Perhaps I'm a bit retrospectively traumatized by India because of what I'm reading. I'm just finishing Suketu Mehta's brilliant book about Mumbai, Maximum City: Bombay Lost & Found. Fearless Mehta hangs out with people who incited communal riots, asking them what it feels like to set someone on fire (but everyone seems to think more riots are coming, and bigger than last time) and then cozies up to gangster hit-men, while - with their enthusiastic support - relaying their stories to Bollywood directors, who need to make sure their country audiences are satisfied with every scene of a film lest that trash the cinema or have their friends set it on fire. Before that I read Amitav Ghosh's exquisite The Shadow Lines, which - SPOILER - describes with extraordinary layering of stories recalling earlier stories the consequences of a riot which nobody even remembers; what unites people on the subcontinent, Ghosh's narrator writes, is the knowledge that a riot might break out at any moment.
I guess I felt that danger on my way back to Delhi when my driver, incensed at being cut off in some particularly unpardonable way by the driver of a bus, blocked all the traffic on this main highway between Jaipur and Delhi and jumped out of the car, ready for a fistfight, as the bus driver and several conductors spilled out of the bus trapped behind us rolling up their sleeves (and I sat very quiet in the back of the car trying not to be noticed). I guess road rage is a worldwide phenomenon from which I'm shielded by living without a car, but the violent anger which suddenly erupted in a man who had seemed gentle and mild-mannered until that moment (and which kept simmering for another twenty minutes, as he hurled abuse at every other driver on the road before finally pulling over at a rest stop and disappearing into the bathroom for half an hour to cool off) was unlike anything I've ever seen. But perhaps the point is that rage, while seemingly unbounded and out of control, was expressed in a setting in which it could not actually spiral into real violence? It seems to me now - after my friend in Gurgaon told me "this sort of thing happens one journey out of three" - that the outburst was well staged, happening by design at a place where police were instantly on hand to force my driver back into the car before anyone actually came to blows, letting him vent his anger but avoid an actual brawl. This insight came much later; at the time I felt the driver'd nearly gotten me killed.
Or maybe India seems retrospectively seething with potential violence because of the way one of my gifts for my sister has backfired. I was so pleased with myself for having found picture books in English of just the length preferred by my 4-year-old nephew, Tales from Panchatantra - the source of perhaps half of all the children's books I saw, and one of the world's oldest collections of stories to boot. But, while intended for little children, these collections of animal stories turn out to be stories I'd not want any little child to hear, most involving the killing of foolish animals by shrewd ones, prey by predators, predators by prey. One story, "The ass has no brains," tells of a fox who persuades a foolish donkey that the lion wants to appoint him his minister, then, when the lion has killed the donkey, persuades him kings should bathe before eating, and eats the donkey's brains, a delicacy; when the king comes back and notices, the wily fox says "the ass has no brains, otherwise he wouldn't have come here!" In another, "The crab and the stork," a stork convinces the animals in a small pond shrinking with drought that he will take them to a bigger pond he knows, but of course simple flies somewhere and eats them - until the crab's his passenger, figures out what's going on, and bites the stork's head off.
I know, the Disneyfied view of a "circle of life" in which nobody actually ever gets harmed is a fantasy, and European fairy tales are full of horrors of their own, though wolves seem the only natural predators to warn children of. Besides, when the Panchatantra tales were first told 2500+ years ago - as political philosophy, statecraft for the sons of princes - predators were real dangers, and the fact of animals killing others was a part of life - as, indeed it still is, though citified people like me only see animals as pets and in the meat section of the supermarket. But still, tell these stories to children? If may be a fiction that different kinds of animals should be friends (and speak English), a representation of an ideally integrated diverse society. But I'd prefer that - even as a political philosophy! - to these machiavellian stories which depict a world of natural enemies who will kill you while pretending to be your friends if you don't kill them first or at least trick them into killing each other. Isn't this how to sow the seeds for communal riots from the youngest age?
Or am I just thinking like a 10-year old, as Americans supposedly do. Perhaps the achievement of Indian democracy is that riots don't break out more often than they do, even though there's every reason to fear them in a society of limited resources. Perhaps it's wiser to see social peace as an improbable achievement which will inevitably produce rumblings of dissent and threat (and requires encouragement and realistic expectations), rather than a natural state of affairs prevented only by exceptionally selfish and divisive people? Perhaps the latter is no less likely to generate riots, or internment camps?
