21. Cops and Jobbers
IT'S NOT A GREAT TIME TO BE A POLICEMAN in India these days. In 2006 came revelations of the brutal killings of young migrant workers and their children in the Delhi suburb of Nithari (and the fact that the police took no notice of the reports of missing children for over twenty months). This was hard on the heels of public outrage over the shoddy police work in the original prosecution of the Jessica Lall case (when a model tending bar at a private party was cold-bloodedly shot dead by a politician's son, and the killer's influential political connections seemed inversely proportional to the competence with which the charges were documented). And not long after, the police were revealed to have failed to act on the murder of teenager Priyanka Bhotmange and her Dalit family, apparently because her “untouchable” status made hers a low-priority dossier. Then came the unconvincing official explanations for the death of a British tourist in a Goa village in 2006, which suggested the police had something to hide, not least their own incompetence. All of these, taken together with the lingering memories of the complicity of the Gujarat police in the massacres in that state in 2002, have contributed to a sense that the nation is ill served by its policemen. The image of the police is largely of a force besmirched by inefficiency, corruption, politicization, and lack of anything resembling devotion to duty.
If the news pages offer little consolation to the khaki-clad upholders of the law, perhaps it's time to turn to fiction. For the best antidote to negativism about the police must surely be the richly evocative, warmly sympathetic account of the force provided by Vikram Chandra in his monumental novel Sacred Games. (But let me hasten to assure nonliterary readers that this isn't a book review.)
Vikram Chandra's meticulously researched, deeply felt novel is (among other things) a warts-and-all portrait of the police at work in the city he still calls Bombay. His protagonist, the battle-weary, divorced Sikh inspector Sartaj Singh, is a wonderfully imagined and carefully drawn three-dimensional human being, vulnerable to the petty temptations that policing offers in our society, prone to cutting a few corners and bending a few rules, but fundamentally committed to the right values. Sartaj's essential decency is a constant, and it is mirrored in the faith of his constable, Katekar. Both men take seriously the duty to serve the public: “Sadrakshanaay Khalnigrahaniya” is the motto of the Bombay police, “Protect the virtuous, punish the wicked.” As Vikram Chandra writes: “Katekar knew he could never confess this urge to anyone, because fancy talk of protecting the good and destroying evil and seva and service would elicit only laughter. Even among colleagues, this was never to be spoken about. But it was there, however buried it may be under grimy layers of cynicism.” In doing a job that the novel describes elsewhere as mired in “its unspeakable hours, its monotony, its political complications, its thanklessness, its exhaustion,” Sartaj occasionally reveals “a senseless, embarrassing idealism.” Once, after rescuing “a trembling ten-year-old girl” from her kidnappers, he mutters, “Today we did good work.”
Sacred Games depicts cops on the take, but almost never out of sheer greed and absolutely never at the expense of the job itself. Sartaj is a basically honest man who discovers that his monthly transportation allowance barely covers three days of fuel for his motorcycle. And “of the many notes he dropped into the hands of informants every day, maybe one or two came from his minuscule khabari allowance.” So the proceeds of corruption are often spent in the cause of duty — an indictment of our society, that we underpay and underequip our police, rather than of the policemen themselves.
Of course, a novel is not a work of public policy, nor a substitute for investigative journalism. But Vikram Chandra did his research thoroughly, spending many years closely observing the working lives of Bombay policemen. And there is no reason why a good novel can't be as valuable in its insights as serious sociology. Sure, the policemen in Sacred Games are not depicted fabricating cases to frame innocents, or extorting money from law-abiding citizens, or discriminating against Muslims or other minorities — all offenses that our police have, at one time or another, been accused of. They beat suspects, hardly an approved method of investigation, but at least in this novel they never beat anyone who doesn't deserve a good hiding, or anyone you actually feel sorry for. And though the presence of politicians is never absent from their lives — especially that of senior policemen, who are portrayed as unavoidably in thrall to political leaders — Vikram Chandra doesn't show his policemen as to be so politicized as to suborn justice for political ends.
