Expression and Elegance

Salman Rushdie’s latest short story, The Old Man in the Piazza, is a moving plea for bringing elegance back to our public discourses. And truth too.

It is not the elegance of total assent that is desired. Everyone saying “Yes” to everything all the time is not a utopia. Language sits sulking in a corner of that utopia in Rushdie’s story. She endures the obsequiousness of all the yes-people for five long years and then, unable to bear the vulgarity of such invertebrate bhakti, stands up and lets out “a long, piercing shriek”. Language rebels against the total assent.

Assent is not a virtue, except in religion maybe. When the leader says that the moon is made of ancient Hindustani paneer, all the bhakts asserting their assent in unison is not the beauty of human life. Diverse are the beauties of language. Shakespeare and Kalidasa have their own places in her kingdom. [Language is presented as a woman in Rushdie’s story.] Vikram Seth’s inter-religious lovers can have their kiss in the temple of language without being shrieked out by the toxin of bigotry.

Dalliance is not what the lady language longs for either. Rushdie’s story shows young and handsome “Byronic creatures” paying shallow homage to language reminding us of the “bestselling” writers of our times. Language allows them “to ravish her in private”. Language has her own promiscuity. Her morals are loose.

Rushdie’s old man is watching all these. He is judging too. The eerie shriek of language works some miracle. The people open up debates. There is dissent now. Freedom of expression is rediscovered. The old man in the piazza becomes an official judge between arguing people. He decides that the earth is not flat and that there is God, and Heaven and Hell, and so on.

Slowly the old man’s judgments move from rightness to rectitude. “No longer willing simply to answer yes-or-no questions, he seeks to establish which of the disputing parties is the more virtuous.” He sometimes passes the verdict in favour of a plaintiff who is undeniably in the wrong but is a lesser evil than the rival.

Language sits brooding. This is not what she had expected from freedom of expression. Expression can have beauty in spite of infinite dissent. It should have. Language longs to be liberated, to unfold her endless beauty, to dance like a peacock…

Beauty is not loud. Not moral. Not religious. Beauty is subtle, gentle, mellow. Why has our language lost all that?

PS. Thanks to Manu S for drawing my attention to Rushdie’s story.

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