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| We, the corrupt |
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With the first decade of this century has come a growing realization
that corruption is not limited to the state and its affiliates. Films
like Life in a Metro and Page Three present the possibility of the
existence of social and moral corruption outside the immediate purview
of politicians and bureaucrats. As the aura of the state recedes from
the urban imagination we begin to find more and more depictions of a
structured and structural social corruption in which the line between
corruption backed by political or administrative power and corruption
backed by other kinds of power begins to get blurred. But Raag
Darbari, Shrilal Shukla's classic novel, had already demonstrated
forty years ago - when the socialist state and its particular brand of
putrefaction were beginning to come into its own in a big way - that
corrupt governments, like corrupt people, spring from corrupt
societies.
Raag Darbari is widely celebrated as an object lesson in the art of
the one-liner. (just one example: ``Babu Rangnath tumhare vichar bahut
oonche hai. Par kul milakar usse yahi saabit hota hai ki tum gadhe
ho'') But self-indulgent humour, no matter how high the quality, in
the face of an unjust and degenerate system would be an act of
complicity. And so we see that within the comic impulse lies the
painful cognizance of a dark and oppressive reality. As one story
layers on another there is a feeling that the act of telling is an
attempt maintain the integrity of the moral core that lies within each
person, a desperate endeavour to define a moral existence by
describing its opposite. Conflict arises, we begin to realize, not
from the corruption of society but from the moral urge within the
individual that prevents him from accepting his given role in the
corrupt scheme, or prevents him from being at peace if he does.
The weakness of Raag Darbari is that the stand-in for our conscience,
Rangnath, is shown to be an outsider to Shivpalganj. In fact the novel
begins with his crossing city limits into the ``ocean of rural
India.'' His time in the village is a season in hell, and although his
rejection of it is seen as an act of cowardice (the passionate section
called ``palayan sangeet'' is one of the most lyrical passages of
Indian writing in the twentieth century) it is nevertheless
possible. He comes from outside, and to the outside he will return.
In contrast to Rangnath, Satte, the narrator of Pehla Padav, Shukla's
1987 novel, doesn't want to run away. When we first meet Satte, he has
just finished a long period of being trained in the school of life by
being a leading light of a group of thuggish student ``daily
passengers'' for whom the Indian Railways provides free transport as
well as a fertile ground for stealing from people and molesting women.
He reverses Rangnath's journey and moves from village to city where he
becomes the overseer of a house being constructed for Parmatmaji, a
minor politician who happens to have married a former object of
Satte's affection. At this construction site his now objectless
affection finds a new target in Jasoda, a Bilaspuri labourer.
The mysterious death of Jasoda's ganja-smoking husband, Neta, is the
hand that shields the flickering wick of Satte's conscience. The
change in Satte's attitude is slow and often suffers setbacks. When he
aligns himself with the now widowed Jasoda and decides to discover who
killed Neta, he goes about it in the sly and roundabaout ways that he
has learned in the daily passenger's school. Satte is sensitive enough
to realizes that no matter how low in the heirarchy he lies there are
those far below him who can never change their lot no matter how hard
they try and, and he is courageous enough to dare to sympathise with
them, and intelligent enough to realize that an open expression of
this sympathy would be disastrous.
Line for line, Pehla Padav is as funny a book as Raag Darbari. But the
despair of Pehla Padav is different from the despair of Raag
Darbari. Satte's realization that he has a conscience that, despite
his best efforts to kill it, refuses to die brings with it an
acceptance that he must now live a life which squares up against
corruption and attempts to fight it. There is no naive idealism here,
no preachy moral high ground. Just a simple idea: if you cannot live
with corruption, you have to resist it. And the understanding that
when you fight against a debased and entrenched system, you fight not
because you believe you will win, you fight because you must, because
that is the only way you can ever be at peace with yourself.
Shukla's journey from Raag Darbari to Pehla Padav, from Rangnath to
Satte, is a journey from fear into wisdom, a journey from despair into
courage. It is the kind of journey that makes a reader feel that
somewhere below the surface there is a spring of clear water that
nourishes the roots of this ugly twisted tree.
This piece first appeared on 21st March 2008 on Outlookindia.com. |
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