Art of disagreeing without being disagreeable

Here is a telling example of Salman Rushdie’s incendiary style. I stumbled upon it while browsing the web last weekend. Diabolically, it was tucked away in a recipe, Salman Rushdie’s Lamb Korma, which appeared in Parade, the American Sunday magazine, last year.

The dish evoked images of the deliciously spicy meals that the India-born Rushdie had as a child. Rushdie’s son, Milan, adores it, we are told by way of a preamble. The Rushdie lamb korma needs chopped onions, clarified butter, cardamom pod, garlic cloves, fresh and finely grated ginger, coriander, chilli powder, salt and lightly whisked yogurt to give the lamb the magical touch of Rushdie’s mother and sister.

However, it was the last ingredient in the list, ‘pinch of saffron’, that caught my attention. “About five minutes before korma is ready, add onion-cardamom paste and saffron so it can be absorbed by the meat and gravy,” Rushdie suggests.

It became blindingly obvious that the man enjoys stirring the pot. Mischief had been tossed even into a recipe. Surely he need not have added that dash of saffron, knowing well how many people feel about saffron, not to mention about Rushdie himself.

This was last year, long before a cottage industry of analysts was dissecting the Uttar Pradesh elections and the Jaipur Literature Festival. The big question: in the current climate, when everyone is so quick to take offence and offend, would Rushdie be allowed to address lovers of lamb korma via video-link or in  person if local connoisseurs of the dish claimed that they were deeply offended by his saffron-tinged recipe or by the idea of someone like him holding forth on a subcontinental delicacy? The jury is out on that one. His critics are adamant. As for Rushdie, he is likely to repeat after Popeye the Sailor, “I yam what I yam and that’s all that I yam.”

The facetious example gets me to what I believe is the most worrying issue today. It goes far beyond the author, his banned book, freedom of expression, and the artistic or literary fraternity. Recent events tell us, again, that as a society we do not know how to deal with a person, an idea, or a situation that we find deeply offensive, or which challenges everything that we cherish. It is commonplace to hear that we are becoming a more illiberal society. What is surprising is that we are surprised by this.

Most adults do not know how to disagree without being disagreeable, most children are not taught how to hold one’s own when all around take a hostile stand. At school, it is rote learning.

At home, children are told they must not question elders or answer them back. Prof Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian is turning into The Abusive Indian, or worse, The Threatening Indian. Neither is a substitute for argument, and there is no training on how to argue one’s  case in a civilised manner.
In his book The Unschooled Mind — How Children Think And How Schools Teach, Howard Gardener, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, pointed out, “Students often come to history, literature, art, or social studies classes with deeply held prejudices, stereotypes, and simplifications. As in the case of sciences and mathematics, one cannot expect that these biases will simply dissipate after a single counterexample. It is important that these prejudicial views be regularly and repeatedly recognised as such and that the students have ample opportunities to develop richer and more rounded views of the subject.” Gardener’s observations about American students are equally relevant to India.

How many schools in the country encourage their students to look at a subject from multiple perspectives or train them in writing an argumentative essay? Talking to friends in academia, it is clear that most schools have little time for such an approach. Rarely do young people get an opportunity to examine a subject from multiple, often conflicting points of view before making up their minds.

Last year, Shikha Sen, a filmmaker, was part of a group of parents at a Delhi school who documented the process of negotiation they went through while putting up a performance of the Ramayana for their children. Various versions of the epic jostled and one set of memories and cultural constructs countered another. What emerged was Anek Ramayana, a rich and varied experience of this epic.

In an aspiring nation, ‘how to’ is a buzz phrase. Everyone wants to know how to get rich quickly, how to be beautiful, how to be stylish, etc. We also need training on how to respond when someone strikes at our deepest convictions. 

— The author is a Delhi-based writer