Today I read the word ‘gerrymandering’ in the title of an article from an anthropological journal. I thought I had heard the word recently used in some series or film, but I could not remember which one, so I quickly checked the wikipedia entry:
‘… gerrymandering… is the political manipulation of electoral district boundaries with the intent to create undue advantage for a party, group, or socioeconomic class within the constituency. The manipulation may involve "cracking" (diluting the voting power of the opposing party's supporters across many districts) or "packing" (concentrating the opposing party's voting power in one district to reduce their voting power in other districts).’
You could find out more on the wikipedia page, including the etymology. Considering the upcoming general elections in the country, and the political heft of events taking place across the world, I allowed myself the lazy mental association of ‘serendipity’.
I started writing this post couple of days ago to commemorate the birthday of William Shakespeare. (The celebration of 23rd April as Shakespeare’s birthday is more invented tradition, than fact). I had chosen the passage below - from a play I read years ago, but not as part of my school syllabus (I remember it being a part of SSC/CBSE school syllabi for several years). The events that transpire in the short excerpt crystallise the anxiety that many of us feel as privileged participants in democracy today. The fact that a youtube citizen journalist got considerable traction for his video comparing the prime minister to a dictator, and speaking about the country’s descent to ‘fascism’, is also a marker of the same anxiety, and a highly polarised, and communalised electorate.
It is a riot, nay, a pogrom that Shakespeare describes in this scene. Many social commentators including Arjun Appadurai and Partha Chatterjee have written about the phenomenon of the ‘riot’ and the ‘festival’ exhibiting similar affective characteristics, so I will not speak of that further here. One of the reasons I am invested in this passage, is because of the simple fact that the mob murders a poet. While the figure of the poet in Caesar’s (and in Shakespeare’s time), was very different from the current manifestation of artistic work, and self-fashioning, the death of a poet is also a comment on censorship, and freedom of expression.
‘Mob’ is usually associated with the fearsome things that happen when groups of people come together. The trope of the collective ‘mob mind’ is symptomatic of humanity’s collapse into animalistic behaviour. The mob doesn’t have a mind. Irrationality and unpredictably set the parameters of its capacity for terror. The words “fascism” and “propaganda” are used more and more nowadays to describe instances of violence against marginalised communities across the country. While this is definitely a majoritarian phenomenon, we are not in a dictatorship (yet), simply because Rathi is able to make such a video and garner more than 24 million views (Youtube has stopped showing increase after hitting the cap of 24 million). Reducing the complex events that are taking place to the label of fascism allows people to dismiss the analysis. We are heading towards fascism, perhaps, but we are not in a state where all power has been wrested from the people.
More than the political circumstances created by the current dispensation, it is the cultural flattening that has taken place in the last couple of decades that is worrying. We are forced to negotiate between simplistic binaries. They wear us out with idiocy and blind faith. The quest for homogeneity makes way for a complete breakdown of nuance, and intellectual or creative activity. On the other hand, many content creators from the right-wing are learning woke language, and sophisticated ways of expressing themselves. However, and there is a caveat, many of them are not directly connected to the political establishment at all. In fact many right-wing creators believe the prime minister to be too ‘soft’. The UP chief minister is seen as a better choice. If we go deep enough then some of these creators are perhaps funded by the BJP, but many of them have no political connections. These kind of creators (not trolls) are most insidiouous; I speak hear of the large, emergent category of ‘Hindutva’ art, cinema, music, reportage, design, literature, history, scholarly productions etc. This the real mind of the mob, and it is deeply commited to its ideology of othering.
In the last few years, we have had to constantly recalibrate our settings of “normal”. The psychological damage that Hindutva has done to this country’s people cannot be measured. What is depressing is that this is now associated with the office of the prime minister, not an individual candidate or even political party. Elections are about numbers, and governance is about management of those numbers. One of the major guiding principles of the utopic Ram Rajya, like Plato’s Republic, is the presence of justice, and truth (Plato banished poets from his republic because, it has been argued, he associated the bards of his time with misinformation). We are decades away even from that imagination. I do not yet have the language to conceptualise the events that are taking place today, and I believe that we have to formulate new vocabularies and fight battles of knowledge, along with information.
When I first read the play, I remember being naive, and unable to imagine a world where somebody could say “Tear him for his bad verses”, and actually get away with it. But I suspect that a poet’s response would only be to write more “bad verses”, and eternally condemn their enemies with the pen.
I hope you are finding the space to write, to dream, and to resist.
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