Writer in post-truth world

A few dozen books arrived home the other day through a special arrangement, thanks to a good friend in Delhi. What a way to begin one’s retirement! My job as teacher has another ten days to go. I chose this retirement with due respect to an old saying in Malayalam, my mother tongue: ‘Quit singing when your voice is still good.’ On the verge of completing four decades of teaching, I didn’t want to leave the profession with any sour blood in the heart. The classroom has undergone a sea change. Teaching has been a relationship for me with my students, notwithstanding my inevitable flaws and limitations as a teacher. Relationships have become rather tenuous now, quite as professional as a one-night stand.

I decided to devote all my time to reading, blogging, some travels and a bit of gardening. It is then that the friend from Delhi put up a very unexpected suggestion to which I said yes because I was going to get a few dozen books free in the process whose details cannot be divulged now.

I opened one of the three cartons and picked a book randomly. It happened to be The Yellow Book: A Traveller’s Diary by Amitava Kumar, published by HarperCollins India (2024). I had not heard of the author earlier. I found out that he is a writer, journalist, professor as well as a painter. Born and brought up in India, Kumar is now teaching in a college in New York.

The Yellow Book is a rather strange volume. The narrative is interspersed rather liberally with the author’s paintings which are related to the text. It is a bit difficult to say what the book is really about. We are given suggestions on how to engage time productively in the first chapter and how to write honestly, in the last. In between we get a lot of extracts from the writer’s journals which deal with the places he visited, writers he met and/or read, experiences with his students…

Kumar doesn’t seem to have a high opinion about present India. In the second chapter, we read:

All the drawings I made in response to the news from India [during the Covid] were driven by sorrow and rage. The reports said that the metal in the crematoriums would sometimes melt from the fires burning; that relatives were often unable to even participate in any ritual of farewell; that the Ganga upstream from Patna was choked with bodies and the poor, unable to afford cremations, were burying their dead on the riverbank. I painted in order to feel less helpless. And hiding in this despair was an even greater fear: that those in power, who had organized election rallies and religious gatherings and helped spread the virus were, in the future, going to spin this story of loss into a victory song. The chief minister of Uttar Pradesh warned that those talking of shortages of oxygen cylinders would be arrested.

This narrative is accompanied by one of the author’s paintings of that time.

One night on TV the author hears a historian say that authoritarian leaders in power lie all the time. These leaders will also claim that it is their opponents and journalists who lie. People are helpless. They don’t know what the truth is. Those who know the truth and are brave enough to tell it publicly are sent to jails. “Democracy is dead.” So the author decides to keep his sanity intact by writing and drawing. The Yellow Book is a sort of record of what he wrote and painted.

The book ends with a chapter titled ‘Enemy of the People.’ One of Kumar’s protagonists writes a novel titled Enemies of the People. It is a political novel and we can guess who the enemies of the people are. You will find their portraits all over: on billboards, at petrol stations, on ration cards, even on your vaccination certificates – telling you what to believe, which god to pray to, what to eat and wear and…

Kumar reminds us about Ibsen’s play An Enemy of the People (1882) and Arthur Miller’s 1950 adaptation of it. Later, in 1989, Satyajit Ray made the film Ganashatru with the same story. Who is the enemy of the people? That is the question raised by all the three. The one who speaks truth to power is the enemy of the people, according to those in power. A doctor who tells the people that the springs which bring them water are dangerously polluted is the enemy of the people in these works. The doctor and his family are made outcasts by those in power. Truth is buried.

Kumar ends this book with the suggestion that an honest writer today cannot be apolitical. When most of your leaders are lying, how apolitical can you be? If you choose to fight for truth, you will be alone, no doubt, like Ibsen’s protagonist. At the end of Ibsen’s play, the doctor declares that he has made a discovery: “it is this, let me tell you – that the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.”

Amitava Kumar has the courage to stand alone. Kudos to him.