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English-speaking India’s King Lear moment
Today, English-speaking young people are having a King Lear moment, where contempt for the old comes out into the open.
Some weeks ago, four of us, women aged between 60 and 70, entered a lift at an upscale (but not luxury) housing society on Sohna Road, Gurgaon. We were laughing and talking. The lift stopped mid-way and three little girls came in, with two depressed-looking teenaged maids. One of the girls, aged about six, stared at us and said loudly, ‘Look at these old ladies.’
A child that age would not act this way unless she had heard similar sentiments expressed by adults. I shudder to think how the less powerful, such as workers and dependent old people, are treated in such a household.
For decades, I have told American students that Indians do not address older people or strangers by their first names but routinely address them by kinship terms, for which the equivalents in English are ‘Aunty’ and ‘Uncle.’ I now need to modify this generalization.
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While the practice continues amongst the poor and the middle class, especially those who are not primarily English-speaking, and also amongst somewhat older people across class, it may no longer hold true for the English-speaking upper-middle class youth. In the last two decades, young Indian and Indian-origin stand-up comedians, both in India and in the West, have turned the words ‘Aunty’ and ‘Uncle’ into insults.
Comedians and social media videos present middle-class ways of talking and behaving as embarrassing features of older people. Examples include ‘uncles’ walking, clapping or laughing as forms of exercise, ‘aunties’ chatting, and older people singing and dancing at weddings. Such behaviour is not considered modern (that is, western) enough.
Those considered modern are the young people we saw at the Jantar Mantar protests, all of them using the filthiest abuses for the Prime Minister (PM) and his deceased mother. Some taunt the working-class policemen on duty, sarcastically calling them ‘police uncle,’ and one compares soldiers’ uniforms to toilet cleaner. A few women from lower-income backgrounds, imitating upper-class women by dressing like them and behaving like them, also spoke like them.
We are used to internet trolls using abusive language while hiding behind made-up names. However, several young women, jeans-clad and fashionable, look confidently into cameras as they voice filthy sexual as well as scatological ideas. One smiles gleefully as she threatens to sodomise the elected PM, who is her grandfather’s age, with her slipper.
Every generation has protested and we have all participated in protests. But I have never before heard use such language at a protest. Bias against the old seems to drive this language. Being ‘youth’ or ‘Gen Z’ is seen as an inherent virtue. Everyone is young and grows old. Just being young or old is not a sign of being right.
Contempt for the old is not new. Simone de Beauvoir, surveying world history in her 1970 book, Old Age, remarks that the old are hidden by ‘a conspiracy of silence’ and treated as ‘a shameful secret.’ In the Mahabharata, Duryodhana humiliates his blind father and his great-uncle, Bhishma, for being dependent on him. Premchand’s story ‘Betonwali Vidhwa’ (which I translated as ‘A Widow with Sons’) depicts an old woman whose sons grab her property and work her to death.
Mistreatment of the old used to be somewhat concealed, not flagrantly displayed. Today, English-speaking young people are having a King Lear moment, where contempt for the old comes out into the open. Laughing at the old becomes a way for the young to bond with each other, and to demonstrate their own upward mobility.
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King Lear is perhaps the ultimate depiction of how the old are mistreated. The two daughters of the king (who is over 80 years old) scornfully label him and his friends ‘old’ and ‘ancient.’ Having grabbed his wealth and power, they expect him to need nothing, not even a single attendant. ‘Old fools,’ says his daughter Goneril, ‘are babes again.’ She calls her father ‘Idle old man,’ and refuses to honour her promises. When he protests, she throws him out into the storm, while her sister blinds one old man and physically punishes another. Ordinary people in the play, though, are horrified by Lear’s daughters’ behaviour. I used to find it hard to conceive of young people, during China’s cultural revolution, slapping, beating and humiliating their teachers in public. It is no longer hard to imagine that.
In every society, there are some cruel people. What matters is that cruelty should not become a cultural ideal. In the Mahabharata, violence is seen as necessary under certain circumstances but cruelty (nrishamsya) is never permissible. Non-violence (ahimsa) is not an absolute principle but non-cruelty (aanrishamsya) is. Cultural ideals usually change not dramatically but gradually and subtly. We should be alert to such change and resist it.
Ruth Vanita is the author of many books including The Dharma of Justice in the Sanskrit Epics. The views expressed are personal.
