LIBERATING INDIAN MIND-6

HISTORIAN PLACE IN SOCIETY

“Can we not Make our gossip more fruitful?” He proposed.

How could I reject such a sensible invitation. I promptly agreed, but with a precondition, “We shall not take ideological position.”
I was wondering how this idea came to his mind. He and his likes had all along been surviving on taunts and sarcasm on those who did not fall in line. I was always reminded of the wayward youths meeting in the evening on the culvert at the turn of our colony and passing witty remarks on passersby in mumbled voices normally audible to their own group. just to fight their vacancy and frustration. Behavior of Communist party and its offshoots in India had a similitude from its very inception. He, being a cardholder of the party, hardly be receptive to anything serious unless recommended so by the party bosses. When I shared my mind he lashed back, “I know through what phase you people are passing and in what dire need you are to cover your own blankness, otherwise you would not have brought politics when I silently agreed to refrain from it.”

We laughed in union to celebrate the tit for tat.

“I really want to know what you meant by non-toxic knowledge? What you meant by toxicity and who were you targeting to. No, I am not ignorant either, but if my guess is correct, you meant the Marxist historians. Am I right?”

“Not Marxist historians alone, although they are not spared, and for our purposes they are more debased than those whom they followed.”

He waited for further elaboration.

“Before I proceed further, I want to ask you a question. Do you know who is the most powerful person in a society?”

“The ruler, no doubt.” He said emphatically.

“That is what I thought myself, but on a hindsight, I found the rulers are ruled themselves and those who rule the rulers enjoy the advantage.

He felt a bit elated, “Oh! that is true of the democracy, I agree. The ruling class, that is bourgeois, is the actual ruler and the ruling parties, whichever they be, take their line from them and that is the reason why parties claiming polar differences behave much like the same once they are in power. The parties change but the ruling class remains the same.”

But even the ruling classes are guided and invisibly governed by their adulators, those who fuel their desire to reach the zenith surpassing their likes, those who change the minds even of mighty kings to desert the power and throne acquired with pain and patience to become a recluse, who coaxed millionaires having so miserly amassed their riches to donate it all for the cause that could earn them fame, who incited through admiration the emperors symbolically retaining their crowns and throne but spend their personal life like sanyasis. It is the adulators, specialing in the art of laudatory who rule the rulers, control the society and in that lied the secret of power enjoyed by the Brahmans as a class.

“But why did you bring this nonsense at the center of our discussion? Had we not proposed to discuss toxicity of epistemology”

“Just to remind you that of all the adulators the historians have been the cleverest and poisonous to their nails.”

“What about the poets who glorified the rulers?”

“They lacked the art, were non assertive, were caught by their misplaced exaggerations, and as such were rated just above the Shudras by the Brahmins despite their claim to Brahmanical order. But those among them who wrote Puranas, the legal codes, the epics intermixing distorted history with simulated history enjoyed the power even over Brahmanas. Mind it toxic accounts of the past in whatever name, be it history, myth or story, are stronger weapons than objective presentation and analysis of the actual happenings and deeds. But they, like pestilence, damage the entire society. Mind it, all fabrication and suppression and exaltation is toxic in nature.”

“You have such a clever way of cursing those you dislike that you shoul,in our age of intellectual property, get it patented in your name.”

“Herein lies the ploy. My dear either you either you failed to understand what I told so plainly or you lack the courage to bear the truth. Have you heard the adage, अप्रियस्य च सत्यस्य वक्ता श्रोता च दुर्लभः. Mind it, not only speaker is the rarest of the rare, but also one who listened it. Truth is the most caustic and corrosive of all the chemicals. Carelessly handled, it puts at risk the life, well being and even prestige of its votary and yet strange is the make of the spine of such freaks that they can not think and do otherwise. And as I told you this singularly makes them so formidable that even autocrats quake and shake at their very name.”

“Stop it! he shouted laughing. There is an end to self-adulation. Living cozily as an egg under a sitting hen you talk in phrases borrowed from martyrs. Is’t it ridiculous.” He rose to leave me. I was left with no alternative but to follow his footsteps.