The multiple lives of the Indian bourgeoisie

The news of Tarun Tejpal, the ex-editor-in-chief of Tehelka magazine, being accused of sexually assaulting a younger journalist was followed by something as sensational if not more, when the parents of the 14-year-old Aarushi Talwar were convicted and sentenced to life for murdering their daughter, apparently caught in an “objectionable” position with the male servant. I was amazed at how familiar names and faces in the media took sides as they continue to do in order not to seem inconsistent in their foolishness and mediocrity.

The compounded irony with Tarun Tejpal is that his book, The Alchemy of Desire, was deservingly nominated for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. It has an absolutely hilarious passage like, “Leaving everything else for later, I went looking for where her hair began and worked my way through its musky trails to where there was none. And having found her burning core, and having drunk of it, I left it, and wandered her body, only to keep circling back to it for sustenance.” How about asking “her” if that’s what she wanted before “I” go about “wandering” her body! Obviously Tejpal missed that part.

The thing about the politics of the “sensational” is that it is a class thing. If you stopped a cycle rickshaw driver on a street, perhaps he would be completely uninterested in both the Aarushi murder case as well as the Tarun Tejpal incident involving the young journalist. I personally don’t think either of these events deserves much media or any attention. If only we paid one-tenth of the attention to violence being done to the poor and the downtrodden classes we would have a much more humane and by implication a less violent society.

Some things have to be left to the police and other departments constituted for specific purposes to do their duty. Only where justice as a norm has been violated should civil society enter the fray, perhaps with the assistance of the media. In any other case, the media should play a passive role and do some objective reporting based on available facts and figures. Journalists who come up with titles like “Why the Aarushi Talwar case is a rape of justice” are not serious about their work in the first place.

The root of the problem is that we live in an unequal society. The murders and the sexual assaults on women are a reflection of gross fundamental inequality. We don’t want to think about that because it would disturb us more than we could possibly bear. It is easier to live through sensations as if they were real.

The class nature of the entire discussion related to both the Aarushi Talwar murder and the Tarun Tejpal accusation of sexual assault is a bit too blatant even for the naked eye. The ones caught in the sensation that cases like the above provoke are in my view unabashedly personal in their response to these things. For some reason we want to believe we are beyond these things.

Indian homes are violent spaces. The treatment of children and the kind of fear that is instilled in them in the name of discipline and the love that is euphemism for a guilt-producing mechanism is anything but nonviolent. I’m not pretending to attempt to know the truth of who actually killed Aarushi Talwar. I only noticed in pictures that for a girl-child she had the dark beautiful eyes of a gazelle and the killer was blind to the surpassing beauty she was endowed with. No child however with or without such beautiful eyes deserves to die in a gruesome manner.

The CBI did a good job in eliminating all possible options. Logically it led to the parents though logic might not be the most accurate basis of arriving at the truth. I would like to maintain a stoic silence at this point except to add that if indeed the girl was brutally murdered merely because she was found in an “objectionable” position with the servant, the parents who conspired to murder their own child are the lowest form of humanity.

Parental love transcends every known human barrier. Otherwise the species would come to an end in a generation. No reason could be good enough to commit an act of violence in any form. There are ways of dealing with it, however shocking at that instant it might appear, to know that your daughter is not the embodiment of purity you imagine her to be. She simply does not have to be that. Sexual feelings are natural to adolescent children like the young of any other species in the living world. The older servant undoubtedly might have exploited his situation as a trusted insider and used it to abuse the budding girl-child. I’m not saying that this is how it happened.

Perhaps all of this is bullsh which it very well could be and at some point in future we are going to see the truth dawn finally like it happens in B grade Bollywood movies. My point is that if it indeed happened that way, it wouldn’t come as a surprise to me. What would really surprise me is if a 14-year-old boy were to be killed by his parents because he was caught in a sexually compromising position with his forty plus year old female servant. Likewise, I don’t expect Tarun Tejpal to be Mahatma Gandhi as far as women or sexual morality is concerned. He did what most men on this planet and Indian men of a certain class do when they get a chance with a woman and more so when they think they could get away with it. Again: not surprising at all.

The problem is the multiple lives that the Indian bourgeoisie lives. We have feminists who want a revolution that would destroy a male-dominated society but one that would exclude their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons from any guilt of oppressing women. The same feminists don’t see the contradiction in using cheap female labor for domestic purposes to do back-breaking work that is nothing but sheer drudgery. I don’t like to belittle the struggle of any woman fighting for equality. At the same time, exclusionary positions make me more than a bit suspicious of the motives involved.

As a brainwashed colonial culture, we don’t want to talk about sex or sexuality in our homes. The bourgeois conscience feels betrayed when the girl children entertain sexual feelings and the father figures turn out to be more figures than fathers. We want to create this morally sanitized atmosphere where roles are fixed and the servant is condemned to live an asexual existence because he has to treat his master’s daughter as if she were his own. We don’t like to think that male servants are as prone to sexual feelings like any other being, especially when they stay far away from their own families.

Part of my grievance against Americanization of the world is the hopeless tendency to moralize. Everyone is a moralist in American media, politics and society. This tendency when I see it on the Indian landscape makes me laugh. We expect newspaper editors to be models of virtue merely because they were at some point occupying high moral ground.

The contradictions that go into making parents turn violent against children and men turning aggressive with women, is a schizophrenic state that the bourgeoisie lives in this country while believing it to be a completely normal state. The women don’t wish to declare in public that they are limited to the roles of “daughters” to their fathers. That however is the only thing they will be: daughter-figures who will allow men to abuse them because the line that separates paternal love from patriarchal abuse is so thin that they simply can’t make the distinction. It is what their fathers have done to them. Thus, the women become complicit in their own abuse.

That which is sensational is what keeps us away from social and political reality. The price we pay for the distance from reality is directly proportional to how much we are willing to lie and deceive ourselves. Those who cannot lie to themselves obviously become a minority abandoned to the dark, lonely corners of the world. But the rest of us wish to live in that schizophrenic state. It is a maddening state because sensation reigns supreme. That’s the state of the Indian bourgeoisie—sensationalized by its own false notions of purity and perfection.

We would rather be unhappy and live multiple lives dangerously opposed to one another like it happened with Tarun Tejpal or the parents of Aarushi Talwar who are completely normal people for all practical purposes. We don’t have to demonize them because they are simply one of us. The only way we can overcome this contradiction is to give up the obsession with consumption. As long as we attribute reality to things, the social relations are only an extension of property relations. In other words, possession is what will determine the role of the relationship. The parents perhaps thought it was “their” child as a matter of possession—therefore, they believed they had the right of life and death over the child. Mr. Tejpal felt the same thing about his employee—an instinctive feeling of dominance which comes from a sense of ownership.

John Lennon says somewhere that possession is in the head. He is right. The madness that possession creates is in the head. If we must live rational and happy lives freed of contradiction we need to remove the demon in the head by not thinking of possessing what appears close to us. Instead we need to unconditionally love, care and accept as well.

Prakash Kona is a writer, teacher and researcher who lives in Hyderabad, India. He is currently working as an Associate Professor at the Department of English Literature, The English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad.