The handmaid’s tale and other alternative facts

Last month, the Texas Senate Gallery witnessed a unique and wondrous protest, one that ‘broke the internet’, as the adage goes these days. Protesting a bill that proposes a ban on second trimester abortions, a group of women dressed up in bright red capes and Victorian white bonnets, raised slogans and held messages that asserted women’s rights over their bodies. Here’s the catch: the red-and-white ensemble was a nod to Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian classic The Handmaid’s Tale (its TV adaptation is currently airing on Hulu), a novel where men enjoy proprietary rights over women’s bodies (the protagonist is called Offred — literally, ‘of Fred’). Women who break society’s sexual purity laws are doomed to become ‘handmaids’, essentially indentured breeders/sex slaves whose sole purpose is to conceive on demand. And the handmaids wear bright red capes with white bonnets.

If you think the handmaids of Texas overdid the theatricality, consider this eerie confluence of fact and fiction. At one point in Atwood’s novel, the handmaids meet Offwarren, whose real name is Janine. Janine was gang-raped at 14, and when she tried to get an abortion (which is illegal), she is surrounded by women who berate her in sync.

“It’s Janine, telling about how she was gang-raped at 14 and had an abortion. She told the same story last week. (…) But whose fault was it? Aunt Helena says, holding up one plump finger. Her fault, her fault, her fault, we chant in unison. Who led them on? Aunt Helena beams, pleased with us. She did. She did. She did.”

And here’s Donald Trump, speaking to moderator Chris Matthews at an MSNBC town hall in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in March 2016, eight months before he was elected President.

“Matthews: Do you believe in punishment for abortion, yes or no, as a principle?

Trump: The answer is that there has to be some form of punishment.

Matthews: For the woman.

Trump: Yeah, there has to be some form.”

When you have the President of the US sounding like the brutish, autocratic men from a dystopian novel, what is one to do? Embrace the fiction, of course — which is what the handmaids of Texas did.

Dystopia Lesson #46: Write ‘fiction’. Cross it out and now write ‘alternative facts’ instead.

The upside down

On the night of November 8, 2016, when Trump was elected President, a reader looked up momentarily from the Anna Akhmatova collection she was buried nose-deep in. Her phone and her laptop were on power-puke mode, the ding-ding notification sounds were piling up. The world had shifted gears, motoring straight ahead to a scary future. The reader responded by doing what came naturally to her. She buried herself in dystopian novels, books where up is down and down is up, where answers are set in stone but questions are conspicuously absent, where dissenters are rounded up, driven out, caged or slaughtered — always in an orderly fashion.

In January, BBC published a report on how dystopian novels were dominating Amazon bestseller lists, barely a couple of months into the Trump presidency. Aldous Huxley’s 1935 novel Brave New World, which wasn’t even in the top 100 list in 2016, had leapfrogged into the top 10. Huxley’s dystopia was an authoritarian State alright, albeit one where the populace “loved their servitude”, doped up on mood-controlling drugs, mindless junk-food entertainment, and gadgets for every little menial task. Sounds familiar already?

The other usual suspects included George Orwell’s 1984, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here. All three were published during 1935-53, that is, from just before to just after World War II — essentially, the last time a significant section of humanity felt that the end was nigh.

Unsurprisingly, the prevailing dystopian mood includes quite a few nods to the panic and the paranoia of the ’40s and ’50s. Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, the writing duo behind half-a-dozen James Bond films including Skyfall, adapted Len Deighton’s novel SS-GB for BBC recently. Set in 1941, in this five-part miniseries, which wrapped up last month, Hitler has prevailed in the Battle of Britain. Winston Churchill has been executed and most of the royals are in exile. Scotland Yard detectives now work under supervision of the infamous SS, the Nazi secret police.

In December last year, Amazon Prime released the second season of The Man in the High Castle, a web series based on Philip K Dick’s 1962 novel of the same name. The book imagines a world where Hitler won World War II and the US has been divided into two parts: the Greater Nazi Reich and the Japanese Pacific States. Chillingly, the opening credits song for the series is a German-accented version of ‘Edelweiss’ from The Sound of Music, which we know as a symbol of anti-Nazi resistance. This is a bit like the hate speech maestro Milo Yiannopoulos’s victimhood narratives, where he paints himself as a walking bullseye for bloodthirsty liberals everywhere.

Dystopia Lesson #138: Consider the ontology of suffering. Now flush it down the toilet.

Mother, should I build the wall?

