In memoriam: A wiser, nicer India

Obituary writers were kept on their toes this year. Well-known personalities seemed to die at what appeared to be regular intervals. For some reason, there was a high count of creative people — artists, singers, musicians, filmstars — among them. M.F. Husain, Bhimsen Joshi, Jehangir Sabavala, Bhupen Hazarika, Shammi Kapoor, Jagjit Singh, Dev Anand, all gone in the same year! They were all of ripe age, true, but even so, it was a loss felt most acutely.

Death, or rather grieving about it, is now a public activity. At one time, after a famous person died, a report appeared in the papers, followed by an obituary and some tributes. After that, the world moved on. The near and dear ones of the departed mourned their loss in private.
Now, no sooner does the news break that the media goes into hyperdrive and the whole universe takes part in an outpouring of sorrow. The social media becomes a global condolence meeting, with everyone with a Facebook and Twitter account contributing their own little memory of what the deceased meant to them and how the death has affected them. Geographical or cultural boundaries mean little; each
such death is a personal loss.
This was most seen when Steve Jobs died. He was a visionary no doubt, and had led his team to some fine inventions that have changed technology in many ways. But at the end of the day, he was a CEO of a company and however cool its products were, they cannot be compared with, say a cure for cancer. Yet the cultists of Apple all over the world, including in India, were in deep shock for days after, extolling his many virtues and quasi-divine powers. Much was made of not only his creative genius but also his one visit to India, of which he was hardly complimentary. But the connection people felt was not limited to any India-related past; Jobs represented a certain ethos, a value system and a way of life. We fear that his death puts a final seal on those attributes; hence the speculation that Apple won’t be the same without him.
The passing away, likewise, of Husain, Sabavala, Shammi Kapoor, Dev Anand and even relatively less widely famous people like playwright Partap Sharma, cartoonist Mario Miranda and others, represents, to use a familiar cliché, “the end of an era”. All of them lived in Bombay, a Bombay that now can only be seen in old films and photographs. It was a Bombay that was urbane, genteel and cosmopolitan. India was a kindler, gentler and definitely a more secular place. That one of these names was also persecuted by anti-secular forces brings that out in sharp relief. Both the actors were dandies and stood for free-spiritedness and optimism where every type of Indian co-existed with the other in the crowded city; and Mario’s Goan villages were full of eccentrics who drank at the village taverna amidst swaying palms. Like Mario, Bhupen Hazarika sang of his native Assam but travelled the globe with his lilting music. These were citizens of the world, yet rooted in their own milieu and culture. They were not aggressive about asserting their cultural identity; they wore it lightly yet proudly. A little known fact about Partap was that he fought a club in Bombay because it did not admit Indians even in the 1960s; when they opened up, he refused to join.
Their deaths, therefore, starkly showed us not just what we once were but what we have now become. We speak of being global citizens, but this is defined as the ability to hold down a corporate job anywhere. We are proud that we get to see a Hollywood movie at the same time as others in New York, London or Tokyo and are thrilled when a product is released here even before it is sold in international capitals.
Yet, our insecurities show everytime there is an “insult”, real or imagined, to our Indianness. Our identities are structured around shallow markers, such as religious practices and rituals. Someone has used a photo of an “Indian god” in an advertisement? Protest loudly, demand an apology and hound the person. This is not applicable just to the Husain case; countless others, in India and abroad, have been attacked on even flimsier grounds.
This is ironical since we have become stronger and more high-profile as a nation; our confidence therefore should have multiplied, too. Instead, it often appears that as a poorer country we were more sure of who we were. Indira Gandhi used to love quoting from The Party, a film starring Peter Sellers which many politicians wanted banned for making fun of the Indian accent: “Who do you think you are?” asks an irate film producer. To which Hrundi V. Bakshi (Sellers) replies, “In India, we don’t think who we are. We know who we are.”
Some of those who died in 2011 were from that India. All of them were born and lived under British rule. Most came from humble backgrounds in an India that was poor. It must have been a difficult time. Yet, they were resolutely optimistic and never lost touch with their core values. That optimism reaches out to us across the decades, across generations. We may not have seen Dev Anand’s later films but we remember him singing Main zindagi ka saath nibhata chala gaya just as Shammi Kapoor’s Yahoo resonates in our ears. In their death we see a weltanschauung disappear forever. That is why we mourn for them.