Ruchir Joshi questions the basis of being politically incorrect, examining contexts from Gaza, racism, sexist rants, slangs to the AIB roast….
There is political incorrectness and there is political incorrectness. And then, there is, you guessed it, political incorrectness again.
Also, as we know, what is politically correct and incorrect is directly linked to history, and thus, the definitions shift with time. So, it was highly politically incorrect at one point to claim that the earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around, as it was outrageous to think of our earth as, of all things, a round ball, rather than what it obviously was, a flat slab at the centre of the universe around which the heavens danced their raas-garba or whatever circling group dance you prefer. Then, when the Bengali reformers got uppity in the 19th century about a quite normal ritual in our tradition, decent people were appalled at their political incorrectness: what was wrong with these anti-national, philistinous monsters that they wanted to put a stop to something as honourable as sati? Did a woman have no right to honour her dead husband? Speaking of rights, what would these mad people suggest next, equal rights for women in all areas? In tricky and troubled times such as ours, we have to keep reminding ourselves of all the things that once went directly against mainstream wisdoms and acceptability: equality between genders and races, political independence for Indians and other non-white people, the right to co-habit outside marriage, the right to love who you please regardless of gender, the notion that great big factories pumping smoke into the sky and effluents into the rivers were not such a good idea, all of these and more.
If what was acceptable in speech and action was heavily weighed in favour of the rich and powerful, (and over the last six hundred years or so, people of Caucasian descent), now the game is much more open, now the tectonic plates are slipping and sliding at a much faster and less predictable rate. In corners of the world women are being pushed back into wearing tents from which their grandmothers fought to be free; in other places, women themselves might want to wear hijab but the state makes it a crime; in yet other places, women take off their tops demanding the right to be fully comfortable in hot weather and walk around without encumberment, the same way men are allowed to. Even as the Israeli establishment continues to steal openly from the Nazi playbook, turning Gaza into an expanded Warsaw ghetto, anti-semitism is back, alive and kicking in Europe. In England, some of these openly anti-Semitic young men stand around demanding that all of Britain be brought under (their version of) Sharia law, whereas in India, an old man in ill-fitting, early 20th century British Army style khaki shorts declares openly that all Indians are basically Hindu. While Germany starts to shut down all its nuclear plants because of the obvious hazards demonstrated after Fukushima etc., in India the powers that be lay down the red carpet for importing dodgy nuclear plants to be built on tectonically unstable areas and dub everybody who protests against this as ‘anti-national’.
In speech, name and nomenclatures have become another minefield: black Americans can proudly use the words ‘nigger’ and ‘negro’, but god help anyone who’s not black if they do; similarly, South Asians in Britain can make jokes about being ‘Paki’ or being called one, but for whites to use the word is akin to a race crime; women (liberated ones) can call each other ‘bitch’, and men too, but those males have to be careful with the word – they can use it as a verb, as in to bitch about someone, but they can’t call, say, Sarah Palin “a stupid right-wing bitch”, or they can, but there will be a PC price attached to the usage. Similarly, here, the names upper-caste mothers used to shout at their kids, names of Dalit castes which were used by them as (supposedly mild) abuses are now a complete no-no, at least in supposedly sabhya urban society.
One English abuse that I personally find difficult to fling from my normally quite colourful tongue is ‘cunt’, but when I visit England I find all sorts of people, both young and old, using it quite freely and casually, as in “he’s being a cunt about washing the dishes.” Why a beautiful, magical body part should be an abuse beats me till I remind myself that over here we also have ‘chyut’, ‘chutiya’ and ‘khaanki’. In the north of India bhenchod and madarchod are also used quite casually, as they are in Gujarat, (especially in famously foul-mouthed Surat by men and women of all ages). A feminist friend of mine, pretty free with curses herself, nevertheless objected to the sexist nature of these abuses – “why the fuck don’t you guys ever say baap-chod or bhai-chod?’ I thought about this and tried coining and deploying chacha-chod, which has a nice alliterative quality to it, but people just started laughing at me so I stopped. For a while, striving for non-sexist gaali-galauch, I was in love with the Bangla leuda-choda, i.e. prick-fucker, till I realised it had homophobic connotations.
So, again, we have a situation where, on the one hand someone, a politician or a ‘social organisation leader’ can utter what to many people might be absolutely obscene ideas, (e.g., let the poor wait for the trickle-down but the rich must immediately be allowed to make more money) but as long as they do it in language that is acceptable in polite bourgeois society, they’re fine, but where if someone publicly says ‘Bombay’ it’s as if they’ve used one of the abuses listed above and they can actually be physically attacked, with justifications provided later. Or, we have a situation where huge statues of Sardar Patel and Shivaji can be proposed, at a cost of, again, obscene crores, and if someone protests they are deemed ‘unpatriotic’, whereas our dilapidated health service can be shrunk, our already sparsely distributed centres to help women who’ve been raped further reduced, all with complete impunity because the new political correctness of the powers that be says this is unquestionably the right thing to do.
In the midst of all this crossfire of what is correct and what’s not, so many of us managed get hot and bothered about the AIB Roast and the crazy reactions to the show. I watched the show on You Tube and it reminded me of nothing so much as a bunch of small boys giving small girls a quick look at their private parts. The girls (as in the audience) giggled and flicked their frocks up and down giving the boys retaliatory peeps, at which the boys really pulled out their full wherewithal for a few milliseconds. If you find that sort of thing funny, then god bless you and your funny bone, hope you grow up soon. If you actually find that sort of thing offensive enough to take it to court then even god can’t help you and you’re unlikely to ever become any real kind of adult.
If the AIB Roast was politically incorrect it was the empty kind of incorrectness that is devoid of any real political substance (and comedy shows about sexual peccadilloes, coming out of the closet, failing as actors and lovers etc. can be highly politically charged, just watch some others from around the world), it was trying to be offensive for the sake of being offensive (exhibitionist little boys yelling “Look! I’m being naughty!”) which is, ultimately, boring.
The other kind of political incorrectness is the insidious one. It’s deeply political alright, but it wears the garb of the upright mother-in-law or the chaste new bride. It actually pretends to be a correctness that is honourable, moral, clean and righteous but what it’s actually doing is propping up the powerful and pushing down the oppressed, what it’s actually propagating are the dirtiest self-serving lies in the name of the truth. It’s saying night is day, it’s saying these horrible times are wonderful, it’s saying criminals are men and women of honour whom we should follow and follow blindly.
Then, of course, there is the third kind of political incorrectness. This one is impolitic, unwise, foolhardy and fraught with risks. This one is not pretty, it can be offensive, it can ‘hurt sentiments’, it can sometimes miss the mark completely, yet it serves a hugely precious purpose – it puts us in touch with a future we can’t yet see or a past that we’ve forgotten but one that we shouldn’t totally jettison. It’s the kind of political incorrectness that opens up the chinks in the all too correctly and firmly shut doors and windows of our current thinking, of our docile acceptance of things as they are. It’s a hard one to achieve but I think it’s a good one for which to strive.
