We have to learn to speak a new language

Today in my state of Karnataka there is a great blossoming of bigotry, hate, violence and cruelty. It thrives with the confidence of receiving full patronage from the state and the protection of its many institutions. Politics has become the art of choreographing hate into spectacular displays of public brutality. Authority and rule are dispersed across a fringe of proliferating mobs, shrill, violent and filled with zealous faith in hate.

Poor vendors who earn a meagre livelihood travelling from fair to fair are stopped at boundaries that have been built by human hate and greed. Strangers spewing hate and infected with a rash of saffron deliberately destroy the wares of a poor fruit seller in the vicinity of a temple to which he has come over many years as a familiar and friendly presence.

Girls going to schools and colleges nurturing hopes of a future filled with opportunities and enabling possibilities are stopped at the gates and told not to enter if they do not submit to the authority of an arbitrary uniformity. Livelihoods are denied with the intention of slowly making life precarious and unlivable for those who are branded as outsiders and as dangerous enemies.

And a great silent majority watches in silence as an insane, inhuman and unrighteous violence is unleashed on those who are most weak and vulnerable and helpless. This silence speaks many languages. It speaks quietly, hidden under the shrill cacophony of those inhuman cries calling to kill and destroy and hate.

It lives in the shadows of arson, murder, lynching and attacks by mobs. It clothes itself in the self righteousness of not being the voice that shamelessly and publicly gives a call for rape and murder. It aligns itself with power while claiming to be indifferent to power. It scavenges on the debris of communal conflicts and pilfers from the ill gotten gains of political battles.

Sometimes this silence is wrought out of fear. Fear of speech, of showing any sign of approval or disapproval. Fear of breathing too deeply or talking too loudly or looking too hard. This silence entombs us in our fear. We build fragile, temporary screens to ward off the rampaging mob and hide ourselves from the visibility of power. But when we entomb ourselves we slowly die. The stench of our rotting corpse may soon become too unbearable to bear even if we have learnt the art of not breathing too deeply.

Sometimes this is the silence that scavenges on the rotting, festering corpses of battles fought for power and personal profit. Such a silence creates a great emptiness in the words we speak. We begin to speak different languages in different places. We dare not go astray of the protocols of speech dictated by the regimes in power. We believe that our public espousal of the truths propagated by power will help us realize our personal parochial ambitions.

But this vigilance over our speech gradually kills our capacity to hear and speak the many languages of being human. We do not hear the despair of hopelessness on the face of an old man who looks helplessly at the vandalized remains of his cart.

We do not hear the anger of loneliness in the voice of a young girl who calls to her God when heckled by the mob. We become deaf to the fear and grief of those who are ours and of our land but are marked by outsiders as strangers to us.

We are unable to word the anger we feel when hooligans take upon themselves the authority to tear apart the tender intimacies of love and the links of friendship. We silence the possibility of listening and speaking to the God in us.

We have to learn to speak a new language. We have to learn to name that gentle king Rama as a brother, a son, a father, a beloved. We have to recite poems on the many glorious shades of orange, in the setting sun, the freshly dug earth, the ripening pumpkin and the flame of the lamp.

We have to be dismantled by the vision of grief as a brother is lynched and maimed. We have to hear the voice calling to God in the music of the azan, the melody of the bhajan, the ringing of the Church bells. We have to learn that broken, stammering speech of love for all that is living and all that dies in this world.

(The writer teaches in the Department of English, Mangalore University.)