Visceral Observations

I believe I should honestly start with how much I loved Rollo Romig’s I am on the Hit List: Murder and Myth-making in South India. I decided to read just one chapter before sleeping one night. The idea was to just start the book and mark it as the next one to be read amongst a tall pile of TBR books I’ve at any given day. Boy, I couldn’t stop, the narrative was fluid and storytelling compelling; I finished the entire part one, right before the Interlude in the book in single sitting while the night and my bed awaited me.

I had a déjà vu feeling, like I had felt exactly like this when I read City of Djinns by William Dalrymple. A non-Indian telling Indian stories and history and so well.

I am on the Hit List is on the surface about the murder of Gauri Lankesh, a journalist / editor of a small, Kannada weekly tabloid, whose murder would catapult her into national consciousness leading to widespread protests. But deep down, it’s about the Indian history of secularism, rise of Hindutva, and delicious detours such as the stories of local reformed dons, interesting local debates if Lingayat is a separate religion than Hinduism, a memory down the lane tracing the origin of Lankesh Patrike founded by P. Lankesh, Gauri Lankesh’s fiery journalist, writer and film-maker father, and so much more.

By all accounts, Gauri Lankesh was an average journalist or writer with very limited, local influence. She was the sole proprietor of eponymous Kannada weekly tabloid Gauri Lankesh Patrike with very low circulation (few thousands) and was perpetually in debt. She also had shoddy journalistic ethics: she published, self-confessedly, biased articles without fact-checking (her devoted, admirable lawyer B. T. Venkatesh vainly kept insisting that she fact-check) and even went ahead blatantly to re-publish works of others without permission in her tabloid while managing to misquote them in the translation. She scoffed at the neutrality or balanced view taught in a journalism school because her journalism was pure activism. She was also convicted of defamation, a charge she had planned to appeal in the higher court but she was killed before that.

If Gauri were alive today, she would likely be bashing non-Kannada speaking ‘outsider’ folks who live in Bangalore in her tabloid. And that’s okay; she exercised her freedom of speech well to broadcast all her beliefs honestly. However, her Kannada chauvinism ironically was also newly acquired; because the Wodehouse-loving, Delhi-dwelling editor that Gauri was, she had started to learn her mother tongue Kannada only when she took over her dad’s influential tabloid Lankesh Patrike in 2000. She had herself self-deprecatingly lamented her Kannada wasn’t that great still, and that perception lingered till the end. And yet, she was an emblem of something that Hindutva brigade hated, and she undeservedly, unjustly paid the price for it. She was a symbol of something bigger that led to a massive, nationwide outrage after her death: people from all walks of life came out to protest, writers, academicians, returned their awards, and so on.

First, she was an irreverent single woman who wrote simply from her heart: she called Narendra Modi Busi Basaya i.e. Bluff Master in her columns and RSS as chaddis, a reference to their old dress of khakhi shorts. She exercised her right to express her opinions freely, ferociously about everything and everyone irrespective of if they were her friends or foes . Second, she actually understood Indian spirit of debate way better than we do in our current climate, and held no grudges to the folks she sparred with. There are so many instances in her life including her brother and friends whom she attacked personally or in her tabloid, but remained genuinely affectionate and lifelong friends to them. There is an humane honesty in being that kind of person. Gauri’s killers, that SIT did a great job of catching, their nameless organization and parent or affiliated organizations knowingly first celebrated her death in uncouth ways, then used it to create fear for others, especially woman journalists some of whom didn’t even report on politics, and then maliciously spread lies about Gauri’s character, life and her politics. They insinuated that she was killed by Naxals with whom she sympathized (it was much more nuanced – she condemned Naxal violence and had mediated successfully with the state to have some of them rehabilitated). It is a mockery of our justice system that has gone on since her death back in September 2017.

Back to Rollo Romig’s book, in addition to the fantastic research into the story of Gauri Lankesh’s murder, investigation and trial, I loved how Rollo got the spirit of India so right. That India is a melting pot of so many cultures, religions, customs and today in an undeclared emergency, malicious elements and organizations are working to kill exactly that spirit nation-wide. I loved, how he as a non-Hindu got the essence of Hinduism so right that none of these illiterate Hindutva proponents know about or appreciate. Isn’t it ironical but also so fitting that none of the Hindutva creatures have ever read the scriptures or even understand anything about the religion to actually perpetuate violence in its name. On page 180 of the hard cover edition of his book, he writes:

I have, for long, shouted at rooftops to anyone would care to listen that Hinduism isn’t uniform: no two Hindus pray the same deity nor in the same way or even at the same time. These shouts of one nation, one religion, one language are toxic that are aimed at breaking us up, diminishing minorities and our identities and curtailing our freedom to our way of life. This is something Gauri understood too; she gave an obscure (at least to me) speech about Hinduism not having father or mother (I haven’t heard the whole speech, but I still don’t understand what is wrong with this statement). It was this speech that made the illiterate Hindutva think that she deserved to die. So, they killed a defenseless, frail, 51yo woman, senselessly, brutally at her own doorstep. It’s heartbreaking.

Gauri, for all her journalistic faults, was clearly fighting for justice and fairness, a very elusive concept in today’s world; she lived and acted with a fierce desire to protect the secular India, for all the marginalized, the minorities, LGBTs, and so on. She was a true martyr who lived a life true to herself and her beliefs. Thank you, Rollo Romig, for telling her story and then the story of modern India. It has been very hard to first live through the sheer unjust intolerance climate and then even more heartbreaking to read about its quick summary in the pages of this book because we remain helpless to face this tsunami of illiteracy and injustice with no light at the end of this long, narrowing tunnel. Especially since there are a very few of fighters like Gauri left. It’s little perverse but I still thought it was sweet when the police told Kavitha Lankesh, Gauri’s sister, that Gauri was ‘a great soul’ because her death had prevented all those people on the hit lists from being killed. Her sister, who is still deeply grieving, said that made her feel like that her death didn’t go in vain. Indeed it didn’t.

P.S: While I enjoyed reading the two interludes in the book about Doubting Thomas and his visit to India and P. Rajagopal, the founder & proprietor of the multi-national Sarvana Bhavan – while they served great lessons in myth-making and moral licensing but they didn’t quite gel with the overall narrative of the book. They should have been separate essays. However, that didn’t take away anything from the fantastic book that this is. My review, alas, is very inadequate to cover the huge expanse of ideas and topics and quirks this book covers.

P.P.S: Here is an interview with Rollo Romig by Karthik Venkatesh which is an interesting, insightful read.