Tough as a Concept

New characters for new times. A time of rapid change favours those who thrive on the uncertain, the unfamiliar, the wholly unknown. It is to storm across the open plains…Indians on elephant-back. They are all over Ruth Prawer’s Jhabvala’s Get Ready For Battle. It is when old ideals give way to new ideas, which create different values, finding odd ways to novel kinds of success. No longer to prove one’s nobility by sacrificing the self to some great notion; today, honour is won by exhibiting your abilities. The goal is independence, where you test yourself against others, hoping to come out on top. It is why Brahmins are turning capitalist.

It is a struggle for wives and mothers to retain their influence during such transformations. Yet Sarla Devi aside, the women win these battles. Mala and Kusum fight to be with their man, even if it this breaks with the customs of public propriety; while Mrs Bhatnagar maintains a vision of herself as a powerful benefactor; Mrs Shankar has simpler, more traditional, concerns: to marry her sister as soon as possible.

These battles are won, yet the men general the war. It is why even inside the home a wife’s dominion is not absolute. In modern India married life is no simple division of labour between the sexes; for now, following British influence, the public and private are merging. Kusum to ring Gulzari Lal at his office, talk about Bundi Busti in the living room, mention divorce - horror of horrors! - in the bedroom. We wince for her; thinking she may lose a victory that seemed assured.

Public life is dominated by the men. Gulzari Lal makes big money as a property developer, and no amount of female sentimentality over the poor will put a stop his profitable deals. No no, he says to his wife’s arguments. The Bundi Busti slum has to be removed to raise property prices; this a fact of nature. Or take Mala; she has no control over her husband's public life, which is rapidly diverging from the old ways; as well-born girls go to parties, where they flirt and drink alcohol. That strict separation of male from female, each allotted their place and task in life, is breaking down. Soon there will be no separate quarters for the women, as public and private flow into and out of the other. For girls like Gogo this is a marvellous freedom, as she performs before her admirers. Protected by her education and upbringing, she will not be seduced into sexual stupidity. Vishnu too belongs to this world of the high caste sophisticate; though he rarely visits it now because of Mala; a severe traditionalist, who hates these parties, and longs for the old times when husband and wife stayed at home. 

Things are more difficult down the social hierarchy. A lower caste girl like Sumi is attracted to this freewheeling life, but in lacking the cultural protections of a Gogo, she suffers its consequences: losing control of her feelings she falls in love with Vishnu; a love she cannot consummate. Ah! The emotions rioting…are suppressed by the female authorities: Mrs Shankar has arranged her marriage. Oh Sumi! Deprived of the sensibility of these high caste types, lacking their sophistication, missing the nuances, you confuse play with seriousness, opening yourself to sorrow. Already she has lost Vishnu, who is bored with these aimless pleasures. Anyone with will and energy soon finds such gatherings tiresome. Then consider the wider pattern of this young man’s life. Tired of the office routine, reliant on a father who makes all the decisions, Vishnu is sinking into ennui. A chap who needs to test himself. As wilful and dynamic as the old man, Vishnu also has his mother’s nobility; it is a fateful combination, with its instinct for adventure, its urge to rule. Vishnu wants to escape into the wilderness, where he’ll create his own empire. He decides to start a factory. Mala has no say in this decision. It is the weakness of wives. Running the house, they live within a larger world governed by men; which once wasn’t a problem, when life changed slowly or hardly at all. Brought up in Bombay, Mala expected Vishnu to follow his father’s wishes and manage the firm’s Bombay branch; so fitting into a familiar pattern. Instead, he wants to go to some godawful place - Chandnipat - where he will become a capitalist adventurer. In a moment of sexual intimacy he reveals his secret.

Private life is being taken over by public concerns. Not necessary noxious, as possibilities are opened up to both sexes. Mala is excited by Chandnipat! Uncomfortable living with her husband’s family she wants her own place, which she can control. Then there are the side benefits. To live in a town will few amenities will force Vishnu to give up his gallivanting. A home at last. With its dreams of a sexual Arcadia. 

