Tune

Essay-satire

Tune

“I am easily influenced. Compared with me a weather vane is Gibraltar.”
Franklin Pierce Adams (1881-1960), US journalist and humorist.

Empire, Imperial–these are terms now found adorning old boards of third-generation owned medicine stores, renovated heritage properties and obscure brands of thingies worn to practice safe sex. Even in a unipolar world dominated by challenging philosophies derived from The Quick and the Dead and High Noon, the only talk of Empire is ghostly, whispered out of the collapsible gates at the silent and forlorn Bijou waiting to be overwhelmed by a multi-screened successor. But once, still in the living memory of a rare old soldier on a Queen’s Pension who spoke intensely, his white eyebrows a waggling, Empire meant everything! Empire was one word that stood in for two to describe the universe, its twin presiding deities, its mother and its father - its mai-baap! When White Brow was young, coins were struck with loyalty on one side and treason on the flip. The choices? There weren’t any unless you thought there was anything to choose from between order and chaos. The prevailing tune then was best expressed by a brass band playing a Sousa march and, if you listen carefully, you can still hear the thump of the big drum. I never asked White Brow about the stirrings of nationalism or the decades he has lived through in an independent India - it would have served only to bewilder an old man.

In childhood and even as a young reporter on The Pioneer, Rudyard Kipling could hear the sound of the sitar clearly. He celebrated the enthusiasms of the Gungas, Kims and Lamas he wrote about with gusto and appreciated the derring-do of 16th century Mogul ruler Sher Shah Suri who tamped down the 2,575 km. Grand Trunk Road from Kabul to Calcutta. Kipling wrote democratically then, with that lump-in-the-throat-inducing you’re a better man than I tone. His attitudes towards the “native” were formed from the fun he had interacting with the Kipling family retainers in Bombay where father Lockwood ran the JJ College of Art. Lockwood did send Rudyard off to be miserable through the set-piece public-school education back “Home” but it didn’t cure Rudyard of his sympathies for the underdog. As a young man he wore his White Man’s Burden lightly, like a cashmere cloak and not like a rain-sodden great-coat!

The change in the tune came later. Just as well as it turned out. Because had Rudy kept the world-view of his childhood and youth he would have ended up as just another minor Raj writer penning his thoughts while doing his colonial time in near obscurity. What made him a celebrity writer in his own lifetime and gave him his exalted place in history is the fact that Kipling gradually changed into the most prolific publicist and defender of Empire travelling to South Africa and Rhodesia to enthuse John Bull at his post. But then why do we still read Kipling today? Because now, we switch off the Sousa march and let the sun shine through the genius of his writing. We are confident in our brownness, yellowness and blackness as we turn the pages and unembarrassed in our whiteness as well. We feel easy like this because RK the publicist is long dead and what a lost cause it turned out to be after all.

Looking at this, we realise a lot of tunes change, for all of us, they grow tiresome, grow silent and just when we think that’s it, all there is, here they are again making a come-back! So perhaps it’s patience we should exhibit along with instituting a search for motives buried far below the surface when confronted with a leopard attempting to change its spots. It gets easier if we regard the writers of some inconvenient proverbs as incorrigible right-wingers and upholders of the status quo. Because becoming someone else has been accorded serious “make-over” status now and is a tried-and-tested formula used by the prescient to very good effect on their “growth.”

Which brings me to the two new biographies out on Mao, one by Jonathan Spence and the other by Philip Short. It turns out, not surprisingly, for the Great Helmsman, who started a China down on its knees on the path that has raised it to near greatness today-that he was also responsible for the deaths of over 20 million of his own people in the process. Short says “history is laid down slowly in China” and “a final verdict on Mao’s place…is still a very long way off.” Spence, on his part, tells us that Mao, aged 27 then, wrote feelingly, in a 1920 essay on Lenin, that, “a forced attempt at construction simply will not work.” However, the Mao of later years had changed his tune beyond all recognition – he now fostered fear with constant purges, caused immense suffering with bizarre social transformation experiments and saw the horrific effects of all these pogroms as just so much acceptable collateral damage. Despite the anguish of the millions who died under the wheel, Mao in his mausoleum, can’t be expected to care over-much when the legacy grew up so nicely into present day China.

