(By Jyotirmaya Sharma) The SANIA- SHOAIB drama has gripped the country for the last fortnight. Only a tragedy of the magnitude of Dantewada managed to erase the relentless preoccupation of ordinary people and of the media with the marital fortunes of a mediocre Indian tennis star and a not- somediocre Pakistani cricketer.
Discussions about whether the media had the right to peep into the lives of celebrities were beamed from every channel, and the arguments were predictable.
One set of people maintained that interest in the Sania- Shoaib saga was justified only because they were public figures, while another set maintained that even public figures have a right to privacy.
Even if one did not wish to read too much into the whole controversy, the Indo- Pak angle lent an ever sharper edge to the coverage of the sordid story.
Moreover, the events that unfolded had all the ingredients of television soap operas and a further testimony to the arguments of those who make these television dramas that what they portray is after all reality.
After all, there was the tearful ‘ first wife’ collecting evidence down to the last soiled sheet, there was the to- bemarried couple professing their love for each other in front of the media, the prospective groom from a
country perceived by many as enemy — geopolitically and in the playing field — claiming innocence, and the guy who was to marry Sania happily partying away while his ex- tobe- wife was wiping sweat from her brow, literally and metaphorically. And finally, as if to wrap up the climax, the community elders arrived and sorted it all out.
The most obvious explanation for this lies in the absence, firstly, of a welldefined public realm in India.
What masquerades as politics or issues of public interest are largely individual angst or questions of personal identity projected as public issues.
Increasingly, the urban world and the ever- expanding middle classes are being moulded together in a mass society of atomised individuals without a common world they can share and inhabit. They are oppressed together and, in turn, oppress each other. A defining feature of such a mass society is moral relativism, and most of all, boredom.
IT IS a world in which no one stands for anything and no one is ready to pay the price for anything. Sania and Shoaib are merely a temporary relief from this boredom and sense of ennui.
In such a situation, people are ready to go to any extent and pay any price in order to thwart this sense of dislocation, boredom and alienation. Therefore, very soon the focus will shift to what Sania would wear for the nikah , the list of guests invited for the wedding and the reception, and a conscientiously meticulous detailing of who is ‘ in’ and who is ‘ out’. It would be a mistake, hence, to relegate this episode to an easy analysis by which the whole drama of Sania and Shoaib is merely seen as a spectacle, fuelled by a burgeoning Page 3 culture. What is happening in Hyderabad is the very stuff modern- day politics of mass societies is all about. It is best exemplified by the readiness of people to accept and embrace fictitious accounts of events and believe in situations that push the limits of the absurd.
After all, if we are to believe that a hero and a heroine in a film can sing a sad love song on the telephone, we ought also to believe that people can fall in love on the Internet, marry on the telephone and divorce each other by sending a message on their mobile phones.
But more than the incredible and the absurd, the questions that emerge from this matrimonial alliance are the same old clichés about patriotism, friend country/ enemy country, tests of loyalty and betrayal.
Just as the secular M. F. Husain finds refuge in Qatar, Sania too has to make it explicit that after marriage she would be living in ‘ neutral’ Dubai.
Marriages and divorces, therefore, can happen on the Internet, or in an aircraft, or even under water these days, but every such situation that enters the realm of conflict is resolved by an ever- increasing recourse to tradition.
Increasingly, the way out of sticky situations is sought to be found in extremely regressive elements of the tradition, where elders, priests, astrologers, soothsayers and oracles are called upon to resolve the issue.
Ideology, doctrine and superstition are called upon to arbiter.
THE STATE and the rule of law are seen as encumbrances that have to be avoided and conveniently bypassed. The Qazi of Golkonda, then, assumes greater salience in the Sania- Shoaib fiasco than the police commissioner of Hyderabad.
Tradition and ideology have one advantage in mass societies that the modern liberal democratic dispensation does not have. Namely, that both offer explanations and solutions that have an inherent simplicity and provide for a degree of emotional security that the state or its institutions can ever hope to provide.
This is the only politics the middle classes are capable of, and this is all that we have left in the name of the public realm.
(Jyotirmaya Sharma teaches politics at the University of Hyderabad)
me@jyotirmayasharma.in