It was a long time before they were spent, and then he lay naked against her naked, his face pressed into her and enjoying her smell. She lay on her back, breathing softly, and he smelt her and tasted her with wet, satisfied lips. He thought of the first year of their marriage and what a wonder and delight she had been to him then; and for the moment she became such a wonder and delight again. And perhaps it was even better now, for she had spread out in the most womanly way possible and her flesh, having lost its girlish firmness, was now soft and yielding and receiving.

He murmured to her, full of bliss: ‘Shall we go away?’

‘To Bombay,’ she murmured back.

‘No, not to Bombay.’

‘Please,’ she begged and drew a loving finger over his naked shoulders.

He shut his eyes and tasted her again with his lips. Wanting only to lie still and drown in her, it was some time before he felt like talking again. ‘No, not to Bombay -’ Then he told her, briefly and in short disconnected sentences, with his face still pressed into her, about Joginder and his factory an Chandnipat.

‘Chandnipat,’ she said.

‘It will be very dull and there will be nobody.’

But she was smiling. She thought of the three of them, he and she and Pritti, in a dull place. There would be nowhere for him to go and he would have to be with her and they would lie like this every day and all night.

Carried away in sexual ecstasy Vishnu hasn’t revealed all the facts: he is going alone (he wants to live, we suspect, the bachelor life in what would be a ‘wild west’ town; and we know what that means). When Mala finds out she is furious. She attacks him and draws blood; then runs crying to Gulzari Lal. Faced with this tidal wave of emotion Vishnu’s will drowns…ok ok, we will both go to Chandnipat. Mala has won her battle. Home to equal her husband’s job.

Let’s have a closer look at Vishnu. Apart from that afternoon, when he couldn’t control his sexual desire, he is cool and distant. Here he resembles his mother; which misleads Sarla Devi into thinking they are alike. That indifference to others, an obsession with ideas, those visions of a better future…these they share; however, the content of these visions is quite  different; Vishnu’s are material, and self-consciously self-interested. This Brahmin doesn’t want to save the world. No! He’s going to conquer it in his own small way. The attraction of Capitalism, where every smart, inventive, strong-willed man can be his own maharajah. Sarla Devi has overlooked his father’s influence.

They have the name of gods for a reason. Both are remote from the more human Mala, Gulzari Lal and Kusum, Gulzari Lal’s mistress. Ruled by ideas, which hardens the feelings; they are pulled into the future by ideals which force them to sacrifice comfort and habit for purpose and meaning. A need to make the concept real rises them above the merely pleasurable, the norms of the norm. It is their noble ancestry, adapted to present purposes.

If Sarla Devi and Vishnu are the executive committee, the others are direct democracy outside its meeting room. Kusum et al the passions of the body outvoting the head. Here, there is no restraint on the feelings; the women in particular forever touching, hugging, kissing one another. A society yet to be made self-consciousness about sex, allows intimacies that are innocent and therefore free. Such innocence, with its ready emotional release, reminds us that most human expression is though the senses, especially touch; and that surrounding ourselves with those whom we trust with our emotions, so expressing them without reserve, is the best means of keeping our psychological balance. The loss of such spontaneity, especially at work, whose territory extends over too much of our lives, may account for the West’s psychic ills; our feelings locked inside the body, whose only outlet is the mind; that inadequate portal. Without this uninhibited expression, the feelings apt to rot inside. Depression. Anxiety. A pervasive listlessness. Has the West fallen victim to Dr Freud? Thinking to save us, did Sigmund the Sauce-Bottle in fact made us ill; as he helped transform innocuous expression into a corrupt mentalism, withering the soul? In Gulzari Lal’s house there is plenty of shouting, arguing, crying, but also scolding, laughing, and making love. Everyone free to express themselves. The reason, I am sure, these women overflow with vitality; for here, there are no worries about exposing the self to one’s intimates. Liberty is the privacy of home.

