When it comes to privacy, the odds have been stacked against humanity; wise is the man and wiser still the woman who realises this. From the moment language began to exist, we have conflated privacy with the unnameable fear, the shadowy threat, the subtle knife. Private are the things that go bump in the night. In the Bible, God basically punishes Adam and Eve for covering what Indian autopsy reports call ‘private parts’. It’s no coincidence that ‘Private’ is also a military term, part of the shock-and-awe lexicon of American machismo.

Last week, I saw the photographer Dayanita Singh making a similar point at the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF), about how Hindi did not have an analogue for ‘private’. Singh was part of a panel discussion titled ‘Total Recall: The End of Privacy’, moderated by the Harvard professor Homi K Bhabha and also featuring writer and design-thinker Niyam Bhushan and Pratap Bhanu Mehta (Director, Centre for Policy Research). This discussion was part of the Privacy series, conceptualised and curated by Bhabha.

To be sure, these talks weren’t really what you call big ticket events by JLF standards. The first discussion in the series clashed with a Ruskin Bond session. The second (the aforementioned ‘Total Recall’) picked up the leftovers from the Margaret Atwood talk. As a result, the crowds at the Privacy series were par rather than extraordinary. This turned out to be propitious for your correspondent, who could arrive 30 seconds before each session began and still get a seat. At some level, though, it felt like a shame because these were some of the most trenchant sessions held at Jaipur in recent years.

Introducing ‘Total Recall’, Bhabha said: “We want the most technical forms of protection but we ourselves are exchanging our privacy (on social media) for a kind of publicity. The question of privacy — the public and the private — is not only a spatial metaphor about society or legality, but also about how we perceive the boundaries of the personal: who is a person? What is a person?”

Singh was the first to offer her views. Being a photographer, she admitted that she was “in the most obvious situation with privacy”. “When I couldn’t bear it any more, the dilemma of violating people’s privacy repeatedly, that’s when I started photographing empty spaces, because I thought maybe there won’t be this kind of intrusion or invasion there.”

In 1989, The Times had commissioned Singh for a photo-essay on eunuchs in India. During this assignment, she struck up a friendship with a 49-year-old eunuch called Mona Ahmed. It was only after the assignment was completed that Ahmed realised the intended destination for her pictures: a London newspaper, which was bad news because she had relatives in that city, relatives who had no idea about Ahmed being a member of the third sex. She asked Singh to hand over the film and Singh obeyed. Ahmed promptly threw it in the dustbin and embraced the young photographer. More than a decade later, in 2001, the duo collaborated on a photo-memoir called Myself Mona Ahmed , one of Singh’s early triumphs.

Art may be amoral on occasion, but one can always create great art while staying within the bounds of ethical conduct: Singh is proof. Her concerns about individual privacy were amplified by Bhushan, who warned of a future where the concept of private information would become obsolete. He also pointed out the irony of voicing privacy concerns in middle-class India. “I discovered that the only time people in this room would understand privacy is if you live in a joint Indian family. At that time you all have your issues: don’t say this to bhabhiji and don’t say that to chachaji .”

Bhushan spoke with a great deal of passion and theatrical flair, aided by a passing resemblance to Prakash Raj, the renowned villain from Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada films. At one point, he demanded a show of hands to estimate the number of audience members with WhatsApp installed on their phones: as expected, almost everybody met this criterion. “Look at this room,” he said, vindicated. “How do you think Mark Zuckerberg is going to recoup his $19 billion if not from this goldmine of your private, intimate, candid, honest, truthful conversations?” Before Bhabha steered the conversation into policy and legal grounds (to bring Mehta in), Bhushan dropped some more one-liners, gallows humour pearls that wouldn’t have been out of place at an open mic. “I’ve used Google Glass and it’s the fastest way to get hit by a lady’s handbag.”

Every great debate should have a naysayer who, in a way, attacks the very foundation of the conflict. For ‘Total Recall’, this was Mehta. “Are we really concerned about privacy in the classical sense?” he asked. “I would submit, not really. Because there are four or five things that emanate from what we want as a society, that are fundamentally at odds with privacy. And these are things that we actually like. I mean, the beef ban was an easy case, because it clearly violated some notion of choice. But what about the intrusions of privacy that come with the choices that we exercise?”

