The ungreat Indian middle class and other stories

The ungreat Indian middle class and other stories

There are three things that the English liberal media in India abhors with a vengeance: majority Hindus, upper-caste Brahmins, burgeoning middle-class.

There are three things that the English liberal media in India abhors with a vengeance. They come in no particular order and the hate brigade depends heavily on the adjective which precedes each of them - majority Hindus, upper-caste Brahmins, burgeoning middle-class. Not even God can help you if you happen to belong to all of the above - the print media believes you have had more than your fair share of help, somewhere back in those times during which your ancestors perpetrated all sorts of casteist horrors. Given that you have inherited that imperfect past, you are its raging torchbearer. Never mind if you are pyrophobic.

It doesn`t matter if your children cannot surmount the massive reservations, no matter how hard they work. It doesn`t matter that you belong to a secular generation which is more worried about infrastructure and population than caste privileges. It doesn`t matter that the real issue is one of development and empowerment and there are many members in your own community who need support desperately. It certainly doesn`t matter that you are a law-abiding citizen shelling out a whopping percentage of your income as taxes. You are a corrupt, debauched, elitist, spineless coterie of intellectual rot.

You, being the majority readership, need investigative stories, heartwarming stories, real-life stories, travel stories, business stories, lifestyle stories. But you also need stories reminding you time and again that you are a bloody jerk. That sort of puts you very properly in your majoritarian, upper-caste, burgeoning place.

I discuss three examples here - one in each of the categories listed above:

Last year, Gail Omvedt used the sacred editorial pages of The Hindu (Open Letter to Bangaru Laxman) to begin with a self-indulgent discourse on her obvious erudition in Indian anthropology and then, just as suddenly, switching tracks to draw attention to the colour of Mr. Laxman`s skin. It is unclear why exactly her left-liberal-secularist heart felt so "naturally disheartened that the BJP is the first major national party to have a Dalit president". Was it because she couldn`t handle the fact that a party which speaks of its Hindu roots had taken a step she would have welcomed from just about anyone else? And then she went back all the way to the Indus Valley civilization, the Vedas, Hindu mythological fables and divinity and the racial origins of the subcontinent in order to wonder, "But to take them (the Vedas) as holy?"

She then ridiculed them as her version of what "can be fun" and accused all Hindus of considering Buddhist and Jain influences on their land and life as inferior. Omvedt should remain glad (as I am) that I have neither the wherewithal nor the inclination to attack her where it hurts most - her God and how she prays to Him. For then she would have succeeded in dragging me down to the level to which she had so unconscionably stooped.

S.Anand`s "Cauvery in a Puddle" (Outlook, Jan 21st, 2002) tore the Brahmin community to pieces by trivialising the quotes of those belonging to it and making a campaign of those who don`t. In a deeply revolting exercise which took one premise as given and then went about proving it (that Brahmins had "hijacked" South Indian classical music and dance), the writer showed how easy it is to make a subjective mockery of anything. A masterpiece of that euphemism called hard-hitting journalism - anyone who has so much as heard a note of Carnatica would read every scalding word - he managed to negate the entire contribution of the community towards keeping an old tradition alive in modern times besides holding them single-handedly responsible for all its perceived ills. There was no mention of the many workshops organized for school kids, the