Memories linger. Memories of dyspeptic bitterness from 1980s’ Calcutta. Dark swirls of indignation against Usha Uthup, mainstream Hindi movies, performance of any kind with a racy beat. Sridevi, Salt Lake stadium and Hope 86, and the sharp slap of Communist absolutism. A pitiful imitation of Bollywood in the gaudy playhouses of north Calcutta. The infective suspicion of women in performance suffocating the narrow lanes of bhadralok neighborhoods.
Boyhood memories, all. And yet that’s not merely why they stay awake like discolored wedges of plaster, crumbling off walls that never really existed. There’s something about the absurdity of that bitterness, the upset stomach behind it, the ugly grimace worn like discolored plaster itself. It becomes a crackling absurdity quickly, as one slips into teenage and the nation moves into liberalisation. But the 1980s remain, the blackest crevice of memory, where the dyspeptic bitterness triggers a dark and real fear.
I feed my memories the steroid of research. A story is born. The Firebird emerges as a novel about childhood, sexuality and moral police set in Communist West Bengal.
It does not look good, they say. Sounds ugly. Feels wrong. The “moral” in the moral police scarcely seems to be about the moral; it is all about the aesthetic, the affective. Small wonder therefore that the MP had to come down heaviest on matters of gay splendour. The aesthetic.
When the map of India faces the sky, Calcutta falls to its left. To its right is Bombay. When does the MP of the Right, battered hotel doors and public parks and all, evoke the worn-plaster memory of the MP of the Left and its Party frowns on the lives of actresses? When indeed, does the moral become the police?
When soft power hardens. When ideology firmly crosses over to the side of violence.
Education versus state power
A university professor who turns to write something on the board normally does not have to worry about flying paper missiles the moment their back is turned to the class. In middle school, the teacher is in no such safe zone. Which is why the physical violence of the wooden ruler, if only inflicted on the battered surface of the desk, is a useful pedagogical tool. And if you step back a few more years, the little devils of primary school don’t even wait for your back to be turned – they might kick and holler and fling half-eaten parathas right at your face if not threatened with the rod. Especially if they don’t come from nice homes.
Is there a relation between maturity, education, and the redundancy of the use of physical force? Are university students better human beings than the kindergarten brats? According to the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, the reversible relation between the importance of physical violence and that of the softly civilising powers defines our educational growth – in church, at home (better-executed in nicer homes), and most crucially, in school. All the way from the kindergarten to the university. More than anything else, education tells you not to throw chalks or paper missiles and, god forbid, parathas at your teacher, manager, priest or father. Education, more than anything else, is the education of your growth as a citizen, or as Althusser will tell you more gloomily, the tale of your indoctrination into the capitalist state.
What happens to those who keep throwing paper missiles? Those who drop out of school, those whose families don’t teach them good behaviour? The state knows that those paper missiles and torn parathas tend to change into daggers and bullets; classroom disruption is likely to translate into a life of crime. If you keep throwing chalks, the wooden ruler will get you; eventually it will turn into the police baton and will break your back.
The state which Althusser had in mind was the modern western state, where the European Enlightenment had entrenched the values of modernity – science, technology, rationality, and, most crucially, capitalism and state sovereignty. It was a state where the wealth generated by capitalism, and the new class it created – the bourgeoisie – helped to manufacture consent about good, polite and productive life.
In such a state, education, be it of the family, church, or school, shapes you according to these norms. The state steps in with baton or handcuffs only when its soft – and more desirable – power fails. In such societies, the relation between crime and lack of education has usually indicated the symbiosis between the roles and violence and ideology.
Outside of modern European and North-American states where modernity and capitalism have achieved this collective consent about good life, this formula of relationship between violence and ideology has often gone haywire. By the standards of the latter, the intervention of the physical might of the state into what should have been the domain of the ideological is actually a failure of state power.
Moral police
On the surface a catchy metaphorical construction, it is actually a sad oxymoron. The police belongs to the domain of physical discipline and punishment carved by the state – the domain of hard power. The moral, by definition, belongs to the realm of ideology, of soft power. The job of the moral, of the indoctrination of citizens into the dominant value-system of the state – be it capitalism or the supremacy of Hindutva – is to be left to the family, to religion, to schools.
