Nisarg Patel
Any middle-class person in India with a bit of conscience, and sometimes assisted with general education about world history, would have asked themselves at some point in their lives the same question which Manu Joseph poses as the title of his recent and first non-fiction book― “Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us”? It is a question which, maybe like the subject of the question itself (i.e., the poor in/of India), has become inescapable and ever-present within the Indian imagination. From politics to cinema, the figure of the ‘poor in India’ is everywhere. We ‘see’ them on the streets, in our homes, on billboards, in Oscar-winning films, and, of course, on news channels when one of them cracks one of those many ‘toughest in the world’ exams; we ‘see’ them, conveniently enough, when they are placated, harmless, and innocent, which is to say, we see them when they are made into our own unimaginative and banal middle-class imagination. Even in the most shocking intensity with which they breach our comfort cocoon, like the 2016 image of Dana Mahajan carrying his dead wife [Amang] on his shoulder when the hospital refused to help him with a vehicle (11), there, at best, are personal revulsions on the general apathy of this country. These personal revulsions hardly get converted into public revolt. And thus, it comes as no surprise that we do not have good answers to some of the very basic and yet pressing questions that Joseph poses as the point of departure for his text:
When they [the poor] see the riches around them…why do they tolerate it? Why don’t they crawl out from their catastrophe and finish us off? Why don’t little men emerge from manholes and attack cars? Why don’t the maids who squat like frogs by kitchen sinks pull out the hair of their conscientious madams who never give them a day off or pay them as much as they pay at least the drivers? Why do the poor tolerate the rich? Why is there peace? Why do we get away? Why don’t the poor kill us? (8-9)
Joseph’s (scattered-) answer to these questions spans 18 chapters of his book, and includes some excellent social observation [ch. 13: What Moneylenders Knew], biographical anecdotes [ch 1: Who is Poor; ch 15: Despite India], and, of course, signature Joseph provocations [ch 5: If You do Well in Exams You will Escape; ch 6: The Poor are worst enemies of Poor], including some outrightly wrong claims tucked inside fun-to-read sarcasm and edgy statements (more on this latter).
The ‘poor’ in ‘why don’t the poor kill us’ are, for Joseph, “chiefly mean…the sort of people…who are centuries behind” (7). These are the people who, in times of disaster like the 2001 Gujarat earthquakes, break cupboards in rubble to extract jewels, money and perfume bottles (3), ask soldiers to kill a relative half-buried in the rubble so as to ‘save’ him from a life of being handicapped (4), or carry the dead in vegetable carts (5). Buried underneath these practicalities in the face of catastrophe, the poor in 21st-century India are still buried, for Joseph, in the fatalism of ancient times. Just like the ancient, they never think that they are “in control”. There is, in other words, an inherent (psychological?) fatalism in them; a fatalism which means, among other things, that the “poor have very low standards for themselves” (32).
Interestingly enough, it is not fatalism that charts as one of the eight reasons (as mentioned in chapter 2), which Joseph charts as a response to his question of ‘why don’t the poor kill us’. Instead, his analysis/response begins with how India’s chaos and ugliness reassure the poor that “the nation is something like them” (56). In the disorder where the “rich see…the romantic vision of humanness”― which is nothing but another name for the “street social hierarchy” (58) that the rich benefit from while in India and the one whose absence they bemoan when outside― “the poor see a world familiar to them” (61). Unlike the poor in the rich nations who “feel that the nation has left them behind,” in India, Joseph claims, “most of the nation belongs to nobodies” (55). There might be a bit of truth in this quite a depressing claim; nevertheless, one does wonder how much ‘belonging’ a disenfranchised person/group can feel at the end of the day while living amongst other disenfranchised person(s)/groups―especially when one considers that no two disenfranchised person/groups are disenfranchised in the same manner in the ‘republic of disenfranchised’ (to pun on Joseph’s ‘republic of nobodies’). Behind Joseph’s claim, which might have some truth in it, there is a risky simplification that eats away at his analysis.