The 1960s and 70s disembodied the West, as the idea came to be seen as the template for social action and behavioural change. Although, as in all such revolutions, the times were full of paradox, as the radicals at first sought to embody the society, by removing the old moralities, seen as not only restrictive but false and inauthentic (that great crime of the age). Sex was key. It smashed up the churches, chapels and cathedrals. Sex at home, but also in office, park, street, wood, swimming pool…behaviour natural to the bedroom or avant-garde theatre spread out into the public realm, as iconoclasm became the ideal. Bye bye taboos! The barriers between private from public, together with those conventions keeping men and women safe from women and men, were broken down. Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing describes the effects. The anarchy couldn’t last, especially when a part of the revolution - Feminism - was pushing for equality in office and factory. It didn’t. Since the 1980s, a vast scaffolding of law has been erected to recreate that public distance, cooling down relations between the sexes, policing the excess of violence and exploitation those sexual adventures can release. This law has worked its effects. Work a sexually sterile place, where emotional temperatures are lowered, making the instinctive dangerous, as each person becomes their own watchtower. It is to be trapped inside the prison house of our minds. To be let out on the weekend to drink one’s self into sexual bliss or oblivion.

The Schloss gets off his soap box - Jackson’s Constipation Pills - and leaves for Soho.

Kusum is as emotionally expressive as Mala, but having lived a more public life is better able to control her emotions, which she uses to manage others. With Gulzari Lal, who is both touchy about his business and more knowledgeable about its characters, she risks going too far; a sign of her insecurity, her need for that divorce. Kusum makes the mistake of trying to involve Sarla Devi, whom she doesn’t understand, thinking her a woman like herself. There is a faux pas. Believing Brij Mohan has influence over Sarla; she honours him with her affections. Ah! It is to create an illusion that damages Brij, who, misreading the signs as love and desire, dumps his prostitute-mistress. Fool! You are a loser sir, with no chance of winning this beautiful woman. No way! The fairy tale not even to reach a second chapter; for Kusum has already got what she wished: Gulzari Lal is to leave his wife. She didn’t need to enter that tricky territory, the public realm, and gamble her future. Herself was enough. Inside the private quarters Kusum is a maestro of the feelings, which she plays like an instrument. Of course she wins her battle.

He returned the pressure yet heaved a sad sigh.

But as far as she was concerned, the time for sighing and sadness was over. ‘It will be soon now!’ she cried. ‘Only take a little courage!’ And then she took it herself and leant across him, holding him with both her arms: ‘Let them go,’ she said. ‘Then it will be only you and I, and what times we shall have together! Soon there will be your divorce - no, no,’ she cried as she saw a shadow fall, ‘there is no going back now!’ and she shook him a little by the shoulders. ‘It must be so,’ she said with such vehemence that he knew at once it really must.

Sarla Devi is a most interesting character, the strongest personality; thanks to the idea, that steel in the reinforced concrete that is this woman’s will; essential for her life’s work, which is to have a cause, an ideal she puts into practice. The reason Sarla is the most selfish of this brilliant ensemble. Some who’ve read the book may disagree. Read again! Read more suspiciously. Her own thoughts, surely, tell my story.

Afterwards she went and sat on the banks of the river, all by herself in a little patch of shade thrown by a clump of bushes. There was no one about, only some buffaloes wallowing in the water and in the distance lorries carrying loads of sand. The river was in flood now and the water stretched as far as the horizon where it merged with the sky and lay all still in a shimmer of heat. There were only sun and river and sky, and Sarla Devi felt flooded with peace. The burden that lay on her heart had lifted and all the poverty and misery of the world had melted from her. She felt so pure, so blissful that tears came to her eyes; her body felt light as a straw blown on wind. If only it could be so always, if only she could be thus free for ever: free from her own body and from her sense of that of others. All her life she had wanted to be free and alone, like this, thinking nothing and being nothing, only a disembodied state of acceptance; and all her life she had been tugged back by her compassion into a world where nothing could be accepted and everything had to be fought against. She was not even a good fighter, but still she felt she had to engage, like an enlisted soldier, and could not opt out.

