There's a clamour for the Bharat Ratna to be awarded to Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. A certain party, I needn't mention its name, is trying to galvanize the collective mood and mandate of the people of India to get Savarkar the country's highest civilian award. Whether or not Savarkar deserves to get the Bharat Ratna is inconsequential－in the sense that, awards in India have often been quite controversial and subjective. Remember, whether it's Savarkar, Shivaji or Amartya Sen (from the perspective of ethnocentric Bengalis), regional and national icons in India have always been ethnic figures, getting a greater degree of support from the ethnicity they belong to. Herein lies the issue. Every state projects its own icon/s and starts campaigning for him/her, esp. at a politically-opportune moment when the country is in the thick of hustings. Because that's the time when the mandate can be favourably tilted en masse.
We must always bear this in mind that icon/hero-worship is India's national character, now further narrowed down to sheer regionalism. So, the saga of Savarkar is symptomatic of our Deification Syndrome. This requires etiological understanding of this phenomenon as to what makes us go bananas over specific individuals, whom we perceive as our idols and imbue them with a coat, nay armour of immunity from public censure. Neil David Nixon's The Making of Icons (Picador, 1990) may help understand this. He writes, "Certain communities and societies have their idols and iconic figures. Those who don't have, strive to create one(s) to compete with parallel communities and societies living cheek-by-jowl in a diverse country (like India)...." The creation of icons is the creation of a national identity and in today's sectarian and provincial context, it's the creation of a palpable sense of socio-ethnic pride. Indians suffer from the proverbial sense of 'perceived penury of personalities' (social scientist Roy Denver's apt phrase in the context of Indian societies, A N Sinha Institute of Social Studies, Patna, 1982).
So, whenever one such popular figure in any state of India pops up on the social firmament, he or she's immediately lapped up, elevated to the top and projected as that society's answer to others! And with this quick elevation comes the associated glorification. Myths, legends and apocryphal 'facts' start getting accrued to the projected icon. The projected and proposed icon becomes a demi-god and with the status of a demi-god, 'touch-him-not' perception sets in. An example will ram home the point. In 2015, I visited a very famous Central University in Calcutta (sorry, no Kolkata for me) to deliver a lecture on Tagore's mysticism. Tagore, as you know, is a 'sacred cow' for all Bengalis. The HoD of that renowned university was aware of my radical views and unsparing attitude. He also read my articles in which I cited a number of (plagiaristic) similarities present in 103 poems of Tagore's Gitanjali (that got him the Nobel for Literature in 1913) and Iranian mystic Hafiz Shirazi's Deewan (1315-1390). In fact, in one of my M Phil research studies on Indian literature, I devoted an entire chapter on Tagore's confirmed plagiarism as 73 poems of Gitanjali are direct English translations of Hafiz's Persian mystic poems. That professor implored me not to mention this fact during my lecture. I flew back without being able to state the truth.
My point is, when you deify a person and iconise him/her, you just can't bear to hear anything unpalatable about him/her. V S Naipaul termed it 'The glued sacredness of Indian icons' that comes with the territory. It blinkers our vision and obfuscates our perception/s. This is a very sub-continental behavioural pattern. The icons assume holier-than-thou and larger-than-life image. Like Caesar's wife, an icon in India is and must be above all suspicion. The internet trolling is a quintessential example of this mentality Indians are afflicted with. If someone doubts the greatness and 'godhood' of a great cricketer, he'll be castigated by his followers, though the player himself remains unaffected. Building temples of actors and celebrities is emblematic of our groveling behaviour towards those whom we look up as gods and goddesses on earth. Those born and brought up and exposed to western liberalism, will not be able to fathom this Indian or precisely sub-continental phenomenon.
At universities like Oxford and Cambridge, one can easily question the authorship of William Shakespeare's works and attribute them to Francis Bacon or Shakespeare's coeval Christopher Marlowe. You can even call the Bard of Avon an avowed homosexual. No one will chastise you. But try doing the same to an Indian icon and you'll be banished to St. Helena or Roben Island like Napoleon Bonaparte and Nelson Mandela, respectively.
In 2010, I was interviewing Khushwant Singh for BBC, Urdu at Hauz Khas, Delhi. During our informal conversation, he too spoke at length about this iconising business (his words) and said: Iconizing is agonising. He adduced an example as how young Bhagat Singh (he was hanged by the Brits at the age of 23!) and his revolutionary friends were mildly 'smitten' by their Durga bhabhi (a very venerable name among Indian revolutionaries). Khushwant mentioned this fact in now defunct The Illustrated Weekly of India with due respect to Bhagat Singh and Durga Devi Vohra. But hell broke loose, though the same fact was mentioned by Nanak Singh and Kartar Singh Duggal in the early 50s. What's wrong if a 20-something young man had a little predilection for a young woman? Wasn't the intrepid Bhagat Singh a human? This sucking-out all emotions of an icon makes us intolerant as well as insipid. Any sane and sensible person will ask as to why on earth do we dehumanise our icons? Today, that brave atheist revolutionary who didn't wear a turban, is a turbaned regional icon in Punjab! We just don't want to believe that all icons are humans with emotions and can have feet of clay. This ostrichism perpetuates iconisation because we intentionally play possum when anything not-so-pleasant is said about our 'sacred cows.'
Bengal's 'iconic' (am I employing the term in true spirit?) writer Sunil Gangopadhyay wrote an essay, Bibhuti Pujor Proyojoniyata (the necessity of hero-worship) for a famed Bangla magazine, Desh in 1975. He wrote, 'Creating, developing and producing icons is our psychological need, the pathetic need of an average Indian because by projecting someone as an icon, we create a false sense of achievement/s for and of the whole. This very need stems out of our deep-seated inferiority complex. That our society or community also has a personality worth-reckoning with is an excuse of a larger group's inertness and inability to exert individually or collectively. It's what we call in Spangler's terminology, a transfer-investment of an individual's abilities.' A community's collective inertia is compensated by ONE DYNAMIC INDIVIDUAL. That's their ICON and thus the whole process of deification takes place.
Maharashtra, after Shivaji, didn't have an icon in the broadest sense of the word. Though Lata, Gavaskar, Tendulkar are greats, the need of a socially and politically mobilising icon was being felt for a long time. Moreover, balancing the caste equation was also imperative because somewhere, Shivaji is seen as the icon of the Marathas. Savarkar fulfills those conditions for the Brahmin community of Maharashtra. As I stated in the beginning, iconisation is a representational process of the respective community. Sarvarkar is a perfect representative of a socio-ethnic group with electoral potential at that. By projecting him as a revered symbol, many an objective can be achieved. I take your leave with the words of Jimmy Carter, "When you iconise someone, you hypnotize. You hypnotize a section of people and also (to) yourself." So very true. Iconisation is a sure sign of a complacent group of people and complacency is hardly considered as a quality or virtue. It lacks social dynamism.
The writer is an advanced research scholar of Semitic languages, civilizations and cultures.
