“Don’t call it a day
Its proper name is night....”
From Aisa nahin bolneka
by Bachchoo

In India on a scattered tour — no not taking in any literary festivals — I am reading Patrick French’s book India, which is sub-titled Portrait of a Country. Somewhere near the beginning he writes about the truth of Indian caricatures and reproduces some jokes he says have been circulating on the Internet. Being in Kolkata as I write this, and having arrived in this city to chair a literary evening and a poetry launch, I shall only reproduce the one about Bengalis, even though the equivalent sequences about Malayalis, Tamil Brahmins and Gujaratis which he quotes are very telling and amusing:
“One Bengali: Poet
Two Bengalis: Film Society
Three Bengalis: Political Party
Four Bengalis: Two political parties”.
French says that he will refrain from quoting the ones about Biharis and Uttar Pradeshis because he wants to avoid the ceremonial burning of his book.
Nevertheless, the formula of the joke is an invitation to make up one’s own. I have essayed a couple about Muslims, Hindus and Christians, but will on the French Principle of Safe rather than Sorry, not put them in print here — not because I fear the newspaper will be bonfired, but because I don’t wish, myself, to call it a day yet. Much safer to use the formula and make a joke against one’s own identity. And being a Parsi here goes:
One Parsi: Constitutional
lawyer
Two Parsis: Gay couple in Kolaba
Three Parsis: Joint family conference
Four Parsis: Central Bank’s annual staff picnic
And the one about Sardarjis? Er — no, no! My dad always said never pick on easy targets. And I am not a Sardarji, but then I am a non-resident Indian (NRI) of sorts:
One NRI: World-rich-list entry
Two NRIs: Anti-racist society
Three NRIs: Clumsy Bhangda group
Four NRIs: Indian literary festival
What strikes one about these formulations is not only that they contain grains of truth coated in humour, but that Indians, except the real cissies, grievance-merchants and ambulance-chasers tolerate these caricatures without any obeisance to political correctness.
This may be because political correctness is a Western affliction, born as a guilty compensation for the outrageous histories of colonial superiority, slavery and racist persecution. The inhibition which causes the West to address the ex-colonials and the blacks liberated from slavery in respectful terms without any possible derogatory connotations is not a voluntary move in the great Western intellectual tradition. Political correctness came to the West through the success of protest and struggle. The Afro-American civil rights movement and the militancy of American black power were aimed at securing material rights, not at eliminating racist jokes. But the material rights are difficult for societies to bestow. Conscientious individuals within the society could re-educate themselves to at least give the black population the linguistic concession of not using derogatory terms to describe them.
Other political movements which characterised the movers as victims followed and expanded the taboos of political correctness to include, under their protective and prohibitory umbrella, all races, genders, sexual-preferences, sizes of people, disabilities and even mothers-in-law.
In Germany, the guilt of what the Nazis had done caused succeeding German governments to pass laws against Holocaust denial. Anyone who knows modern Germany knows that on this ground, the discourse of race or ethnic superiority, Germans tread very self-consciously indeed.
No such inhibition stops some nations and populations calling other people kaffirs or assuming, in violent contravention of any possible test or justification, that they are somehow “more chosen” than people or nations that hold different religious, moral or political beliefs. No political correctness towards minorities, women or anyone else there.
In India we have since gaining Independence, having been the underdogs of the freedom struggle, generated a strange brand of political incorrectness. It is very strange to explain to people whom one is arguing with what the phrase “scheduled castes” means. One tells them that it literally means people or sections of the Indian population who are mentioned in the “schedules” of the Indian Constitution.
What then are these “schedules”? Well, they are appendices to the Constitution which recognise that certain sections of our people, owing to the caste system and the existence of tribal populations who are not in the main dwellers of the plains, have been historically underprivileged. The Constitution of India seeks to identify them and mark them out for concessional treatment or special advancement. Hence the names “scheduled castes” and “scheduled tribes”.
Okay, one has crossed that hurdle with one’s interlocutor still wondering how the word schedule (pronounced “Sked-yool” if he/she is an American) can connote anything more than a timetable one has determined to follow.
Then there is the problem of the phrase “backward castes” and even “other backward classes”. Nowhere else in the world would such a blatantly factual categorisation exist. The word “backward” in any nation’s English, doesn’t simply mean “deprived”. It would be hard to convince a Westerner that people actually vie for these labels because they could confer political privileges on them. In a sense, these labels, which we bandy about without a second thought, may indicate that we Indians are averse to committing the sin of political euphemism.
While checking in to my hotel in Kolkata I was asked to produce some photo-identity. I wasn’t carrying my passport or my Person of Indian-Origin card, both of which have photographs. It seems one can’t get on flights or through some bureaucracies without this pictorial proof. Luckily, I had my British driving licence with the picture of someone who looks vaguely like me on it and produced the pink card for the perusal of the hotel receptionist and all was well.
“What do people who don’t have passports and driving licenses do?” I asked.
The obvious answer was that they don’t take flights and don’t check into hotels so the question doesn’t arise and Pritish Nandy, my host at the Kolkata occasion, said as much. “But what if they wanted to; would they provide a ration card or something with their photograph on it?”
“There are no ration cards anymore”, said Pritish. “They call them BPL cards.”
I asked what these were.
“Below Poverty Line”, Pritish said. Now shall we know even as we are known!