The importance of being a liberal

The Elephant, The Tiger And The Cellphone:Reflections On India In The Twenty-first Century
Shashi Tharoor
Penguin/Viking
388 pages
Rs495

Liberals, like nerds, can be bullied. But unlike the nerds, liberals are not too bright. They do not have the spark of genius of the nerds.

The liberals are mediocre in the nice sense of the term. That is, they are normal folk, who believe in the good and right things.

And they assume the role of opinion leaders because they are articulate and express themselves in earnest tones.

They are evangelical and self-righteous as well in what they believe and in what they say. International bureaucrat and novelist-essayist Shashi Tharoor is a liberal.

To make things worse, he is also an Indian liberal. Unlike the Western liberal, who is willing to accept diversity and differences, his Indian counterpart wants to embrace everything.

So, he makes that extra effort to embrace what is in danger of being excluded. The Indian liberal is not just a bundle of contradictions. He is cornucopia incarnate.

This confused liberal worldview of Tharoor is to be gleaned from the 70 pieces in this book, comprising the newspaper columns that he has written since the turn of the century.

Tharoor writes well, and his liberal viewpoint, which comes through consistently, can be an irritant as well as a reassuring refrain that binds the disparate pieces.

The pieces have been divided into theme-based sections. For example, the first section, “The Transformation of India” is an unabashed paean to liberalised India. Tharoor’s iconic figure is the ochre-robed at Kumbh mela using a cellphone.

He is quite like the other uncritical admirer of liberalisation, Gurcharan Das, who is starry-eyed about the market economy.

But the creative writer that he is, Tharoor wants to connect the fables of Panchatantra, the Indian epics, the Upanishads, the IITs and the BPO call centres into a seamless whole of a grand narrative.

Tharoor innocently bares the Indian liberal’s desire to accept all without realising that he might be trumpeting his own faith. He declares that he is a believing Hindu, a practicing Hindu.

He writes with disarming self-indulgence about his Hinduism: “So Hindusim is a faith that is so unusual that it is the only major religion in the world that does not claim to be the only true religion.”

Though he does not say so, it is very clear that he believes himself to be secular, the ultimate intellectual rope trick played by modern educated Hindus that vexes educated liberals of other faiths no end.

Like a good Indian liberal, Tharoor is an admirer of Jawaharlal Nehru, warts and all. But he makes that extra effort to understand people who are not liberal in his and the Nehruvian sense.

So, his piece on Sardar Patel offers an interesting insight into Tharoor’s sense of fairness.

He writes: “As a recent biographer of Jawaharlal Nehru, I have been somewhat disconcerted to discover that my admiration for my subject immediately prompts people to assume that I must dislike his formidable deputy, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.

In fact I count myself among the doughty Sardar’s fans, and am at somewhat of a loss to account for the presumed incompatibility of these two inclinations.” Again, the incorrigible Indian liberal’s desire to be inclusive.

The real triumph of Tharoor comes when he writes about matters closer to himself in life. “My Father’s Heart” is about the passing away of his father in 1993. Emotion and elegance of expression hang together convincingly:

“It was in 1993, when I was thirty-seven years old and a father myself, that the telephone call I had been dreading for twenty-five years — ever since my father, then thirty-eight, had his first massive coronary — finally came. On 23 October 1993, Chandran Tharoor’s heart had finally given in.” 

It is a fine sentence. The sorrow of loss syntactically bound. The mawkish liberal redeems himself.