Well, the India game is over and everyone lost. Riots have engulfed the land, the navy has mutinied, and the Simla conference collapsed into irrelevance. We've left, too; no knighthoods likely, though we tried every trick in the book including honesty.Each player in the "Reacting to the Past" games is given a character and an aim, the failure to achieve which means you lose. Usually someone loses, but this time everyone did. Everyone was crestfallen - except for the Gamemaster, who seemed to be having the time of his life scuttling our every effort (and the American Indians' every effort) to stave off disaster. In the post-mortem he told us that this game was designed to produce this result, and the Instructor's Manual is full of ways in which the Gamemaster can ensure it. If we felt we'd been had with the promise, however counterfactual, that we might have achieved something different, so much the better. Sometimes good outcomes are not possible, a good thing for students - especially Americans - to learn.
Well I don't know. In one sense, yes, obviously it is a fantasy that the past can be changed. But other games - about the trials of Socrates, Galileo and Anne Hutchison, the French Revolution, the Wanli Emperor, etc. - are designed to be genuinely open-ended. (Only in the post-mortem are students reminded that history has already happened.) Why is the India game the exception? As my Kiwi teammate noted, for all its tragedies modern Indian history is actually in many respects a success story, something the materials we received and the content of the "post-mortem" debriefing made inconceivable. If Americans are generally too sanguine about historical opportunities, this experience suggests that the only other option - the flip side - is a grim and sadistic fatalism. It shouldn't, I suppose, be a surprise that the fatalism should show its face here: Orientalism is alive and well. And 'India' is the place in the western imaginary where time dissolves, where complexity overwhelms, where the inconceivable and the intolerable are inevitable.
Oh well, it's just a game, right? When I arrive in India - the real India, the real me - in two and a half weeks, it'll be a truer test. Wish me luck.
(By the way, the picture above was today's sunset. Below in a brief separate post are two other pictures you absolutely have to see.)
