From Kundera to Kamra, why authoritarian regimes hate laughter

In 1948, when the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia seized control of their country, university student and party member Ludvik Jahn began to exchange letters with his friend Marketa, who was away at summer camp.

When Marketa, also a party member, said that her camp had a “healthy atmosphere”, Ludvik responded with a postcard jocularly declaring, “A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity. Optimism is the opium of the people! Long live Trotsky!”

Marketa reported him to the higher authorities in the party. Ludvik was summoned for a hearing and asked to apologise. He refused. “But comrades,” Ludvik explained, “it was meant to be funny”.

That cut no ice. Ludvik was expelled from the university and was sent to do hard labour in the mines.

These are the contours of the debut novel of celebrated Czech novelist Milan Kundera. Although Kundera described The Joke as a love story, the novel is also an excursion on the absurdities of a humourless society under the grip of authoritarianism.

First published in 1967, all the editions of the book were rapidly sold out. The next year came the famous Prague Spring, when the secretary of the party attempted some liberalising reforms such as increasing the freedom of speech and abolishing censorship. These were short-lived as Soviet forces invaded Czechoslovakia, crushed these reforms and reinstated authoritarian conditions.

The Joke and its film adaptations were banned. Kundera went into exile in France in the period following this invasion, which, ironically, came to be known as “normalisation”.

As life imitates art, there appear to be some similarities between the Stalinist regime in Czechoslovakia and the bullying actions in India by the Hindutva-infused Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party state apparatus against stand-up comedian Kunal Kamra.

Like Ludvik Jahn, Kamra has refused to apologise for a joke. In his case, it is a video he recorded containing a parody song poking fun at Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde.

After the video was released in March, a mob vandalised the suburban Mumbai venue where the segment had been shot. The police did nothing to stop the attackers, who owed allegiance to the Shinde faction of the Shiv Sena.

In what appears to be India’s version of “normalisation”, several FIRs have been registered against Kamra based on complaints by members of the Shiv Sena’s Shinde faction. Kamra has been threatened with violence and even death.

The Mumbai Police has sent summons to members of the audience who attended Kamra’s show, to record their statements as witnesses.

As if that wasn’t enough, Mumbai municipal officials demolished a structure at the venue that they claimed had been built without authorisation. Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said that legal action would be taken against Kamra unless he apologised.

Perhaps because India has the veneer of being a constitutional democracy, Kamra has not been sent to the mines.

On the face of it, Stalinism and Hindutva are divergent political ideologies. For Stalinism, religion is an anathema, while a violent assertion of Hindu majoritarianism is the fuel of Hindutva. There was no room for private capital in Stalinism but Hindutva survives on crony capitalism.

Stalinism is premised on maximum government even as Hindutva espouses “minimum government”. Stalinism proclaimed equality with an iron fist whereas Hindutva thrives on preserving hierarchical caste inequality.

Sitting on such seemingly disparate ends of the ideological spectrum, why is it that their response to humour is similar?

Humour, it’s clear, is a source of unity for the repressed. “I learned the value of humour during the time of Stalinist terror,” Kundera had said. “I could always recognise a person who was not a Stalinist, a person whom I needn't fear, by the way he smiled. A sense of humour was a trustworthy sign of recognition. I have been terrified by a world losing its sense of humour.”

But it is also a tool of resistance. As a party sympathiser in The Joke notes, “No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at.”

Ironically, in Stalinism and Hindutva, the idea of solidarity and liberty are inverted.

Solidarity is interpreted not as displaying consensus with fellow citizens but as being in tacit agreement with power. In Mumbai, for instance, the violent mob hopes to be rewarded for ostensibly showing solidarity with Shinde.

In both regimes, the state and its foot soldiers have limitless liberties to harass those holding dissident views. They operate by continuously pruning individual liberties, which slowly results in self-censorship of thought and action to avoid the needless gaze of a vicious state.

After the venue in Mumbai was vandalised and subject to state-sanctioned demolition, the owners announced that they were shutting down “till we figure out the best way to provide a platform for free expression without putting ourselves and our property in jeopardy”.

This is precisely the desired chilling effect the Hindutva alliance seeks, where wit, trust and freedom are strangled, leading to a dehumanised society. In the world portrayed in Kundera’s novel, the scholar Burt Fientuch asserts, “joke-like episodes point up the tension between the humane – as exemplified by playfulness, love, friendship, humour and the like – and the inhumane, as exemplified by those who have forgotten to laugh”.

The similarities between these two regimes have a deeper imprint in the everyday practice of politics and in our imaginations of society.

For the Stalinist state and for Hindutva, jokes are lethal. The mere act of citizens laughing shakes their architectures of tyranny.

Rajendran Narayanan teaches in Azim Premji University, Bangalore and is affiliated with LibTech India. The views expressed are personal.