Children of the transition

Children of the transition

Delving into ‘The Harappa Files’, and Sarnath Banerjee’s insights into India today.

Vijay Prashad is a historian, author and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, an inter-movement research organisation based in Buenos Aires, Johannesburg, New Delhi and São Paulo. He is also the Chief Editor of LeftWord Books and a fellow at the Independent Media Institute. As a journalist, he writes for Frontline, the Hindu, and Turkey’s BirGün. He has been associated with Himal Southasian since its inception.

Banerjee's expert in Harappan plumbing.
Banerjee's expert in Harappan plumbing.

A strangely familiar world greets me on the cover of Sarnath Banerjee's The Harappa Files. There are two boys, in karate gi, one with a tiffin-carrier in hand and the other with a thermos. A woman, one chappal-clad foot flying towards the reader and a no-nonsense expression governing her face, holds their hands. The image is in colour, set against a brown backdrop. It is a sight that one might see in contemporary India, but it is more likely than not that today the three would be in a car, windows rolled up, FM radio on, perhaps with the children playing with handheld devices. Anyone who lives above the lower-middle class these days would like to have all those things – commodities that have created a rift with their own lives from three decades past.

The image resonates with India's children of the transition, those who were born in the 60s and early 70s, who experienced neither the excitement of the wave of independence nor the cataclysm of the wave of liberalisation. Most goods were out of reach, creating a longing for unavailable things advertised at the backs of imported comic books – shoes, jeans, cassette tapes, Twinkies, a Charles Atlas bodybuilding kit, x-ray glasses. In the first anthology from the graphic-novelists' group The Pao Collective, Sarnath Banerjee (born 1972) recalls his desire for Nike shoes. A relative from abroad brings our hero his used pair. The hero's father, "in one sweep of anger, disgust and embarrassment," throws them away. Then, one night, our hero spies his father, "an open copy of Sportsworld by his side, a size 3 Bata keds in his left hand and a clumsily held paint brush in his right. Blue ink on white canvas. Cheap bastard." Cheap, but nonetheless loving and – much like the erstwhile Indian government – desperately using techniques of reverse engineering and import substitution to generate commodities for a generation that seemed to want more regardless of the costs.

When liberalisation struck in the 1990s, most of the children of the transition took to it well. The upper ranks of the social pyramid would have had an easy time anyway; success was preordained for them, as were trips abroad that allowed access to foreign goods. Just below them, those who had relied upon relatives from abroad or on 'fancy markets' in major cities could now go to mid-market malls for their loot – and at least touch it. The vast bulk of the population – those who walked, for instance, and those who farmed the land – made few gains, and indeed lost a great deal in the new era. For them, the goods were a rebuke, the malls temples in which they had become untouchable. Liberalisation came, goods arrived, capital was freed from regulation, but the State did not disappear. Its bureaucratic apparatus now moves rapidly for those who oil its gears with 'donations', but lumbers to a halt before the entreaties of the poor.

Tiresome offices with babus sitting behind ponderous nameplates and copious amounts of self-assurance – this is how the ordinary chap sees the State. Banerjee draws the bureaucrat as a gargoyle, one of whom is S S Sivakumar, "a petty bureaucrat in the Department of Surplus Emotion and Nervous Breakdown". In 1951, cartoonist R K Laxman inaugurated his Common Man, the ordinary chap of the old era, to bear witness to the limitations of the new democracy. "I had to create this mythical individual in a striped coat, with a bushy moustache, a bald head with a white wisp of hair at the back, a bulbous nose on which perched a pair of glasses, and thick black eyebrows permanently raised, expressing bewilderment," wrote Laxman. "He voyages through life with quiet amusement, at no time uttering a word, looking at the ironies, paradoxes and contradictions in the human situation." Banerjee does not have a figure like this to be the sentinel. Nonetheless, his India, with its committees and bureaucrats, its filing cabinets and triplicates, comes at you with equal parts Kafkaesque gloom and Laxmanian humour.

Land of the one-eyed king
To simply look at today's India with 'quiet amusement' as Laxman's Common Man does would not do. That is the pose of the critic of Nehruvianism – one who had faith in its ideals but scoffed at its practice. Banerjee has no faith in the vision of Manmohan Singh's liberalisation. He paints the gloom that shrouds the ordinary person who must confront the State, but it is not enough to be gloomy for that would not capture the contradictions of 'India Shining'. Banerjee's drawings are lively, colourful and often funny. His are not the darkened pencil drawings that are so often used to evoke dystopia. India is not that; that would be too simple. As the Orientalists used to say – maliciously – India contains multitudes, a little this and a little that, with the palimpsest experienced differently depending on where you stand on the class ladder. Liberalisation emerges from the carapace of bureaucracy – the former benefitting those for whom the Nikes were within reach during the 1970s, and the latter encaging those who did not know what Nikes were or are. The new order does not invalidate the old but absorbs it. That is why the skeletal remains of the State and of cultural artefacts reveal themselves in Banerjee's book, pestering those who would like to void life of its history.

Banerjee does not have a Common Man. He does not have a firm basis for his uneasiness with liberalisation. Nor does he profess adherence to an ideological stance from which to tear apart the inequities. That is not his style. Neither is his work of the new kind of stylistic 'narrative non-fiction' on India, like Siddhartha Deb's The Beautiful and the Damned: A portrait of the new India (2011) or Sonia Faleiro's Beautiful Thing: Inside the secret world of Bombay's dance bars (2010). These works offer stories and reports that capture the lives and hopes of their actors, offering history as context but keeping the analysis imbedded in the prose. Nevertheless, even these careful and precise writers allow their adjectives to slip in and condemn this person or that one, revealing their preferences. Deb cannot help skewering the business-school magnate Arindam Chaudhuri anymore than he can help feeling kinship with the "ghost workers" of Kothur. Nor can Faleiro disguise her affection for Leela, whose philosophies of business and marriage allow Faleiro to become her stenographer.

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