Writing When Authoritarianism Looms

 I am not sure if the Indian novel reviewed in A Novel of India’s Identity Crisis (The Baffler) describes living under Modi or living in the run-up to Modi (the novel is set in 2014). I get a feeling of the latter, where it exposes the society that produces Modi. Who knows if any American can put in the work Devika Rege put into her debut novel Quarterlife.

Quarterlife is a story of a group of people—all carefully chosen representatives across a spectrum of religion, caste, class, and political leanings—engaged in this effort to keep up amid the shuffle, to get to grips with the present. If the country has an identity crisis, the characters function to bring the stakes of this identity crisis to life. The ensemble of people in the story embodies, as one review noted, the “many inequalities [that] can be glossed over in the name of common nationhood.”

I sent KH a link to “Multiple Worlds Vying to Exist”: Philip K. Dick and Palestine, I added the following:

The clash of realities seems to capture our world of Trump and not-Trump. Could it be we have been wrong about our thinking of DJT as playing false with reality when, in fact, he is true to his reality? Yes, I know that also sounds like a definition of insanity. Is that not also be used for Philip K. Dick? Okay, I will it another way: DJT corresponds to the reality of some while he is a grifter in our reality. Mirror worlds only not in alternate universes.

He responded with:

In a universe of alternative facts, why not have people believe that Trump is their saviour?

And I finished off the conversation in what probably reads too convoluted:

Not alternative universes but the same. Probably very solipsistic. Put another way: you and I are in the alternative universe. Does anyone think they are not in the Prime Universe? Does any villain really see himself as the villain? Or to put it yet another way; an alternate but adjacent. How much of what is going on in Gaza is part of your reality? How much of what is going on in Ukraine is actually part of my reality? How much of a trans person's reality is shared by either of us? 

(I was already feeling a little feverish when I wrote that last night; just saying, in case I sound to you as nutty as I now read myself.)

I put this here because I feel there is a difficulty in Americans knowing one another enough to understand why one supports Trump and another detests him. Perhaps, we have gotten too angry with one another. 

This sounds like America:

At the Jaipur Literature Festival earlier this year, Rege described sensing, around the time of the BJP’s ascent, “fatigue with the existing liberal world order, this desire for change without knowing what exactly we’re asking for.” This sentiment reverberates most clearly through Rohit, who is utterly dissatisfied with his friends’ responses to the threat of nationalism (“To confess to anything other than dread around Gyaan or Ifra is to announce oneself as a moral reprobate”). At the same time, he is wary of his brother’s excessive enthusiasm about returning home, which is the result, he feels, of a failure not just to find a sense of home elsewhere but to understand what it means to belong somewhere at all. He’s equally embarrassed by Amanda’s brand of idealism and rebellion. “If the national election revealed how out of sync he is with his soil, Amanda and Naren have exposed the limits of belonging elsewhere,” he realizes.

I keep hearing Trump is about change, people want change, and they want the Establishment disrupted, but I do not hear Trump say what he will change other than going after the "enemies within", or the people say what they want to be changed, or anything about how disrupting the Establishment will produce positive good for the average American citizen.  The novel reviewed seems to raise a question that is, I think, presumes a question about the good, as in what good will the promised and sought-after change will produce.

To want to be a good Hindu without quite knowing what this means, to not be satisfied by the progressive’s willingness to denounce Hinduism wholesale, can be painful, constricting, suffocating. Rohit is uncertain, worried about being on the wrong side of history, yet itching to be what he views as authentic; as a result, he wins nothing. His friends abandon him and quit the film studio in protest of Omkar’s film, and even Omkar grows to hate him, accusing his interest in the cause as that of a “child’s fixation on a new toy.” Characters from nearly every single interest group, from Gyaan to Omkar, wrestle with the insecurity borne of longing to be the right kind of Indian, but the insecurity of the nationalist is especially tragic. They insist that this or that is the one thing we all have in common, because to admit the truth—that there is not one thing that all Indians have in common—is tantamount to admitting that there is no such thing as India. This is scary, and sad.

What do we Americans have in common? 

History, yes. However, we ignore our history, or turn it into myth, or accept only the parts that leave us feeling good about ourselves. This feels as binding as soup.

We cannot claim a single religion as binding us, for all that Protestantism did long bind many of us. 

We cannot claim a unifying ethnic background. I say that as one who spent last evening going over a lot of genealogical information, some even knew, only to see a known theme repeated over time - a lot of Scots and Irish, an admixture of what might be either, or might be English (gasp), with a more recent addition of Swiss added on top.

What we do have binding us is a creed. Do the Trumpists really want to rid ourselves of the Declaration of Independence?

I want to point out how an Indian novel could teach us about America. Some may find that even if you have come this far to be fanciful. However, America influenced the novel.

In Rege’s defense, she writes in Quarterlife’s first-person epilogue that “to call this a novel or a book implies more closure than I wish to claim.” In interviews, she’s used the word ethnographic, a term that might better capture her ambitions, which are more sociological than narrative. Rege was drawn to the novelistic form, but her research process was inspired by James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a book of immersive reportage about the lives of Alabama sharecroppers during the Great Depression. She admires the way Agee “put aside what he knows as a young man from Harvard and Exeter” in order to give his characters “dignity.” Rohit and Amanda, too, are infatuated with their subjects’ dignity. If this seems fetishistic at times, it’s also perhaps the only way to reveal all the contradictions of India, of Hinduism, of politics and millennial angst, of the “many-headed snake” that is the nationalist party.

Therein, too, what made me write Americans may not want to take the time and energy for an ethnographic study of one another. I feel I do not have enough time left to me.

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