Following pacification through mass disenfranchisement, Joseph moves on to what might be the unofficial national religion of India―exams. In a country that is ever creative in creating its latest neurotic anal fixations, none could come in its intensity and longevity as to the obsessions that most Indians (except, of course, the rich who can afford to bypass this through foreign universities) have towards the ignominy that is sold/offered today as ‘university education’. There are multiple ‘hot takes’ that Joseph offers here, including his interpretation of the fate of Kanhaiya Kumar (80-81) and Rohit Vemula (81-82), his perception of the Communist Party of India [“a farcical derivative of some thought experiment of two wealthy German migrants taken too seriously” (83)], and his proposal for “the most humane reform” in post-secondary education which would “ensure that a college degree is not a qualification for non-technical or non-scientific jobs” (85). The thing that lies behind all of Joseph’s gripes about education is that he sees current Indian education as the mechanism of ‘co-option’ par excellence:
The elite promote a way of life in which they are highly adept as the best way to be…the poor then do everything they can to imitate the elite but they fall short because there are aspects that cannot be imitated, aspects of parenting that cannot be aped; the poor then become grotesque versions of their elite. (71)
This cycle continues, Joseph argues, with the elites now migrating to places they discreetly consider superior to them, and their former stronghold filling with lower-middle-class and the poor. Joseph’s argument is, in a sense, nothing new. From Homi Bhabha to Ashis Nandy and V.S. Naipaul, a lot has been written about ‘mimicry’, and one wonders if the ‘co-option’ that Joseph identifies in modern India is anything other than a colonial hangover? Joseph himself cites a report from a British bureaucrat in charting the story of the ‘co-option’ of Indians by the British (73). However, instead of looking at this long-history of co-option, which, as it happens, is neither limited to lower-class Indians nor is an individual phenomenon (right-wing European thinkers like Heidegger were afraid of co-option of the ‘whole’ of European culture by what he saw as the culture-less American way of life), the only people who gets framed by Joseph as guilty of co-option are disenfranchised minorities. There might indeed be truth in Joseph’s claim that what passes as “melancholic left-wing activism” in universities can be “an extremely dangerous space for the depressed among the poor” (82). One cannot be blind to how much ‘mimicry’, especially of the West, goes into what is considered activism at prominent universities in Indian metropoles. Nevertheless, it is equally dangerous to create a paranoid category like ‘co-option’ which reads and reduces every progressive act, and each radical person, as simply dupes of imitation (also, who said nothing original can come out of imitation?). One such outcome of the paranoia of ‘co-option’ is the creation of what Adorno once identified as ‘the jargon of authenticity’―an equally, if not more, dangerous social scenario.
Beyond “the religion of higher education” (85), the two other comparatively minor factors which Joseph states as the reason for peace within one of the most unequal regions of the world are i) mutual hatred amongst the poor [Ch 6: Poor are the Worst Enemies of the Poor] and ii) the extra-judicial judicial system of India [Ch 7: The Dark Forces that Guards Us]. Contrary to all the canonical Marxist who believes that the primary antagonism is class antagonism, Joseph claims that leftists are hugely mistaken in thinking so. If one is to analyze envy, claims Joseph, one would quickly see that the poor “don’t envy Elon Musk or Mukesh Ambani” but rather those who are one’s “equal” (91). It is this envy amongst the equals which, according to Joseph, has to be taken into account when considering the continuation of “caste hierarchy” amongst the Dalits [say, between Vankars or Mahars and Valmikis]. What is surprising is that it doesn’t occur to Joseph that ‘envy’ might be a local symptom through which a broader class antagonism makes its appearance within a social field. Envy arises because one sees, and thus feels insecure about, the class mobilization of those whom one once considered as one’s equal. Moreover, considering that the book is about the ‘psychology of Indians’, Joseph might have benefited by taking the age-old lesson of psychoanalysis that no subjective feelings are to be taken for granted. Envy might very well hide other forces of antagonism within a subject. This flat reading continues in the subsequent chapter, in which the only argument for why the poor don’t rebel is given as the fear of “Indian jail and Indian judicial system” [“it is a deadly deterrent even for criminals”] (104). One wonders whether the jails and/or the judicial system of Louis XVI or czarist Russia were exactly known for their humane treatment of convicts? And yet…
