H for History, N for Nuance
There aren’t real heroes anymore. And at the same time, there is more than enough room for all heroes. Such paradox plays gleefully into the hands of history, or more specifically, those who bother to read history. Yes, things come and go out of fashion but the way we understand our history stays clayed in the good ol’ fashion of seeing everything from one angle and assuming that view as the ultimate truth. No greys, please.
A simple exercise to explore this area is to ask oneself the definitive question: Am I a good or a bad person? The answer could swing either way, depending on how harsh you are on yourself. The bottomline being — if I am such a good person, why are bad things happening to me? Or, if I am such a bad person, how does it matter anymore?
The missing line here is nuance, and on digging deeper, ambiguity itself. More often than not, we fail to identify this distinction in others because we don’t care to look for it when it comes to ourselves either. We like to keep things nimble. Either this side or that. Leave no fence behind.
This disability could be precisely why our perspective of human history is distorted too. Take Gandhiji’s case. He is either a saint or a devil for the hasty generation of ours. Whichever side you take, you end up exaggerating. I read recently that he didn’t care about indentured laborers and only wanted to expand India’s economy through local traders. That’s utter bullshit. His very first project in Champaran is a proof that he wanted the bonded labour to dissolve in Bihar. And how was he going to do that? By removing British from business. You can fight economy only through economic means.
Conversely, there is no doubt Gandhi harboured regressive views about race, women and caste but they are from an era far away from us. His balancing act evidently got out of control. 13 years ago, even Obama stood against gay marriage. But then, with the change in era, views change too. It’s naive to compare 21st century to 20th century. Orwell’s writing was littered with homophobia but that doesn’t make his insightful predictions about our world any less worthy. We are constantly evolving as a massive society and it’s only a matter of time before our criteria for what is “good” and what can be “bad” changes again.
Because what we call acceptable has to be fought against by what we call unacceptable. It’s a yin-yang of a club; some are allowed, most aren’t. As a result, we create heroes out of anti-heroes and anti-heroes out of heroes, when a saner approach would be to accept the unacceptable while unaccepting the acceptable. Nuance, remember? The day can’t stretch long enough to keep the night away. Sooner or later, the nocturnal creatures must get out.
Since I mentioned Gandhiji, let’s look at somebody who can be on the other end of the room. I’ve been reading Annihilation of Caste, a splendid unpublished speech by Dr. Ambedkar, so, let’s say he is standing at the other side. Given his reputation for not giving a damn about reputations and sticking to the truth more fiercely than the person who wrote The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Dr. Ambedkar fits the bill for this blog post. However, let’s not belittle these historic giants by creating a caricature of their beliefs.
It’s petty to create friction where there was none in the first place. For instance, you often read how he had to fight his way to claim the authorship of the Constitution. Which is bizarre given the pull he enjoyed because of his legal acumen. At the end of the tryst, Dr. Ambedkar was an obvious choice to head the Constitutional Draft committee. But if you go by some exaggerated accounts, it sounds like he was fighting against the Congress to win his place in the Committee. Which wasn’t the case at all. Everybody under the roof recognized his proficiency in the world of law.
What makes Dr. Ambedkar fascinating is his no-holds-barred style of rhetoric. He is probably the only man who survived 1947 to emerge as the shining beacon of truth because he remained unbiased. He didn’t spare anyone be it the British or Gandhi or Jinnah or Congress or Muslim League or Manusmriti or Islam or Vatican… he criticized everyone equally. An unusual gold standard in Indian history. Basically, he was Manto from the political spectrum.
Today, the problem is because of the right-leaning government, there is little to no interest in reading what he had to say about all the other subjects. Once we go through all the probable prose, we’ll realize that the concept of anointing heroes and antiheroes is completely farcical. It’s easy to discredit Gandhiji for his achievements just to ensure extra brownie points for others, when all we need to do is explore (read: read) more. They all did what they thought needed to be done at a given point of time. Just like we, the lesser mortals, do.
Taking sides for the heck of taking sides is a shallow way of peering through history. History, after all, is read by those who don’t have a say in its writing.
