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| Home >> Articles by Experts >> Santosh Desai |   Email this Page |
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Ritual reality and the Indian ...Satosh Desai
Do we live in the real world at all? This might seem a strange question to ask in a country where reality, far from being an abstraction, is an everyday sensory overload. The answer, in this case, is indeed blowing in the wind. We are overwhelmed with reality wherever we go. However, in the midst of all this reality, a lot of our everyday behaviour seems to be strangely ritualistic and often largely symbolic.
A good example of how our actions are guided by symbolic rather than real effect is to be found in the area of hygiene. At one level, we are scrupulous about taking a bath everyday, and yet we see nothing wrong in dumping our garbage right outside the threshold of the house. It does not take a genius to work out that flies, mosquitoes and sundry germs may not recognise the symbolic sanctity of the threshold and will come right back in. But the symbolic separation of our house and the rest of the world is seen as being the real one and therefore one is satisfied by the dumping of the garbage on the other side.
This belief in the primacy of the symbolic world is a pervasive one. It colours the way we lead our life not just in the arena of hygiene, but in other arenas too.
Take the way in which we view our jobs. V S Naipaul in “An Area of Darkness’’ describes a sweeper thus: “The sweeper...he must be abashed and silent, yet somehow evident, careful never to open his eyes, squatting crabwise about the room among the dirt, which is his livelihood and therefore must be identified with. He was a sweeper and his function therefore was to be a sweeper, not necessarily effectively to sweep. The sweeper was a dependent being, whose job was to be willingly dependent; cleaning itself was immaterial.’’ The overriding compulsion is to be everything a sweeper should be, without the actual detail of sweeping. A more familiar analogy, at least for those familiar with Delhi, is the Delhi traffic policeman. Every Delhi traffic cop looks like a traffic cop, speaks like one and has in every way the unmistakable demeanour of a traffic cop. The only one thing he does not do is to manage the traffic. His relationship with traffic is pure and spiritual, unsullied by any actual action. In the face of traffic jams and gross violations, he always maintains his sense of detachment and never once gets drawn into action.
The exception is during symbolic periods of activity like the “lane driving week’’ or the “anti-speeding week’’ when they swing into action. The very presence of these weeks legitimises the lack of action during the other periods. This phenomenon of seeing one’s job defined as an abstract noun rather than a verb is widespread. The Indian clerk is no less wedded to symbolic action, with every fibre of his being intent on signifying his clerkness to the exclusion of any action.
The penchant for symbolic action finds its pinnacle when it comes to finding a method to punish inaction. The institution of the suspension is an inspired one. Any misdemeanour, be it a rail mishap or a custody death, immediately leads to a suspension of the officers concerned. The suspension is a brilliant device, in that it marries instancy with stasis. The action is swift but of no consequence. The suspension as a punishment is a hedge against public memory, an act of indefinitely postponing action till it becomes unnecessary. Most suspensions are lifted, once the clamour for punishment dies, and often with retrospective effect, without materially altering the life of the one suspended. In this and many other cases, we are satisfied with intention rather than action.
The most instructive bow to this tokenism is to be observed when we eat a plate of bhelpuri or chaat. The vendor cleans the plate of the earlier customer with a ceremonial swish of a dirty rag accompanied by a ritual dip into a pail of dirtier water. In effect, he has merely ensured that the germs are now more evenly distributed across the surface of the plate. But this is good enough for us. It is not that we do not care about hygiene; if the vendor had not wiped the plate we would object. It is only that what we are seeking is not delivery of effect but the signification of intent.
A vivid example of this need is the kind of advertising that the government through DAVP is best known for. Slogans on walls (“Plant A Tree Today’’), full page ads in newspapers (100 days’ achievement of minister X) are all created with not the slightest possibility of any impact. Often they test the limits of absurdity with slogans in English about some social programme being painted on village walls. My favourite one is a kiosk found on the Delhi-Gurgaon highway which reads “Think Grid-Interactive Solar Power’’; I have no doubt that the world would be a vastly better place if only all of us were to think of nothing else. Even the way the government deals with budgets is in line with this underlying worldview. What matters is that the budget was exhausted and not that it was used effectively. Spending money becomes the surrogate for action; intent substitutes action.
Where does this mindset come from? Perhaps from a collective psyche that sees the real world being the one within our minds rather than the one outside. As Sudhir Kakar says, human freedom, in the traditional Indian context, then, seems to imply an increase in the potential to experience different inner states while limiting action in the outer world.
Overall, it seems to reflect a lack of belief in the ability of any person to materially alter the world through individual action. By giving relatively lower importance to the physical world, we place thinking on a higher pedestal over action, seeing the latter as a lower order activity compared to the former. This allows us to be more accepting of imperfect execution and less demanding of getting the details right. It permits us comfort with the token form of action. It also means that we can tolerate with much greater equanimity, everything that is wrong around us. Our streets may be filthy but at least our minds are pure!
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| Also see : Bhagavad Gita, General |
