Bhopal gas tragedy should never be forgotten

As you become older you realise it is not nostalgia that haunts you. You sense your world shrinking. People and places that you treasure, who make the calendar called your world just drop out of the map. One feels helpless as your autobiographical map of the world feels helpless against the new cartographies of the world.

Mine is especially an oral imagination. One recites an event and in reciting an event, in all its sonorous beauty, the narrative unfolds. I also realise orality and embodiment go together. I remember because my mind recites it and my body senses it at its fingertips. Memory is in many ways an embodiment. When you abstract it as a statistic, it becomes more generalised. It loses its sense of mnemonical poetry. In many ways, we are still an oral nation. Our memory is collective, contained in folklore and legends, and often festivals and rituals merely enact memory to reinforce it. I realise I need ancestors and genealogies as frameworks for myself.

Digital

I realise we are now a society where memory is oral, textual and digital. Memory, now seen as information, is archived and digitalised. I sense it is a powerful method but I, in my old fashioned way, sense the difference between information and knowledge. Knowledge has context, is self-reflective; it has a cosmology and an epistemology. Information is discreet, fragmented, atomised and abstract. Knowledge connects. Knowledge enables story telling. Information creates fragments of narrative.

I am using this long winded introduction to think about memory, memorials and museums in India. We tend to treat sacred groves with respect. Taboo creates the song lines of memory and we treat as sacred the black buck or the tulsi plant. Our relationship to them is ritually immaculate. But look at the way we treat stone walls as sites for graffiti. “Mona loves Mohan” is our answer to the beauty of rock, to the wonderful historicity of the Qutub, the Taj or to old monuments. Grafitti as personal signature becomes more relevant as an event than the monumentality of history. We do not seem to treat monuments with reverence.

In fact our memories have a way of being silly or trite. Our folk memory is creative but what I call mass memory seems to be trite. I remember a lazy conversation where my friends and I differentiated different kinds of mass memory. There is a touristy memory where we treat events as outside us and we trivialise memory. Here memory is sentimental, scattered and focuses around “selfie like occasions.” So Goa rather being a collective memory of the Portuguese becomes food in a particular restaurant or the band that played funky music.

Cynics add what they call “tutorial college” memory. This is bowdlerised memory, playing Charles Lamb to Shakespeare. Tutorials are summaries that make a complex event accessible. They create a pedagogy of access. Our sense of nationalism and science has a tutorial college edge to it. We talk of ancient science not as a philosophy, a world view but combining tutorial and tourist views of memory. Modi’s idea of plastic surgery in India is a good example.

There is a third approach to memory which I call folk statistical. The mind, can reel of factoids and statistics of cricket matches, factory output and disasters with equal ease. Statistics, as Camus said, may not bleed but they do help domesticate reality. We recite statistics to reveal the grasp of an event. We say Bhopal was the world’s worst industrial disaster or that over 5,000 people were murdered during the 1984 riots. Numbers conveys a sense of control and comprehension when it actually alienates and distances us from the event. We talk numbers when we cannot speak the everydayness of suffering.

Trivialisation

I sense this trivialisation of memory in all the three modes I described. One feels this deeply when one watches India remember an event like Bhopal. Bhopal as an event, as a disaster, as a narrative of suffering has eluded the Indian imagination. Our folklore can remember a flood, famine or cyclone and even date birth and death in terms of these events. Floods are a part of ritual memory but the world’s biggest industrial disaster produces a nameless silence.

Embarrassed by indifference, the society is then prodded into the act of knowing. Then our society produces the triviality of memory. We cite Bhopal as an example of disaster tourism, virtually erasing the history of the town before the gas disaster.

We cite casualty statistics as if they are productivity indicators we should be proud of. We cite one or two specimen stories to simulate human interest. But basically we have sanitised Bhopal as an event. Memory is too trivialised or becomes teratology, a compendium of monsters, of pathologies when we talk Bhopal. This is why one must pay a tribute to the survivors and NGOs who fought to keep Bhopal alive, who in their battles of resistance that Bhopal reveals itself as a metaphor which has permeated the very nature of life and living.

Survivors

I remember survivors, particularly women, who have fought for justice in Bhopal and justice they realise is not possible without sustaining memory. Then there is the Bhopal group for information and action and individuals like Satinath Sarangi who have sustained the everydayness of struggle.

I remember my friend Ward Morehouse, a Rockefeller expert, who realised he had got development wrong. He produces not only a major critique of science policy but the first book on the Bhopal disaster. Morehouse bought shares in Union Carbide to attend meetings where he could continue the battle. It is people like this empathising and listening to the survivor that have kept Bhopal alive, as memory, as act of conscience.

The anniversary of the disaster passed uneventfully a few days ago. I want to thank quietly the heroes, the survivors who will not let Bhopal die. As they struggle to speak Bhopal, they keep an everydayness of memory, survival, and heroism alive. For this one has to be grateful.