Touchstones: Raw pain and ironic humour

Now that a ceasefire has been declared between India and Pakistan, supposedly achieved by Donald Trump — the new Superman of our planet — we can expect some relief. However, the nation wants to know how it actually happened (despite several press briefings by the government and the defence forces), so each day Prime Time TV news helpfully brings in bristling moustaches, anchors who literally froth at the mouth and many busybodies who apparently know it all.

My earnest plea, therefore, is to declare a ceasefire here in our own country between the two main national parties, the woke and un-woke and the ‘specialists’ of public policy and defence analysts. The nation has moved on and — barring the loonies in every religious and ideological group — people want to hear about other important matters that relate to their welfare and peaceful co-existence. I am reminded of a basic tenet of the Christian faith called the Doctrine of Forbidden Knowledge. When He created the Garden of Eden for Adam and Eve, God gave them everything they needed to survive but also warned them, firmly, never to taste the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. We all know what happened when Eve broke that vow. In our own mythology, Sita was asked never to step beyond the Lakshman Rekha and we know what happened when she crossed it.

In both cases, the point is that it is best to accept certain boundaries for a harmonious existence. Both sides have scored spectacular self-goals by not heeding this wise advice. The result is that neither can see the good in the other and devise more and more lunatic questions to embarrass their rivals. In fact, it is the Omar Abdullahs and the Owaisis who have won hearts by their dignified responses. There will come a time when they will ask those questions that trouble us all, but timing is so essential. Take the case of the Professor from Ashoka University whose Facebook post led to such a brouhaha that he found himself in custody. Or that pipsqueak who said vile things about one of the Indian Army spokespersons, or the trolls that went after the Foreign Secretary and his daughter…

As for our social media warriors and the troll armies, you can almost predict what they are going to say. Can no one see the harm we do to our national reputation worldwide if we treat this sad episode like a World Cup cricket match between Pakistan and India? With so many differing voices, naturally any foreign country will think 10 times before standing up for us. Standing up for whom? This version or that?

Let us now switch to something that has really made me feel good and so proud that I’m almost bursting. This is the news that a little-known Indian author, Banu Mushtaq, has been awarded the prestigious International Booker Prize for her short story collection ‘Heart Lamp’, translated by Deepa Bhasthi from Kannada into English. For one, unlike most previous Indian winners of the Booker, Banu comes from a non-English-speaking, economically backward family, is a Muslim woman and a feisty activist who fights for Muslim women’s rights, their education and the stranglehold of the patriarchal families that deny them the space and independence that they seek. Above all, she fights for all those women, Hindu or Muslim, who are poor and are eternally dependent on men. The cruelty they endure, their ceaseless humiliation and marginalisation is different when it comes from the heart of a writer who has actually suffered all this. Unlike the fiction that speaks of an imagined community, Banu’s work has the raw pain and ironic humour that is also so much a part of those who suffer silently.

Her translator, Deepa Bhasthi, says that to find the vocabulary to bring Banu’s world into English, she delved deep into how misogyny unfolds by entering kitchens, bedrooms, prayer rooms and the silent soliloquies of women. It is obvious that the same lamp lit both their hearts and the reader begins to understand what the cryptic title of this collection is about. As a translator, I rejoice that we are finally getting to hear voices that never reach our ears. Readers like us who are educated, born into liberal middle-class families, speak mainly in English and brought up in cities and towns are often blind and deaf to the raw language of hardship.

Many contemporary feminist writers whose heart bleeds for the poor, the marginalised or the abused are guilty of making their stories vehicles for peddling their own brand of militant literature, that is often presented without those human nuances that come from the heart. Mushtaq says, “I don’t engage in extensive research: my heart itself is my field of study.” It is to her work in upholding Dalit and farmer rights’ movements and her writings as a reporter from Hassan in Lankesh Patrike that she owes her literary career.

Her experience as a reporter gave her a deep understanding of how religion, society and politics demand unquestioning obedience from women to turn them into being subordinates forever. Coupled with her own strong heartbeats, her work reached out to a jury that had probably never imagined such lives or heard such tales.

This is what I call a true Indian victory.

— The writer is a social commentator