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Why so serious? Indians need to lighten up and laugh more
When it comes to social media I often slap my forehead with dismay. I find that those posts in which I'm proud of my creativity and absurdist humour are almost always overlooked.
- PUBLISHED: Wed 23 Jan 2019, 2:04 PM UPDATED: Sun 27 Jan 2019, 6:35 PM
- By:
- Aditya Sinha (Going Viral)
A bizarre commonplace happened on social media over the weekend. A major newspaper in India tweeted a quote by badminton star PV Sindhu saying how women abroad are treated with respect, but in India we only give lip service to respecting women. She is correct. While she was saying this, Bharatiya Janata Party legislator Sadhana Singh's called dalit leader Mayawati an eunuch.
On social media I occasionally agree with someone with an ironic remark. Here I retweeted Sindhu's quote, adding: "How dare she criticise Indian culture."
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As you no doubt know, irony is a literary device. It's the verbal equivalent of eye-rolling. In irony, the intended meaning is different from the actual meaning of the words. While I write I'm listening to an ironic song, Brooklyn Baby by Lana Del Rey, which seems apparently like nostalgia or celebrating an attitude; she is, however, satirising the hipster lifestyle. With my re-tweet the irony was to underline what she said, and my faux outrage was aimed at India's deep-rooted problem of our conservative, patriarchal culture.
As you also know, however, most Indians have zero sense of irony. Perhaps it is a matter of language, because when I chat in Hindi with my extended family from the cow-belt, then my ironic comments are rarely misunderstood (it may also be perhaps because my relatives are used to my faulty sense of humour). But more than that - because people who are uncomfortable in English are always encouraged to stick to their vernacular (and that's no ironic comment) - a lack of irony appears to be a genetic defect of Indians, who are a thin-skinned collective of literalists. An Indian might be witty, but Indians are not.
Worse, this immunity to irony is evidence of the fact that we Indians lack a sense of humour. Yes, you may probably say, what about all those stand-up comics in Bandra on the weekends; or even well-known performers like Vir Das? Frankly, I watched live performances when I lived in Mumbai, and I can only sympathise with the better comics. Mumbai's audiences might include a variety of people like young housewives and finance wizards, but they only laugh at crass sex jokes; elaborate or well-constructed narratives that performers are especially proud of, seem to go over their heads. If you read our novels, they are dreary and self-serious. No one remembers GV Desani's novel All About H. Hatterr, a 1948 farce that all Indians should be proud of. Even serious novels can adopt a light touch - classically, comedy and tragedy are like conjoined twins, one emphasising the other - but in Indian writing it is rare. (We also celebrate the mediocre, but that's a separate essay altogether). In movies, gone are the sit-coms of the 1970s, replaced instead with an endless line-up of crass and loud movies in which the only source of humour is sex and flatulence.
I tried my hand at humour in a crime novel two years ago, but it was not the thrilling success that my non-fiction books are.
A fellow crime writer drew me aside at a literary festival and said he found it jarring to read a humorous novel involving a murder. I wondered whether he was right, or whether he merely represented India's lack of sense of humour, or whether my novel was simply crap.
When it comes to social media I often slap my forehead with dismay. I find that those posts in which I'm proud of my creativity and absurdist humour are almost always overlooked by the herd. Those that I casually or dismissively remark on, either in irony or just in contempt, are hugely popular, collecting hundreds if not thousands of 'likes'. To put it pithily: smart stuff goes over everyone's heads, and stupid stuff is lapped up greedily. It is something that never ceases to amaze.
What adds to this general fault in Indian society is the polarised moment that we live in. Everyone feels passionately about their politics, and everyone feels they must stick to their 'side'. (Anyone who tells you they don't have an ideology, or that they're 'centrist', are liars or knaves of the highest order.) In this milieu, then, many Indians will take everything that they see or read on social media at face value - so that along with the grey area between political extremes, literary nuance is lost. We Indians cannot afford to be ambiguous in our tribal loyalties, it seems.
To return to the tweet about Sindhu: I did try to let some of my angry cyber-audience know that I was being ironic. It was a hopeless waste of time, however. How can you stop someone from seeing red, when all they know is black and white?
Aditya Sinha is a senior journalist based in India and author, most recently, of 'India Unmade: How the Modi Government Broke the Economy', co-written with Yashwant Sinha