This guest post was sent to us by PRASANTA CHAKRAVARTY

A recent exchange in a congregation addressing the nature of contemporary civil society caught my attention. This was a formal gathering where there was supposed to be a pitch on an idea tentatively christened civility index: that is, whether it was possible to empirically measure civility and come up with some conceptual conclusions, as well as have more practical usages once such indicators will have been developed. A searching question came from someone who had spent a lifetime fighting liberal centrism and opportunism. “Why do you call the whole thing civility index,” she inquired, “civility connotes propriety and manner and etiquette, when you are interested to scale human capacities, right?”

This is a fundamental and worthy question, especially keeping in mind that certain variants of civil society discourse has caught the imagination of many invested in democracy right now, even as they wish to steer clear of old leftist certainties and eschew easy liberal pluralism at once. Are propriety and etiquette wholly irrelevant to our understanding of modern civil society? Is manner rudimentary to civil society, counterproductive to doing anything worthwhile? Does civility dilute the associational potential of civil society—human capacities being robbed off by issues of mere conduct and comportment? Are traditional societies uncivil by definition? And does civility, more than just civil, civic or public, betray fashionable elitism unabashedly?

These ideals of pacification and distinction through which civility functions actually jolts our sensibility of fairness or democracy or radicalism, as the case may be. Even from a strictly libertarian standpoint it would seem that civility per se neither maximizes utility nor respects persons as ends—and hence cannot be counted as a moral virtue, can it be? From perspectives that are more uncompromising, it suggests fomenting consensus through slyness, thus devaluing heterogeneity and social differentiation. From an even more radical standpoint, civility corresponds to cold and unnatural artificiality—seeking to replace both natural equality and cultural depth.

The analytical potential of civility is also somehow shrouded by a latent ambiguity. That the idea of civility depends on a connection between human capacity and manners demands a direct correspondence between inner states and external appearance and assumes the transparency of inner conviction and moral character such that one necessarily has direct access to capability by means of appearance, behavior and language. There is no way to guarantee that one’s appearance represented the actual state of one’s interiority. So, you end up confronting dissemblance and narcissism in anyone engaged in the civility business.

But insisting and actively hunting for such a direct correspondence between reality and representation may not always be very yielding. Even a trifle premature may be. Think of some of our best riotous literary representations, subversive of civil society by common consent. Kashinath Singh’s hugely popular Kashi Ka Assi comes to mind. Singh’s episodic narrative charts the diurnal vagaries of cultural politics, especially empowerment politics of nineties Banaras, offering us a slice of the changing equations among Kashi’s citizenry passing by and assembling routinely at the Assi Ghat all through that tumultuous period. The semi-fictionalized memoir is indeed a remarkable chronicle of how the political battle lines were being redrawn in the northern part of our nation through BJP’s spectacular ascendancy and the counter challenges provided by SP and BSP and their own turf battles. Singh’s relative objectivity as an omniscient insider is a great virtue—though sometimes his satirical targets are pretty obvious. In that sense, the book is a worthy companion to the best works of Carlo Ginsberg, Keith Wrightson, Shahid Amin or Robert Darnton—just more literary-sociological may be. And unmistakably, Singh is working in the tradition of Bhagavati Charan Verma and Renu, Srilal Shukla and Manohar Shyam Joshi. The satirical bite of the work comes from the rather elegiac realization that Eastern UP has lost much of its say in national politics, but at the same time a tremendous optimism fills the pages. More importantly, the narrative performs reality through an unbridled and joyous use of language, apparently caring little about tehzeeb or vinay. After all, if one telling statement has to be culled out from this richly oracular work, so that one can catch a hint of the milieu, it must be: ma chudaye duniya, hum bajaye harmuniya. Kashi Ka Assi, it would seem, offers us vignettes of life, not behavior. But can the two be so easily sieved, separated, distinguished?