Joseph’s book undergoes a significant shift post Chapter 7. If the initial 109 pages read as engaging with the question he posed in the title of this text, from chapter 8 onwards, the text starts to read as a loosely related set of think-pieces on the middle class of India and Joseph’s own obsessions [from saving Aadhar Card from the ‘activists’ (ch 11), to mourning Facebook’s ‘Free Basics’ in spite of ‘activists’ (ch. 12)]. The ‘poor’ does make an appearance now and then, but they tend to merge more and more into the background of the text. For instance, Chapter 8 focuses on the theme of language and nationalism, and contains some intriguing claims like “there is no such thing as an Indian nationalist; there are only North Indian nationalists”, “Hindi cannot colonize the South because Hindi is useless” (111), some harsh truths like “India has to be the only society in the world whose upper middle class does not speak any language with complete mastery” (114), and some signature Joseph sarcastic comments like “English has names for so many abstract things, labels, even lies, that can be misunderstood as truths, like hypnosis, secularism, sexism, liberty” (119), comments where it is difficult to tell how much it is that Joseph believes in it and how much is just him having fun at the expense of provocation of his reader. This theme of nationalism continues in chapter 9, but this time it is not language but rather the question of patriotism. It is here that Joseph makes somewhat of a flat, if not outrightly ahistorical claim, that the “first wave of modern Indian patriotism emanated from the U.S. in the late 90s” (131). There is partial truth to the fact that the first generation of diaspora (irrespective of them being Indians or not) tend to be rigid, conservative, and sometimes radicalized much more than people back home. And there might also be some truth that a typical Indian was “radicalized in America by a society that did not deem him a member of the upper crust” [a point which, surprisingly enough, proves how people are indeed impacted as a result of a change in their ‘class’; the very ‘class’ which Joseph thinks is a Marxist delusion] (131). However, Joseph forgets that the 90s were also the time when India witnessed one of the most significant political and religious mass mobilizations in the form of the ‘Ram Rath Yatra’, a project that was neither organized, facilitated, nor undertaken by NRIs in the US. It was pure native xenophobic patriotism, as native as it comes. Beyond this inept reading of the rise of nationalism in the 90s India, this chapter does ask a crucial question: “Why do Indians have immense political stamina for useless issues?” (135). Joseph’s answer, however, comes out a bit confusing. He says, and rightfully so, that one reason behind this is that the “upper class have disproportionate control over storytelling” (136), but then goes on to add that when it comes to stories, “people identify with stories not out of wisdom but impelled by that highly influential force—misunderstanding”, the “pleasurable massage of prejudice” (137). It is as if humans, like animals in heat, cannot escape the lure of misunderstanding. There is, as psychoanalysis teaches us, a component of self-compromise, if not self-destruction, in our acts; however, one wonders if the absence of political mobilization/revolt in India can be understood simply with one-word answers like ‘misunderstanding’.
In chapter 11 [How a Billionaire and Career Politician saved Aadhar] and chapter 12 [Let the Poor have Fun], Joseph brings out his long-standing gripes with what he monolithically frames as the ‘activists.’ The protest against Aadhar, according to Joseph, “was, very simply, a turf war between humanitarian middlemen and Nilkeni” (160). There is no in-depth discussion of the “valid reasons” the activists had against Aadhaar, and instead, what we get are details about Joseph’s 2018 interview with Nandan Nilekani. In such a scenario, where ‘activists’ are buried under a monolithic banal blanket of derision [activists are those who are “caste aside by the modern material world and so derive their self-worth from activism” (160); activists have “Ideas without due thought for the Indian situation” (171)] and pages on pages are spent on giving insights about the ‘visions’ of the billionaires, Joseph, like a good reactionary, makes it feel like it is actually the dominant ideology which is in crisis. This comes out pretty strongly in his somewhat embarrassing defense of Facebook’s ‘Free Basics’ where, yet again, the activists are presented as having “lazy, neurotic suspicion of the large corporations” (181). Maybe Indian activists are mimic-men, victims of “colonization of mind” (171), but what about the sleuth of whistle-blowers like Sarah Wynn-Williams, a Facebook ex-employee who has written precisely about the manipulations that the company tried to undertake with projects like ‘Free Basics’ and ‘Internet.org’. It makes one wonder if Joseph is entirely ignorant of these exposés of Facebook during the last five years (very unlikely), or is he a lazy thinker who cannot care less when facts goes against his agenda, or, worst of all, whether he too is a victim of delusion (the same delusion he is ever eager to detect in the ‘activists’)?
