Everyday people

Sly and the Family Stone’s No 1 hit from 1968, ‘Everyday People’, was a funky theme song by one of the first racially-integrated rock groups of the ’60s. Sly Stone and his family members were black, but there were also two white members and two women in the band. Their message? ‘We got to live together’:

There is a yellow one that won’t accept the black one/

That won’t accept the red one that won’t accept the white one/

And different strokes for
different folks/

…I am everyday people.

Speaking of everyday people – or no, rather, speaking of its opposite, it has been LitFest season in India the last few months. From Bengaluru to Jaipur, Delhi to Mumbai, the elite have gathered to joyously celebrate the finest array of upper-caste literature published over the last year or so. As one of those elites, I have myself enjoyed it. But I must confess to an empty feeling that I’m always left with after cavorting with my in-group.

But there was one LitFest this year that I woke up from the following morning without an ethical hangover. It was the Vidarbha LitFest in Nagpur. Sure, it was a smaller one, and less glamourous. But with the guiding theme of inclusion, it had a soul.

And I don’t mean those common gestures of low-quality inclusion, where you include but you fail to recognise. Where you include but tokenise (people included on the basis of gender or caste know this feeling well). Where you include but patronise (persons with disabilities often experience this). No, the VLF sought high-quality inclusion, the kind that fosters a genuine experience of the other.

We know we have need of our usual others, we are not solipsists. Solipsists believe they are complete and autonomous without others – that there really are no others. Very few of us believe this. But very many of us believe that we are complete only with those others whose identities significantly overlap with our own. These are our in-group others. As collective solipsists, we believe that we can do completely without out-group others. In-group others provide us with care, affection, a social life, and meaning. But out-group others are a nuisance, a bother, they just don’t belong. We are happy to include our usual others because we are social beings. But we usually only include out-group others out of a sense of obligation, or because of charity. Low-quality inclusion. Or as Sly Stone characterised it:

You love me you hate me you
know me and then/

You can’t figure out the bag I’m in

We generally ignore the fact that the experiences and properties that make us who we essentially are, tend to be shared – your most intimate moments generally are those shared with a beloved. Even if alone, only you yourself, you are at your most private and impenetrable in your solitary thoughts – eyes closed, attention turned inwards; your thoughts are totally private, inaccessible to anyone else…and yet, your thoughts are coherent to you only because of the language by which you communicate to yourself. This language is not your own – it was given to you by your community, by your others. And so the others are at the core of even your own-most self.

But these others might be only your in-group others. What about out-group others, people who are unlike us, perhaps who dislike us, or at any rate who differ from us in terms of caste and class, gender and ability and so on? Here is where literature can so easily be leveraged. To bring us to our out-group others, or them to us, is one of literature’s most valuable functions.

The literary experience, transporting yourself into and through a book, exercises the imagination and can awaken your cognitive empathy: where we imagine what it would be like to be in the other’s position, situation, and thus creating understanding of our out-group others. It is this same capacity for cognitive empathy that is responsible for breaking down the barriers, fears, and indifference that prevent high-quality inclusion.

For this valuable role of literature to take effect for us, however, our celebrations of literature must be celebrations of inclusion, too. That means engaging with our other others, our out-groups – people we have feared, vilified and scorned.

There is a long hair that
doesn’t like the short hair/

For bein’ such a rich one that will not help the poor one/

And different strokes for
different folks/

…Oh sha sha we got to live together/

…I am everyday people.

(Aakash Singh Rathore as Dr Jekyll is a Professor of Philosophy, Politics and Law, author and editor of over 20 books and counting, and as Mr Hyde, one of India’s top-ranking Ironman triathletes.)