Sarla Devi’s wish to save others - here Bundi Busti - is inseparable from her ego, with its will, that mad love for ideas. In the old days it would have been art or religion. In modern times, when self and society's moral order blend together, the idea pulls her towards the public realm; and especially towards the poor, creating huge tensions in the idea of herself as a moral person; for the idea of the social good, with its bias towards equality, bumps up against her own privilege. Argh! Her guilt is a burden too large to hold. However, ideas in creating this burden also lighten it, taking away the shame, as she acts them out. Saving Bundi Busti or saving Sarla Devi? The danger of social action, which in mixing these two motivations can cause tremendous harm, as the idea clothes a monstrous egoism in idealistic dress. Play with them like a philosopher or poet, and ideas are the soul’s vitalists; massaging the mind flexible and fresh. Good too for psychic health; as the ego, a rucksack too heavy to hump up the metaphysical mountain, is dropped. Ideas beneficent when staying in the mind, gambolling with ideational friends; miraculous when intuiting their nature we release their energy, taking us into ever distant horizons…never to reach the summit of Never-Never-Land. Ideas. Wonderful when we look up and out. Awful if confuse with our own interests. Soon they’ll turn nasty, coercive. A horrorshow.

We do not think the words of a cookbook their own recipe, that chuck a paragraph into the pot we’ll boil up a tasty meal. Alas, this is precisely the view of the idealist, drunk on ideas.

It is hard and difficult work transforming concepts into material. Equality on a page nothing like equality on street or in public square; ideas losing much of their beneficence when confronted with resistance or indifference. Instead of a mind’s free play the idea becomes a physical command, a four-letter word, an order, a law, a fist, a truncheon, as we force others to listen us. Once offering limitless freedom, the idea, when outside police station or parliament, becomes a thug or totalitarian. Be cautious of the concept. In trying to materialise the idea we risk removing much that enlivens and feathers the soul; we lose the idea’s precious gift of the ludic and profound. One has to be as sophisticated as Kant to see the varieties of thought and their various consequences. Sarla Devi is no genius. Smart enough to understand ideas she has no ability to play with them. Indeed no! for Sarla an idea must be substantiated in action. Ideas mere things. The problem of the literalist. They can copy ideas but cannot make or shape them. So dangerous! When an idea ceases to be a part of life and becomes its whole, much of life is abstracted out, as we are squeezed into a concept’s claustrophobic space. Sarla is trying to translate one kind of substance - mind - into another - body - without realising that she risks wrecking both. Always to be aware of the dangers, the difficult compromises that must be made in social action; always to soften the friction between the concept and the human material. The idea alone is not enough. Think it is and you will cause pain. Consider Nancy in Oliver Twist. Given the chance to escape Fagin’s gang, she refuses; because the idea of a pretty future ignores her attachment to those crooks and to her own degradation. The idea. Never the same as the matter it represents; the clever but unsophisticated - Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet - too dull to spot the distinction. 

Sarla Devi is blind to her own psychology; which uses ideas to affirm the self. In an India where public life has become so important, this high caste woman has found a way of retaining her status; her interventions less about saving the vulnerable than expressing her ego, exercising that will to rule. It produces many problems; not least for Sarla Devi, who lacks the power to force her ideas onto others. It is not that Sarla is stupid. This needs to be made clear. No no no. I suspect she is the most intelligent character in this novel. No, she is a fool. No judgement. It is why she is forever starting battles she cannot win. Sarla Devi throws her life away running after bad concepts. If only….

Sarla Devi looked up, and above the street - remote but seemingly attainable - she saw a sky huge and soft with evening. There was a last, lingering, fading, orange streak on the horizon and flung out against it a flight of silhouetted birds with outstretched wings. She looked down again. She went on walking; she hoped she would be able to find Tara. She knew that, even if she did, Tara and her old women would be angry with her and probably drive her away. But she had to go them, she thought, looking up again at the sky, she had to engage - and then perhaps in the end, one day, when she had engaged enough then she could be free.