What is certain, from the worm’s eye view, is that dancing to a given tune and changing it are undeniably two sides of the same coin. It makes little difference to us worms. And, aurally speaking, it’s sweet Melody, not Feed-back (those howling noises that Hendrix extracted from his amplifiers sometimes, not the result of opinion polls or hotel-guest surveys), that changes into Grunge when it starts to bore, the better to express all those very real negative emotions! Tunes live in the ether and play in our heads, massaging our cranium, rib-cage, pit, gut and gonads, but from the inside. They buzz when we up the audio and startle when they stop. Tunes work well in the shower, mist-wrapped and warm. Tunes become anthems, when enough people tune in, capable of programming whole nations into Stepford Wives like conformity.

Personally, I prefer tunes one-on-one, in cars, in bars, even in muzak-filled elevators, in fact, all enclosed, womb-like places, but that’s just me. Tunes roll really well too, pebble smooth, comfortable being metaphors of change. Change the arrangement or up the tempo and it becomes a thing transformed. The change can be dramatic, more so in politics, as I’ve been saying all night, than elsewhere. And current day India still answers to its pretty British given name, influenced by the Indus, now in Pakistan. We didn’t mind at all as long as our frontiers stretched from Afghanistan to Burma. What fun could be had by one-and-all running up and down Sher Shah Suri’s Grand Trunk from end-to-end. The trouble began in our fractured psyches when 480 km. of the GT between Peshawar and Lahore went missing one hot August midnight in 1947.India was left with a mere 2,000 km. that link, after a fashion, only six of our modestly proportioned states. The pining for the lost arm, albeit overwhelmingly Muslim, has gone on unabated for 58 years. The arm, on its part, has been mortally afraid of being seized upon when it wasn’t looking and being grafted back forcibly on to the heaving and wholly unacceptable Hindu body politic. This has been the tune complete with periodic sabre-rattling, three bloody wars, constant skulduggery, mistrust, chicanery and appalling acts of terrorism thrown in free-of-charge.

And then, mere days ago, the hawkiest-hawk in India’s body politic, he of the Rath Yatra and Babri Mosque demolition, the steely nay-sayer of the Agra summit, decided to very astutely change his tune. It’s true that there is much consternation in India and reams of newsprint have already been expended on trying to understand the move because the song the Leader of the Opposition and President of India’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP) has chosen to sing is from Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s song-book. But isn’t Mohammad Ali Jinnah the founder of Pakistan, a country that largely came into being because of Jinnah’s strident advocacy of the two-nation theory for Hindus and Muslims?? Mr. Advani, picked out a particular tune in which Jinnah said that Muslims and other minorities should live in harmony and peace in Pakistan to find a way to call him “secular”. Justifiable outrage in India apart, Advani has received very kind notices in Pakistan because here was the master hawk from across the border recognising the right of the arm to live its own life on its own terms. It would have brought a tear to the eyes of the early summiteers Begin and Sadat. They understand intractable, Oh do they just! So what’s next? Smiling faces and casinos in Kashmir? Gorbachev coming by to give us a tutorial on Glasnost? Bush giving us nice Indians a high chair at the Security Council? From the worm’s eye view this is wonderful for the people of the sub-continent and the businessmen are liking it very much too. The ruling Congress and its allies are miffed with this blatant hijack of its we are secularists and here to save the nation from those nasty communal forces platform but they’re not saying very much yet. And despite the turbulence at present, this is an audacious political make-over for Lal Krishna Advani that will propel him to the bride-spot, electorate willing, he’s definitely caught the bouquet this time, so no more bridesmaid for us to kick around!

(1,590 words)

By Ghatotkach
Saturday, 11 June 2005