A little girl Dorothy with her dog Toto crouching
in a small house. Scared. Their round, big eyes
staring through a cracked window pane to the vastness
wilderness and beyond. The house itself is being
uprooted and carried away by a fierce tornado. This
tornado carries these two scared souls, from the
homely security of Kansas, to the wonderful Land of
Oz ruled by the great wizard. From there to the
Emerald City, where the old wizard rules, a yellow
brick road leads they way.
My own story is somewhat Dorothy's story narrated in
reverse and also, being stripped of its fantastic
and magical elements, pretty sedate. Born and
brought up in Assam-land (which is somewhat like the
land of Oz for reasons which will soon be clear), I
was condemned to exile in Kansas for some years and
am still busy carrying out that sentence. On her way
to the Emerald City, Dorothy finds herself a bunch of
quaint pals: a Scarecrow with no brains, a Tin
Woodman with no heart and a Lion with no courage. And
I am not very sure I have not befriended or at least
came to contact with these amazing characters a few
times in my own Assam.
A few days ago I got into trouble when, in a group of
Indian friends, mentioned that Indian people are more
apt to act by their instincts rather than by reason:
yet I still maintain I was nearer the truth. Now
zooming back to Assam, the same malady of limited
vision, the desire to react to situations in a manner
rooted and expounded in the hundreds of years of
tradition of Assam is still persists. The average
Assamese, like any average Indian, is used to live by
his instincts: his reactions to different situations
are already pre-defined by his caste, his religion and
his class. A person in Assam is not, above all, an
individual with individual views and reactions to
situations like in the West. He is primarily a part of
a clan before he is an individual and his actions
reflect the views, the traditions and the taboos of
the clan.
But we have to remember that things can never be
expected to change overnight. For hundreds of years
Assam was under foreign rulers. Even now one cannot
say that the solutions provided by the present
government are tuned to the Assamese needs and
sensibilities. Liberty itself is a very sharp
instrument to be used with care, especially by people
who are new to it. When an oppressed race is given
the gift of liberty, his first identity, to quote
Naipaul, is always a small one. The religious and clan
boundaries are the support system of the people. They
are not only here to stay for quite some time, but
they are also necessary. The good thing is that people
are beginning to express their individuality within
these new boundaries.
I prefer to term this largely prevalent phenomenon of
acting inside preset boundaries as the
Scarecrow-effect. Now finding the Tin Woodman in a
land where largeness of heart is often prioritized
over needs of survival is of course a difficult task.
I still remember reading a story where a rich family,
losing everything in a flood, is rendered homeless.
Things take a turn for the worse and a day comes
when they have to refuse alms to a hag who goes
begging around. At this point, the lady of the house
sits down and wails. Her sorrow does not stem from
the fact that she is poor; she could have borne the
poverty with grace and strength so uniquely Assamese.
She had to refuse alms to a beggar: something she
would have never done if she had even a morsel left
and she weeps for that fact. But even among such
traditions barbaric acts are seen every once in a
while. I don't want to turn this essay into one of
enumerating the social evils afflicting the society.
Almost everyone memorized a list of them from
high-school text books; the evils afflicting the
region are neither more nor less than those
affecting the rest of the country. But there is a
difference in point of view. The rest of the country
does not take any interest in the slow development of
the people; what raises their eyebrows and what
graces their coffee-tables are the individual cases
of cruelty emanating from the state. This builds a
psychology that the north-easterners are a bunch of
barbarian hill-people, which in turn color their
subsequent deductions and opinions.
Lions without courage, I have to admit, are something
we have in liberal quantity. If you have ever read
an Assamese newspaper, I am sure you will understand
what I mean: everywhere there is talk of the "silent
majority". Silent majority! The concept of democracy
itself, prevalent in India in general, is based on
the very fact that the populace, by its overwhelming
numbers, can throw down any errant leader, drag him
onto the street and chop his head off. A silent
Democracy is a farce: it is the Statue of Liberty
clad in burqua! A Democracy, when the people are
silent, degrades into a dictatorship or what is
worse: a plutocracy instantly. One ought not to be
prodded and elbowed to exercise this right: it should
come naturally to them.
Most things in life do not work as they are supposed
to. Talking about metaphorical lamps, James Joyce
says, "I need them only for my own use and guidance
until I have done something for myself by their light.
If the lamp smokes or smells I shall try to trim it.
If it does not give light enough I shall sell it and
buy another." Assam has a sizeable number of
well-educated guys; the only problem is with
application of their education. Most of them are laid
back and take only an armchair interest in what goes
on around him. And the views of most that do dare to
speak up lack vision.
In the same context I remember a quaint incident. A
fellow of a northern merchant caste who had done some
advanced course in computers in USA came to contact
with a famous Indian writer. He claimed that he was
"too-educated" for India as no one was ready to
appreciate his effort to lay down computers in rural
areas. The writer compares him to a plumber from the
slums. A plumber from the slums is a simple soul
called upon to exercise a skill which he exercises
blindly. Tap water to him is a luxury; his wife stands
for hours in the morning to get water from the
municipal tap. So he does not understand why the tap
has to be placed straight at the center of the tile.
