Poster of Mother India

For about three months now, I’ve been writing a small column for the French periodical, Courrier International. My job, in it, is to gloss an Indian word from an accompanying article on India; so far the column has appeared in French, and this is the first time that four instalments, placed in sequence below, appear in the original English. The four words discussed are kisan, mata, neta, and angrezi. I know an Indian reader would already be familiar with their meanings; but, speaking from experience, I’ve noticed that a native reader might find interpretations meant for the non-native intriguing and even strangely instructive: thus, for instance, my fascination with the section on Calcutta in the Lonely Planet guide. It’s on this principle that I offer to a local audience what was meant for a foreign one.

This word, kisan, has been buried for more than 30 years in my subconscious — and would have probably remained there had not the Courrier International prompted me to exhume it. The subconscious I speak of was formed in the final 20 years of the Nehruvian nation-state: in the Sixties, in the decade I was born in and in which Nehru died, and in which his legacy — of patrician socialism and a cautious and watchful capitalism, of a country that made room, at once, for agrarian development and industrialization — seemed to determinedly outlive him; and in the Seventies, when that misguided but noble legacy was used by his daughter to perpetuate her own reign, and then finally put to rest. Somewhere, in the midst of all that governmental hymning, my brain absorbed the word kisan and its importance — a word that means ‘farmer’, and which conjured up in the child’s mind a gaunt, dark North Indian peasant, turbaned, solitary, dressed spotlessly in white. This man represented an ambivalent continuity between the past and the present. I think it was Nehru’s short-lived successor, the unlikely Lal Bahadur Shastri, who coined the slogan, “Jai jawan!” especially in the wake of the conflict with China: jawan meaning, ordinarily, ‘youth’, but, here, referring to the soldier: “Victory to the soldier!” But the slogan was two-pronged — “Jai jawan, jai kisan!” — thus transforming those gaunt, intent, dignified peasants into foot-soldiers on our march of progress. Another register of the word incontrovertibly entered my consciousness before I was 10 years old: for ‘Kissan’ was also a brand of jam and tomato ketchup. I inevitably began to forget the peasant; kisan became, for what seemed like forever, a morningtime and afternoon condiment.

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This word, mata, is full of ambivalence for me. From its shape and sound, anyone familiar with the Indo-European languages would be able to guess its meaning: ‘mother’. It must have been from a handful of words such as this one — mata, pita, mrityu: ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘death’ — that scholars like William Jones, in the fatiguing humidity and ennui of 19th-century Bengal, arrived at the astonishing but inescapable conclusion that some of the languages of the East and of the West came from a common source, and formed a common pool of words and root-words. Mata, in conjunction with similar words from Sanskrit, gave birth to the idea of a world civilization, to the notion that the human sensibility had an extraordinarily rich history in antiquity even outside the Mediterranean basin. Probably from the late 19th century in India, however, the word began to be appropriated by nationalists and Hindu revivalists. And so it’s not unusual to find, as the freedom struggle and nationalism (and, secretly, revivalism) begin to gather strength, vivid, kitsch representations of the great peninsula, the sub-continent, as a woman, the country tapering towards her toes in Kanyakumari, Gujarat and Assam becoming her blouse-covered shoulders, the then inviolate and now wracked Jammu and Kashmir forming the face, the pure but commanding gaze, and Uttar Pradesh (where her breasts heave), Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and all of the South, wrapped and protected by the inexhaustible sari. This was mata, the motherland, resurgent or imprisoned, as the mood of the poster would have it, already not quite ancient, already modern, slightly flirtatious. It’s this Sanskrit, ‘high’ register — mata (which lent itself almost inevitably to the Brahminical tone of our nationalistic rhetoric, to the reconstruction of our national heritage with mixed consequences, to our many-hued kitsch in Hindi cinema) that I find myself uncomfortable with. The monosyllabic ma, which most of us call our own mothers, and which the mystic Ramakrishna Paramhansa called Kali, is so much more intimate and direct: in its unpremeditated affection, its desperate appeal, in acknowledging its object is at once abiding and temporal, as the world is.

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Neta: meaning ‘leader’, or, in common Hindi and North Indian parlance, ‘political leader’, or just ‘politician’. In its phonetic proximity to netra, or ‘eye’, I wonder if it shares a common root with that word, and possesses, therefore, a hint of ‘visionary’. Like so many words in the public domain, alas, it is a debased term; unlike democracy, where the represented are constantly betrayed by their representatives, here, the word, with its soaring, outstretching meaning, is let down again and again by the tribe it would represent. And what a tribe, these netas and parliamentarians, often thieves and murderers, with longstanding cases pending against them. Come the elections every four or five years, and they will stand before the electorate — these netas who’d been everywhere but in their constituency for three years or more — arms folded, palms joined together, a picture of abrasive, poorly manufactured humility. May the gods keep the Opposition from power, or the court cases will ripen suddenly as a result, and the calculatingly cowering neta might find himself in jail, at least for a few days. The word is hardly ever used any more without irony. It reached its apogee in the 20th century with Subhash Chandra Bose, a brilliant renegade from the Congress, a great but not uncontroversial nationalist who created the Indian National Army, a ragbag force that left, nevertheless, a profound mark on the freedom movement. Known to the Indian people as netaji (ji being an honorific), he disappeared with the aeroplane he was in while fleeing to Japan, in 1945. Until even about a decade ago, some people were still waiting for him to return: as if he might emerge, blinking, as those ancient World War II Japanese soldiers did in certain islands. After that first neta, it was difficult to find another.

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As I write, the paraphernalia of Independence Day (which occurred two days ago at the time of writing this) recedes. The men at the traffic lights, hawking two small flags leaning towards each other, a coat of arms propped upon a tiny platform, have disappeared. On August 15, 61 years ago (how can one escape repeating this? — it’s like a magic spell which, uttered, makes us who we are), the Angrez — Urdu for ‘the English’ — left this country. Their language, Angrezi, is extant here even now. But the fact that the Urdu word (and not a Sanskrit-derived one) is still widely used in north India, as are its variations (in Bengal, we say Ingreji), reminds us of an irrevocable historical transition that took place two hundred or so years ago, from the world of the Mughal courts, where Persian was the official language, and into which the Angrez arrived with their unspoken intentions, to the world that came to be, where the English ruled as did their tongue. Angrez still contains within it a hint of the original surprise, admiration, superciliousness, and faint distaste with which the court must have greeted the visitor; and angrezi a residue of the early puzzlement at this bird-like, modulated, staccato language. And yet how soon, and how unforeseeably, that language would become a norm, a context, a form of imprisonment, a pathway from one landscape to another. It would carry within it renewal and doom, faith and duplicity, knowledge and violence, in a way the resplendent court couldn’t have guessed at. So much has passed in our own time which we thought was as immemorial as human nature: the ideologies of the old Left; the spiritual empire of the Soviet Union. Angrezi originates in an era that had grown used to its indefinite certainties, its rhythms, its habits and expectations, probably never (how could it?) seriously dwelling on the notion of its own termination.