If only she had tuned into her own tradition, learned the ancient lessons of India; where wisdom is discovered up in the metaphysical heights not down in the city’s dust. If only she had turned to Hinduism not embraced Western style politics. Independence has been won. But in taking up that political project India may have lost its soul to the West; where the Gods reside no longer in temples but public offices and voting booths. So many ironies, not least for us Westerners, who seem unaware that the Social is a church in which we worship ourselves. Such wisdom is beyond Sarla, who has little feeling even for ideas.

The Schloss is back! Standing once again on his soap box he gives us a sermon on the modern world: this woman is a victim of education, he says. Wiser heads shake their heads; then point out that Sarla Devi was born a noble, destined to sacrifice herself to an ideal. Not school but Lamarckian inheritance; only in her case the sensibility has malfunctioned; the ideas are out of control. This woman one of life’s oddballs, who not only cannot gauge the difference between an idea and the thing it represents, but values the idea above all things. Blinded by the torchlight of the concept. Such characters are naturals for public life; albeit most to suffer the misery of defeat, when, the ideas too extreme, the mind inflexible, they cannot influence those - the majority - who put comfort - mental, emotional, physical - before the austerities of an abstraction. Concepts are all very well for a bit of entertainment, the excitement of a demo, a youth’s masturbatory phase; but when the real work starts, when a family calls…the concept is, for most of us, put back into its box (the Box Of Organised Knowledge) and left on the shelf. Impossible for Sarla Devi, who is a fanatic; an idea it's own addiction, fuelled by a political life where there are only winners or losers. A concept junkie always looking for her next fix; a new cause to inject the self into; each defeat requiring ever great hits…. 

Sarla belongs to the past; it is why she is always losing. Too extreme to influence others, she lacks the talent to lead them; while she is powerless to force others to kowtow to her concepts.

A friend who hasn't read the novel, says its because she is a woman pushing herself into a man’s world. This is to misread the society. There are many ways to enter such a world, Kusum is one example; another, more convincing case, is Mrs Bhatnagar, a consummate public figure, who runs many committees and heads numerous associations. Her ideas rhyme with the times, and she gets things done to her satisfaction. How flexible is the public persona! Mrs Bhatnagar seamlessly melding establishment philanthropy with speculative development; her wish to move the slum-dwellers to a new town according perfectly with Gulzari Lal’s acquisition of the adjacent property.

‘I don't know why you are all so worried about the divorce. It is not important at all.’

Sarla Devi is too egoistic, too enclosed within herself, insulated within her thought-fortress, to mould her beliefs around the realities of others (although such distance allows her to acquiesce easily to Gulzari Lal’s request for a divorce). She has no feel for how we think. Thus this strange paradox. For characters like our heroine, ideas are both a fanatic expression of the ego and its most perfect camouflage. Once Bundi Busti is lost, she immediately loses interest, as if never existed; for she has a new project: to save Tara, her brother’s prostitute. But Tara doesn’t want saving! Sarla Devi is an extraordinary fusion of the public and private, where the private individual - its feeling, understanding, sympathy - is forever mediated through public conventions; emotion understood only if expressed as an idea. The purity of a concept, its abstraction from every compromising concern, hides from the believer their own pathological interests. Does it create finer feelings, a greater humanity? No. In fact, it leads to an utter indifference to the individual, who is treated as little more than a representative of the idea; Tara the Victim who has to be saved. The ironies are terrible. The idea of Tara’s salvation greater than the physical presence of her son, who fails to rise to the level of his mother’s idealism. An extreme selfishness, where the public realm is no arena of self-sacrifice but a place of self-assertion; a private space, where this impressive woman exercises her formidable will. The universalism of a concept the perfect cover for that most egocentric of traits, the desire to command. She must win! But a mistake has been made. Sarla has chosen the wrong opponent. This goddess is fighting modern India. A battle she’s destined to lose.

Review: Get Ready For Battle