In that he may be kinder to our agents of law enforcement than they entirely deserve: both in Gujarat and, as the Srikrishna Commission so graphically demonstrated, in Bombay itself during the 1992 riots, the police were partisan, and they were partisan because their political overlords wished them to be. The great danger in a democracy is that the police imagine their duty is to the elected rulers of the day rather than to the Constitution and the society that has entrusted them with its safety. Of course, the police are unlikely to be immune to the pressures of political reality in a country where politics infects every activity like a virus. But it is the absence of a self-correcting mechanism when this happens that should worry us all.
Still, I'm pleased that Vikram Chandra's book gives us a more nuanced portrait of the Indian police than we might glean from popular stereotype. Good news stories about the Indian police (like the recent arrival of an all-women's police contingent to help the UN keep the peace in Liberia) are all too rare.
22. Becoming Bengaloorued
ONE INDIAN PHENOMENON THAT NEVER CEASES TO SURPRISE, and often confuse, foreigners is India's penchant for renaming its cities. An American businessman who was planning a visit to India after a long absence told me that his associate there “used to live in Madras, but he seems to have moved to some place called Chennai.” When told that his friend hadn't moved at all but that Madras had become Chennai, his jaw dropped. “But cities don't do that,” he said weakly.
Well, in India they do. The victorious Indian nationalists of 1947 were at first careful not to upend the familiar verities of Indian life when the British left, so the cities of the Raj kept their names for decades, even while streets named for British imperialists were gradually renamed for those who had resisted them. In the first decades after independence, practically the only city that changed the spelling of its name was Kanpur, which the British had absurdly spelled Cawnpore, a form that sounded affected to every Indian ear. The Anglicized “Poona” also became Puné to reflect the way the name was actually pronounced, and Mysore state was renamed Karnataka to resurrect the proud tradition of what the British had called the “Carnatic” region. But the big metropolises of the land — Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, and Madras, the four best-known Indian cities internationally (until they were joined by Bangalore) — stayed what they had always been for the first fifty years of India's independence.
Then change came. The self-appointed guardians of Indianness — politicians looking for new postures to affect, and new issues on which to assert themselves — finally came into their own in the 1990s. They proclaimed their determination to reverse the colonization of the Indian sensibility by “restoring” the “original” names of cities that had allegedly been mangled by the foreign conquerors. So the government of Maharashtra, led at the time by the chauvinist regional party the Shiv Sena, renamed the state capital Mumbai, proscribing the use of the word Bombay for any official purposes. The city of Bombay (whose name came from the Portuguese Bom Bahia, or “good bay”) had never existed before the colonial era created it, but it had developed from a number of fishing villages, one of which may (and I use the word advisedly) have been called Mumbai. So Mumbai's claims were at least debatable, but even if the case for it could be sustained, what was worse was the decision to abandon a name with nearly four centuries of global resonance. This struck me at the time as the equivalent of a company jettisoning a well-known brand in favor of an inelegant patronymic — as if McDonald's had renamed itself Kroc's in honor of its inventor. “Bombay” had entered global discourse; it conjured up associations of cosmopolitan bustle; it is still attached around the world to products like Bombay gin, Bombay duck, and the overpriced colonial furniture sold by “The Bombay Company”; in short, it enjoyed name recognition that many cities around the world would spend millions in publicity to acquire. “Mumbai” was already the city's name in Marathi, but what has been gained by insisting on its adoption in English, aside from a nativist reassertion that benefited only sign painters and letterhead printers? (The Shiv Sena went one step further and renamed the city's main railway station, Victoria Terminus, an Indo-Gothic-Saracenic excrescence universally known as V.T. and completely devoid, in everyone's imagination, of any association with the late Queen-Empress. V.T. is henceforth to be known as Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus: try telling that to a Bombay taxi driver.)