…”

I rather think we should applaud the intelligence of our young men who choose to become junior executives rather than cannon fodder for which our army has been advertising, and is now recruiting on college campuses. I believe that the strong message that is being sent out to the powers-that-be, is No More War! I believe that it would require someone very stupid, indeed to submit to the hierarchical discipline, arbitrary, crude, even brutal, imposed by the armed forces…

And then in May 1998, India, or rather the new BJP government which came to power on a bellicose note, tested a nuclear missile, to which in due course, Pakistan replied in like fashion. The sub-continent, as Bill Clinton remarked, had suddenly become a most dangerous place.

This has provoked two Indian writers, Arundhati Roy and Amitav Ghosh to describe in the most graphic language, the actual consequences of a nuclear attack on either country which would effectively be the end of both. Nobody wants to think about that. Arundhati Roy also speaks in her essay, ‘The Death of Imagination,’ of her love for her country, almost a helpless love, which may have come into being, unwilled, unbidden.

Many of us feel that way about India. We wouldn’t perhaps go as far as to bend down and kiss its soil each time one left or returned, but we would acknowledge the surge of emotion we feel when the anthem is played, or when we see archival footage of people being lathi-charged during the freedom movement, or when we teach our children shlokas we learned in childhood; its hundreds of little, inexplicable things. Perhaps one should not even try to explain love.

Loving this country shouldn’t be so hard. Does this love make a difference to anything? It is certainly not the rampant nationalism that makes everyone jump to attention when military trucks carrying the latest phallic missiles roll past on Republic Day, indigenous, everyone of them! It is certainly not the triumphant patriotism that had everyone trying to outshout the other when the news of the missile testing emerged.

One felt, indeed, as if one were struggling like a fly congealed on fly paper, for expression, for a voice that could be heard above the din.

And yet, and yet, I believe that the impulse towards peace is growing, that our young people are more clued in to the way the winds of the millennium are blowing. I believe it was C.L.R. James who once remarked that there was no idea that hadn’t been thought of first in India. It is a pity that we have become ever more impoverished, not just in the socio-economic sphere but where great, living ideas are concerned.

We like to see ourselves as a great vibrant democracy as well as an ancient civilisation, with all its attendant chaos and confusion. But can democracy coexist with the caste system? Can class and communal hatred that has existed over millennia be healed overnight? When it has been uncovered just how closely linked humans and primates are genetically, is not civilisation itself just an illusion?

We are so eager to assert ourselves globally; our international credentials in software technology have made us welcome in every developed country, but one–fourth of our people are still illiterate. Liberalisation is fine for people who already have a head start, our native intelligence and capacity for hard work takes us very far wherever we emigrate. But we carry our prejudices and complexes with us; whether in the US or in Fiji we prefer to live in ghettos among our own kind, prefer to marry people within our own native sub-groups, and display the same ancient animosities towards alien cultures or religions.

If globalisation teaches us anything, it is that we cannot do without each other. We are all interdependent, not only in the marketplace; we have to help each other more without counting the cost. We need help in educating all our people and giving them a fighting chance to survive. America cannot lecture us on making peace with Pakistan and then urge us to buy its arms and planes. The WTO cannot raise its trade tariffs to iniquitous extents and then expect developing countries to manage their economies equitably. Medical and environmental technology have to be shared. There can be no price laid on human knowledge. If the human genome project helps to find cures for Alzheimer’s or AIDS, or other intractable diseases, then the whole world should benefit. Just as the AIDS virus sneaked past borders into every country on earth through blood and saliva and semen, basically human contact, then, human contact has to be used to destroy it.

What does it really mean to be Indian? Gandhi, the greatest Indian of the 20th century, believed that ahimsa or non-violence was actually a new awakening, a new consciousness. It is the recognition of that, that will determine what the next few centuries will be like on the sub-continent. Fragmented states at war with one another, or perhaps a united South Asian federation? Will SAARC be able to do for its member countries what the European Union has achieved?

But for this to happen India will have to transcend its meaningless cycle of revenge and retribution, and extend a generous hand of friendship not just towards its neighbours but towards its own minorities. Can it rise to its real potential, eschewing violence, and allow the past to be reconciled with the future?