From bad to worse

It isn’t easy being the bad guy. Look at Mirza Kamran , the Mughal prince who spent his life plotting against his brother, Humayun. Of the few traits that distinguish Humayun, his bone-headed faith in Kamran’s essential goodness and loyalty is possibly the most intriguing.

Abu’l Fazl, author of the Akbarnama and breathless hagiographer of Akbar’s family, couldn’t make sense of it. “Wondrous to relate,” he exclaimed after yet another breach of fraternal faith, “the hypocrisy… [of Kamran] had not yet been revealed on the mirror of [Humayun’s] mind.” The king’s advisors were less circumspect, insisting he limit his “optimistic views of persons”. One of them even refused to swear an oath of loyalty until Humayun, in turn, promised to act in accordance with his loyalists’ advice.

Humayun’s frustrating mercy is well known; but reading through the endless confrontations between the king and his brother, I was equally confounded by Kamran’s obstinate villainy. Once, famously, he had Akbar — his nephew — displayed upon the walls of Kabul fort, an infant-shield against Humayun’s besieging army. Already, he’d butchered the family of one of Humayun’s generals — letting the bazaar loose upon his wife, killing his three boys and throwing their bloodied remains into the camp below.

Kamran lost the siege, as he would lose every battle with his brother; but like a malevolent jack-in-the-box, no sooner was he defeated in one battlefield than he arose in another. It’s not even as if he grew closer to his goal with every revolt. If anything, the opposite. He was robbed in the cold mountains; forced to flee in women’s clothes; humiliated and betrayed by his allies, until (finally) Humayun had him blinded.

“Who’s your favourite Game of Thrones character,” a friend asked the other day. It’s the kind of question — like, what would you do if you won a million dollars — guaranteed to send me into reveries. Having pondered the matter from many angles (favourite avenger? Arya Stark; favourite anti-hero? The Hound; favourite for the Throne? Anyone but Jon Snow), I’d say the GoT characters I’ve enjoyed the most are the villains. The really bad ones. Joffrey, that pathological little prince, Ramsay Bolton and his salivating mastiffs — the cartoon villains, the Kamran-types — they’re the ones who make my hair stand on end. And it’s not their evil chill alone that’s mesmerising; it’s the pure relief, the satisfying yes! of their comeuppance.

Is it more thrilling to watch virtue prevail or villainy destroyed? Jon Snow may have won the battle against Bolton, but he becomes more boring with every saintly turn. Tyrion Lannister was great while he was a drunken cynic. Now that he’s a policy wonk for the dragon queen, he’s not half as enjoyable .

It’s not the same, either, when you paint with shades of grey. One of the more depressing sentences I’ve read recently was in a book about the Czech resistance during World War II. HHhH , by Laurent Binet, describes — amongst other things — how dozens of Czechs were smuggled back home by their government-in-exile to sabotage Nazi rule. All of them were volunteers; almost all were spurred by patriotism. “Only two,” writes Binet, “...volunteered because they were seeking adventure, and both turned out to be traitors.”

An adventurous spirit — the ability to have escapades, to thrive on uncertainty — makes for good literary heroes. Could it be that in real life, a simpler ability to act on simpler truths — to God and country, friendship and family — constitutes heroism?

Then what makes villains? ‘HHhH’ is the German acronym for ‘Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich’ and HHhH is about a Czech mission to assassinate that brain. Reinhard Heydrich — also The Hangman, The Blond Beast, The Butcher of Prague — was a favourite of Hitler’s, who gave him yet another nickname, ‘the man with an iron heart’. For Hitler, writes Binet, Heydrich was “the perfect Nazi prototype: tall, blond, cruel, totally obedient, and deadly efficient”. Qualities that earned him a place in the select committee that engineered the Final Solution.

There’s a wonderful essay by the philosopher George Steiner in which he discusses what it means to describe the Holocaust — and to do so successfully. The problem, Steiner argues, is that even if a writer imagines a concentration camp honestly and well, the Holocaust is, in fact, unimaginable. Paradoxically, then, the more skilful a narration, the more it distorts.

“(The) hideous truth becomes more graphic, more terribly defined, but also has a more acceptable, conventional lodging in the imagination,” writes Steiner. “We believe; yet do not believe intolerably, for we draw breath at the recognition of a literary device, of a stylistic stroke not finally dissimilar from what we have met in a novel. The aesthetic makes endurable.”

The allure of cartoon villains is that they are so easily crushed, so perfectly obliterated. Reinhard Heydrich was the head of the Nazi secret services, one of the handful of Germans who actively masterminded the execution of six million Jews. And the Czech resistance killed him. But what of the millions of Germans who only shrugged at the Holocaust?

That is a simpler villainy, more simply propelled — by indifference, by self-interest — yet so much harder to pin down or eliminate. Being the bad guy may not be easy; being just like everyone else... that isn’t so hard at all.

PARVATI SHARMA

Parvati Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and the author, most recently, of Jahangir: An Intimate Portrait of a Great Mughal

COMMENT NOW