Joseph’s interest in millionaires continues in the following chapter [ch: 13, What Moneylenders Know], and he does provide quite an interesting profile of ‘The patriarch’ who controls the gold pawning empire in Southern India (Muthoot Finance?). In the absence of his uncritical deference for millionaires, this, by far, is one of the most intriguing studies of the ‘psychology’ of the rich in this book. And, moreover, Joseph does provide here an answer, not original but an answer nonetheless, to the question of ‘why the poor don’t kill us’. The answer is ‘familiarity’, and he derives it from the behaviour of the pawnbrokers towards their client (202) [not knowing the customer’s name is considered a disgrace, the patriarch always flies economy, etc.]. Beyond the nameless ‘patriarch’, the other interesting social study also comes in one of the later chapters, and it is Joseph’s biographical details of his time selling the Funskool board games―an “experience [which] deprived” him “of a strand of profitable bitterness” towards the upper class (233). This is also the chapter that offers a necessary criticism of the state of sports, especially Olympic sports, and gives a sketch of the Malegaon film industry [topic of recent movie, Superboys of Malegaon (2024, Reema Kagti)].
As a result of the hugely fragmented nature of text, it is no surprise that Joseph would state the question of “why do good things happen in India” in complete disbelief (238). Considering that there is no development of a sustained argument through the text, Joseph can only make a hypothetical statement as the possible response to his question. He proposes:
Society changes when the second rung of social power takes on the most powerful. Usually, this second rung is the old elite. When they become underclass in a new world, they try to restore the balance of power through a moral cause (239).
This is a view where the poor, i.e., the majority of Indians, are mere props. It is a view where “activism is the war of the millionaires against the billionaires” (241) and “good happens, chiefly, when the second rung pulls down the top rung in self-interest” (248). For an author who is at his best in thinking against the dullness of hegemonic norms, his analysis of the process of change in India is both dull and outrightly boring. This is the same old idea of trickle-down economics, where instead of ‘capital’ it is ‘change’ that flows down from the ‘swarg-lok’ of the billionaires to the common man.
It is no surprise that Joseph ends his book with a conservative chapter titled “Inequality cannot be Solved.” And neither is it of any surprise, especially considering that the general disregard Joseph has for Marxist thought, that he would state economically senseless statements like “Billionaires are far less guilty of inequality than what the upper middle class creates” (264)―as if ‘inequality’ is an object which people hoard in their houses and is not a social phenomenon. One wonders whether Joseph considers economists like Thomas Piketty, who have been raising alarms about the widening inequality in the 21st century based on historical analysis backed by solid data, as delusional?
Manu Joseph’s first foray into non-fiction, even after his years of working as a journalist, is somewhat disappointing. While there is no shortage of his signature edgy humour peppered throughout the text [“secret to happiness may lie in colonizing, brutalizing, and plundering vast regions of the world so that you can one day raise a financially pampered and socially compassionate population that cycles to work” (53)], and neither any dearth of critical commentary against the patronizing attitude towards the poor [“when poor chat it is not always about curing a child of diarrhoea” (188)], the book does fail in delivering what it promise to do: i.e., responding to question of ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us’?
Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us can be ordered here.
Nisarg Patel [નિસર્ગ પટેલ] is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He reads, writes, and translates between Gujarati, Hindi, and English.
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