THE ZEITGEIST
HIS NAME WAS Siddhart Ghosh. In literary circles, he was known as Poltu. Poltu was a well-known name in the sci-fi cabals that served as an opposition to the BJP regime. It was Poltu who vouched for the story I am going to narrate.
It was 2047, the anniversary of the Indian republic now greying quietly. In 2044, the BJP has dismantled some of its history study centres and set up an equivalent ‘futures’ group. People were surprised because the future was an official anathema to the BJP. The future as an idea hinted at the possibility of alternatives and it was the plurality of alternatives that made the BJP uneasy. It was a world full of surprises.
The linear history that the BJP proclaimed behaved like a regiment correct and predictable―evoking all the right symbols. I remember a discussion with the futurist Rajni Kothari. He told me confidently in 2003 that not one party saw a future as a dissenting possibility. You won’t find your Sakharovs and Linus Paulings in that entity. He smiled mischievously. What froze time into a linear concept was an official idea of security which legitimised and brought into being the official idea of surveillance. What threatened security was the prospect of diversity. Diversity is swarmed with dissent and the BJP was obsessed with cleaning up the past. It saw itself as a rectifier of the past rather than a predictor of the future. The future―even the well-behaved future―was mainly the present interpolated into a different time. The BJP was mechanical, Poltu explained.
The first change in the regime’s attitude came with economics in 2041―a finance minister, now a greying liberal, received the Edward Goldsmith award. He had abolished the NITI Aayog a month earlier for supporting an expensive and outdated economics. Economics in India hardly had any sense of obsolescence. In that context, Poltu said, “Gandhi was a real science fiction hero” who talked of pollution, obsolescence and iatrogenesis as expert-induced ailments.
The BJP tried to twin security and sustainability together. Corporations loved the marriage and held seminars from day 1 denying the possibility of divorce. The BJP forgot that sustainability was not an affluent world. It anchored subsistence economies, not conspicuous consumption. The cracks appeared quickly. Worse, the twinning of concepts necessitated multiple histories and marked their way to futures thinking. Poltu added that, while the finance minister’s family was proud of his award, the official ideology of the party dismissed futures thinking as wishful thinking. Poltu noticed that whether it was thinking of budgets or history, the BJP was getting weaker.
What was coming next was an interdisciplinary disaster―a clash of knowledge systems which the government did not know how to anticipate. Ecology as a mindset did not share the mentality of the two other disciplines. It was a search for a futuristic common.
Already, movements were expressing new ideas. NGOs inspired by the Chipko movement were planting fruit trees all over the city. Poor eucalyptus was out of fashion. The informal economy insisted that ecology was new patriotism.
It was at this time that sociology departments revolted. Patrick Geddes, the founder of the informal city, became an icon. The university changed radically and became a natural den for the opposition. Ecological researchers quoted Geddes to say that the university was built around dissenting academies. The BJP desperately tried to brand the movement leaders as urban Naxals but failed.
Suddenly ecology and futuristics became key disciplines and a new syllabus had out-argued the party ideology. The BJP was shamefaced because it felt it had tamed the universities by emasculating the Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Other phenomenon began to emerge outside the country. The coconut cult, which looked Hindu, swept the country. Its high priests recited the 420 uses of the coconut. It was an attempt to show that employment could be generated where the manufacturing industry had failed. Unemployment became the bane of the regime.
Suddenly, Indira Gandhi’s books edited by Jairam Ramesh became bestsellers. Payment bookshops sprouted the new literacy. If nature changed, the body cannot be far behind. Mental health became a threat to the regime which confused it with law and order and a more subtle social science was called for. The regime was playing to the drumbeat of nuclear energy and genetics. Research had to now accept a social science built around the informal economy. Agriculture and a return to agriculture was seen as ethically healing. Collecting traditional seeds became a popular hobby―more popular than stamps. The farmers of Uttar Pradesh and Haryana hailed the university as a life-giving body. Ecology, Poltu said, was seen as satyagraha. The youth had found an answer. Poltu said it was strange that a new syllabus should be an answer to a new politics.
This essay is a fictional piece Poltu made me write. He lit his anti-ecological bidi and smoked his ideas in glee.
Shiv Visvanathan, Social scientist