India has seen its fair share of bizarre and tragic goings-on in the last couple of years: Dairy farmers getting killed in the name of cow protectionism, rationalists and atheists murdered by religious fanatics. Why, it was only a few months ago that over 80 per cent of the currency in the country was declared worthless, the repercussions of which are still being felt. We haven’t pressed the panic button yet (the jury’s still out on whether we should), unlike American or British liberals. Our writers and artists have, however, taken the hint and created some delectable dystopias of late.

The latest among these is Prayaag Akbar’s debut novel Leila (Simon and Schuster India), released earlier this month. The (near) future that Leila is set in is dominated by walls — signalling the victory of puritanism over compassion and common sense, almost every community has built vertiginous walls around itself.

“Purity One, first of the sector walls, stretches out across us to the edges of the dusk, either end into the swirling ash. Gritty grey brick. Sixty feet high.”

Behind these walls, every community is free to live by its own rules (“Real estate listings became like matrimonials: Brahmin-only, Yadavs-only, Thakurs-only, Parsis-only.”) Residents’ Welfare Associations (RWAs) rule the roost and charge their own taxes. There are two easily identifiable effects of this change of guard. One, spaces outside the walled communities have fallen into ruinous disrepair.

“All the way down this road along the sector wall there is a dense, growing pile of trash that has shaped over the years into an incline covering half the street. Festering peels, thick trickles of fluid, unidentifiable patches of white and yellow, bulging polythene packets breached at the gut, oozing. Soaked, blackened raglike emanations, long as dupattas, fished out from blocked sewers by scavenger-caste men who dive in little chaddhis into manholes.”

Two, a la Atwood, sexual and genetic purity (the hint’s in the name of the wall: Purity One) are non-negotiables for the walled communities. ‘Purity for all’ is a common greeting. Personal interactions with members of other communities are frowned upon by the shadowy ‘Council’, which runs everything and catches anyone who crosses the line. Enforcing their will, a State-sponsored vigilante group called the Repeaters roam the landscape, punishing transgressions imagined and real.

Leila is narrated by Shalini, an upper-caste, fair-skinned young woman who falls in love with Riz, a Muslim man. Right from the beginning, it is made clear that Shalini is on a collision course with the Repeaters — she marries outside her community, she lives in the decadent East End (the Bohemia of Leila’s dystopian world), she smokes, drinks and wears what she likes. And on an appropriately Shakespearean qayaamat ki raat (Judgement Night, if you will), Repeaters murder her husband in front of her and take away her young daughter (the titular Leila) to be raised in a draconian Council-run school. Most of the novel is set 16 years after this event, after Shalini has been ‘rehabilitated’ and put on a solid sedative regime, with a little help from a friendly neighbourhood ‘purity camp’.

All of this may sound like an elaborately crafted finger-pointing exercise at puritans and organised religion, but Akbar’s far too smart a writer to stop there. When we meet the yuppie residents of East End, we see that their personas are an indictment of liberal complacency in the face of rising authoritarianism. When I asked Akbar about this characterisation, he said, “The places where it feels like I’m blaming liberals for the way things turn out... I’m pointing the finger at myself.”

Like Leila, Akbar is the child of a mixed marriage, born to a Muslim father and a Christian mother. During his childhood, he became aware of his own privilege (his father, MJ Akbar, was a well-known journalist then, and is now minister of state for external affairs).

“In India, identity is what everybody says you are. I never felt Muslim; I grew up in an areligious household. But everybody kept telling me I was Muslim and you tend to take that (identity). At school, on the playground, there was a little bit of heckling, like ‘go back to Pakistan’; things like that.” The extent of just how much easier he had it than other Muslims struck him during a journalistic assignment in 2012. Akbar interviewed Mohammad Amir, who was 18 when he was falsely arrested and convicted on murder and terrorism charges (a string of low-intensity bomb blasts in Delhi had killed over 20 people and injured hundreds in 1996-97). He was on his way to a haqeem (doctor) when the Delhi Police picked him up in an unmarked white Maruti Gypsy.

After 14 years in prison, Amir was eventually released in January 2012, after he was found not guilty. “He was the same age as I was then,” recalls Akbar. “I realised that was how it was for a Muslim man back then.”

Akbar describes Leila as a piece of speculative fiction, but it’s difficult not to see the influence of past dystopias here. The mother-daughter bond, and Shalini’s aching reminiscence of it, carries echoes of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, where a father and son undertake a tortuous journey across a nuked landscape. The Repeaters slut-shaming Shalini reminds you of Janine from The Handmaid’s Tale. If the headlines of the (near) future read anything like Leila, god help us all.

