Whose Freedoms are Our Freedoms?
‘This is my India’: Graffiti near Shaheen Bagh, New Delhi. Photo: Karan Madhok
The book Our Freedoms: Essays and Stories from India’s Best Writers confronts the challenges of the present, with remarks on religion, caste, sexuality, politics, and more. Saurabh Sharma argues that the collection has the elixir to inspire the soul of the nation.
In its report Freedom in the World 2021: Democracy under siege, Freedom House—a U.S.-based non-profit NGO—lamented that India is becoming an “electoral autocracy.” Unlike the mainstream media back home, Freedom House didn’t mince words, writing, “Modi and his party are tragically driving India itself toward authoritarianism.”
The rot runs much deeper than the present ruling regime, as it has hardly been the only one attacking ideas of freedom, and, in turn, ideas of India itself. However, the attempts to curb freedom and to limit the democratic framework of the country under the present government are qualitatively different, akin to Nuremberg laws, and are conducted with impunity in what is a uniquely democratic nation.
While I am writing this, I am arrested by a thought: In times like this, along with the ongoing pandemic, what purpose is served by writing? What can these words do? And I find the answer in A Burning by Megha Majumdar, a book that has captured contemporary Indian reality like no other:
“Not very much.”
Yet I write.
Rana Ayyub writes why… “[i]t is not easy to live in this New India… without the privileges that make it easy to breathe in this democracy.” It’s that same privilege that made many of my family members and friends throw this question at me whenever I’d go to the citizenships protests in the capital: “Tu bhi kagaz nahi dikhayega kya?” (“Will you, too, not show your papers?”)
Writing can show a path to future generations. It can give something to hold on to. It’s the hope that all is not lost that I write, and the warmth that the written word provides that I go back to reading. And in reading the stories and essays from Our Freedoms: Essays and Stories from India’s Best Writers (Juggernaut, 2020), edited by Nilanjana S. Roy, I felt the same sense of warmth. These writings convince me that, in any situation, words have within them the elixir to transform and inspire even the one who may feel bereft of any agency to function in this brutal world.
Confronting Freedom
The book begins with Snigdha Poonam’s essay “Beauty and the Beast”, her words as arresting as her essays in the remarkable book Dreamers: How Young Indians are Changing Their World (2018). Her essay in the Our Freedoms anthology introduces readers to the ordeals faced by the owner of a beauty parlour in Bhajanpura in New Delhi, who is looking for compensation for the injuries and damages that her business suffered after being torched by the violence that engulfed the city’s northeast areas in February 2020.
I live under the two-kilometer radii of this area. A large number of citizens, including some of my own family and friends, were convinced that the violence in Delhi—enacted chiefly upon the city’s minorities with complete impunity of the state—was justified. It was sickening to hear such insensitive and dangerous remarks, which is why, perhaps, I found hope in the comforting words of this collection.
The themes resonated in more lyrical fashion in the following poem by Akhil Katyal, also contained in the collection:
These Days
the sun
climbs so slowly
even the fallen seeds
throw long shadows.
Above them
the hours spread
like locusts
like hunger
like an illness
refusing to relent.
A government uses
this convenience to
make some arrests.
Photo: Saurabh Sharma
Elsewhere, Gautam Bhatia writes about his unshakeable faith in the best ‘toolkit’ ever created, The Constitution of India; while Annie Zaidi is reminded how she has never been made to separate “from the question of where other people think my ‘place’ is, in terms of both my status and the choices I am allowed by the systems that govern my life.”
In “Crossing Over”, a translation of N. Kalyan Raman’s work, author Perumal Murugan takes us through the freedom that is “hostage to the caste system.” He writes how “[l]ove allows people to transcend barriers. But our caste system won’t allow crossing over.” Gyan Prakash, in his essay, brings into notice how this “[s]ystemic inequality is the subject of a global conversation today.” But leave alone having this conversation, caste is a reality that every Indian, including I—an oppressor caste person—often fails to confront.
Yashica Dutt evokes the notions of the freedom that she knew “was something that wasn’t mine to take.” She mentions never being able to become that “right kind of Dalit” because she lives in New York. In her essay, “The Freedom Exchange”, Dutt writes about the ‘exchange’ that she got into with her mother, which was “also the template memory that I returned to when I thought about what freedom meant to me—a thin thread, suspended between the limited choices my mother was given and the options I might discover.”
Who can breathe in this New India?
In yet another moving piece, Rana Ayyub writes not only why she hopes, but also enunciates why “[i]t is not easy to live in this New India. It is not easy to live here without the privileges that make it easy to breathe in this democracy.” It’s that same privilege that made many of my family members and friends throw this question at me whenever I’d go to the citizenships protests in the capital: “Tu bhi kagaz nahi dikhayega kya?” (“Will you, too, not show your papers?”) They basked in this glory that they will remain unfazed in this regime—a dream come true for them and others who shared this perspective.
“Agendas”, a short story by Roshan Ali, covers a conversation between a believer and nonbeliever of the same family, set at the backdrop of a riot. In this story, the casualness with which an autorickshaw driver mentions the riots in Delhi is bound to have a chilling effect on its readers: “‘Anyway I am not worried sir,’ he said after a brief silence. ‘Summer is coming. Too hot to do rioting.’” Violence is given almost the same stage as conducting one’s daily routine, an everyday business activity for some. Later in the story, again, an auto driver says this to the protagonist: “‘Delhi is burning and you are upset because you argued with somebody,’ he said. ‘What a life you bade log live yaar.’”
