THE JOURNALIST, columnist, novelist and screenwriter Manu Joseph is not a contrarian. Or so he insists, often exasperatedly. Never mind that he thinks India’s epidemic of farmer suicides, with thousands of indebted farmers taking their lives every year, is a “successful myth”, “a depression story, not an economics story.” Never mind that he describes higher education as a “false hope” held out to co-opt and tame the poor. Never mind that he once said that labels like “liberals, intellectuals and activists” don’t make sense to him because the people they apply to are all “equally the Taliban”, or that he dubbed The Wire, an independent news website known for its critical stance towards India’s ruling Hindu nationalist government, “an activist organisation.” No, Joseph preens, he’s only “on the side of sanity.”
“Contrarian” would suggest he’s trying too hard, which it’s doubtful Joseph would ever want to be accused of. Here he is in Firstpost: “My only interest in life is to write and to be of use to the people who say they like me.” And at the Times LitFest in 2017: “I work in morally ambiguous zones, so people call me a contrarian.” Here he is again, this time in Khaleej Times: “They are confused about me now and don’t wish to be exposed to what I might have to say.”
“No prophet is accepted in his hometown,” sighs Jesus Christ in the Gospel of Luke 4:24. If someone said that it was Joseph who had said that, we wouldn’t blink an eye. The New Testament, after all, is a story about a heretic’s life and death. In it, four friends profess their faith in Christ even as everyone else brands him an infidel. Like any respectable set of renegades, they can’t resist insulting the establishment. Some heretics must die to found a new religion. Unluckily for Joseph, he has been denied the martyrdom he seems to desire. With precious few followers or apostles, he is left to retell his story over and over, until the distance between the teller and the tale collapses altogether.
Such a fate has already befallen Indian journalism – the journalist becoming the journalism, as Joseph’s own columns make clear. Now, much of what passes as “news” is decidedly just opinion, every platform teeming with “deep dives”, “explainers” and podcasts flush with people who aren’t reporters, even if they’re taken to be so. All that we consume is fragmented into ahistorical, partisan tidbits, floating about reliably decontextualised. Every journalist is neatly slotted into left, right and centre, leaving only the role of the outlier unassigned. No one has snatched it up as swiftly as Joseph. It helps that the moral landscape itself has begun to turn as nihilistic as him.