One of the central charms of the book lies in the delineation of a fine tapestry of exchanges and interdependencies among the city’s denizens. Pappu ki Dukaan, the 57-year-old tea and bhang joint (a slight modification of the more traditional bhang and thandai concoction), at Assi Chauraha is our protagonist, where networks are worked out—which used to be ‘samajwadio ka coffee house,’ now turning out to be ‘bhajpaiyo ka appughar.’ Pappu’s is a miniature legislative house with its own Sansad Bhavan and Ashoka Hall, its Triveni Kala Sangam and Boat Club. Governments rise and fall within and without.  Ram Manohar Lohia still smiles from his frayed photograph. Once regularly frequented by the likes of Madhu Limaye, George Fernandes and Rajnarayan, it now harbours a motlier crowd. And a singularly ardent patron of the joint is our Professor of Hindi, bhangacharya Chauthiram Yadav. When Mulayam in UP and Lalu in Bihar came to power, both sought a learned and wise yadav-shiromani as a chancellor for their respective state universities. They zeroed in on this half-Yadav of Banaras—partial because Chauthiram never domesticated cattle, and though at times took to ganja, was not particularly fond of wrestling. Periodically he even hobnobbed with some thakurs. Anyway, the chief ministers, hoping for a deal, arrived at the professor’s abode and asked for his opinion about the possible appointment. “I could come with you, but on the singular assurance that Pappu ki Dukaan reaches there before I do,” was Chauthiram’s calm response. When enquired about the nature of the dukaan and to all questions that followed, the good professor closed his heavily laden eyelids and kept on replying: neti, neti. At one point, by now an utterly bewildered and exasperated Lalu tells his counterpart that the guy is simply unqualified for the kulapati position since instead of addressing them as neta, he keeps harping neti.

So, Pappu ki Dukaan could be explained best by framing what it is not, via negativa, as they say. It is not a place for sentimental moralizers, not a place for the chicken hearted and not a place for the impatient or the ignorant—politically, musically, hedonistically.

A sense of vibrant, throbbing curiosity underscores Singh’s Banaras. Interactive and argumentative—a heady mix of pralaap and pravachan circumscribes its continuation as a living entity.  A characteristic response of the Assi Ghat frequenters to a Mirzapur MP aspirant’s using pure rhetoric in the ‘98 election campaign (Atal Behari ji was on his way to meet you all, till he suffered a heart attack!) in order to instill emotional, lachrymose reaction among the prospective voters is this: Bhosdi ke, koi tark nehi, koi program nehi, ro-ro kar seat bator rahen hain? Swashbuckling jabs, enigmatic asides, witty ripostes and touché abound. But argument for mere argument’s sake—dry and humourless—never and never ever! Rather, an indulgent, lighthearted sense of banter characterizes the Assi revelers. Each one trying to get a leg up on the other, but with no rancor whatsoever. Song and dance, jokes and leg pulling are the order of the day. As Singh reminisces towards the end: Baat haansi –majaak ki, andaz phalsafana—part philosophy, part fun—that was that. When Kalyan Singh became the chief minister with Mayawati’s support, Saroj, an Ahir and a regular at Pappu’s, narrated this story: “While returning from Ramnagar the other day, I chanced upon an elephant at the chauraha. Upon nearing the spot, I witnessed an utterly inebriated soul dangling by the elephant’s tail and yelling out: Look, look I’ve gotten hold of the trunk. Now the elephant is under my control. He seemed an unreservedly happy man. Meanwhile the elephant farted “poooo” and the man fell flat on the ground with a thud. When the onlookers picked him up, the man identified himself as one Kalyan.” Or take the case of this exasperated disciple of a certain political guru who started with Bahuguna and was now looking for salvation with Rajiv Gandhi. The disciple, still owing allegiance, deadpanned on his master at Pappu’s: Tere husn ka hukka buhj gaya hai /Ek hum hai ki gurguraye jaate hain.

The setting is suffused in sensitivity and a certain élan. The sessions are dignified but not deferential. The abuses and swearing are integral to such open hearted, indomitable ambience. Tradition is accepted and made fun of at the same time. No concoction of cultural idiocy is entertained. The wise Aghor sant of Assi, Girija Shankar, for example, entertained a pet thesis about Tulsidas who once returned home to find his wife busy with her paramour. Since Tulsi was least bothered about her anyway, did not even get her back in time after gauna—this was but expected. Girija carried on that accepting this fact does not diminish the value of Ramcharitmanas or of Vinayapatrika in any manner. Or, for that matter, to imagine that Bismillah Khan, the first citizen of Kashi for decades, used to play the shehnai for marriage parties during his adolescent days, tiptoeing behind the bride and the bridegroom to Lolark Kund or Tulsi Ghat! That is fine, people falter, rise up and move forward all the time.

