Sedition, Sedition! |By Badri Raina| More often than not the meanings of things are clear and in your face, and yet our excess of education renders them needlessly and suspiciously complicated and ambiguous. Reason why holy books and religious mentors caution us to keep our curiosity under check. Curiosity kills not just the cat but stable edifices built with loving care over ages of received wisdom. By authoritative men mostly. Take this for instance: in America once at the university where I was hoping to acquire sophisticated knowledge of things, I posed, during a lunch hour, the following question to a batch mate who was a good seventh day Baptist: if there was one man in recent times who read the Sermon on the Mount like his life depended on it, that was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi; so tell me, come the day of judgement, would he be saved or consigned? My good Christian mentor took no more than the wink of a redeemed eye to answer that the same Gandhi would be consigned for the obvious reason that he was not baptized. That is how simple things can be which our fashionable penchant for complexity often render dangerously clouded. So tell me, what would you call an Indian who is of the opinion that Faiz Ahmed Faiz is a more thoughtful poet than Kavi Pradeep? A discerning critic? A man of great historical imagination whose view of nationalism laudably includes the wretched of the earth, as opposed merely territorial loyalty? Wrong everytime; the simple answer is seditious. Same for an Indian greatly learned in the intricacies of ghazal gayaki who prefers a Mehdi Hasan or a Ghulam Ali to many who aim to sing ghazals here at home. Or those Indians who rave listening to the uplifting soulfulness of an Abida Parveen or a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan-seditious. Or, heaven forbid, an Indian who praises the performance of a Pakistani cricket team, especially when playing against an Indian team-seditious, seditious, seditious. Reason why the Aussies ought to regard Bradman as the most seditious cricketer of all time: think that he could not name a single Australian batsman as worthy of his name but only a foreigner called Tendulkar. Which reminds me of how unconscionably seditious my late pater familias was, even as a Pandit: to the last day of his life he would insist that the best palak-meat ever to be had was at a dhaba in Lahores Anarkali bazaar and nowhere in India. Imagine the perfidy. Also that Sialkot made the finest carom boards he had ever played on. Sedition over and over again. Now, obversely, what would you call a famous Pakistani columnist, hawkish one at that, who recently wrote to say that the only memorable thing the Punjab ever produced was Maharaja Ranjit Singh; and wrote again to say that no singer ever came near the greatness of a Kundan Lal Sehgal and a Lata Mageshkar. Seditious? But of course not; you would call him a liberated Pakistani, what? Or that clutch of Pakistani bowlers and batters who insist Tendulkar was the greatest-seditious? More likely, fair-minded and non-ideogical Pakistanis, no? Or, that increasing number of young Pakistanis who laud Indian democracy and wish they had the same-seditious? Well. Well. Well. Or those raucous diasporic Indians, citizens of other countries, who never fail to cheer a visiting Indian team against the nationalist claims of their non-Indain citizenship-seditious? No siree, they may be ensconsced as citizens of other countries, but, by Ganesh, are they not the best Indians there are? Without a demur indeed. After all, the bulk of them are ardent Modi supporters, so what if they do dirt on their citizenship. Sauce for the goose need not always be sauce for the gander. There are those we love and those we hate, and there the matter ends. After all, an excess committed on a Kashmiri for questioning the quality of the states commitment to secularism is a nationalist act; but an excess committed on a saffron activist for doing the same is a horrendously anti-national brutality, is it not? Thus, an Indians praise of anything Pakistani is sedition, but a Pakistanis praise of anything Indian is a gratifyingly laudable and liberal event. Simple. Best that we do not overlook this thumb rule. What would you call an Indian who is of the opinion that Faiz Ahmed Faiz is a more thoughtful poet than Kavi Pradeep? A discerning critic? A man of great historical imagination whose view of nationalism laudably includes the wretched of the earth, as opposed merely territorial loyalty? Wrong everytime; the simple answer is seditious.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 08:59:57 +0000
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