There are, i believe, many places like Dumka, in the map of India.Places where the native lives in exile:forced,condemned and quiet.This native population is usually an elderly and middle-aged multitude who cant speak in English and good Hindi,whose children live far away chasing either the blend of the feudal-corporate dream or getting what is known as education in our world.This population suffers from a defect of vision following sixty years of a post-colonial nation state that has let it see only defective systems of governance and culture.
I am aware of the obscurity of my expression and am rather unashamed about it.Important political theorists call this region the cow-belt and the term is quickly losing its derogatory connotations.The area has found new states,Jharkhand and Chhatisgarh in our constitutional framework.
No newspaper is complete these days without reports of a new category of insurgency called "Naxal violence" in some or the other corner of these two newly formed states.The legal/legislative apparatus of the socialist,secular,democratic nation has declared it criminal to have any sympathies for this kind of violence, as if criminalising violence was unprecedented and insufficient.An ex-Jharkhand chief minister is alleged to have amassed thousands of crores in an year of regime.He was busy buying mines and islands in English and Japanese speaking countries of the world while we were mourning that fact that we dont have smart ministers who can make effective deals in times when chief ministers compete against each other in wooing the mittals and jindals of the world!His acts, and many other acts of a similar kind, are softly called 'scams',perhaps to rhyme with 'spams' that fill up our mailboxes,in the vocabulary of the self-governed country while legal activists are busy wondering how many acts in the domestic and public sphere can be called "violent".
Violence needs bloodshed,broken skulls and a few blasts;the more glorified ones achieve the dubious status of becoming an '-ism' like terrorism.The one in which our ministers and bureaucrats engage in are non-acts of violence.One doesnt have to act to kill, merely sit and watch.Some strange postmortems discover a nothing in corpses that die unnatural death in these absurd places:the nothing that the starved consume.But this violence is not violence simply because no violent act has been committed!!
These inactive people,not surprisingly, have their supporters and yes symapathizers. Did some Nazi sympathizer write a book called "Being and Nothingness?"
Newspapers of the last week in jharkhand published photographs of aides in this scam and stories of this man who used to sell milk door-to-door and is now owner of properties in the land of diamonds and that man who once ran a khaini-shop before becoming this person with aay se adhik sampatti. What say economists about this magical phenomenon of assets more than income?I am afraid the media reports and the photographs of these men and their and properties are clipped and pasted on walls of many aspiring scamsters who are selling tobacco,milk,liquor or (horror,horror) medicines in some small towns like the one from where i am writing or some big city where you are reading this....
Marquez claims to have invented his magical realism since the traditional realism was inadequate to contain the reality he set out to negotiate with in his fictions.Our English fiction writers, children of Rushdie,find no less magical our own reality...but is it adequate too?Is reality indeed a matter of the magic of words and nothing more?Perhaps so.Or else why should our newspaper readers need no Rushdie, no Marquez.An average reader of daily Hindi newspapers,i have a hunch, will find magic realism a poorer art,stale, incomplete and conservative.
What say you?
