Us And Them

“I can’t be a pessimist because I am alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed to
believe that life is an academic matter. So I am forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive. Whatever, we must survive.”

—James Baldwin on May 24, 1963, at the apartment of Robert Kennedy, who was US attorney general in the John F Kennedy administration

“How’s one going to get through it all? How can you live if you can’t love? And how can you live if you do?”

—James Baldwin, Another Country

I will begin with a story. Yet again.

In this prolonged crisis where I have often wondered about this “othering” politics that’s rampant with unspeakable crimes like lynching because the other is suspected of eating beef, I have often gone back to stories within the family and without to find an antidote.

Because stories about love must be told and retold as acts of resistance to the rampant politics of hate that perpetuates “otherisation” of any offending identities and as we begin to assess the complex questions in this issue about politics of ethics and emotions, we must attempt an answer, an antidote to what we are experiencing—the rise of illiberalism, populist authoritarianism and anti-pluralism.

In the brothel in the red light district of Kamathipura in Mumbai where I have spent a considerable amount of time tracking the lives of people, the one enduring truth was that love sustained them. The family unit here was not a product of bloodline but of people who had come together to form a bond to resist systems that rejected them since they didn’t fit in the “collective identity” framework.

When I first met Z, the eunuch who ran the brothel in Gulli no. 1, it was for a story on adoption by eunuchs. Over the years, I met others. Their stories were similar. They had been the “offending identities” who had been ostracised and had ended up here because they didn’t have a choice. But they decided to fight together. They came from different faiths. In a corner in the brothel, their deities had been placed. It was a place of confluence and coexistence. It has been more than a decade. A decade is enough for disintegration, but they survived.

When I was young, I saw in my house a room with four doors, four windows and two beds that had been aligned with each other. They were placed next to each other despite their different designs. This was the room where two women who dared to confront their identities shared. One was the legitimate wife, an upper caste Hindu who had to reconcile with the fact that her husband had got home another woman. The other was a tribal who had converted to Christianity.

The wife went to the other woman with an offering of paan and invited her to be part of the family. In the family albums, they are both dressed in similar saris posing together. They chose friendship over identity. They loved each other because they had overcome their respective identity crisis.

My grandmother had let go of the status that came with being the wife. She had understood the delusions of these constructed identities that could alienate her further. They figured they would need to re-examine their identities to get through. They chose love. They were no longer the victims or the perpetrators.

Instead of reconciling, the woman chose to do something that wasn’t a compromise but a manifestation of understanding and love, a post-categorical love that is tough and philosophical, the kind we need today to counter the rise of illiberalism. Love is secular. It is a political force.

***

I have often gone back to James Baldwin, an American writer and civil rights activist, whose work centered on race, politics and sexuality. When I first read Sonny’s Blues, a story about a black algebra teacher and his reaction to his brother’s drug addiction, arrest and recovery, I knew Baldwin was proposing the idea of love against the darkness of our times, the need to escape spaces that are made up not just of physical and social coordinates but also, self-definition. Love is resistance.

Love belongs to the realm of the particular and the universal at the same time. It isn’t restrained by time and space. It also means breaking free from the trap of assigned identity, which also manifests dualistic relationship between external and internal forces for an inclusive political world.

Politics of emotions works on aligning and marginalising people on the basis of identity. At the core of Baldwin’s politics of love, lay the question of identity. The love he proposed was philosophical, confrontational and based on self-examination of everything that constructs an identity. Without loving oneself, one couldn’t love the other.

The possibility of violence is a reality that we have witnessed and have even rationalised to avoid confronting who we are to maintain the status that we assign or are assigned. That’s what our identities become. There are bitter partisan divisions and adjustments in new frameworks of alternate truths that work on the principle of repetition and become more abiding by the day.

Emotions run high. Rage, hate, apathy and fear have led to political polarisation that has degraded democracies. In a post-truth world, feelings trump facts. Histories are edited for identity formation and to perpetuate conspiracy theories. Our WhatsApp groups are instances where ostracisation of the other becomes the means of cementing hate with an intended extinction of any identity that doesn’t cater to faith and race of the majority in a post-truth world. Deception is prevalent in the media-driven world. The theme that most media seem to work with is “otherisation”.

Baldwin’s politics of love had concern for public good. Although it elevated the role of feeling in judgement which Hannah Arendt warned against in her letter to Baldwin in 1962, it is a valid force, a resistance to the subversion of this simple act of inclusion of identities to mean very simplistic notions—like the kind of love for the country that excludes the other.

“In politics, love is a stranger. Hatred and love belong together. You can afford them only in private and, as a people, only so long as you are not free,” wrote Arendt.

But emotions are no longer strangers in politics. Love and hatred belong together; love can trump hatred.

Emotions have been considered at odds with rational society but this hyper rationalist liberal viewpoint doesn’t hold anymore. Baldwin had talked about an identity crisis. Who we are is a question that we would rather not answer, so we align ourselves to status. That status must be an elevated one, which makes us insecure. Why are we obsessed with superiority? Is this a rationalisation and mobilisation of economic exploitation to give some sense of value to ourselves?

“Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up,” wrote Baldwin. To love is to rethink our sense of reality and it honours the dignity and freedom of the other. That’s a political act because it means coming to terms with history and questioning it. Love can reclaim the lost promise of democracy. It alone can condemn the exploitative logic of capitalism. It can imagine new modes of relationality. It can redeem societies, people and histories.

The answer and antidote is the politics of love. In this issue which came out of a discussion with Prof. Ajay Gudavarthy about his book Politics, Ethics and Emotions in ‘New India’, we look at the role that emotions play in Indian politics. There are many questions that this issue puts forth.

Those are worth asking. For our sake.

Love could be the answer. I am an optimist like Baldwin. I have put my faith in love stories.