Of Surveillance State and the leaking bucket

It was the bucket on the right that my eyes kept returning to, even as I was moved by the actors on stage, what I was being led to feel and think. I was one among many watching students of the National School of Drama performing Arthur Miller’s The Crucible under Amitesh Grover’s direction.

I noticed things with admiration: Sarah Mariam’s translation of the play into Hindi, particularly the use of dialects, the acting, and, of course, the set and light design. As I walked out of Mandi House, I ran into Sarthak Narula, set designer. ‘What you did with everyday objects was quite amazing,’ I said to him, thinking of the tablecloth, a ladle, chairs, and, of course, the bucket. I was still processing my thoughts – the social intelligence of performing the play in a city and a country and a world where a new McCarthyism has become the norm, our addiction to truth as a species, and so on.

And yet it was the bucket that stuck in my head. Stubborn about pursuing a trail of thought, I began to wonder why it should be so. Like many students of English literature in India, I had had to read The Crucible to pass examinations. I knew many of the dialogues by heart, but I couldn’t remember a bucket in Miller’s text. I almost scolded myself for being fixated on it.

But curiosity, that thing like a kettle on a stove, took over, and I began looking for – yes – the bucket. The internet always rewards waywardness and wastefulness. So there it was, in a Tatler review of the play at the Globe earlier this year: ‘Entering the open-air theatre, all conversations came to a halt. But the play is far from starting. Rather, actors wander around with pitchforks, rifles and buckets, leaving the audience truly consumed by the world of the Salem witch trials... The show has begun.’

The pitchfork in the open-air theatre at the Globe belonged to the outside. The spoons and ladles in the Hindi Crucible were house inmates, their form created by the assurance of the inside. The affiliations to a particular space were clear. But one couldn’t be sure about the bucket. Was this why it had remained stuck in my eye? There’s something in the shape of a bucket – it resembles the shape of a well, or anything that can hold water, the reason wiadro, the Polish word for it, derives from wed, related to water – that makes them slightly amphibious, a thing whose form lends itself to the weathering of the outside and the intimacies of the inside, or something that allows for the outside to be ferried to the inside. McCarthyism 2.0, a surveillant and censorious state, has entered homes: the religious-legal infrastructure is taking away wives as witches.

I cannot forget that bucket supplies a large-bodied idiom to language. It appears early in our English-speaking life, as a children’s song, “There’s a hole in my bucket”, a song about a circular loop, a deadlock that seems impossible to solve because of its contradictory nature. There’s a hole in the bucket, one character says to the other. It can be fixed with a straw. But the straw is too long; it needs to be cut. For that, a knife is necessary, but the knife needs to be sharpened, and for that, a wet sharpening stone would be needed. The stone might be found, but water? For that, a bucket is necessary. But the bucket has a hole in it. The conversation continues in this futility loop.

This is the world of Miller’s play; this is also the world outside The Crucible, the world of the audience that was watching it in Delhi. I heard the nervous laughter around me. Executive, legislature, judiciary, all coming together to create an endless loop of surveillance out of which there is no way to prove one’s innocence as a social being, a human being. There’s a hole in the bucket – in Salem and America, then and now, in Delhi and India.

‘A hole in the bucket’ also describes a person constantly seeking attention, who feels attention leaking away. It is not just Abigail in the play, the young girl who falsely accuses the women of Salem of being witches, who, to get a man’s attention and the power that comes with it, destroys a community. Running governments in many countries today are different versions of Abigail, with holes in their buckets. That’s all they need – bouquets.