Motives and drives are not alien to this cosmos. Not always altruism and nobility run the show—dhurt, paakhandio aur lobhiyo ka shahar hain yeh—the city of cunning and greed. In fact, a lengthy and hilarious episode lays bare the upper caste dilemma to at once maintain its claims of purity and frugal living and giving a nod to the lure of easy money by exploiting the Incredible India marquee. Laderam, for instance, is the cryptic password floating around among the initiated, referring to mammon, dough, paisa: ka kari reti, ka kari mela / laderam guru, baaki sab chela. The publicity of the Graham Staines incidence in Orissa could have been a huge setback for the guesthouses and lodges mushrooming around the Ganga since mid-eighties and the renters were worried sick—whatever their political ideology. But this laderam, also a charlatan in the narrative, (and his ethnographer Swedish wife) who glamorize Kashi for its heritage of Raand, Saand, Seedhi, Sanyasi is heavily pilloried for their selfish and fly by night attitude: Ganja and bhang are giving way to brown sugar and heroin and viagra and god knows what else, and the pension of the local elderly goes into buying these exorbitant stuff. Houses are being bought under false names by comfortable, nouveau tourists and restored for their own consumption. Dubious admissions in mahavidyalayas in order to get visa extensions—Sanskrit in six months, Sitar in ten. These people want Banaras to dazzle in its full oriental glory for their own end, so that it can be consumed clean, thunders Dr. Gaya Singh, one of the central characters, almost a conscience to the narrative.

In order to buttress his point, Dr. Singh goes on to tell a chilling, superlative fable worth recounting in full: In the days of yore, right in this Varanasi, one Brahmadatt’s son became the king who was also an ardent carnivore. He craved for meat every night. One night, his cook’s dog ate away the king’s share. The frightened cook ran straight to the burial-ghaat, chopped off the thighs of a freshly brought corpse, cooked the meat and served to the king. The moment the king tasted the stuff, he was ecstatic, totally floored by the taste. Upon enquiry, the cook buckled and gave away the story. The king ordered that from now on nothing but human flesh should be served to him. But it was not so easy to find fresh corpses everyday. The king ordered one prisoner from his royal jail to be sacrificed every day. Once the prison got emptied of its occupants, the king devised a ploy of luring strangers with a bag full of gold-coins at the street corner, branded the poor souls as thieves, executed them and got his pound of flesh. Gradually, families were beginning to lose members—someone’s sister vanished, somebody lost her father, someone’s young kid went missing. The scared subjects complained to the chief-of-staff about a possible man-eater roaming free in the kingdom. And so the king’s accomplice, the cook, was caught red-handed one day and being pressed, divulged the reality. The king, charged by his subjects, confessed and was exiled. For his survival, he requested for a scimitar, a cooking pan and his cook—and carried on with his trade in the jungle in a new avatar: that of a man-eating robber. Soon, people began to avoid the jungle route and eventually the king, in his mad craving, slayed the cook and gobbled him too. The king was famishing, till a rich Brahmin decided to take a chance. He arranged plenty of laderam for some villagers who would act as guards and see him safely through the jungle. As the entourage moved in, the king/robber duly pounced upon them and the poor villagers fainted immediately. As the robber was taking away his meaty, juicy Brahmin body, the villagers got back to their senses. They were ashamed of their inaction despite taking the dough and thought of at least giving it a try. So, they ran after their enemy. As the robber was getting started with his scimitar, one of the villagers hit him on his toe. The bleeding robber, taken aback by the counter-attack, left the scene in a huff and vanished in the wood, for the time being at least. The villagers realized that the man-eating villain was not altogether invincible. Dr.Gaya Singh stopped right there with this short comment that in Kali-yuga its this Brahmadatt’s son who crossed the seven seas to become the US President and we, the frequenters at Pappu’s—are those village guards, provided we realize our role. It is a deeply vigilant yet patient world that Gaya is referring to, one that builds up its edifice over years of banter, argument and experience. It is a cool and collected world that may start to behave unexpectedly in a serious and more constructive manner. It is this unruffled nature of civility that is at once the club’s comportment and its reality. It is as if a constant dialectic, give and take works between self-seeking and other regarding elements. Result: a sense of the unsentimental, cheeky, impudent civility.

