“Odd parallel”.
That’s how you would, in all probability, frame your response to subsequent assertions.
“Not quite,” would be my riposte to your reaction, in the disputative vein…
Writing about this analogous similarity is necessitated by a recent conversation with my spinal therapist. It served as a reminder of a long-forgotten, four-decades-old exchange between the District Magistrate and Superintendent of Police of Meerut in Uttar Pradesh.
My conversation, the other day, started with the therapist’s standard query, “Hello, how are you?” Instead of “better” – my stock reply in this current phase of therapy – I mumbled, “Not good.”
Cutting the long tale short, I answered the anxious therapist’s “why, what happened?” by haltingly stating that we had, probably, prematurely increased the rigour of therapeutic exercises during my previous visit.
“Possibly, we could have waited for some more time,” she said ruefully and added that I must go back to doing only base-level routines at home besides reducing the duration and walking speed.
Now, the conversation I was reminded about.
It was an early autumnal afternoon in October 1982. For the greenhorn in journalism that I was back then, the first communal riot ‘assignment’ had taken me to Meerut a day ago and to the District Magistrate’s office that day.
He was a hostel mate’s elder sibling and this ensured ‘access’ to the imposing office room where he took stock of the prevailing situation in the city and nearby villages with senior colleagues of the police and district administration.
“Sir,” started a non-uniformed official, (not a police officer noted the cub reporter’s mind) “there is news of renewed violence from Shahgasa…”
“But the situation had begun improving and you recommended relaxation in curfew during evenings,” the DM said using an accusative intonation, the second part of which was directed at the police officer who unambiguously exuded authority and seniority, but became a tad ill at ease at this prod.
He had but to respond: “Last week after we relaxed the curfew in this area for a few hours and allowed some shops to open, we felt that people were ready to restart their businesses as they had suffered enough losses since September. We thought normalcy would prevail like in other localities…”
The police officer’s nano-second pause was enough for my Bhai Sahab to butt in morosely, “Shayad jaldi kar di…(Possibly we were hasty). We should have relaxed curfew gradually and not for five hours at a stretch during peak business hours. And even then, Section 144 should have continued.”
The top cop responded by saying that he had already ordered the rollback of curfew relaxations and imposition of Section 144 in the entire municipal limits besides applying more clamps on riot-prone villages – many of which pop up in headlines even now.
The therapist sported a somewhat regretful expression while conceding that the ‘setback’ was perhaps triggered by a hasty effort at returning to ‘normalcy’. In my mind’s eye, this bore a resemblance to the look on the officer’s face as he evaded the DM’s eyes while accepting the error in judgement.
But that moment soon passed and the officers took up other issues – civic facilities, distribution of essentials in curfewed colonies, medical emergencies, identification of dead bodies, care of the injured, and in hospital, and most importantly, progress with investigations and apprehending trouble-makers.
A couple of days in Meerut were sufficient to collect enough ‘meat’ for the story I was assigned to write by the magazine’s editor. While returning on a rickety UPSRTC bus that threw up the rear row of seats by several feet every time the tyres hit a pothole and on which I was perched, I was painfully reminded of the gnawing lower backache that was plaguing me for the past several weeks. The twinge had been triggered by a wrong step during a game of squash and was yet to go.
Back then, I was oblivious to this being the beginning of a lifelong challenge of managing spinal health and keeping the lower back pain-free. At that time, I would have labelled as alarmist, anyone who warned that this was one pain that would never go away.
The Meerut experience was also my initiation to a continuing journey through India’s communally polarised socio-political battlegrounds where only religious identity matters when identifying the ‘other’ and where politicos harness conflict for electoral gains.
But in 1982, still picking up the essential skills of journalism, I did not have the capacity to fathom that the riots, narratives, and viewpoints witnessed and heard in Meerut over a few days would not only ceaselessly resonate through the country over subsequent decades but would also considerably reconfigure India’s polity and social attitudes.
More than four decades after these twin experiences in quick succession – the back injury that confined me to the bed for a few days and exposure to a communal riot during which prejudice, fear, and anger led people to seek retribution even before being ‘wronged’, I began hesitatingly contending that social harmony was akin to the human body’s spinal column and vice versa; the body could function normally only when the back remained unaffected by pain or distress.
The minutest of tingles anywhere in the spinal column, lower, upper or neck regions, can lay aground even the healthiest and fittest of persons.
Likewise, if society is in turmoil, if there is disharmony between various groups, there can be no progress or development and everything else comes to a standstill. None of the ailments have fatal impact yet immensely disturb normal functioning.
