I turned sixty a few months ago and contrary to what I imagined it would be like when I was much younger – I don’t feel very old at all. In fact, I feel like a little boy all over again, eagerly waiting to turn teenager and looking forward to adulthood.
This disconnect between the state of my consciousness and how long I already have been on Planet Earth has nothing to do with my being physically very fit (which I am not!).
It seems more to do with the fact that while I have been more or less in the same place all my life the entire world has travelled back to an era from even before when I was born. Back to the era of colonialism, fascism, racism and plenty of wars for resources, domination and national ego.
That is why I am like a creature from the future, ahead of one’s times because it is the times themselves that have regressed. If all this is sound too mysterious, let me explain.
I grew up in the seventies fed on a rich diet of books, comics, documentaries and movies about World War 2 and the horrors of Nazi Germany. The historic vanquishing of fascism was the big theme that came through in the English language literature or audio-visual material we got in those days.
Even in the small town in central India where I lived it, with no TV, internet or even access to the latest books, it was impossible to escape the global narrative of what happened in Europe in the thirties and forties. One knew much less about Imperial Japan’s brutal wars in east and south-east Asia but had a clear sense that they were somehow bad guys and clearly on the wrong side of the moral and political fence.
In the Hindi literature or movies or music one encountered the dominant topic was the Indian freedom movement and the defeat of British colonialism. Hagiographical accounts of Gandhi, Nehru, Bose, Bhagat Singh are what we imbibed deeply without any questions. The evil nature of the Raj was only too obvious and one did not need a PhD to find that out.
It was only in the eighties sometime that I got introduced to Marxism and the Russian Revolution – all very intellectually exciting and of course quite intoxicating too – the prospect of a revolution being nothing less than nirvana for the religiously inclined. Here too, the world was much simpler – bipolar and divided between the Soviet and the US camp, of capitalists versus workers, feudal versus bourgeois, public sector versus privatizers and so on.
And then came the period in subsequent decades when one questioned everything one had learned or as my more academically minded friends would say, we ‘problematized’ everything.
What exactly was fascism all about? Was it synonymous with the Nazis alone – as popular literature made it out to be – or was it far more widespread and even mundane? Did not much of Europe’s elites welcome the Nazis with open arms and their ideology find admirers around the world – including amidst our very own RSS (which is just the ‘SS’ with an extra ‘R’)
Did the Indian freedom movement really result in freedom for everyone in the Indian sub-continent or was it a small cabal of vested interests, communities/castes that took over power, without changing anything in the colonial structure of economy, governance, culture, politics? Had not the de-colonizers become the new colonial masters over their own people? And, what was this idea of independent India all about anyway, when it suppressed the rights of so many sub-nations within its fold?
Yes, the socialist revolution looked very desirable – even worth giving up one’s life for – but what was the reality of actually existing socialist states in Russia, China or even tiny Cuba? Why did it still talk, walk and smell so much like the ancien regime? Did a ‘revolution’ mean bringing about fundamental change to create a completely new world or was it more like the literal meaning of the term – going around in circles?
And then there were also questions – very unsettling ones – about whether the ‘bad guys’ were always as wrong about everything as they were supposed to be?
For example, would India have even existed in its current shape if not for British colonialists welding together such a vast and diverse set of people into one modern, nation state? And does not the Indian constitution, with its insistence on rule of law, democratic institutions, fundamental rights and secularism, rest on the edifice of ideas that emerged from the period of European Enlightenment – introduced to many Indians during colonial rule? Weren’t Gandhi and Nehru, as also Savarkar and Jinnah, more Englishmen than Indians?
And, while communal, majoritarian Hindu political forces in India are obviously despicable can opposition to them mean condoning retrograde trends within the non-Hindu communities in the country – especially within their political leadership? Should anti-communal activists in India maintain such a stony silence about atrocities against religious minorities in Pakistan, Bangladesh or Sri Lanka?
As for the militant anti-capitalism, with which I grew up, how does one go from opposing monopolies or profit-hungry corporations to entirely dismissing the role of the market, competition, entrepreneurship or economic incentives in shaping government policies? How did those championing the ‘withering away of the State’ end up creating the most powerful State machine in history?
And the most disturbing question of all – what about race, biology, gender, culture – themes which fascists and the Right have always stoked to divert attention from far more important social or economic issues? Does opposing their bigotry mean ignoring the role of biological or cultural evolution in how ‘actually-existing humans’ behave in reality?
Does structural and systemic change alone guarantee the disappearance of staple human emotions like anxiety, greed, jealousy and need for domination in most humans? How long are we going to prattle on about the ‘social and economic’ while zipping our lips on the ‘personal’?
Finally, where does the entire political spectrum, from Left to Right, really stand on the most important question of contemporary times – of ecology and the exploitative relation between human species and other forms of life or with Planet Earth itself? Aren’t there too many odious overlaps on this subject in the worldviews of those, who otherwise seem opposed to each other politically?
What I am really talking about here of course is my quest for adding multiple angles to the simplistic ideas of Left, Right, Good, Bad from my younger days – a journey many readers may be familiar with in their own experiences. It has indeed taken up a lot of energy and time over the years and I have no regrets at all. My understanding of the world and how it works in practice has been incredibly enriched by clearing doubts that would simply not go away.
However, for all the pursuit of nuance I have benefited from I also realize the hard reality we face today – there are simply too many out there who remain completely unreformed, unrepentant and deliberately unreflecting about their own follies. While those on the Left and democratic spectrum of the global population seem to dither in self-doubt those on the Right have doubled down on their colonial dreams, fascist ideas, fantasies of unending wealth, racial/caste prejudices, and quest for absolute, monarchial power.
They have no doubts at all about what they are doing and no intention either of questioning their own wants or ways to achieve them. Whether it is the rise of Hindutva forces in India, the white supremacists in Europe and the US or the settler-colonial Zionists of Israel – these are as ruthless as they were in the comic books of my childhood.
There is no doubt at all, nationally and globally we are back in the era prior to World War 1 at a minimum and certainly on the eve of World War 2. A whimsical and contortionist history has placed the distant past in front of us as our immediate future. The question we face is – so what exactly are we going to do about it?
It is here that I feel today a very strong need to return to the world I grew up in – when it was neatly divided between the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. When one had much greater clarity about what was acceptable and what was not, could tell the good from bad and one could confront pure Evil without vacillation. Maybe it is time we need put aside our textbooks and stopped perpetually searching for the right answers in some ponderous Google-like database.
If you don’t agree, just ask any Palestinian in Gaza. Nuances are a luxury when existence itself is in doubt.
Satya Sagar is a journalist and public health worker. He can be reached at [email protected]
