Skip to main content

Simple People without a Leader



The English translation of Umberto Eco’s novel, The Name of the Rose, was originally published 30 years ago.  It’s the only novel of Eco that sold millions of copies.  I started re-reading it during this brief winter break in order to re-live the thrills I had gone through reading it about a quarter of a century back.

While I’m about half way through the brilliant novel set in a Benedictine monastery in medieval Italy, I would like to share a thought from it on why certain new teachings, especially religious ones, gain popularity among the masses.

In the medieval Europe, any new religious teaching [what other teaching was there in those days?] would be viewed as heresy, a challenge to the authority of the Pope.  Eco’s protagonist argues that the majority of those who flock after the new teachers are the “simple” people (who lack “subtlety of doctrine”) who are also marginalised by the dominant classes. 

The marginalised people are powerless in any society.  What they really want is power, power to earn their livelihood, power to live with dignity, and power to control their own lives.  When a new teacher, a reformer, “passes through their village or stops in their square” they cling to the man hoping that his teaching is going to subvert the existing power structure which is inimical to their interests.  The people [aam aadmi] hope that the new teacher, the reformer, will help them move from the margins toward the centre of the power structure.

As more and more people join the new teacher, his teaching acquires greater force and thus becomes a threat to the existing power structure.  Hence the new teacher is labelled a heretic and burnt at the stake.
“Actually, first comes the condition of being simple, then the heresy,” says Eco’s protagonist.  The simple people create the heretic.  In other words, if the simple people were not so simple, they would not follow a teacher so easily.  “The simple cannot choose their personal heresy,” in Eco’s words.  They lack the intellectual sophistication required for that.  Hence they follow the reformer.

This is how Maoism, for instance, becomes a lucrative ideology today for the marginalised people.  Maoism promises them some power with which they can move from the margins of the outcast existence nearer to the centre of the power structure.

This is how anti-corruption movements gain momentum on the spur of a moment.

This is also the reason why new and newer religious teachers find more and more followers. 

Some such teachers may indeed help people move from the margins nearer to the centre.  Eco’s protagonist cites the example Saint Francis who wanted to bring dignity to the impoverished people by giving them the dignity of the “children of God.”  We may recall how Mahatma Gandhi did something quite similar with the people whom he called “Harijan.”

Eco goes on to show that Francis did not succeed in his attempt, however, because “he had to act within the church, to act within the church he had to obtain the recognition of his rule, from which an order would emerge, and this order, as it emerged, would recompose the image of a circle, at whose margin the outcasts remain.”  In other words, the church would ensure that Francis’s people would continue to be outcasts or marginalised!

Otherwise, Francis would have to act outside the influence of the church’s hierarchy.  He would have to create a new power structure, as the Maoists are trying to do today in certain parts of India.

The Reformer must have a profound vision.  Otherwise he/she would be counter-productive.  Eco argues (as part of his fiction, of course) that the marginalised people “tend to drag everything down in their ruin.  And they become all the more evil, the more you cast them out.”

A reformer without a profound vision will only end up making the marginalised people even more marginalised.  By making them worse enemies of the various forces in the hierarchy.  Their greater depravity will create worse evils in society.

One of Eco’s characters (his narrator, in fact) gives the example of lepers.  Lepers were the most wretched outcasts in those days.  When the young and beautiful Isolda was condemned by the King to be burnt at the stake, the lepers made a plea.  The stake was a mild punishment, they argued, for someone who “at your (the King’s) side enjoyed rich stuffs lined with squirrel fur and jewels.”  “... when she sees the courtyard of the lepers, when she has to enter our hovels and lie with us, then she will truly recognize her sin and regret this fine pyre of brambles.”

What the lepers really wanted was not to give Isolda a just retribution or to teach her penitence for her sins; what they really wanted was to bring her exotic and unattainable beauty beneath their power.
Every act of rebellion is a banner for power raised by an outcast – actual or self-perceived.  I hope Eco wouldn’t frown at that conclusion of mine. 

The power need not be political, however. It may be simply the power to live one’s life with a feeling of security and dignity.  The kind of protests that Delhi’s public grounds witnessed in the recent past were banners raised for such power.  If there was one real leader in India, the maidans of Delhi would have throbbed with alleluias chanted for him/her.  What a pity – our alleluias are destined to remain unsung!  We are a nation of mere sloganeers.

Comments

  1. Replies
    1. No, Raghuram, unfortunately Hazare proved NOT to be a leader. He lacked the vision.

      Delete
  2. Does a leader necessary have to be a universally admirable? I have a hunch Arvind Kejriwal is shaping up for it. Whether you like him or not, his mobilising skills are formidable, and he's only just started. But maybe I'm an optimist.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Shovon, I think the only person who can do something meaningful in today's India is Mr Kejriwal. He is a crook. But he also has some ideals, it appears. He knows India and how the country works. According to me, he should be given a chance. Let us vote for his and his Aam Aadmi Party. Let us try it out. Why not when all other options seem to be closed.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Sorry Matheikal for intruding into your dialogue with Shovon Chowdhury. I believe there would have been a few people thinking along these lines about Adolf Hitler too.

    RE

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You are most welcome to intrude, Raghuram.

      I wish a few more intelligent people intruded!

      Delete
  5. I wouldn't call myself politically intelligent...I think your post is brilliant by the way of how you have explained it. I loved reading it!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Tomichan there are so many leaders who can teach anyone how to steal,plunder,rape or more!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...

Empuraan – Review

Revenge is an ancient theme in human narratives. Give a moral rationale for the revenge and make the antagonist look monstrously evil, then you have the material for a good work of art. Add to that some spices from contemporary politics and the recipe is quite right for a hit movie. This is what you get in the Malayalam movie, Empuraan , which is running full houses now despite the trenchant opposition to it from the emergent Hindutva forces in the state. First of all, I fail to understand why so much brouhaha was hollered by the Hindutvans [let me coin that word for sheer convenience] who managed to get some 3 minutes censored from the 3-hour movie. The movie doesn’t make any explicit mention of any of the existing Hindutva political parties or other organisations. On the other hand, Allahu Akbar is shouted menacingly by Islamic terrorists, albeit towards the end. True, the movie begins with an implicit reference to what happened in Gujarat in 2002 after the Godhra train burnin...

Empuraan and Ramayana

Maggie and I will be watching the Malayalam movie Empuraan tomorrow. The tickets are booked. The movie has created a lot of controversy in Kerala and the director has decided to impose no less than 17 censors on it himself. I want to watch it before the jingoistic scissors find its way to the movie. It is surprising that the people of Kerala took such exception to this movie when the same people had no problem with the utterly malicious and mendacious movie The Kerala Story (2023). [My post on that movie, which I didn’t watch, is here .] Empuraan is based partly on the Gujarat riots of 2002. The riots were real and the BJP’s role in it (Mr Modi’s, in fact) is well-known. So, Empuraan isn’t giving the audience any falsehood as The Kerala Story did. Moreover, The Kerala Story maligned the people of Kerala while Empuraan is about something that happened in the faraway Gujarat quite long ago. Why are the people of Kerala then upset with Empuraan ? Because it tells the truth, M...