On television and print these days we are being asked to chose the ‘greatest Indian after Gandhi’, someone who has had ‘the maximum impact’. We will be guided through this process by a jury comprising ‘some of the Greatest Indians who have shaped the nation’, including Chetan Bhagat, Arun Jaitley and Shashi Tharoor. Despite this cumulative greatness, its lasting impact is a great sense of discomfort.
The issue
is not the shortlist, though that’s clearly a problem. Why the clowning Kishore
Kumar should be greater than the beauteous Madhubala may be a difference of taste.
That BKS Iyengar or E Sreedharan should be pitted against Nehru or Ambedkar as shapers
of the nation, would seem instead a travesty of judgment. Millions remember the day that Indira Gandhi died
but Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai, valuable as their work is, are hardly
household words. Some in the list do indeed have instant name recall – like
Tata and Birla – but more as synonyms for wealth and corporate power. Certain professions like the judiciary are
conspicuous by their absence – surely some of our justices have been great ‘idea
leaders’.
Even the
Bharat Ratna awards are accused of reflecting regime preferences. Here, the
inclusion of Atal Bihari Vajpayee over Lal Bahadur Shastri or Annadurai probably
owes more to the presence of BJP members in the jury than to an intrinsically
greater worth. There are none in the jury who represent social movements of any
kind.
My
problem, however, is not that I, or anyone else, would have come up with a
different list, but with the very idea of a singular list that culminates in
one winner. Leave alone the hundreds who are worshipped, even the major Hindu
gods are a trinity. As children, we invested
our energies in one ‘best friend’, but age makes one realize that even a spouse
cannot substitute for all relationships.
Surely a 65-year-old country of 1.2 billion cannot be so impoverished
that one person can make or break it; all the people listed have contributed in
their own inimitable ways.
As oral
historians know, time is telescoped when people try to remember what affected
them. It is not surprising that nationalist icons and those of recent vintage figure
more than others from the middle period.
More generally, though, how does one
measure and rank across time or space? If asked to chose my favourite book, I
would strongly resist. If one reads RK
Narayan (the only writer shortlisted) for
small town nostalgia, the Punjabi poet Amrita Pritam provides a different inspiration.
To hear Bhupen Hazarika sing is to sail
the broad Brahmaputra, as against the gentle Ganga-Jumna of Mohammad Rafi. Each of the linguistic and political
communities that constitute India will have their own list of formative
Indians, people who shaped their sensibilities in lasting ways. The choice of a
jury comprising mainly urban middle class people drawn predominantly from the
fields of ‘politics, finance and entertainment’ tells us less about the ‘greatest
Indian’ than about the nature of power today and the constrained imagination of
our elite.
Gandhi has
been excluded from the list – apparently because his greatness overshadows all
others – but even he was able to define his ideas only because he was in
conversation with other phenomenal people.
It is
hardly surprising that in the BBC program that inspired the Indian effort, Churchill
should have been chosen “The Greatest Briton” over Shakespeare, Darwin or
Newton. What this reflects, above all, is the British desire for relevance in a
post imperial world. In contemporary India,
the compulsion to choose just one is as likely to promote parochialism as a
shared “Indian” past, as each community votes for its own. The whole exercise risks
reducing India’s great arguments, its carefully developed institutions and its
vast diversity to a souped-up version of Indian
idol.
Whether
this process will encourage the ‘debate’ or ‘awareness’ that its promoters
claim is disputable. What is indisputable is the commodification of 50 great
Indians, who are being re-branded and served up in a contest that does less for
them or for public ideals than it does for television ratings.
This was published in the http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-06-18/edit-page/32282575_1_shortlist-amrita-pritam-jury