Dystopia Lesson #7: Worship women and trees. Now, lock up one and chop down the other, whenever possible.

FutureSex/LoveSounds

“Sexual intercourse ended / In nineteen twenty-five / The khaki knickers descended / And ate it up alive / Not that we were doing / Much humping ourselves / But now our meagre screwing / Was banished to the shelves”

I wrote these lines many years ago, after members of the right-wing group Sri Ram Sene went about assaulting young women at pubs in Mangaluru and elsewhere, claiming that drinking in public was against that chimeric beast called ‘Indian culture’. Around the same time, in 2010, Madhav Mathur began work on the Dvarca trilogy. In September last year, the first novel in this trilogy, Dvarca, was released. Dvarca is a bit like the Sri Ram Sene’s wet dream come true. The year is close to 2200. India is now Dvarca, a State with a bicolour flag (green has been dropped) and an official, monolithic religion, Navmarg, a version of Manuwadi Hinduism with the racist/sexist/homophobic bigotry amped up. Every citizen has their name and their life’s purpose spelled out at birth, and even birth is regulated; there are no sexual impulses anymore and State-sponsored doctors inseminate women on schedule. The social order (read: the new caste system) is colour-coded: the colour of your wristband indicates your position in the pecking order (both Leila and The Handmaid’s Tale also feature forms of societal colour-coding).

Shall I go on?

Every citizen is required to wear cutting-edge eyewear called DDs (Divya Drishtikon, or ‘divine viewpoint’), which stream a mixture of propaganda, instructions and scripted patriotic ‘entertainment’. The financial system has been directly linked to your spiritual awakening, a sort of reverse Scientology. There, you can buy enlightenment; here, enlightenment will get you all the money you want. The currency is called PB (Punya Bindu, or ‘Virtue Quotient’).

When I asked Mathur about the genesis of the Punya Bindu, this is what he told me.

“I see a growing overlap between the workings of corporations, government, and organised religion. The financial system in Dvarca lies at the confluence of these three worlds, where everything we do is measured and tracked in a structured way, and has been monetised. We are already heading in this direction with our technology. Corporations have always had a way of rewarding/ penalising you for your behaviour and contribution. Governments do it too, and we all follow these rules.”

The book follows the fortunes of young Nakul and his family: his father Gandharva, mother Jyoti and sister Mira. Nakul has been marked since birth as a future super-soldier; in fact, he is the first of a newly-evolved batch called Parashuram. He is given a prize for his performance at school by Shastri-ji, the Supreme Leader of Dvarca himself. Unfortunately, the source of Nakul’s raw aggression and savant-like performance is revealed when he hugs Shastri-ji (spoiler alert): In the, well, heat of the moment, Nakul gets an erection that pokes the Supreme Leader, after which, of course, the boy becomes public enemy number one.

Dystopia Lesson #666: The future of sex shall be decided by celibates.

Cry, the beloved country

The war-mongering, factionalism and doublespeak of Leila and Dvarca can also be seen in other recent works such as Anamika Mukherjee’s Survivors, where Delhi has been hit by a nuclear disaster and the only thing between her protagonists and annihilation is the last library in town (we approve of the librarian-as-badass situation). Sarnath Banerjee’s graphic novel All Quiet in Vikaspuri imagines the Capital reeling under a water crisis; the RWAs have armed themselves to the teeth and are bombing each other.

China, of course, is a step ahead of us. They’ve actually hired a writer of dystopian fiction as an economic advisor. Hao Jingfang, 32, won the 2016 Hugo Award for Best Novelette for ‘Folding Beijing’, a story that imagines the Chinese capital as a foldable city: The upper, middle and lower classes live on separate physical surfaces (during agreed upon time slots), which fold and unfold on schedule. When the time allotted to a class is over, they are put to sleep until their next time slot arrives, and the entire process repeats itself.

What these fictions have in common is a deep concern for the world that we are leaving behind. In some cases, fiction failed to keep pace with the horror of the real. Mathur, for instance, told me, “I started writing the Dvarca trilogy seven years ago, and I had to go back and rewrite many parts. My nightmare-fiction was becoming a reality: both in terms of world politics and technology.”

Dystopia Lesson #1: Read the most depressing book you can find. Now toss it aside and look at the headlines of the day. Laugh until you are crying, until you are unsure which came first, the laughter or the tears.

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