To apply new technology in places like Assam, so
vastly rooted in tradition and comparative poverty,
requires vision. That vision is never elusive but is
yet to be actively pursued.
Let's speed our story up to the part where Dorothy
with her merry company finally meets the Wizard. The
Wizard of Oz is not actually a wizard. He is a
pseudo-wizard: just another cunning fellow who, by a
matter of deceit creates for himself an image of
being omnipotent and omniscient; he makes everyone in
the city wear green glasses so that everything will
look fair and green to them: even petty stones and
bricks look like emerald though the sparkling green
glasses. And everyone around, thus, is very happy. He
lives in and rules from Oz. In my case the Wizard
lives somewhere else. He, along with his troupe of
wizard-lings and wizard-wannabes, lives in the ancient
Mughal city of Delhi. Yes Delhi. You know; Jantar
Mantar, new Ferraris, creaky DTC buses, heat-melted
'Picnic' chocolates: Delhi. Sitting on a swiveling
leather chair, he hands out pretty glasses to
Assamese politicians with the word "PROGRESS" written
on either panel. They look at their own state through
them and are happy. Verily impressed, they bring back
with them whole carton-loads of these glasses and try
their best make the people in Assam wear them and
thus be happy and satisfied like them. And the people,
na‹ve as they are, for the most part, oblige. I
lost my pair in the confusion of the tornado that
brought me to Kansas; my friends have been calling me
a stoic or what is infinitely
Worse - a stoic and a skeptic ever since.
The brick paths in Assam are still golden
All we have to do is to discard our sparkling glasses
of false vision and come back to reality. The present
state of affairs is knotty and labyrinthine no doubt
but in no way unsalvageable. Every Assamese worth his
shirt is proud of the lavish natural gifts of his
state; and so he ought to be. Why, even after being
one of the potentially richest states in the nations,
is it still falling behind mainstream India? The hills
and the rivers and the obvious problems arising out
of them cannot be made scapegoats: parts of Europe
are almost inhabitable due to the Alps and have many
fast rivers and neither are they so much endowed with
natural resources. Is it due to the intelligent
exploitation of the resource? Or is it mismanagement
and failure to achieve maximum efficiency of the
resources? I think it is something of both; further
confounded by the Scarecrows, the Tin Woodmen and the
Lions without courage of Assam-land.
Next time I plan drag my pals to a good Fairy. The
Scarecrow needs to fill his cranium up with handfuls
of bran and some pins and needles so that he can have
a bran-new intellect and also a sharp, pin-pointed
judgment. The Tin Woodman needs a pretty silk heart
filled with sawdust and the lion needs a dose of the
green courage-potion. And everyone, I hope, lives
happily ever after.
L' Allegro
Arguably, "Satanic Verses" is one of the most
controversial books of the last few decades and
Salman Rushdie one of the most errant word-smiths. A
passage in the said book runs:
"After that there had been nothing to stay for. The
aeroplane lifted and banked over the city. Somewhere
below him, his father was dressing up a servant as
his dead wife. The new traffic scheme had jammed the
city centre solid. Politicians were trying to build
careers by going on padyatras, pilgrimages on foot
across the country. There was graffiti that read:
Advice to politicos. Only step to take: padyatra to
hell. Or, sometimes: to Assam"
This book was written during one of Assam's more
trying moments: the stormy eighties. We have
certainly progressed a great deal from the time when
we used to be compared to hell. Such unfortunate
parallels are not just due to the fault of the
Assamese people; it is more or less the ignorance
about the ailments of the region among the population
of India. Joined to India by a small strip of land,
the north-east is often viewed by the rest of India as
a mere decorative artifact. The lean physical link to
continental India seems to have bottle-necked even
the intellectual interest of the Indians for this
region. I don't blame Rushdie for what he wrote; he is
a writer: his job is to put to paper whatever he sees
in real life and to his credit, he does it very well
most of the time, objectively. May be it is an
offshoot of his fancy that he is an intellectually
uprooted South-Asian writer, much like V.S. Naipaul
and Nirad C. Chaudhury and that he can observe the
world around very objectively. But for every
objective Rushdie, there are ten analytical
pseudo-intellectuals who look at Assam once every two
decades, in a manner as if they are investigating the
ruins of Giza or some petty tribe tucked away in the
depths of Amazon, with their fat magnifying lenses and
try to deliver instant fix-it-yourself solutions for
the problems of the region. One such Utopian idea is
the idea to join the Brahmaputra and all its
tributaries to the Ganges and other rivers. I often
come across such vibrant speculations in various
magazines and articles.
Back in my Oz-land, at such times, I grab a bowl of
popcorn and say,"Hobo Diok."
(Contributed by Syamanta Saikia, Wichita, Kansas)
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