How to decode sermons of great men of ‘humble’ origins

In the brown world, holders of certain special positions get an automatic license to give sermons to people. These positions come with a certificate of greatness, if not saintliness, and most usefully, an effective immunity from prosecution for crimes. The President of the Indian Union is one such position. Sermons are grand only when they’re coupled with an occasion made grand by splurging public money. Teacher’s Day is one such. I’m yet to come across a great teacher who was inspired by sermons of the powerful on Teacher’s Day. It’s possible that people inspired by Teacher’s Day sermons are out to transform this subcontinent at this very moment. But I haven’t seen them. To mark Indian Union sarkar’s Teacher’s Day 2015, Pranab Mukherjee spoke about his school days at a school in Delhi.

Mukherjee said he walked 5 km daily to his school. ‘My life is my message’ must be the oldest PR stunt. That evoked in me a picture of a child who walked to schools along with other children of the area. It’s a picture of hardship and determination. The subliminal message I got was if Mukherjee can get from there to where he’s now, everyone can achieve their dreams. The 5-km-walk imagery projects the quality of being not entitled, being ‘self-made’, through merit and struggle, whatever that means for a Brahmin boy with a Congressite father who was a three-time Member of Legislative Council, when Congress was the ruling party in Kolkata and New Delhi. The official website of the President of the Indian Union states he is ‘a man of humble origins’.

What this picture doesn’t reveal is that Mukherjee’s class in his school was thoroughly unrepresentative of the caste composition of the area to ‘all’ whose inhabitants the school supposedly catered. That was true then, that’s true now for schools where subsequent generations of such Mukherjees, Chatterjees, Jaitleys, Sardesais, Chaturvedis, Bhats, Mishras, Iyers, Namboodiripads and such others have moved to. ‘Other’ people now do five-km treks. There’s a caste-class pattern about who these ‘other’ people are. They are the non-savarna people whose high percentage in the Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) data is being suppressed by false excuses.

There is ‘humble origin’ and there is humble origin.

The 5-km walk also gives the impression of a humbler, more austere time, when school density was pathetic. Schools that are primarily expected to be attended by ‘others’ are also in a hopeless state now. Austerity didn’t touch the Viceregal Palace then, and doesn’t touch its renamed avatar, the Rashtrapati Bhavan. Ashis Nandy points out this fashion among the traditionally well-to-do to falsely claim that they were poor or not rich. Is this to make the self-made through merit and struggle argument sound convincing, to play down the defining role of inherited privilege in their lives?

Stories of rags to riches, chaiwala to King-Emperor, labourer to tycoon, obscures the statistical reality of upward progress of the rest of the chaiwalas and labourers. They have minimal chances of vertical movement in legal ways, irrespective of the miles they walk to school. These stories, of which the ‘American dream’ is the Western Hemisphere version, skilfully ignores systemic causes of exclusion, precisely because they are identifiable and changeable in a humane, democratic society. Thus, we have ‘human stories’ of exceptional individuals as products of grit, innovation, merit and hard work. This marks out the excluded as people who lack these qualities, as a group. Of course, the building of my concrete home and cultivation of the paddy that ends up in my plate as rice, doesn’t require merit and grit. In a subcontinent of saints, sermons need to be decoded for what exactly they are.

The author comments on politics and culture