The essays, stories, and poems are both a warning and a comforting reminder. In an atmosphere of contesting histories, this book—which confronts the present without overlooking the shared journeys of Indians—will add to the rich tradition of reflecting on our origins, acknowledging the past and envisioning possibilities for the future.
You are bound to witness a class-divide here, but that’s a surficial reading. The context is that you can’t fully appreciate the depth of this assumption if you don’t know that the protagonist is far from living that life being a Muslim in today’s India.
Salil Tripathi was thirteen when the emergency was declared. In the essay “Emergency and Freedom”, he recalls the announcement—‘The President has proclaimed an emergency. There is nothing to panic about.’—and writes, “I was surprised by the mutual contradiction. If the nation faced an emergency, surely, we should panic? If there was no need to panic, how could we be in an emergency?”
But no one captures the Hindutva agenda in more concise, sharp language than Aatish Taseer in his essay “Exile in the Age of Modi”: “India is an overarching and inclusionary idea; Bharat is atavistic, emotional, exclusionary.”
In an attempt to reclaim the “Gujarati identity from the haters,” Suketu Mehta calls out “the Gujaratis who lead the country now want to turn India into a national Ahmedabad.” While Amit Chaudhuri asks whether there is “no free country for a Kashmiri?”
In her piece, Menaka Guruswamy writes that the country is facing “a different kind of virus—hate and distrust,” which has spread its tentacles far and wide. She laments the fact that last year, in March, “as India’s poor marched, ministers posted pictures of themselves in pyjamas, socially isolating at home, relaxing and watching the Ramayan serial on TV.” She believes that COVID-19 demands “a different solidarity” and “a citizenry that will not countenance the use of a pandemic to enable the crushing of a free, constitutional fraternity.” Amid the pandemic, while everyone is cautioned to maintain social distancing, Raghu Karnad reminds us of an idea that we mustn’t get socially distanced from political togetherness, “the gift to India from the garden of Shaheen Bagh.”
In a different tone from the rest of the essays, and something that’s close to my heart, Priyanka Dubey writes of discovering “perhaps the most fundamental form of freedom is the freedom of seeking forgiveness and the freedom to forgive, what drives me and so many women outside the tiny and often privileged world of the big cities to become journalists is often so deeply personal that it is hard to write about it, but to write it is also a kind of freedom and reclamation.”
The nation we never wanted
“Hatred gives identity,” Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in his gut-wrenching creative nonfiction work Between the World and Me. Here was a Black man recounting personal anecdotes, telling his son that his Black body is breakable. In this tiny book are weaved histories and memories of atrocities. It is unlike anything I had read before.
But as much as I was hung onto the racial divide in the west, I’ve grown up reading little or nothing about the casteist society at home that has made me who I am. Only as a queer person did my ideas of freedom locked horns with my non-queer friends. Only when something that seemed undeniable to my friends and family was taken from me, I realised the value of agency of this trivial term called ‘freedom’. Not realising that denial of everyday things like water, a space to walk, and a lesser privilege like having a portion of land in one’s own name is a reality for many in India. And the currency of that divide is hate, which is now being channeled with brutal efficiency by the government in power that aims to limit India to a land of Hindus—and Hindus alone.
In the foreword of this book, Roy writes that revolts against the (British) Raj were driven “by a deep love and claim over the land,” and not the love of a nation that didn’t exist. She also writes that “hatred can feel liberating—it frees people from the constraints of having to work at love for the stranger, kindness toward those not your kin, fraternity to those whose ways are not yours,” but it’s slavery, too, as “[i]t traps first haters and then entire countries, shriveling their souls as they lose their guiding angels, their djinns of benevolence, and shoving them into a narrow case. You can either build a Republic of Inclusion or a Republic of Exclusion.”
It’s this hatred that will make this country an authoritarian one, something that it has already begun becoming. Begun, but it hasn’t become one.
In this sense, the essays, stories, and poems in this book are both a warning and a comforting reminder. In an atmosphere of contesting histories, this book—which confronts the present without overlooking the shared journeys of Indians—will add to the rich tradition of reflecting on our origins, acknowledging the past and envisioning possibilities for the future. Roy, as an editor and compiler, ensures to keep the outlook fairly diverse. I felt, however, that the collection would’ve been further strengthened with stories from the Northeast, Adivasi tribes, etc. adding another important perspective to the idea of freedom in India.
I write with the hope that we realise that it’s never our dream to be an exclusionary nation. Else we would become, as Priyanka Dubey cautions, a nation that “keep[s] dismembering their own histories, forgetting and erasing too much.”
Title: Our Freedoms: Essays and Stories from India’s Best Writers; Editor: Nilanjana S. Roy.
Publisher: Juggernaut, 2021; Pages: 328.
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Saurabh Sharma is a reader and a writer. He works as a writer in an IT research and advisory firm in Gurgaon. He reviews books and pretends to write on weekends. You can find him on Instagram: @writerly_life and Twitter: @writerly_life.
