The Death of Truth and a lot more

Susmesh Chandroth in his kitchen

“Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought,” Poet Shelley told us long ago. I was reading an interview with a prominent Malayalam writer, Susmesh Chandroth, this morning when Shelley returned to my memory. Chandroth says he left Kerala because the state had too much of affluence which is not conducive for the production of good art and literature. He chose to live in Kolkata where there is the agony of existence and hence also its ecstasies.

He’s right about Kerala’s affluence. The state has eradicated poverty except in some small tribal pockets. Today almost every family in Kerala has at least one person working abroad and sending dollars home making the state’s economy far better than that of most of its counterparts. You will find palatial houses in Kerala with hardly anyone living in them. People who live in some distant foreign land get mansions constructed back home though they may never intend to come and live here. There are many such palaces where a couple of aged people may be living (or dying, depending on how you wish to view it) getting all the money they require from their children who are all abroad.

All the manual labour is done by migrants from other states. According to very modest estimates, there are about 35 lakh (3.5 million) migrant labourers in this small state. Malayalis have stopped doing blue collar jobs. They have become both slothful and snobbish, says Chandroth in the interview [Madhymam weekly, 23 Dec 2024]. And he’s right too. I come across an unfair share of slugs and snobs in today’s Kerala. The tragedy is they can afford it too because there’s someone or another working in Alaska or Siberia for ensuring the welfare of these slugs and snobs.

Can good literature, good art in general, emerge from such a social condition? This is the question that Chandroth hurls at our faces. His answer is no. Art is a process of psychological sublimation, he says quoting Graham Greene. Pains and frustrations forge classical art. Dostoevsky’s novels are still sold and they don’t need any advertising. And who was a more agonised writer than Dostoevsky?

Chandroth chose Kolkata to live in because West Bengal was the leader in art, music and literature for some two centuries. Now life still continues to be rather painful for a large number of Bengalis, but the state doesn’t produce good art, music or literature.

Is there a contradiction here? I stopped to meditate. No, I realised that Chandroth is saying that for him to write good literature painful reality is required. West Bengal provides him with that. But the same reality need not necessarily inspire others.

The reason is the overall erosion of moral values and principles. Ideologies as well. We now live in a country whose leaders have no ideology whatever. They can switch from one political party to another just for the sake of getting a chance to contest the elections or for a few crore rupees. Chandroth cites the examples of P Sarin who jumped to the Communist Party from the Congress merely to get a chance to contest the recent election in Kerala, and that of Sandeep Varier who ditched the BJP to join Congress because all of a sudden he was inspired that the BJP was a communal party. Both these individuals who left their parties and the party which accepted them show utter lack of principled stands.

This is how India is today: a country of absolute fraudulence and expediencies. How profound can its literature and art be?

Perhaps, the worst disservice perpetrated by the Modi regime is just this: the assassination of ideology, of truth, principles, and morality.