Communalism or any other form of sectarian conflict, as a political ‘problem’, has spawned a vocabulary of its own. Flag and peace marches, citizens’ committees, all-party delegations, press conferences, news headlines, inquiry commissions, court-appointed ‘special’ investigative teams, and the list can go on. Most Indians are aware of this for the issue is what led to the Partition and remains a festering sore.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
Management of spinal health has a similar list ranging from machines to procedures and exercises. The objective of both sets of interventions is the same: limit damage whenever there is ‘breach’ of peace and ways to ‘regain’ past vigour.
In the past four decades, as my back literally became more of a pain – the condition even getting the medical name of ‘disc prolapse’ with qualifying alphanumeric entries following the diagnosis in the prescription – India too further slid down the precipice and began drowning in the cesspool of hate and prejudice.
Soon, I began drawing parallels between managing my lower back and India’s battles to ensure that political contestations remained restricted to ‘basic issues’ involving livelihood, security and betterment and not stray to conflicts based on religious identities.
In these overlapping tales, there was a third element that I became conscious of – the story of Sisyphus, the central character from the Greek legend.
In it, he is condemned by gods till eternity to roll a boulder up a hill, again and again. He does so despite the effort straining every muscle, nerve, and pore. Yet tragically, as he nears the top, every time, the rock rolls down again forcing him to start all over again.
Albert Camus, the French-Algerian intellectual who wore numerous hats – philosopher, writer, and journalist being among them – wrote the essay, The Myth of Sisyphus in which he presented him not as a tragic personality but as a hero who does not get daunted by the relentless struggle against absurdities of life.
Often, I felt my ‘back’ story, as well as India’s struggle to maintain social harmony, was akin to the situation of this character from Greek mythology. The effort was equally herculean for all – condemned to ceaselessly roll up the rock of punishment, pain or discord till the point where it could be figuratively ejected, only for it to roll back to the bottom of the slope.
As with my backache, when months pass without being bothered by reminders to keep taking care of the injured body part, periods occur when there is inter-community amity for days, months, years, almost till eternity, in towns, cities and states, till once again, the silliest of causes, triggers a minor clash and soon almost the entire populace gets engulfed in a ball of flames that defies dousing.
Sisyphus was punished to the ceaseless act for defying death. Neither I nor other members of society have supernatural powers to attract such a sentence. But the spirit of not abjectly surrendering is an intrinsic human characteristic, and challenges are inescapable in life because it is never meant to be a cakewalk for ordinary mortals.
No person is plagued by the same ailment like mine, nor is each society or nation locked in conflicts specific to our nation. But, parallels exist everywhere.
Overcoming the two challenges is essential if we wish to navigate towards egalitarian existence through the time available, for the self, as well as for the collective.
Despite the seemingly insurmountable task, the futility of this effort is yet to be accepted either by me or by others – the country as a whole. Probably because, these attempts are not meaningless, even though, Sisyphus like, we will again be pushed down, all the way to the bottom.
The labour to roll up the rock, push out the pain caused by impinged nerves and weakened muscles, or stem the cumulative anger generated by make belief histories, to ensure that society does not implode periodically, has to be seen as the reward.
It is an act that stands as a tribute to the human capacity to fight the odds at all times and not give up despite being up against a wall, even if always.
At this moment, I, with my back, and the nation, with a regime that promotes divisiveness and spreads prejudice, are quite Sisyphus-like, at what Albert Camus wrote, “The foot of the mountain.”
But we must never lose sight of “one’s burden”, the pain that partially incapacitates different body parts and the gory sight of the carbuncle that oozes puss and never heals.
It is this struggle and the resolve not to accept what the majority would probably deem as ‘fate’, that is more important than curing the back pain. It is more essential because finding a way to permanently resolve the discord, between disc and nerve and the muscles around it, is non-existent. The ruptured disc remains what is has become, not what it once was decades ago.
Likewise, India’s conflict-ridden inter-community relations cannot ever be permanently ‘settled’, but there can at best be a consensually stated or principled acceptance of India’s plurality.
The back pain and the disharmonious inter-community relationship have to be in a state of detente. To achieve this goal, the rock must be pushed up till the very edge. We must recall Camus’ words: “Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well…”
Camus asked his readers to “imagine Sisyphus happy”. Cure, although being a mirage, must be chased. But even in its elusion shall a sense of achievement be present, enough to fill one’s heart. For, did not the essayist state that the “struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s (woman’s too – my insertion) heart”. The confidence gained during ascendance is what will overcome our gloom when we once again begin the climb down to start the ascent all over again.
An NCR-based author and journalist, Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay’s latest book is The Demolition and the Verdict: Ayodhya and the Project to Reconfigure India. His other books include The RSS: Icons of the Indian Right and Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times. He tweets at @NilanjanUdwin.