Leisure and patience to trudge through issues and ideas form the bedrock to the kind of civility that we witness in Singh’s universe. Assi has its own shabdakalpadrum, Singh reminds us, and goes on to give us telling instances of just that, culling pearls from its newest and evolving coinages. Two words come handy: karyakram and byavastha. Karyakram—meaning liquor—does not enthuse the Assi affiliates. Uncork the bottle, pour the stuff in a glass or goblet and start sipping. Initiate karyakram (program) and you take the nation straight onto the primrose path of instability and unbridled cataclysm. If the nation is to be kept on track, steady and secure from high-falutin nonsense, take bhang instead. Not to be gulped down in haste, it has to be procured with a lot of time and patience—hence byavastha (arrangement) kicks in. You have to arrange for bhang—soaking-filtering, churning-mixing and so forth. Takes hours. Karyakram is for those who do not have leisure time. Bottom-line: keep byavastha to yourself and parcel karyakram to Delhi.

A long section on laughter and mirth, nostalgically marks the rather pensive last episode of the book. Assi, ever an attitude, has given way to a place called Tulsinagar: Assi se Assi chala gaya, that is, leisure and has been replaced by break neck speed and development. There is no place for laidbacks and lackadaisical morons in Tulsinagar. And no place for jollity and laughter, which are now being cultivated and caricatured for a tag. And its here that one of the old timers comes up with this simple query to his son: “Kid, I wonder about sorrow these days. Is it about living for oneself or about being happy at another’s sorrow?”  We come back where we started about civil society and civility. Singh is laying bare such an extraordinarily common enough world that we have forgotten it. Can we separate ideas, reality, self and manner in this mêlée? All these characteristics—interdependence, curiosity, banter, humour, musicality, sensitivity, calmness, vigilance and leisure, not only extend the ambit of civility manifold but revises the concept altogether. It also makes the whole affair deeply sold to an ethics of heterogeneity and heterodoxy, but from within a given structure. Of course, I have just now dealt with literary representation, but then the whole idea is to complicate first order reality itself. The real and the possible are intimated and intoned here. Mischievous, shall we say. Reality dwindles and grows at the same time in the narrative and so does civility. And simultaneously, in Singh, the roles of the political poet, the satirist, the lyricist and raconteur are sutured.

One locus classicus of the civility discourse, Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments has defined that term so narrowly that it has become a byword for slyness and dissimulation since. And our subjectivists and empiricists are engaged in a shadow battle on those grounds. One group from Iran to Uganda cries hoarse: our culture has nothing to do with enlightenment—we are like this only, uncivil, fragmented and otherworldly—a grand alliance between certain radical postmoderns, culturalist pimps and old oligarchs have ensured the saleability of this position. So, life-world is the new war cry, de rigueur in chic gatherings of late. And their detractors routinely come up with theories of sane ratiocination and models of interest maximization, as if end justifies all processes, all frolic, all dark and diverse hobbies that one may aspire for in life. It has come to such a sorry pass that basic cigarette smoking or rasgulla gobbling is now an anathema—an unproductive venture, unhealthy and uncivil in a Smithian/Ramdossian world. Be morally sympathetic to your neighbors and play the health game. Well, that is being boringly mundane at best, eons away from carefree, hedonist civility that still underscores our existence in the main. Whatever happened to devil may care irreverence and a serious nurturing of an analytical milieu—attributes that Kashinath Singh would surely commend as worthy of a param haramio ka tola?

Afterword

One wonders whether this argumentative, subversive picture of interactive civility is what sustains Kashi after the bomb blasts of March 2006. Banaras has quietly carried on, sometimes with more vigor and robustness, after an initial possibility of civic destabilization on religious lines. In fact, conscientiousness, the disposition not to act, in certain cases, until one believes and feels that one’s action is right, may provide a rare oppositional meaning in times of crisis—war and civil riot. True, at times Banaras has chosen the developmental route by subscribing to caste politics (purohits and panchangs are very much a part of its existence), but the messiness of the situation demands new alliances all the time. After the spectacular rise of BSP in 2007 and its policy of reverse osmosis and inclusion in UP and beyond, the fight is now triangular, if not quadrangular. And a sense of deep, romantic-argumentative culture of civility—of chait, chandni, geet, gulab—could be vital in the long run for calling the crass culturalist bluffs and other such manipulative gestures. As for Pappu ki Dukaan, it now stands fractured amicably—the old one cornered by the bhajpaiyis and a new hang out, closeby, is patronized by the progressives. The odd thing is that the original joint hasn’t yet gotten rid off Lohia’s photograph.