If state undertakings to rewrite history curricula and ban books are more ominous, they are also more natural. If you want to control the value system of the citizen, especially the adult, enfranchised citizen, you go for the textbooks, the schools, the media and publishing industry. All of which, in Althusser’s scientific taxonomy, make up the “Ideological State Apparatus.”
If they do their job well, there is no need for the agents of violence – the police and the army, that which make the “Repressive State Apparatus”, to step in. If your family, religion and schools have succeeded in indoctrinating you that sexual relations are permissible only within marriage, marital sexual relation will be the only one you will desire; non- or extra-marital sexual instincts will only be a nightmarish memory of your barbaric, pre-civilisational existence and will shame your normative, civilized sexual self if and when they visit you.
When state police has to batter doors to examine the “legitimacy” of consenting couples to have sex with each other, it is simply a pathetic instance of the failure of state power to install moral authority. “The night of the bullet was followed by the morning of the chalkboard,” the astute Kenyan critic of colonialism, Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo had reminded us. State authority that has brought out the baton and the gun to control values have never succeeded in the long run.
Never allowed to grow up
The separation of violence and ideology is an acknowledgement, not only of education, but of adulthood. Underlying this separation is the bourgeois assumption that the adult is an “educated” adult. Note the easy equation between crime and college dropouts in the US. Clearly this separation does not work in India.
Too easily, the Indian state takes on the role of the family elder, its politicians become Didis and Bhaiyas. And Bhaiyas and Didis spank your bum from time to time. For reading porn. For locking the hotel room with that boyfriend you were never really supposed to have. The rod is never spared. Nor does the Indian citizen ever grow up and outgrow the family that is the state.
Liberal resentment against moral police is, on a fundamental level, resentment against the oxymoronic nature of this vigilance. Against this grotesque crack in the seamless, sequential relation between violence and ideology promised by the modern capitalist state.
But the crack widens every time the state spanks our bum. In this widening crack lies the queer promise of personal freedom.
An excerpt from Firebird
Trinankur was silent now, but his eyes remained locked with Ori’s, in a kind of a pact that excluded the others at the table. There was safety in Trinankur’s company, in his gentle smile. Ori looked down again, at the crescent of prawns across his plate.
“You tell her everything, don’t you?” It was strange listening to Dushtu’s voice. It kept growing fainter. It seemed to come from far away.
“So tell us,” he leaned ahead. “When did you first see your mother with Samiran uncle?”
Terror clutched his heart like a black, sharp-clawed bat, killing his desire for sweet and sour fish. An acid wave of vomit rose to his throat. All eyes were on him now, even those which pretended to look away.
Trinankur just sat there. He chewed his food furiously. His pimples jumped up and down as his jaws moved.
“We know you’ve seen them at his house,” Tatai’s voice crawled towards him, like a buried animal slowly coming back to life. “Doing things to each other.”
“Oritro?” The voice cut through the darkness. “How many times have you seen your mother with Samiran?”
His mother?
The woman who’d fought with vultures? Over her brother’s grave? The one who’d been Antigone, out in the windy nakedness of the Maidan grounds under the dark evening sky? The stubborn, hotheaded woman who pierced through her clothing of shyness to silently fight everybody around her?
He wanted to eat. The fragrance of fried prawns had merely sharpened his appetite. He tried to ladle some sauce with his spoon, stab at a piece of meat with his fork. But his hands, weak blobs of jelly, couldn’t make sense of the darkness on his plate. It was frustrating, and strangely it made him want to laugh. The laughter weighed down on him, wrestling him to the ground, pinning his arms at the elbows till the fork clattered against the rim of his plate and bounced on to the table.
“You’re not doing this right,” Trinankur’s voice came from the wilderness. “I was getting to it gently. He’s a child, remember?”`
“Yes, I saw that,” a voice whirled. “Going on and on about paintings. Then it would be school, and if he likes Mughlai food better than Chinese. And then, cricket. Smooth!”
“You need patience for some things. I didn’t win the elections three times running being a brute.”
“Who do you think you’re doing a favour?” It was moving, the intense energy in Tatai’s voice. Quickly, he turned to Ori again. “Does your mother go to this man’s home often? Do they meet elsewhere?”
“There’s no one else in the graveyard,” Ori heard his own voice come from a distance. “Just the vultures.”
~ Excerpted with permission from The Firebird, Saikat Majumdar, Hachette India, 2015.