Mehta went on to explain that accountability — the checks and balances that we place in any system of governance — is a major deterrent to privacy. If knowledge is currency, then any and all private knowledge is perceived as withheld capital from the production cycle. These are the kind of judgments that lead to populist fascism.

Last year, the film Masaan , directed by Neeraj Ghaywan and written by Varun Grover, featured several scenarios that did corroborate Mehta’s bleak view of public policy in India (Bhabha referred to the film on more than one occasion). In the very first scene of the film, we see Devi (Richa Chadda) furtively watching porn. She then dresses up to meet a young man at a hotel room, where their sexual encounter is interrupted by a police inspector, who tells Devi: “ Ab tumhaari zindagi kandam (condemn)…” How did the inspector get so empowered, so brazen that barging into a room and beating up two consenting adults having sex wasn’t even a difficult choice for him? To put it mildly, privacy stands no chance against the peculiarly Indian ‘honour code’ that has been running the show in this country for a long time now.

Which is why it was fitting that the third discussion of the series was the one that finally drew a full house. Called ‘The Honour Code’, it was a conversation between Bhabha and the Ghanaian-American philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah. Appiah currently writes a column called ‘The Ethicist’ for The New York Times , wherein he provides answers to moral dilemmas posed by readers. He was clearly tickled to see the massive crowd that had gathered for the conversation, laughing when Bhabha told him, “They are all very interested in honour.”

In September last year, a gay teenager had written to The Ethicist, asking if it was alright to lie to his father about his sexuality. His father had made it clear that he would disown him and stop paying his (hefty) tuition fees if it turned out that he was gay (the discovery of an old love letter to a high school classmate had prompted this ultimatum). Shockingly, the father had demanded to see printouts of all his email correspondences to leave no room for doubt.

Aghast at these shocking breaches of the young man’s privacy, Appiah had replied unequivocally: “Not only is this young man entitled to conceal the truth from his father, but he doesn’t owe him a repayment later when he can afford it. Threatening not to do your duty if your son turns out to be gay — which is, after all, something over which he has absolutely no control — is awful in many ways. The fact that he would fail to discharge his obligation to pay his fair share if the son told the truth is a reason not to tell him the truth.”

It is not such a stretch to imagine this case in India, with the father being a rich, influential man. He would have probably used police or a private investigator to keep tabs on his son. Indeed, the former BCCI supremo and cement tycoon N Srinivasan had allegedly kept his son Ashwin in captivity because of his affair with another man.

On the whole, the Privacy series was enjoyable because of the sheer quality of the conversations, the way the panelists played off each other’s strengths and — last but certainly not the least — the charm and erudition of Bhabha, who expertly moderated each discussion and made sure that in between the artillery fire of relevant questions, there were a few innovative answers in there as well.

Bhabha is best known for his theory about the nation-state being primarily a feat of collective or community imagination, aided by nationalist texts and other shared cultural tropes. Working from this starting point, you could analyse the workings of the nation-state using theoretical tools typically reserved for works of fiction.

India certainly has some traits of the Victorian novel. There’s many a misguided Darcy among upper middle-class Indian men and most socialist films of the ’50s and ’60s have at least one Uriah Heep figure. Midnight’s Children , perhaps the most famous Indian novel of all time, anchored our destiny to the fictionalised biography of Salim Sinai (Bhabha used this book as one of the examples for his theory; his son Satya later played Sinai in the novel’s film version).

But of late, we are beginning to resemble the fictions of Mr Orwell, who, after all, was born here. How long before we abandon the pursuit of privacy entirely? One feels certain that a Ministry of Truth would be welcomed by hundreds of thousands of people in today’s charged political climate. Perhaps an Anti-Sex League as well. Who is a person, Bhabha had asked at the beginning of ‘Total Recall’. Perhaps, 10 years down the line, we will be asking (privately), “Who is an unperson?”

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