Tridip Suhrud writes about the changing landscape of Gujarati language, the increasing voice of machismo and the dying categories of compassion and love. This article was first published in Tehelka

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A few weeks ago I was asked to explain my preference for Gujarat. The first of the three responses I gave was the resonance of the Gujarati language. As I tried to articulate this I recognised that the response, though honest was part romance, part longing. Because, for the past few years my relationship with Gujarati language, literature and Gujarati society has been tenuous and marked by longing.

It was not always so. My emotional and intellectual core was built in and through Gujarati language and literature. Gujarati was the language of home and also of school and college. Gijubhai Badheka, Kakasaheb Kaleklar and Jhaverchand Meghani filled my childhood. Govardhanram Tripathi’s Sarasvatichandra was my sole companion during the hot, dusty afternoons of my adolescence. And there was K M Munshi too. I read his racy prose breathlessly. His trilogy excited imagination, delighted the heart. But, then and now I remain partial to the world of love, valour and sacrifice that Meghani created. His characters loved deeply, waited till the end of time and fought righteous battles unto death. Swami Anand, Kakasaheb, Prabhudas Gandhi, K G Mashruwala and Ramanlal V Desai opened for me the world of Gandhi. Poet Sundaram brought to us the sublime beauty of Sri Aurobindo and Mother of Pondicherry through the journal Dakshina. Umashankar Joshi was our poet laureate. Nagindas Parekh made not only Tagore and Bankim available in Gujarati, but also the Bible, which sounds more true to me in Gujarati even today. Later, under the watchful eye of Achyut Yagnik and Ashis Nandy I read the nineteenth century world of Narmad, Karsandas Mulji and Manibhai Nabhubhai more academically but without the joy being diminished in any way.

My understanding of Gujarati society as also its critique was framed by Gujarati writing. I understood the nature of intense spiritual longing through the painful conversion to Christianity by my favourite Gujarati poet Manishankar Bhatt, “Kant.” As Bapu drew me more and more towards him, I began to recognise the liminal existence that he had in Gujarat’s society and economy. Gandhi’s denial of private property and personal family as the sole heir to legacy went contrary to the ethos of Gujarati mercantile capitalism. His emphasis on casteless existence perturbed Gujarati middleclass then as it does now. His conviction that one could be a good Sanatani Hindu only when one is simultaneously a good Christian, a devout Muslim and a faithful Parsi challenged our narrow, sectarian way of being religious. Caste and communal conflict was a constant reminder that Gujarat was capable of turning against itself in frenzied celebration of violence with unnerving regularity. Through all this my world of emotions and ideas continued to grow enriched by new aesthetic sensibility and academic training. The modernism that we had created in art and literature had once recognised and even celebrated homo-eroticism of Bhupen Khakkhar’s paintings or the sexual economy of his stories and plays.

But as we embraced the modern political economy of production and consumption, of trans-national linkages, modernism of a Bhupen, a Gulam Sheikh or a Suresh Joshi slipped away from us.

The Gujarati language around me had begun to alter. The most definitive sign of this came during the debates around the dam on the Narmada. For the first time after the Mahagujarat Movement, which led to the creation of the Gujarat State, Gujarati society and polity attained near unanimity on the Narmada issue. This unanimity had a new tone. All those who opposed the dam, raised the issue of rehabilitation of the displaced or brought forth the environmental audits were termed anti-Gujarat. We had found our ‘developmental other.’ This led to erasure of dialogue on either side. Gujarat with its long and generous tradition of voluntary work with its roots in self-volition grew weary of NGOs. With this we forgot the criminal tribes that Ravishankar Maharaj had hoped to free. We forgot also the tribals, called Raniparaj by Gandhi and Veddchi’s grand-old man Jugatram Dave. The selfless service of the dalits and Harijans by Thakkar Bapa and Parikshitlal Majumdar receded to the margins of our collective memory. We forgot the legitimacy of autonomous acts, acts which allow one to be moral. Did we understand the autonomy of Anasuya Sarabhai who fought for the mill-hands of Ahmedabad against her brother Ambalal? Do we understand the rectitude of SEWA and Ela Bhatt?

This idea of forces ranged against us, the people of Gujarat, came to be deeply etched in our minds after the violence of 2002. We had once again turned against ourselves, in a macabre dance of violence. In the demonology we created we were the victims or spectators. As spectators we could merely watch without being a witness. If we had any memory of Mahadev Desai we would have understood the difference between a spectator and a witness. Mahadev showed us the way to be a witness, a witness is a bearer of Truth. Gujarati language was no longer the same. As it had no desire to hear the pleas for compassion, pity, justice, love, remorse and reconciliation. A language that could not hear of compassion and pity, of penance that cleanses and purifies cannot be the language of Gandhi. It was not a language of caring and nurturance but of machismo. We wished to purge all that we saw as effeminate in us through our new found hyper-masculinity. But in so doing we also purged our language and our cultural selves of all that was feminine; we shut doors on other cultural and psychological possibilities that recognition of pain and suffering, of nurturance and healing could have given us. We foreclosed the possibility that some critics might have been moved by genuine love and desire that Gujarat recover aspects of its linguistic memory and cultural possibility.

At a moment when significantly large part of Gujarat celebrates a stupendous victory of Narendra Modi and of Gujarati asmita, I want to raise a small, still voice. A voice that urges us to recognise the legitimacy of autonomous action, reminds us of the possibilities that we have closed for now. It is a plea to restore to our language categories of compassion, pain, love and nurturance. It is a plea to for the feminine in us that is weighed under our masculine asmita.

Tridip Suhrud

Tridip.suhrud@gmail.com