“Only the poor have courage. Why? Because they are hopeless. To get up every morning to plough a potato field in wartime, to bring kids with no prospects into the world. To live poor- that takes courage. No, they trudge along uncomplainingly, carrying the emperor in his heavy throne and the pope in his stone cathedral. They stagger, starving, bearing the whole thundering weight of the…wealthy on their broad stupid backs. Is that courage? It must be, but it’s perverted courage. Why? Because what they carry on their backs will cost them their lives.”
Bertolt Brecht
The more I grow up, the more I come to face reality. The subtle complexities of the world unfurl themselves to me. Everything is political. How difficult my life is and to how difficult it feels it is to how difficult the life of my mother’s house help feels it is and how difficult it really is, is political. In front of my laptop, I am sitting here trying to articulate pain and apathy, and the very act of sitting and articulating is political. I thought my thoughts and my words are not political, and this assumption in itself is and has always been political.
Last week, my mother got a call from her friend. After a cordial exchange of pleasantries, her friend gave my mother an in-depth account of how infernal her life had become because of her pesky househelp. My mother, of course, empathised and suggested that her friend get rid of her help and not delay in finding a substitute. This made me ponder about what the value of a human was. Was it ethical to reduce the value of a human to their productivity and demeanour? I found it unfair that some people are just cogs in the wheel, conveniently surmised to be pliant and expected to work under someone’s thumb.
Geeta aunty, my mother’s house help, has been around since I was twelve years old. When she came to work post lockdown, I asked her about her experience and quickly realised that while my lockdown was about enjoying what I treated like a holiday, hers was about grim survival. She told me that she endured four months of lockdown with no work, no money to feed her family, and got through with the 1 KG of wheat that her mother gave her. Everything had fallen apart for her and millions just like her.
We read about lives lost and see lives lived indecorously every day. The repetition of their misery is endless, irremediable, and maybe that is why we fail to give them a second thought. The importance of life appears, only under conditions in which a loss would be felt. “This will be a life that will have been lived” is the presupposition of an important life. But what about lives that are not lived? Lives that come into the world with no hope, with the burden of unbroken generational trauma and looming desolation and an endless, inescapable cycle of poverty? When a child is born, its survival depends on a social network of hands. This network determines the significance of our lives and, inevitably, its grievability in the social world.
In words of one syllable, there lies an expertly hidden dichotomy between important and less important lives. This distinction, everywhere, has a notable historical context. From caste minorities and people of colour to gender minorities, war casualties, capital-deficit people living in capitalist economies etc., all are examples of factions who throughout history have been considered less important and subservient. This humiliation can be seen in the colloquial rendition of ‘rape’ in India, which is synonymous with ‘tarnishing the honour’ of a community or family. Since by the virtue of their existence, Dalit women have no ‘honour’ to begin with, their rights against sexual violence are met with negligible remedying(1). Similar barbarization is observed in J&K where since 1990, 41,866 people have lost their lives in 71,038 incidents of militant violence, according to data shared by Home Ministry sources. Those killed include 14,038 civilians, 5,292 security personnel and 22,536 militants(2), showing that the life of an average Kashmiri is worth little to nothing and their lost lives are dismissed as “necessary casualties” in the face of a greater threat.
This chasm is very reminiscent of the Orwellian dystopia in Animal Farm. In the book, the animals plot to take control away from humans and establish ‘animalist’ commandments to avert the propagation of human oppression. But, as time passes by, they change the final rule of “All animals are equal” to “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”.
When I started writing this essay, I wanted to tell Geeta aunty’s story. I wanted more people to know about her reality and so, I told her about my topic and asked if she had something to say about it. All she said was, “Everyone who is hard-working and humble should be respected. However, some people are looked down upon because they are poor and not on the same level. They (people who don’t respect the poor) don’t understand that if there were no poor people, the rich wouldn’t fare so well themselves. Who would build their buildings, if not poor workers? Even they should understand this.”
Finally, yet importantly, whose lives are mourned and whose lives are left unlamented should be taken to heart. As proposed by Noam Chomsky in ‘Manufacturing Consent’, the interests of dominant, wealthy groups, with political and economic backing, control public sentiments by differentiating between worthy and unworthy victims. After the 26/11 Mumbai terror attack, we encountered enormous media coverage with graphic pictures of those who died. Public mourning was dedicated to making these stories evocative for the nation. But what about lives lost in the 2020 Delhi Pogrom? Or the lives of Palestinians, common people who died as a consequence of war? Differential distribution of public grieving is a political issue of massive significance. What would happen if these lives were grieved as openly as ‘worthy lives’? Why is it that the media fails to name these victims, show us their faces and tell us their stories?
Open grieving is bound up with outrage, which in the face of injustice and unbearable loss has enormous political potential. It is, after all, one of the reasons Plato wanted to ban poets from the Republic. He thought that if the citizens were too often exposed to tragedy, they would weep over the losses they saw and that such open and public mourning would disrupt the order and hierarchy of political authority.
I asked Geeta aunty to tell me about herself, and she told me that she came to Delhi from Badaun, a village in Uttar Pradesh for work.
“I like working. It keeps my mind off things. I like being dedicated to work and doing my best. I also like listening to old music. My favourite song is Duniya Mein from Mother India. I can feel that song.”
“Duniya men ham aye hain to jina hi padega Jiwan hai agar jahar to pina hi padega”
“If we have come into this world, we have no option but to live. Even if life is like poison, we have no option but to drink it”
– Somya Gupta