Ritual reality and the Indian …Satosh Desai
Do we live in the real world at all? This might seem a strange question to ask in a country where reality, far from being an abstraction, is an everyday sensory overload. The answer, in this case, is indeed blowing in the wind. We are overwhelmed with reality wherever we go. However, in the midst of all this reality, a lot of our everyday behaviour seems to be strangely ritualistic and often largely symbolic.
A good example of how our actions are guided by symbolic rather than real effect is to be found in the area of hygiene. At one level, we are scrupulous about taking a bath everyday, and yet we see nothing wrong in dumping our garbage right outside the threshold of the house. It does not take a genius to work out that flies, mosquitoes and sundry germs may not recognise the symbolic sanctity of the threshold and will come right back in. But the symbolic separation of our house and the rest of the world is seen as being the real one and therefore one is satisfied by the dumping of the garbage on the other side.
This belief in the primacy of the symbolic world is a pervasive one. It colours the way we lead our life not just in the arena of hygiene, but in other arenas too.
Take the way in which we view our jobs. V S Naipaul in An Area of Darkness describes a sweeper thus: The sweeper…he must be abashed and silent, yet somehow evident, careful never to open his eyes, squatting crabwise about the room among the dirt, which is his livelihood and therefore must be identified with. He was a sweeper and his function therefore was to be a sweeper, not necessarily effectively to sweep. The sweeper was a dependent being, whose job was to be willingly dependent; cleaning itself was immaterial.
Take the way in which we view our jobs. V S Naipaul in An Area of Darkness describes a sweeper thus: The sweeper…he must be abashed and silent, yet somehow evident, careful never to open his eyes, squatting crabwise about the room among the dirt, which is his livelihood and therefore must be identified with. He was a sweeper and his function therefore was to be a sweeper, not necessarily effectively to sweep. The sweeper was a dependent being, whose job was to be willingly dependent; cleaning itself was immaterial.
The overriding compulsion is to be everything a sweeper should be, without the actual detail of sweeping. A more familiar analogy, at least for those familiar with Delhi, is the Delhi traffic policeman. Every Delhi traffic cop looks like a traffic cop, speaks like one and has in every way the unmistakable demeanour of a traffic cop. The only one thing he does not do is to manage the traffic. His relationship with traffic is pure and spiritual, unsullied by any actual action. In the face of traffic jams and gross violations, he always maintains his sense of detachment and never once gets drawn into action.
The exception is during symbolic periods of activity like the lane driving week or the anti-speeding week when they swing into action. The very presence of these weeks legitimises the lack of action during the other periods. This phenomenon of seeing ones job defined as an abstract noun rather than a verb is widespread. The Indian clerk is no less wedded to symbolic action, with every fibre of his being intent on signifying his clerkness to the exclusion of any action.